The Last of Us had its biggest departure from its video game source material yet with a glorious detour that told the 20-year story of apocalypse survivors Bill (Nick Offerman) and Frank (Murray Bartlett).
In The Last of Us game, traveling heroes Joel (Pedro Pascal in the series) and Ellie (Bella Ramsey in the series) embark on a dangerous mission with hardcore survivor Bill to find a car battery. Bill’s partner Frank is only seen as a corpse in the game, having already passed away, and Bill’s romantic feelings for Frank are only hinted at.
In the HBO version, Bill is shown in the early days of the Cordyceps outbreak. Frank falls into a trap on Bill’s property and the two bond. Their romantic relationship is chronicled over the course of two decades and they bond with Joel and Tess (Anna Torv). When Frank is disabled by an illness, he decides to take his own life – and Bill decides to do the same. Those are the broad strokes that don’t do justice to the nuanced and heartbreaking work of everyone involved in the episode titled “Long Long Time.”
“How different we are [from the game] has to be proportional to how good it is,” said Neil Druckmann, who developed the PlayStation game and is serving as showrunner on the HBO drama along with Craig Mazin. “Frank was mentioned [in the game] but by the way. Here we can kind of examine this relationship and obviously make some changes. and [the idea] was so good I didn’t mind that it was different.”
“In the game, you build your relationship with Bill by fighting alongside him,” noted Druckmann. “There’s a set piece where Joel has been hoisted into this noose trap and Ellie has to take him down. It’s exciting and one of the most memorable parts of the game. I think a smaller adaptation would be like, ‘This action sequence needs to go on the show.’ Whereas [Mazin was] like, ‘No, don’t focus on that, there’s this interesting thing happening with this survivor and this partner that he had. What is this story? Let’s examine that. Let’s be specific.’ So it was easy not to be appreciated when you had these really wonderful ideas that I think expanded the world and expanded these characters.
In the game, Bill’s romantic feelings for Frank “passed over many heads,” Druckmann said. “Back then, [the subtlety is] which helped record it. It’s sad to say, but it would have been controversial otherwise.”
Said Mazin, “That was a section of the game that I loved. I liked the character of Bill. But a lot of this section is about the gameplay – we need to get here, we need to get there. And Neil designed Bill to reflect something I thought we had the opportunity to do differently; It reflected the worst possible outcome for Joel, which was to cut himself off from humans completely. There was someone Bill could have loved. He decided against it and now this guy is dead and he will be alone for the rest of his life.”
“When writing television, we don’t have gameplay and I’m looking for time to spend with characters that are doing something different than what I was watching,” Mazin continued. “And we’ve just seen people who are scared, who are in a dangerous place, who are hiding or running away or worried or getting hurt or killed [in the first two episodes]. I need something else now. Here’s a man who’s safe. Now let’s talk about this Frank guy. And I said, ‘I think we have the opportunity to do a lot of things at the same time.’”
“We can show the passage of time — which we didn’t see on the show,” Mazin added. “But we can also explore the underlying theme of these two kinds of love. There is what I call “open love”. It’s very nurturing, it’s open-minded. He says it literally: “Paying attention to things is how we show love.” That’s great. Thank you. And then there’s Bill’s love, which is violent — because it’s protective. And so much of what this show is about is how love pushes us in these different directions and that it can backfire in dramatic ways. Not this story. Her story is actually happy. Even if it’s sad, it’s happy. You win.”
Druckmann: “I’m very excited to see what the reception will be like, because it’s very different. But what mattered to us was the underlying theme. When you play that sequence, you take away that Bill – obviously there’s some interesting action – but it’s like a warning to Joel, right? Every relationship that happens in the story somehow reflects Joel and Ellie because it’s all about them. So it was about making Joel feel the danger of what could happen to your partner. Here in the game, Joel really makes the decision that he needs to take care of this girl, and here the same thing happens. We deviate and take that detour, but then we come back to what the underlying story is about.”
However, one line in the episode almost didn’t make the show, but was added after Nick Offerman spotted a description in the script of what Bill was thinking at the beginning of the episode and insisted on saying it out loud. “Nick Offerman was like…” Mazin said, and he did a pretty good Offerman impression: “One thing about the script. There’s no way I’m saying, ‘Not today, you new world order freaks with boots.’ I say it, and that’s it.’”
“Then Nick did such a wonderful job playing a man torn by love,” he added. “Whatever happens [several characters in the show]and some respond with beauty and some with violence.”
Offerman and Murray also spoke to about this episode and their experiences in it.