The Last of Us Episode 3

2023 - 1 - 30

Post cover — Image courtesy of "The New York Times"

'The Last of Us' Season 1, Episode 3: One More Good Day (The New York Times)

This week's episode, starring Nick Offerman and Murray Bartlett, stepped away from the main action, offering a melancholy vignette about companionship.

On their way to Bill and Frank’s, Ellie pesters Joel with questions about the pandemic, and he explains to her — and to us — more about what happened. (“It’s like a spaceship!”) As they pull out of the compound, she pops in a cassette tape, and Joel is moved to hear “Long, Long Time,” a song that clearly means a lot to him, too, for his own unspoken reasons. Joel won’t let Ellie take a gun; but when he isn’t looking, she finds the pistol Frank kept stashed in a writing desk, and she shoves into her backpack. In a parallel to the sequence in which Bill fortifies his neighborhood, we see Joel and Ellie stock up for their road trip, grabbing clean clothes, toilet paper, deodorant and other basics. It’s clear these guys are going to hit it off from the moment they meet, when Bill says he is hesitant to feed Frank because he doesn’t want other bums to come by looking for a free lunch — “This is not an Arby’s,” he grumbles. All this domesticity leads Bill to worry that taking pleasure in basic human interactions will be a distraction from his mission to survive, leading to near-fatal mistakes — like the night when raiders try to infiltrate the compound, and Bill gets shot. But on a deeper level, this episode is about how even amid a world-ending crisis, the taste of a fresh strawberry can make a person want to stick around for another day. After Frank coaxes Bill to admit that he has never acted on his attraction to men, they slip into bed together, with Frank promising, “I’m going to start with the simple things.” Bill can’t entirely shake his fear of losing everything to the authorities or to the infected — a paranoia more intense now that he has someone to protect. Instead, most of the 70-minute running time is spent on one long journey into the past, stretching from the frantic early days of the cordyceps plague, in 2003, to one quietly bittersweet day in 2023, not long before Joel and Ellie knock on Bill and Frank’s door. Joel keeps his feelings to himself, but it is easy to imagine that for him this home was a portal to a safer, cozier past, like the one he lived back in Austin. As someone whose favorite post-apocalyptic movie is George Romero’s “Dawn of the Dead” — with all of its long scenes of survivors constructing a combination fortress-oasis in a shopping mall — I could have lingered forever in this episode’s 2003 segment.

<i>The Last of Us</i> Showrunner on Why Its Heart-Wrenching Third ... (TIME)

Craig Mazin weighs in on the HBO series' third episode, a bottle episode featuring heartbreaking performances from Nick Offerman and Murray Bartlett.

“And if we know emotional success can still happen in this world, if it can go well, we can worry a little bit more as Joel and Ellie move through this story because if there’s no chance it goes well, then no one cares much. And I know that there’s a certain different kind of love that happens that you can’t get early on. “I wanted to show there’s this other form of love that’s the product of time and commitment,” says Mazin. In the show, Mazin and Druckmann revise the love story, allowing Bill and Frank not only to fall deeply in love with one another but to find decades of happiness together. Mazin argues that Frank and Bill’s melancholy but beautiful ending serves an important purpose for the story going forward. There’s a lot of tension, a lot of sadness and tragedy and violence. And they’re also people who through wounds—very different kinds of wounds—have shut the rest of the world out.” In the game, Joel cashes in on a favor Bill owes him by asking Bill to help him rig up a working car. Chronicling Bill’s story from the beginning of the pandemic, rather than introducing him 20 years in, also allowed the show to expand its scope. On his last day, the two men get married, and Bill informs Frank that he intends to die too. Frank befriends Joel’s partner Tess via radio communication, and soon Bill and Frank are on double dates with Joel and Tess, to the chagrin of Joel and Bill, both of whom would prefer to keep their inner circles small. When the infection is first discovered in 2003, Bill hides out in his home in the suburbs of Boston while everyone else evacuates the town.

The Last of Us Episode 3 Is a TV Moment We'll Never Forget (Esquire.com)

Thanks to Murray Bartlett and Nick Offerman, we need an Emmy Award for Best Bottle Episode.

Frank and Bill crush up enough sleeping pills to end their lives together—and go to sleep for one last time. When Joel and Ellie finally arrive in present day (well, August 2023), there’s a key left for them and a hand-written note. Frank tells him that the quarantine zone is completely gone, and Bill lets him out of a hole after testing to see if he’s infected. He plans one final day with Bill, and it’s set to the incredibly recognizable “On the Nature of Daylight” by Max Richter. He wants to spruce up the town and play a little Sims in real life, but Bill reminds him that “we will never have friends, because there are no friends to be had.” Cut to: Joel and Tess having dinner with them outside. Tess thanks the couple for the beautiful meal, but Bill is still on edge. The two of them live together for another three years before he starts to truly feel the isolation of their living situation. With everyone in the town now gone, Bill pops out of a secret bunker he built below his house stacked with guns, barrels of sulfuric acid, and a stack of security camera feeds. Then, he sets up a bunch of booby traps and—as he eats his dinner—watches them go to work on some unlucky infected humans. Next, Joel and Ellie find something even worse: a mass grave of people, all of whom the army didn’t let enter a quarantine zone—because they either had a chance of being infected, or the QZ was just too full. That’s a good thing, because our hero, Joel ( [Pedro Pascal](https://www.esquire.com/style/mens-fashion/a42535800/the-last-of-us-pedro-pascal-jacket/)), must help Ellie (Bella Ramsey) reach the Firefly oasis that she believes is somewhere out there, still trying to find a cure. “You needed a truck battery or whatever, and you made a choice.

'The Last of Us' recap: A kinder, more loving tale for Bill and Frank (The Washington Post)

In the third episode of HBO's "The Last of Us," actors Nick Offerman and Murray Bartlett shine a kinder light on video game side characters Bill and Frank.

Still, Bill is shot and injured, and Frank brings him into the home to tend to his wounds. Enter Joel and Ellie, as they find the abandoned town and the empty nest of Bill and Frank. Bill and Frank aren’t the only two men who get a more loving relationship in this episode. The episode closes by pulling away from Joel and Ellie and into the wafting curtains of Bill’s bedroom window, as Ronstadt sings, “And I think I’m going to love you for a long, long time.” Frank is the only survivor from a group of 10 who escaped the Baltimore quarantine zone, now apparently overrun with monsters, and he just wants to get to Boston. Frank shows Bill that he traded with Joel and Tess to obtain seeds for a garden. Bill says he knows he doesn’t seem the type to know wine pairing, and Frank says with zero judgment, “No, you do!” Bill seems to be taken aback by someone who seems to accept him completely, despite having just met. The video game version of “The Last of Us” made up a fictional game and character called “Angel Knives,” but HBO is under the Warner Bros. In the game, Frank and Bill are two older gay men whose story ended with bitter suicide, leaving a lonely Bill to stew in his resentment and regret. This is shown immediately as the pair walk along and Joel lets down his guard a little, opening up to a smiling Ellie as she bombards him with questions about his past and the history of the apocalypse they’re surviving. He’s become a community of one, a man finally vindicated and justified in his dim view of humanity, and we witness him reap the rewards. Most of it largely ignores protagonists Joel and Ellie to focus on the tale of Bill and Frank, minor characters in the game whose story here is transformed in unexpected, kinder ways.

A Standout Episode of The Last of Us Does Something the Games ... (Slate Magazine)

Perhaps even more so than previous episodes that followed the original plot beat-for-beat. That's because the strength of the series lies not—as Mazin claims—in ...

Joel and Ellie are unaware of the significance of its lines: “I think I’m gonna love you for a long long time.” Do you bring the note to Bill (who survives Frank in the game) in order to see his reaction? On the show, we’re not playing Joel, but we are experiencing the world as he is, turning all these possibilities over in our heads. The missableness of these moments gives you the feeling that they exist in a living, breathing world that you (the player) are moving through as your character. Bill has left a note “to whomever, but probably Joel,” telling him that “men like you and me are here” to protect “the one person worth saving.” For Bill, that was Frank. The details of Bill and Frank’s lives in the game, for instance, are mostly discovered through missable interactions. Joel balks when Ellie offers to be boosted over a fence, and as long as you treat Ellie like cargo, you don’t have to connect emotionally. That’s because the strength of the series lies not—as Mazin claims—in how it adapts the games’ story, but in how it adapts the games’ storytelling. That’s why, when the show was announced, I was skeptical that it could capture the spark of the games, even if it followed the games’ plot. That you’ll eventually care for her enough to be her has to be a surprise, just as Joel’s feelings for her are. [explained](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-features/the-last-of-us-hbo-pedro-pascal-bella-ramsey-interview-1235290103/) [several](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/01/02/can-the-last-of-us-break-the-curse-of-bad-video-game-adaptations) [times](https://www.empireonline.com/tv/news/the-last-of-us-craig-mazin-greatest-story-ever-told-video-games-exclusive/) how he planned to do with the series what virtually no video game adaptation has done before: Be good. But the show’s third episode, was not even part of the games.

The Last of Us Recap: This Is You (Vulture)

A very special episode explores what waits on the other side of survival. A recap of “Long Long Time,” episode 3 of HBO's “The Last of Us,” starring Pedro ...

hit to that point and the biggest she’d have until 1975 when she topped the chart with “You’re No Good.” It picked up a second life when it was included in Rondstadt’s blockbuster Greatest Hits collection in 1976. [Sign up here for email alerts](https://www.vulture.com/promo/get-vultures-the-last-of-us-recap-alerts.html) for every new The Last of Us recap. Frank insists on fixing up the town a bit to make their surroundings more pleasant and in bringing some others into their world — a couple named Joel and Tess, who Frank knows from speaking to on the radio. But he wants one last day with Bill before taking his own life at the end of a nice meal. “This isn’t the tragic suicide at the end of the play,” Bill tells him. “I know I don’t seem like the type,” Bill replies, to which Frank responds, “No, you do.” Frank knows who this man is and what he needs, even if Bill doesn’t. All he needs to do now is make delicious meals, tool around town in his truck, and enjoy the silence — that and occasionally chuckling when his carefully mounted defense system takes out one of the Infected. In a startling edit that initiates the flashback, the camera frames the blanket of a long-dead baby and then cuts 20 years to show a healthy (but doomed) infant wrapped in the same blanket. After passing a crashed jet — an object of awe for Ellie, who can’t believe Joel is so dismissive of the miracle of flight — he attempts to steer her away from a grisly mound of skeletons, innocents rounded up by the U.S. Still, it’s deeply connected to one of the show’s central concerns with the sort of connections that can survive the cordyceps apocalypse and what it takes to sustain those connections in a world defined by dehumanization, only some of it caused by mind-controlling fungus. He has a bunker full of guns, security cameras trained on all corners of his property (a lovely two-story house not far from Boston), and all the supplies he needs to get by. He hasn’t been a dad in a while, but the old instincts seem to be kicking in.

'The Last of Us' Season 1 Episode 3 Recap: Frank, My Dear (Vanity Fair)

Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey take a backseat to a beautiful love story starring Nick Offerman and Murray Bartlett.

With an hour still on the clock, The Last of Us pushes into another window of sorts, tripping backward in time all the way to the start of the outbreak. It is way too soon to talk about The Last of Us’s third episode, “Long Long Time,” as the best episode of 2023, let alone the best episode of The Last of Us, right? Consider it one last tip of the Red Sox cap to the New England faithful.) Despite no imminent danger, ghosts lurk throughout Joel and Ellie’s trek. Is it too soon to declare it the best episode of 2023 and The Last of Us, so far? Following an opening two installments that demonstrated astounding fidelity to the video game it’s based on, The Last of Us breaks the mold with its riveting third episode, a 75-minute meditation on life and love in the not-quite-a-zombie apocalypse. It’s still The Last of Us, after all.