THE LAST OF US Showrunner Explains The New Bill and Frank Story is "The Skeleton Key To Unlock All of This Show"

The most recent episode of The Last of Us is getting a lot of high praise from fans, many saying that it is the best episode so far. Fans are even calling for award nominations for Nick Offerman, who gave an incredible performance as the character Bill.

This episode, titled “Long Long Time” after the 1970 Linda Ronstadt song expands on the story of Bill and Frank in the game in a big way. In a recent interview with EW, Offerman said: "It's a beautiful, completely surprising love story.”

The episode charts Bill’s story from when the outbreak first started and his survival over several years in Lincoln. During that time he meets a weary traveler named Frank (Murray Bartlett) who finds himself stuck in one of Bill’s traps. The two begin a relationship with each other and their social circle comes to include Joel (Pedro Pascal) and Tess (Anna Torv). 

Craig Mazin says: "I had an instinct that we would probably need to take a breath as an audience after the first two episodes. I wanted a way to show some of the passage of time between Outbreak Day and the current day of the show without doing more of the same, of the world falling apart."

When talking about the character Bill, Mazin went on to say: "The character Bill is fascinating. I love the idea of a guy who was actively preparing for the world to end, and when it did he was like, 'Good!' Bill in the game is a dark prediction of where Joel could end up if he doesn't open his heart back up again: alone in a fortress of his own making, paranoid and grouchy. I felt like, we can go and actually do a different thing, which is to say there's an omen of hope. You can actually, in this world, still find somebody that you can share your life with. Nobody lives forever, but the goal that we should all have is to have a good life. And when the end comes, we are satisfied."

“After spending 16 years together, Frank is suffering from a terminal illness, and Frank wants to end his life, but before he does, he wants to spend his last day picking out suits, getting married, and share a final dinner with Bill. It’s at this dinner that Bill mixes Frank's many medicines into a glass of wine so he can peacefully pass away in his husband's arms. But, Bill doesn’t want to live without Frank and he also drinks the lethal concoction. He says: "I'm old, I'm satisfied, and you were my purpose."

In the end, Bill and Frank die together. They have kind of a happier ending in the series because in the game Frank ends up killing himself to prevent succumbing to the Cordyceps infection, leaving behind a note: "I want you to know I hated your guts ... I guess you were right. Trying to leave this town will kill me. Still better than spending another day with you."

At the end of the episode in the series, Joel and Ellie (Bella Ramsey) travel to Lincoln where they find Bill and Frank dead. Ellie reads the letter Bill left behind for Joel, telling him to help himself to his supplies and cache of weapons to "keep Tess safe." 

When talking about this in an interview with the LA Times, Mazin explains why this story in the series is the key that unlocks the rest of the show: "For people who played the game and loved the game, this is pretty much all entirely new. The story of Bill and Frank and the letter that Bill leaves behind [in the show] is such a huge part of why Joel decides he's going to keep going [on this journey] with Ellie … Their relationship ultimately becomes kind of the skeleton key to unlock all of this show, as far as I'm concerned."

Mazin expanded on that comment, telling EW: "The idea was to show these two people functioning in a relationship, two very different people who have different concepts of how to love, and in their relationship and their two different ways of loving, both outward and inward, we create a kind of thematic codex for the whole show. Every relationship we see from that point forward, you can feel like a Bill and Frank kind of lurking inside everybody."

He also said that Bill and Frank's love story was a way to express to Joel and the audience that "there is a way for people to achieve a kind of peace and happiness and love in this world." Mazin went on to say: "I think in a show like this, where the world around our characters is constantly pressuring them ... there is the tendency for endings to be tragic and violent and abrupt and too soon, and I thought it was important to show how a relationship could endure, and then conclude in a natural way. Because death is a perfectly natural thing to do."

What did you think about the third episode of The Last of Us?