TLOU 103 Review: Appeals to Emotion Can’t Conceal a Shallow Script

While 'Long Long Time'’s appeals to emotion may have hit home for some, the episode’s overall writing fails to adequately support its unoriginal and saccharine plot.

Long Long Time, the third and latest episode of HBO’s The Last of Us, has been getting heaped with praise for its touching portrayal of a queer love story in the post-apocalypse. But though its attempt to provide representation for this marginalized group is, in fact, admirable, the episode is narratively weak and unfortunately ends up reinforcing some highly questionable politics.

Though main characters Ellie and Joel are present in this episode, it’s Nick Offerman and Murray Bartlett’s characters who dominate this largely self-contained episode. Ten minutes in, we flash back to September 30th, 2003, and we meet Nick Offerman’s character, Bill, a libertarian survivalist (we get an establishing shot of a giant Gadsden flag hung up in his basement) hiding in a home-built secret underground bunker as he watches the military evacuate his isolated suburban town.

Once everyone is gone, we get a montage of Bill forging a path to self-sufficiency; chopping down trees, building greenhouses, setting up booby traps, and building a high-voltage fence around “his” property.

Four years later, a man named Frank stumbles into one of his traps. He talks his way into a free meal and shower; the two kiss; they have sex.

Three years later, Frank is still there. Him and Bill are in love. They briefly clash over Bill’s survivalist tendencies and conspiratorial thinking. Frank wants to beautify the neighborhood; Bill thinks it’s a waste of resources. Thanks to Frank’s persistence, Bill reluctantly forges a smuggling alliance with a younger Tess and Joel.

Raiders attempt to infiltrate Bill’s defenses; they shoot Bill; they fail; Bill survives. Bill and Frank plant strawberries, eat good meals and drink wine. They grow old.

Frank experiences some kind of illness that reduces his mobility. He uses a wheelchair; painting is hard; he has to drink from a straw; he needs help to take his pills. He decides to kill himself, and asks Bill for one last good day, and to then drug his wine so he can die “on his own terms”.

The two have a wedding; they eat a repeat of their first meal; when it comes time for Frank to kill himself, Bill drugs his own wine as well. “This isn't the tragic suicide at the end of the play,” Bill says, helpfully letting the viewer know that this is not, in fact, a ‘bury-your-gays’ storyline. “I'm old. I'm satisfied. And you were my purpose.”

“I do not support this,” Frank replies. “I should be furious. But from an objective point of view... it's incredibly romantic.” (What does ‘objectively romantic’ even mean? How can something be objectively emotional? Emotion is, like, one of the whole bases of subjectivity.) The two go to bed and die.

Cut back to the present. Joel and Ellie arrive at the house. Ellie finds a letter from Bill reading the following: 

If you find this... please do not come into the bedroom. We left a window open so the house wouldn't smell, but it will probably be a sight. I'm guessing you found this, Joel, because anyone else would've been electrocuted or blown up by one of my traps. Hehehehehehehehe. Take anything you need. The bunker code is the same as the gate code but in reverse. Anyway... I never liked you, but still, it's like we're friends... almost. And I respect you. So, I'm gonna tell you something because you're probably the only person who will understand. I used to hate the world, and I was happy when everyone died. But I was wrong because there was one person worth saving. That's what I did. I saved him. Then I protected him. That's why men like you and me are here. We have a job to do. And God help any mοthеrfսckеr who stands in our way. I leave you all of my weapons and equipment. Use them to keep Tess safe […].

Joel and Ellie have an exchange that originally happens much earlier in the game, right after they leave Boston:

JOEL: If I'm takin' you with me, there's some rules you gotta follow. Rule one, you don't bring up Tess. Ever. Matter of fact, we can just keep our histories to ourselves. Rule two, you don't tell anyone about your... condition. They see that bite mark, they won't think it through. They'll just shoot you. Rule three, you do what I say when I say it. We clear?

ELLIE: Yes.

JOEL: Repeat it.

ELLIE: What you say goes.

They restock on supplies and leave Lincoln in Bill’s truck. Roll credits.

Overwhelmingly, people love this episode. It speaks to them; the representation of older queer people happily in love speaks to them; the idea of growing old and dying beside someone you love speaks to them; the idea of serenity and a life lived in relative peace despite the chaos and violence of the apocalypse speaks to them. (So, presumably, does the pastoral fantasy of self-sufficiency amid chickens and strawberries; of maintaining your own comfort at the expense of others’ survival; and the very American fantasy of being a ‘safe haven of plenty’ while ignoring the way your privileged status only exists at the expense of everyone outside your borders.)

Undeniably, this episode moved a great deal of people; it made them laugh, it made them cry, and it gave them a thoroughly enjoyable hour of television. And I’m not here to discount that- I have laughed over and cried over and enjoyed far, far stupider content than this. And yet… despite how enjoyable this episode may have been… I don’t think you would be justified in calling it a good episode of television. I don’t think it was well-written. In fact, I would (I will!) argue that the writing on this episode was actually exceptionally weak, both in regards to the episode itself and the episode in relation to the story as a whole.

(Before we get into why, I should probably issue a disclaimer: if your metric for good and bad writing is that if media was enjoyable to you, it was well-written, and if it was not enjoyable to you, it was poorly written, then we are operating on fundamentally different axes of taste and criticism, and we have little or nothing more to say to each other.)

Moving on!

So, what is this episode supposed to be accomplishing?

When we first open on Bill, it’s pretty quickly established that this is a man whose survivalism and conspiratorial thinking has swallowed up every other aspect of his life. Bill’s political attitudes and personality have resulted in a total emotional isolation, even before the apocalypse. Despite having lived in Lincoln long enough to have custom-built a bunker below his house, he has virtually no meaningful personal connections in his neighborhood. He’s not concerned for the welfare of anyone else being evacuated, and neither is any evacuee wondering where he is. No one notices he’s missing as they pile up the population and move them out. When he realizes that he’s all alone in Lincoln, a look of pure glee overtakes his face. As he writes in his letter, “I used to hate the world, and I was happy when everyone died.” “But I was wrong,” he continues in that letter, “because there was one person worth saving.” So maybe this is supposed to be what the story is doing; showing that Frank turned him into someone better, someone who could sustain emotional connection.

The problem is that The Last of Us doesn’t actually do that. We meet Bill. We meet Frank. Frank is set up very quickly to be the opposite of Bill; self-aware, open, good with people. We see Frank challenge Bill’s views exactly once, in their fight over Frank’s desire to clean up the neighborhood and make friends, but it’s quickly brushed over and we never return to it. There are implications that Bill has changed to some extent by the end, as he waters decorative flowers outside their front porch, a move the earlier Bill would have condemned as “poor resource management.” As someone who prioritized survival over all else, he must have changed by the end to commit suicide beside Frank, but we never get to see any of this change. We’re just told that it happens. The Last of Us sets up Bill’s survivalism, makes the very deliberate choice to make him a hardcore libertarian (the Gadsden flag is a show addition), and then proceeds to ignore the implications of Bill’s ideologies in favor of a cheap love story Jackson McHenry has called “Pixar-style manipulation,”. Long Long Time seemingly deliberately sets up its main characters’ dramatically different understandings of the world and of themselves, but then almost completely refuses to engage with the inevitable conflict that would result from the dynamic it designed for itself.

Politics are simultaneously made key to understanding the character and completely irrelevant to the character’s development. Within the context of the story, Bill’s most deeply held political beliefs are ultimately nothing more than seasoning to the main meat of his story; the script demonstrates that his ideologies are key to understanding his character in our introduction to him, but then makes them completely irrelevant once Frank walks into the picture. It’s not about politics, we’re told, even as the Gadsden flag and wild accusations about 9/11 are paraded in front of our faces; it’s about love.

Is this interesting? Is this good writing? Is it compelling characterization to have a character’s most deeply held and defining beliefs fly out the window (ha) as soon as a love interest is introduced? Is it good writing to imply growth for a character without ever actually showing us how, or even conclusively if, said growth took place? To paraphrase CJ the X, is Long Long Time a story about love and grief and change, or are love and grief just there? (And change just hinted at?) Are love and grief just present in this story that ultimately gets lost in its own fix-it fanfiction-esque retelling of a relationship that somehow managed to be more nuanced and better fleshed out in a 5-minute cutscene in 2013 than through a whole hour in 2023?

The show justifies its 1¼ hour run time with the claim that it's giving these characters more depth and characterization than they were given in the game, but how much does it even do that? Outside of clearing up the specifics of how Bill became self-sufficient, what new information did we learn about either of them? Bill is a survivalist, a prepper, a grump. We already knew that. The addition of his good taste is the only new thing we get to know about him. As for Frank, we leave episode 3 still knowing basically nothing about him. We're familiar with the basics of his personality and we know he was leaving the Baltimore QZ. What's his last name? How did he get from Baltimore to near Boston unharmed, on foot, with no weapons or even a backpack? Did he leave anyone in Baltimore? Did he lose anyone when it fell? Bill had no one in the first place, but that seems a far less likely story for the gregarious Frank. Or, if his personal social life was similarly empty, why? What specifically attracted him about Bill? Did staying in Lincoln come down to a life here or a death out there, or was there a choice he had to make between Bill and an alternative? If there wasn't, when did "I have to stay here or I'll die" become "This is my home too"? Long Long Time doesn't even pretend to try and answer any of these questions. For a story that's supposed to be about love and loss and grief, The Last of Us seems curiously uninterested in actually exploring any of those themes in relation to its characters.

In the game, much less time is spent on the original Bill & Frank relationship. Bill, Joel and Ellie come across a body hanging in one of the buildings in Bill’s neighborhood. Shaken, Bill fills Joel in: that was Frank, his partner. The player finds a letter in which Frank explains that Bill’s hardcore survivalism ultimately tore their relationship apart, and Frank decided to steal a car battery and leave, feeling he was better off dead than living the way Bill wanted them to live. When he was bit, he decided to hang himself. This scene comes only shortly after Tess’s death, where, in the Capitol, Joel yells at Tess, “No, we are survivors!” Bill is both a plot convenience to pass off a car to Joel and a mirror image of what a commitment to survival above all else will get you.  

The show sets up that same hardcore survivalism in its version of Bill, deflates it without bothering to explain why or how Bill changed, and then- in the conclusion to the story- once again tries to claim it as definitive of Bill’s character. Bill’s suicide note- his last missive to the world- is full of gleeful joy at the thought of someone other than Joel trying to access his stockpiled resources and getting blown to smithereens by his booby traps. So did he change, or not? If Bill’s politics are the way we get to know who he is, and then they disappear the second it becomes inconvenient with the story, who are we supposed to interpret Bill to be, especially when his dormant “survival-of-the fittest free-market-capitalist first-come-first-serve finders-keepers” energy returns for comedic effect in his final words?

Bill and Frank’s love story exists within a fantasy wherein a character’s extreme survivalism and libertarianism can ultimately be reduced to nothing more than a fun, silly character quirk once he finds someone to eat strawberries with. It’s an internal logic where even a character’s most deeply held ideological beliefs can handily set aside over a (literal) good meal and glass of wine, for the sake of a generic, “universal” love. Despite the fact that we are shown that Bill lacks any sort of social life or deep emotional connection because of his survivalist attitude pre-apocalypse, all it takes for him to find love during the apocalypse is the right person to wander in asking him for a meal. While we never see him change, we’re somehow still supposed to believe him redeemed, and to be on his side when he tells Joel that “men like them are on this Earth to protect the people they love.”

The suicide pact between Bill and Frank ultimately comes across as a saccharine, disingenuous convenience for the sake of avoiding dealing seriously with the characters’ politics and worst elements. This is perhaps what lends the episode its fanfiction-esque quality; the skirting of obvious, inevitable (and actually interesting) conflicts between Bill and Frank for the sake of a fun, soft love story. But Bill and Frank’s story, as written, is almost entirely self-contained and largely irrelevant to what the show has set up for itself so far. Hence the letter; a ham-fisted attempt to connect them back to the larger story of The Last of Us. 

The letter Bill writes essentially only exists to hastily connect Bill and Frank’s story to Joel and Ellie’s story, since the two pairs no longer meet. It’s Bill’s equivalent of Tess’s “save who you can save” line from last episode, and evidences a growing trend of characters in the show validating, or setting up, Joel’s ultimate choice to doom the world to save Ellie. The show also transparently relocates Joel’s setting of rules and boundaries for Ellie to after he reads Bill’s letter, as opposed to right after Tess’s death, as if to imply that Bill’s invocation of Joel as duty-bound to protect the people he loves is now motivating him to commit to protecting Ellie. This doesn’t make sense at all, first of all because he doesn’t love Ellie yet, second of all because he was never expecting Bill or Frank to take Ellie to find Tommy anyways- he was going to be doing that himself regardless- and third, it once again diminishes Tess by implying that her begging him to get Ellie to Tommy’s was less compelling than a letter left behind by a man he didn’t even consider a friend. 

The show treating Bill’s letter’s argument that Joel has been put on this earth to protect people is also stupid for another reason. I’ve already talked about why Joel’s decision is at its most compelling when it’s despite his “character arc,” and not because of it, so I won’t rehash that again. What I will say is that repeatedly having Joel encounter scenarios and people who tell him to save Ellie is a gross misunderstanding both of his character and the final choice. The personality cocktail that causes Joel to do what he does is already in him from the very first scene of the game; he doesn’t become selfish, he doesn’t learn to prioritize his family over the world- obviously! Because his character arc is overall a positive one! Overall, he is able to open up more thanks to Ellie. The ending is such a brutal set-back because, again, it is not supposed to happen. So not only does Bill writing this emotional, soul-baring letter to someone he says he does not like feel out of character and reinforce problems in Bill’s characterization and arc, but it actively makes the ending we all know is coming worse. 

What narrative purpose does the suicide pact serve? You could argue that it allows two queer characters to have a happy ending (nothing happier than a suicide pact!) and avoids the bury your gays trope (diversity win! The gays are not being buried, they are decomposing in bed instead. Diversity win! We killed both of the gay old men, instead of just one!) but it also positions Bill and Frank as dying atop a giant hoard of invaluable supplies while people outside their walled garden trade ration cards for shoelaces. How does the suicide enrich our understanding of Bill, or of Frank? In Bill’s case, it doesn’t. It presents Bill as a character who overcame his survivalist tendencies without, as previously argued, actually showing us how or why or even if that actually happened. Maybe the most infuriating thing here is that there was no reason for Bill and Frank to both die, and Bill’s survival could have, in fact, enriched the narrative.

If Bill had lived- even if the rest of the episode had proceeded as it did, but Bill had lived, maybe vomiting the pills up in an inability to suppress his survival instinct, that could have provided both an interesting climax to the worst aspects of Bill’s personality while allowing Bill to meet Ellie and Joel and to contribute to their story through the way he contrasts with Joel. Bill would’ve become a character whose intrinsic drive to survive put him into a limbo state of living past his purpose. Not only would this have paralleled Ellie’s perception of herself in The Last of Us Part II, but it would have continued the theme the show has established of parallels between the cordyceps virus and human nature. Joel’s murder of the soldier in episode 1 was compared by the showrunners to the instinctive movement of an infected person; Bill’s survival instincts forcing him to continue living past his purpose would have been much the same as a cordyceps forcing a human body to continue operating past its “purpose.” 

“But tabby, wouldn’t that fall into the bury your gays trope?” Let me ask you this. If it’s really so important for Bill and Frank not to leave the other behind, for the sake of avoiding ‘bury your gays’ (you keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means), why kill either of them? Straight up, why did they do that? They didn’t have to do that. They’re already massively changing the story. Frank doesn’t develop a degenerative disease in the original. Bill lives in the original. Straight up, why did they make them kill themselves? They didn’t even have to do that! They could’ve had them live and meet Joel. Hell, Bill could’ve told Joel what he said in his letter in person. He could have given Joel free supplies while still alive (and it would’ve meant more, because, y’know, the supplies would still have been useful to Bill even as he gave them up). It’s like it didn’t even occur to the writers to let them live. It’s like they got so wrapped up in wanting to write a beautiful, tragic gay love story that they completely forgot the “tragic” part is optional. They chose to make their old gay couple kill themselves for no reason and they’re still getting praise for avoiding bury your gays (I understand that a gay character dying is not inherently ‘bury your gays’, but let’s get real, that’s what most of the people who praise this episode understand it as.) It’s kind of impressive. This episode said “if you’re disabled, you might as well just kill yourself” with its whole chest, unnecessarily killed off its gay couple for the development of its protagonists, and people are still defending it with their lives for its progressivism. You almost have to respect it. In the words of a mutual, this is BBC Sherlock levels of fake-deep gaslighting. Remember when we all thought that show was good? Like, genuinely a masterpiece? The 2010s were weird as shit.

The last shot in the episode is through the window Bill and Frank left open so the house wouldn’t smell like their rotting corpses. It’s supposed to be poignant; we watch Joel and Ellie leave from inside the room containing Bill and Frank’s dead bodies; there’s light streaming in; the shot is visually similar to many of the video game’s iconic window shots. But ultimately, this shot, again, says nothing. It’s an empty callback to an aesthetic signature from the games that contributes nothing to our interpretation of the stories or characters. The light motif has already been done to death in the show, explored in only the shallowest of senses (“When it’s dark, look for the light.” Light is good and dark is bad. Do you get it? Do you get it? How original. How en-light-ening.) This shot is a microcosm of the whole episode; an irrelevant interlude too distant from Joel and Ellie to properly continue building their story, and yet aesthetically and superficially similar enough to its source material to be labeled as “prestige”- as long as you don’t bother trying to parse any kind of meaningful intent from it.

There are a whole host of other, smaller critiques that I have with this episode. Why are we set up for an action scene with the raiders, and then they immediately bite the dust and we move on? Why don’t we get to see this action? Does the show think it’s above developing its story via action sequences? Is it that insecure about its status as a game adaptation? Why hint that there was just a great action sequence happening off-screen and then not give us any of it? Could Bill and Frank fighting off raiders not have shown us how they work together as a team and taught us more about their relationship?

Why position the obvious choice in the face of slightly reduced mobility as suicide? Sure, Frank was in a wheelchair, he needed help for a lot of simple tasks, and he was having trouble painting. He didn’t seem in pain. Bill was more than happy and able to provide him with the aid he required. But the show presents the simple fact of Frank no longer being able to be completely self-sufficient as just cause for suicide. If it was Bill, this might even have been compelling, in the context of his political and ideological beliefs, but from Frank this reads as the creators’ earnest opinions of the value of living a life that requires some small amount of assistance. It’s absolutely a question worth asking.

Overall, episode 3 of The Last of Us is desperate to be genuine and moving, but shies away from doing anything interesting whatsoever. Even when it provides itself with a perfect set-up for a climax, like with the raiders or with tension between Bill and Frank’s drastically opposed worldviews, it shies away at the last second for the sake of more easily manufactured story beats. Why provoke emotion and interest via layered emotional conflict or via an action scene when you could just have two old men grow old and die together? The show is so obsessed with what it’s decided to be that it completely neglects what it could be. It’s sad; there’s such a wealth of complicated forces here that could be fascinating to watch interact, but they just aren’t being given room to breathe within the stiflingly simple script.

Long Long Time is so insistent on dictating its creators’ interpretation of Bill and Frank to its audience that it completely forgets to tell an actual story. It’s got the emotional depth of a Pinterest board, the range of a character playlist. It assembles aesthetic signatures, tropes, and tracks its audience already associates with romance and emotion and hurls them at us with the grace and subtlety of a bowling ball in an attempt to make us sob. There’s nothing you haven’t seen a million times before; if you like Nick Offerman and Murray Bartlett’s performances, maybe you were compelled. On the other hand, if, like me, you thought they had zero chemistry, there was probably nothing interesting for you in the whole episode.

Overall score: 1/5. Up did it better (and was less ableist.)

More Criticism

• The Empty Sentiment of The Last of Us

• The Last of Us Review: HBO’s Video Game Adaptation Is All Flesh, No Bones