The Last of Us episode 3 was originally "two hours" and made Craig Mazin cry "so hard it hurt"

Episode three of HBO’s The Last of Us adaptation has already been lauded as one of the best hours (and a bit) of television by many. However, there was a time when it was nearly twice as long.

Talking to Deadline, series co-creator Craig Mazin revealed that one cut was “almost two hours or something like that”.

Please note, there are spoilers for The Last of Us below.

Episode three of The Last of Us tells the love story of Bill and Frank, something that is not well developed in the game.

Bill is a survivalist, and quite a cantankerous one at that. Frank, on the other hand, is warm and hopeful. Even when the world around him is crumbling, he manages to find joy – in the words of Nick Offerman, who plays Bill on the show, “Frank is the flowers, and Bill is the soil.”

When Mazin first saw how long this original edit of the episode was, he assumed it wouldn’t be good. However, then he sat down to watch it, and the end result made him cry “so hard it hurt”.

“[Episode director] Peter Hoar did his director’s cut with our editor, Tim Good, which was quite long,” Mazin explained. “When they sent it to me, I think it was almost two hours or something like that. So, I was like, oh, that’s probably not good.

“And I sat down, but I’m like, ‘OK, I’ll watch the two-hour version of this episode.’ And I cried so hard that at one point, I actually said out loud, ‘Ow.’

“I mean, it hurt. I cried so hard it hurt. And I thought, ‘Well, if these guys can do this to me and I wrote this fucking thing, then I think it might work pretty well on other people’.”

And, work well on other people it did, with the internet now awash with strawberry gifs and emojis (I am one of those people). Now I know there is an extended director’s cut of episode three, I am desperate to know more about what was left on the editing floor. I would be more than happy to sit down and spend two hours further exploring Bill and Frank’s relationship.