Two men meet after the collapse of society. One of them falls into a booby trap, hidden outside the wire-fenced border of the other man’s suburban ghost town. He is bedraggled, hungry. The other man shows sympathy and invites him in for a meal. There is tension in the air. The threat of violence. And yet, the opposite happens – they fall in love. For nearly two decades, these men grow old together, away from the plague that has decimated the world. Eventually, they die together.

This beautiful, heart-pinching story is the focus of “Long Long Time”, the third episode of The Last of Us. Up to this point, HBO’s post-apocalyptic video game adaptation had been a violent dystopian nightmare. There were brutal fights. Traumatic deaths. Viscerally upsetting monsters. At the heart of it were Joel (Pedro Pascal), Tess (Anna Torv) and 14-year-old Ellie (Bella Ramsey), picking their way through a ravaged society.