The ‘Last of Us’ Season Two Premiere Departed From the Games’ Story In One Major Way

Tonight’s season two premiere of The Last of Us made its intentions clear right up front. After a reminder of the lie Joel (Pedro Pascal) tells Ellie (Bella Ramsey) at the end of the first season, the Craig Mazin-written and directed episode settles on a new face: Abby. Portrayed by Kaitlyn Dever, the character is one of the few remaining members of a revolutionary militia group called the Fireflies. You may also remember that Joel kind of, uh, wiped out an entire base’s worth of the group in the season one finale, saving Ellie’s life but preventing the Fireflies from using her to cure the mutant-Cordyceps pandemic, and setting up the events that unfold in this week’s premiere. Carnage begets carnage, and Abby makes her intentions clear about what she plans to do when she eventually finds Joel: “When we kill him, we kill him slowly.”

Mazin’s positioning of Dever’s Abby at the top of the premiere is intentional, quickly establishing what appears to be the season’s most immediately pressing thread: an impending encounter between Abby and Joel over what he did to the Fireflies. It’s a bit of a departure from The Last of Us Part II, the 2020 PlayStation 4 game this season is drawing from; in that game, Abby’s introduction into the story comes without this context. This makes her much more of a cipher, a character whose motivations remain mysterious until later in the game, when audiences get a chance to play as Abby.

In a press conference last month, Neil Druckmann, co-creator of The Last of Us games as well as the series, said that the shift was intentional. “In the game… you play as Abby, so you immediately form an empathic connection with her because you’re surviving as her,” he says. “We can withhold certain things and make it a mystery that will be revealed later in the story. We couldn’t do that in the show because you’re not playing as her, so we need other tools. And that context gave us that shortcut.”

The shortcut makes her reappearance at the end of the episode feel like a five-alarm fire and proves The Last of Us isn’t content to rest on its laurels. Judging by the wordlessly determined look that Dever gives the camera at the end of the episode, she intends to keep her promise. Combine that with a blossoming Cordyceps threat, and audiences are poised for a lot of action right out of the gate. If The Last of Us follows through on Abby’s promise as it seems poised to do, we’re looking at a storytelling decision that could rival the Red Wedding or Ned Stark’s death on Game of Thrones in terms of Sunday-night shock factor—while establishing a deeply personal narrative for the rest of the season. In other words, strap in.