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This post contains spoilers for Season Two of The Last of Us and The Last of Us Part II PlayStation game.
With another wave of shocking twists, Season Two of HBO’s The Last of Us has come to an end. Over the course of seven episodes, the adaptation of the PlayStation game has charted a bloody path through its apocalyptic take on Seattle, killing off characters left and right — some having a greater impact than others.
And while the first season of the show was no slouch in axing its supporting cast at regular intervals, this year’s plot has taken a heavier toll on viewers with an abrupt and brutal end for what people considered to be the star of the show, Pedro Pascal’s Joel Miller. Just like those who’d read the Song of Ice and Fire series prior to Game of Thrones, gamers have been sitting on the death of Joel since the TV adaptation was announced back in 2020.
All things considered, TV audiences have taken the twist in stride — or at least better than many players did initially. Following the release of the 2020’s The Last of Us Part II, Joel’s death played a role in helping ignite a hate campaign against the game’s creators and cast, including actress Laura Bailey, who voiced Abby.
Yet despite there being a saner response to the big twist this time around, many viewers fear that the show may have lost its core appeal when it lost the relationship between Joel and Ellie (Bella Ramsey). Following Joel’s departure, there’s been a perceptible vibe shift online; one further exasperated by the finale’s not one, but two, cliffhangers that leave Ellie’s fate in doubt for those who haven’t already played the game.
But, as many fans already know, there’s reason to be hopeful about the story ahead. Despite some major changes to certain story beats and characters, HBO’s take on The Last of Us hasstayed surprisingly close to the complex (and controversial) structure of the game that inspired it. If the original plot is any indication, what lies ahead could be some of the best stories to come from the series.
What’s the issue?
Since the show was first announced, players have wondered just how series creators Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann (who co-created the games) would tackle the ambitious story of The Last of Us Part II. For the first season, it was kind of obvious; 2013’s The Last of Us is a game that uses cinematic language and Oscar-worthy motion-capture performances to tell a relatively straightforward story, easily befitting a movie or show. Following Joel and Ellie on a cross-country odyssey, the story is neatly broken into four chapters based on seasons of the year, with subchapters serving to provide little pit stops and pockets of storytelling where new characters enter and exit (usually by dying).
The second game, however, is a much more sprawling tale that utilizes different perspectives and storytelling methods to shake things up, hitting players with pivots and misdirection. The game opens with a prologue that also serves as an extended tutorial, and ends with Joel’s death, kicking off Ellie’s quest for revenge. In the show, these events take up a full three episodes (nearly half the season), before the plot accelerates exponentially.
As mentioned, this season ends with dual cliffhangers. First, Abby (Kaitlyn Dever) arrives for a showdown with Ellie. Devastated by Ellie’s murder of her friends, Abby points her pistol at Ellie and pulls the trigger before the scene cuts to black, leaving Ellie’s fate a mystery. The next scene picks up with Abby at an undisclosed location that’s revealed to be the football stadium that the WLF (Washington Liberation Front) has been using as their headquarters. With a rhythmic drumroll, onscreen text reads “Seattle, Day One” —indicating that the story is flashing back three days.
The first bit is a classic bit of cliffhanger rage bait. Viewers will now have to wonder whether Ellie truly dies (a plausible scenario, given the current body count), and the wait could last up to two years given the previous gap between seasons. It’s the second twist that’s more interesting — and it’s one all too familiar to gamers.
In The Last of Us Part II, players take control of Ellie from a narrow perspective, not knowing who Abby is or why she killed Joel. In fact, there’s almost no information at all about the Wolves, Scars, or anything happening outside her purview. Playing the game for the first time, the showdown between Ellie and Abby could arrive around 10-12 hours into the game (i.e., the entire runtime of the first game), and it feels like you’re approaching the end. Then, the trigger is pulled, and the screen goes black. What’s next is an even bigger surprise than Joel’s death; the game isn’t over, it might’ve just begun.
Without any major spoilers, the plot of The Last of Us Part II is structured as a sweeping epic that plays out in three acts (prologue aside) and Ellie’s three-day journey through Seattle only makes up the first third. The next act revisits the same timeframe from Abby’s perspective. From there, the story continues in the aftermath of their conflict in the theater.
For years, fans have wondered just how the hell the HBO show would tell this story. Would it bounce back and forth between their perspectives or cut out massive swaths of the larger picture? Season Three of the show was announced before the second aired, but even still there was no indication of a fourth. The structure of the original story could’ve been changed entirely; it seemed unlikely that the showrunners would perform the same rug-pull as the game, but that’s exactly what they did.
In a recent interview with Collider, Mazin made it clear that he envisions the show running for four seasons, saying, “There’s no way to complete this narrative in a third season.” Based on the tease in the finale, even nongamers might expect the next installment to be more focused on Abby, and that certainly appears to be the case. Speaking with Variety, Catherine O’Hara (who plays Gail), confirmed the theory while discussing whether she’d be returning to the show, saying, “[Definitely] not this next season. It’s the Abby story.” But without Joel or Ellie, will anyone stick around to watch?
The rise of Abby
From the get-go, shifting the story to Abby’s perspective was going to be controversial, regardless of whether it’s the game or show. After taking an emotional journey with Joel and Ellie, fans had grown attached to the duo. Killing Joel was a sucker punch, but forcing players to take on the identity of his killer? Many felt that was an insult.
In the years that followed the sequel’s release, those who felt slighted flocked to forums like Reddit to bemoan the game’s choices. The biggest community of critics reside in a sub-Reddit dedicated to railing against the story and more specifically, Abby’s role in it, which has been an incubator for hateful rhetoric and harassment against those involved with The Last of Us Part II for the past five years.
One of the key themes of Part II is the fact that everyone is only seeing things from their perspective; all these characters who are suffering loss and passing that suffering on to others are doing so in ignorance. Ellie doesn’t know that Joel killed Abby’s father until she’s already spilled a small army’s worth of blood in retaliation. Abby herself isn’t even aware of the atrocities she and her WLF coalition are inflicting on others until she’s forced into situations where she gets to know more about the Scars.
Switching to Abby to relive the 72 hours in Seattle allows players who had previously only known her as a boogeyman to begin to see why she killed Joel and what she’s going through. Having lost everything early on, she finds a new family with the Wolves and other characters yet to be introduced in the show. After a few hours in Abby’s shoes, as Ellie stalks through Seattle killing off her friends, their roles are reversed. In this context, Abby herself is the protagonist — or at least as important a deuteragonist as there can be.
Unfortunately, decisions already made by the show’s writers have undercut some of that impact. Divulging Abby’s motivation in the second episode sucks the air out of the reveal later in the season when Abby beats information out of Nora. There’re also multiple sequences in the series that set up the larger conflict between the Wolves and Scars that’s central to Abby’s story but have no bearing on Ellie’s.
But here’s the thing: Abby’s story is fantastic. It has all the components of Ellie’s — found family, love triangles, coming of age in a grim world — all taken to the next level. She’s a deeply sympathetic character despite her tough exterior, and the events that unfold for her ultimately make Ellie’s thread seem quaint in comparison. It’s an expansion of all the things that made The Last of Us Part I and II work so well before, and a more complicated look at this world and its inhabitants.
Most importantly, the change in perspective could end up being the solution to the show’s current Joel-shaped hole. If everyone is wondering why they would want to watch Ellie without Joel, it might be best to move onto a new set of characters to learn about and live with entirely. Going back to Game of Thrones, one of that show’s greatest strengths (at least, early on) was its constant shift between characters and factions. Good guys did bad things; bad guys did bad things but we loved them anyway.
Much of the enjoyment of that series stemmed from audiences being forced to be critical of characters they previously sided with, changing their own perspectives as time went on. That’s what The Last of Us will be asking for moving forward. It may have been easy with Joel (Pascal’s charm is infectious), but fans of the game know that the same thing is possible for Abby.
If Season Three can even lean even further into the game to tell a different kind of story, there’s hope that everyone — viewers and characters alike — may find solace in the unknown. For the open-minded, the best could be yet to come.
