The Last Of Us Season 2 Premiere’s Abby Scene Takes A Bold Departure From The Game

Do not go out on patrol if you haven’t seen the season 2 premiere of “The Last of Us” or haven’t played “The Last of Us Part II.” Spoilers lie ahead.

When “The Last of Us Part II” released in 2020, fans might have been a little confused when, after playing as Ellie for a little while, the game abruptly switches focus to a character who’s only initially identified as “Woman.” As she traverses a snowy tundra behind “Man,” the two bicker a bit before crossing a steep mountainside; when “Woman” almost falls, we learn her name is Abby, and his is Owen. 

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If you’ve played the entirety of the Naughty Dog game — directed by Neil Druckmann, who helms the HBO small screen adaptation with “Chernobyl” showrunner Craig Mazin — you know that the pair’s mission, such as it is, is to find Joel in the settlement of Jackson, Wyoming and try to get revenge. Let’s now turn now to the first season of the HBO show, which concludes with Joel — played in the series by Pedro Pascal — murdering his way through a makeshift hospital of Fireflies to save his ward and surrogate daughter, Ellie (Bella Ramsey) as the Fireflies prepare to kill Ellie in surgery, using her immunity from the cordyceps virus to find a cure. Joel ends up killing everyone … including an unarmed doctor. That doctor’s daughter, Abby, is played on the show by new cast member Kaitlyn Dever, and the way the series handles her introduction is very different, marking a huge switch-up from the game.

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The game leaves you in the dark as Abby for a while largely because it builds suspense masterfully; you don’t fully understand how Abby relates to the main story, Joel, or Ellie for quite a while but because you’re playing as her character, it’s in your best interest to keep her alive. When you find out Abby’s endgame, though, you might wish you’d let her die at the hands of an Infected horde … but again, the show changes up the perspective with a new take on the material.

If you haven’t played the games, this might seem like a really small tweak for the second season of “The Last of Us.” Why does it matter that Abby and her crew are some of the very first people we see in the season 2 premiere, and also, why does it matter that we know for certain that Abby is hunting Joel in the show but it’s left a mystery in the game?

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These two different approaches to the exact same story provide one perfect example of how to adapt something like a video game for the small screen. By having the player control Abby without any information towards the beginning of the game, it increases the intrigue around her character, forcing players to guess who she is, why she’s even relevant and empathizing with her while tension builds. The perfect way to express that tension in the show is for viewers to immediately learn that Joel is in Abby’s crosshairs for killing her father; that way, we know he’s in danger, but he has no idea — and nor does Ellie, who finds herself at odds with her makeshift father figure after the time jump that kicks off season 2 of “The Last of Us” in earnest. 

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The fact that Joel is prey instead of predator for the first episode of “The Last of Us” season 2 — especially when you consider that the final shot is Abby and her gang looking down upon Jackson’s New Year’s festivities — sets up a confrontation between him and Abby, though we don’t know when it’ll come to a head. So what’s the intention behind this change? Luckily, we do know why the show switched things up.

During a press conference attended by /Film before season 2 of “The Last of Us” premiered, showrunner Neil Druckmann opened up about why they made this change, and again, it really just came down to creating the same story within two different mediums.

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“There are two reasons why we changed certain contexts or moved certain things up in the story,” Druckmann said. “One of which, in the game … you start the game and you play as Abby, so you immediately form an empathic connection with her because you’re surviving as her. You’re running through the snow, you’re fighting Infected. And we could withhold certain things and make 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 needed other tools, and that context gave us that shortcut.”

Druckmann then pointed out that they did something similar in the show’s first season. Joel’s daughter Sarah, played on the series by Nico Parker, is the point-of-view character for the beginning of the 2013 game “The Last of Us,” but you can’t replicate that in the series; instead, we follow Sarah through her day during the pilot of the TV series, only to be gutted when she’s shot and killed at the beginning of the outbreak. Finally, Druckmann said it all came down to timing.

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“And another reason is that where that revelation [about Abby’s backstory] happens in the game, if we were to stick to a very similar timeline, viewers would have to wait a very, very long time to get that context. It would probably get spoiled for them between seasons, and we didn’t want that. So it felt appropriate for those reasons to move that up and give viewers that context right off the bat.”

“The Last of Us” airs new episodes on Sundays at 9 P.M. EST on Max and HBO.