The latest trailer for The Last of Us season 2 not only confirms the show's release window, but also teases a major narrative shift to the story. Now, we're going to be getting into big The Last of Us Part 2 game spoilers to discuss this one so make sure you've played it through before reading on.
Still here? Well then you'll know that the key driver behind Abby's mission of revenge is the loss of her father. He's the doctor who was about to operate on Ellie at the end of the first game who Joel kills to get her back. This backstory is revealed pretty late in The Last of Us Part 2 when you're playing through Abby's past, and it's a pretty harrowing moment.
As you might recall, you play as Abby as she walks through the hospital corridors with the emergency red light on and the alarm blaring as she gets closer to the room her dad is in. It's a gut punch when you realize what happened to him, and it finally makes sense why Abby killed Joel at the start of the game.
It's a masterclass in slow-build storytelling in the games, but it's also a decision that led to the actor who played Abby, Laura Bailey, getting a barrage of abuse when it first came out. As a player early on, it's hard to understand why Abby does what she does, killing off the main character in the games.
Now, given that The Last of Us season 2 is planning to split the story across multiple seasons, if this backstory plays out the same way, then viewers won't find out why Abby kills him for years yet based on the release model of the show. That's why I've been hoping that the creators – Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann – might pull this forward.
Not only will bringing her past up hopefully help protect Kaitlyn Dever, who plays Abby in the show, from the same kind of abuse, but it also makes sense for the story. In live-action, it's much harder to follow a character for extended periods of the narrative when you have no idea about their motivations. While the reason for her revenge won't redeem her, it will add a lot of emotional complexity to Abby's story when we see it on screen.
Thankfully, the latest trailer for season 2 has convinced me that they've done just that. The new clip opens with Dever's Abby walking through a red-lit corridor as the alarm blares, which looks almost shot-for-shot like the hospital scene. While we don't see any more of this, later on, Abby can be seen kneeling over a grave as well.
Hopefully this isn't a double bluff from the creators, and we'll be able to see both the brutality of Abby's actions in the new episodes as well as part of her reasoning behind them. April can't come soon enough…
The Last of Us is returning to Max in April and Sky and NOW in the UK.
For more, check out our guides to the best HBO shows and the best HBO movies to stream right now.
