There are only seven episodes on this season of The Last of Us, and the fourth, "Day One," just aired. That means we're already halfway through the season, which is a bummer, but at least HBO is making every episode count.
"Day One" found Ellie (Bella Ramsey) and Dina (Isabela Merced) setting up camp in post-apocalyptic Seattle. Somewhere in this ruined city, they will find Abby (Kaitlyn Dever), the woman who murdered Ellie's foster dad Joel (Pedro Pascal) earlier in the season. And when they find her: sweet revenge.
Or at least that's the plan. If you've played the video games the show is based on, you know things get complicated. In The Last of Us Part II, you play as Ellie for around the first half of the game. Then you switch to playing as Abby, the woman Ellie is hunting, and see things from her perspective. It's a very bold twist that had fans in an uproar when the game first came out in 2020.
The game is very discreetly divided into Ellie and Abby sections: first you play as Ellie, and see what she does over a period of three days. Then the clock resets and we switch to playing Abby over those same three days. Before the second season of the show started airing, I figured that HBO might jumble these timelines up. Rather than having us watch first Ellie's journey and then Abby's I thought we might cut back and forth between them. But now that there are only three episodes left and we haven't seen Abby at all since she killed Joel, it looks like the show will stick to the structure of the games, meaning that this season will be all about Ellie's journey.
That means that season 3, which is already ordered, will very likely flip things and revolve around Abby, who has a very eventful three days while Ellie is out there hunting her. Again, this is a bold move. Fans loved Joel and share Ellie's thirst for revenge. How will they feel when we spend a whole season of TV with the "bad guy"?
Probably a bit like how they felt when the same thing happened in the game, which is to say, they were furious...at first. In time, The Last of Us Part II has come to be seen as an excellent game that told its story in a unique way. Switching between Ellie and Abby is the point; you're supposed to question what being a "bad guy" means. Abby does something horrible, but we see that she had her reasons, reasons the show front-loaded. Ellie is the nominal hero of the tale, but she descends deeper into darkness and obsession to the point where she starts to look as bad or worse than the people she's after.
I figured that cross-cutting between Ellie and Abby might help sell that story better. It might have us questioning our loyalties and the uprightness of Ellie's quest earlier. But maybe that was always impossible. For one thing, both Ellie and Abby's stories take their time working up to a climax. With so few episodes available, we wouldn't be able to reach that climax in just one season; season 2 would've ended with nothing resolved. And the show still works the way they're doing it, even if I was expecting a change.
In the game, after we get through Abby's part of the story, we switch back to playing as Ellie for the final push. It's unclear if that part of the game would be lumped into the forthcoming season 3 or whether the show will have a season 4 to wrap things up. But with the way things are going with season 2, we can at least say that we'll be spending most of season 3 with Abby and her friends.
New episodes of The Last of Us season 2 air Sunday nights on HBO and Max.
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