The season 2 finale of The Last of Us ended on a couple of cliffhangers. To start, Abby tracked down Ellie after Ellie had killed a few of her friends, part of her quest to avenge her father Joel, whom Abby killed at the start of the season. The cycle of revenge continued, with Abby killing Ellie's friend Jesse and wounding Joel's brother Tommy. Finally, Abby trained her gun on Ellie, and we cut to black.
We then wound the clock back a few days and woke up with Abby in a Seattle football stadium; in season 3, we'll see what she was doing while Ellie was hunting her, in a mirror of how things play out in The Last of Us video games. Essentially, we'll spend all of season 3 getting to know the "villain" of the piece.
“I don’t think television is supposed to work like this,” showrunner Craig Mazin said during a press conference, per The Hollywood Reporter. “We’re clearly breaking quite a few rules, and I love that. And I love it because that is the point. This is not something we’re doing as a gimmick. The point of this story — and this is looked at from so many different angles in so many different ways — is that the entire concept of protagonist is flawed. The entire concept of villain is flawed. Our way of processing the world through heroes and villains is a mistake. It ends up creating these barriers between people that shouldn’t be there. It ends up giving ourselves justifications and conveniences for bad behavior, and it ends up allowing us to judge others summarily for things that we don’t quite understand the motivation behind it. We know this is a challenging thing to keep track of emotionally. We understand people are going to be provoked. But part of this story is about examining why we’re so comfortable with following one person’s point of view about everything.”
That's interesting big picture talk from Mazin, but what exactly does it mean for the future of the show? Will Bella Ramsey appear again as Ellie?
Speaking to TV Line, Ramsey said that they'll "most likely" have a smaller role: “I think that I’m going to be there, but not a whole bunch. We’ve had conversations about that. I sort of have a rough idea of what it’s going to be, but I can’t tell you.”
Season 3 will mostly belong to Abby, which means actor Kaitlyn Dever gets to really show what she can do. "[T]here is another side to this story that we have yet to really delve into. And there’s no question that Abby is the hero of her story, Kaitlyn Dever is the hero of a story always, you know," Mazin said. "I mean, if you have a Kaitlyn Dever, you use a Kaitlyn Dever."
Seeing things from Abby's point of view means we'll get to know some of the Seattle-based factions we only glancingly met in season 2, like the militant Washington Liberation Front, aka the Wolves, and the fanatical Seraphites. “How did that war start? Why? How did the Seraphites start? Who is [their] prophet? What happened to her? What does Isaac want? What’s happening at the end of Episode 7? What is this explosion? All of it will become clear,” Mazin promised.
Will Joel be back in The Last of Us season 3?
If you've played The Last of Us video games, you know basically where the story is going, and you know that Ellie will eventually come back into it. Even dead characters could come back through flashbacks, something the show has made smart use of.
Talking Polygon, Mazin said that while they didn't veer off the beaten path much in season 2, they may have more "flexibility" in season 3. "And you know, we love a side trip to Indonesia, it’s one of our favorite things to do, so maybe- maybe a side trip to, you know, Joel and Tommy terrorizing the countryside, we’ll never know,” he mused.
Co-showrunner Neil Druckmann added that he never expected to get a flashback to Joel's childhood in season 2, so he's not ruling anything out. “You can’t predict these things,” he said. “We’re telling you that next season, one, there’s an epic nature to everything that’s about to happen. But this other story is going to be really important coming backing to Joel and Ellie and everything we’ve seen so far.”
As for the living characters, will there be any awkwardness between Ellie and Dina now that Jesse, the father of Dina's child, is dead? “I mean, how could it not have a drastic impact [on their relationship], especially when he’s the father of this baby, but also a very close friend, a former romantic partner?” Druckmann asked Deadline. “Yeah, it’s going to mean a whole lot.”
"The question that we’re asking, and the thing we’re interrogating in this story is, when you’ve committed such horrible things, depending on your circumstance, can you ever come back from that? We see in that porch scene, Joel is trying to come back from what he’s done, even though he doesn’t regret it. Now, we have these two characters that are on this downward spiral, trying to do justice for the people that they love, and we’ll see how far that goes."
The only question now is how long we have to wait to see all of this. Unfortunately, it sounds like it could be a long while:
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