Warning! This article contains major spoilers for The Last of Us season 2 episode 1 and The Last of Us Part II.
Well, it's official: Kaitlyn Dever's mysterious new character Abby is the antagonist of The Last of Us season 2 – or at least that's what episode 1 establishes in its very first scene, anyway.
Having already made us wait two years to reunite with Joel and Ellie, showrunners Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann boldly open 'Future Days' on a bunch of Fireflies we've never met before. Standing by a makeshift graveyard on the outskirts of a city, one of the group asks, "Why would he do this?"
"I heard rumors. It was some kid he took that was supposedly..." another replies, before getting cut off by a third: "That wasn't true. It isn't possible."
"No, probably not. And even if it were, it doesn't f***ing matter anyway. Not without..." Tati Gabrielle's character says, gesturing towards one of the crosses in the ground.
As the sequence goes on, it's revealed the "he" they're talking about is Joel and, well, whatever he did... Dever's Abby wants to "slowly" kill him for it. "[He's got] a three-day jump on us. We should've gone right after him."
"We were trying to save the wounded," one whispers. "But we didn't save anyone, did we?" Abby snaps back, before she kneels down beside a grave marker and places a Fireflies pendant around it. Cut to the opening credits.
We don't see her again until the very end of the episode, as she and one of her Firefly pals silently peer into Jackson from the snowy mountains surrounding its perimeter.
That scene is more in keeping with Abby's introduction in the video game, which sees her wake in a remote lodge and guided to Jackson's outskirts by her Firefly friend.who series watchers will later come to know as Owen.
They briefly talk about an unknown man inside Jackson, and how they're going to "lure him out", but they don't name their target, unlike the show does. When Owen tells Abby his partner, Mel, is pregnant and suggests the others are going to want to turn back when they see how fortified Jackson is, Abby sets off on her own – and winds up running into a bunch of infected.
Her path crosses with Joel and Tommy, then, when they help her shake off the runners and she leads them back to one of Abby's groups hideouts. Unbeknownst to the Miller brothers, though, they've unknowingly wandered into a trap, and Abby shoots Joel in the leg as her friends pin Tommy down.
As the others hold Tommy at gunpoint, Abby fatally beats with a golf club, ending his life just as Ellie stumbles into the room and is forced to watch. The chilling sequence is essentially the catalyst for the whole game, as Ellie sets out on a violent, vengeful mission to hunt Abby down and make her pay.
From Owen and Abby's chat on the mountains and her hissed "Guess..." at Joel's "Who are you?" prior to the latter's death, players can assume there's some sort of history there. But we don't get any real clue as to why Abby butchered Joel until over halfway through the game, as Abby – who we're controlling at that point – visits Seattle with her new ally Lev. The truth is told via flashbacks, bringing players up to speed as to Abby's complex motivations.
While The Last of Us season 2, episode 1 doesn't explicitly note why Abby wants to kill Joel, her tearful encounter with the grave suggests that he's responsible for the death of someone close to her. It's possible that Mazin and Druckmann opted to do this due the extreme reaction to Part II, where impatient players bombarded Abby voice actor Laura Bailey with abuse and death threats online. (We already know that HBO hired additional on-set security for Dever as a precaution while filming the small screen adaptation).
It could also be down to the game's structure not working so well for TV. In the game, players control Ellie for the entire first half of the game before switching to Abby. In the show, though, it seems that their storylines will be interweaved throughout.
"A big part of the theme of the second game is about perspective, how someone's hero could be someone else's villain and vice versa. It's weird to talk about a story where its structure could be a spoiler," Druckmann teased in a recent interview with Entertainment Weekly. "We gave it a lot of thought and tried different things. There are some deviations of where we place things."
"We certainly are going to mess around with time the way it was in the source material, but as Neil said, we messed around in ways that we felt were appropriate for the show," Mazin added. "When I say 'messed around,' I mean scientifically determined in a narrative way what we thought would be most impactful."
The Last of Us airs on Sundays in the US on HBO and Max, before landing on Sky and NOW in the UK the following day. Ensure you don't miss an episode with our guide to The Last of Us season 2 release schedule.
