Part of what makes The Last of Us Part II so great as a video game is the dispersal of information. Key facts are held for just the right time so that when they land, they create the maximum emotional impact. And, obviously, that’ll carry over to season two of The Last of Us TV show. In the case of one key character, though—Abby, played by Kaitlyn Dever—it’ll happen in a very different way.
Keeping things spoiler-light, in the video game, Abby is the main antagonist throughout the first half. It’s not until the second half of the game when you are forced to play as her that you get her full backstory, thereby making her a more complete character. We don’t know exactly how things play out on the TV show but, in a recent press conference io9 participated in, game and show creator Neil Druckmann confirmed that Abby’s backstory will be revealed much earlier in the show, and explained why that is.
“There are two reasons why we change certain context or move certain things up in the story,” Druckmann said. “One of which [is] in the game… 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 can withhold certain things and make it a mystery that will be revealed later in the story. We can’t do that in the show because you’re not playing as her. So we need other tools and that context gave us that shortcut.”
“Another reason is, where that revelation 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,” he continued. “It would probably get spoiled to 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.”
So, “right off the bat,” we learn two things. First, that quote makes it sound like season two splits the events of Part II pretty evenly. Second, it also sounds like we learn Abby’s connection to Joel and Ellie in the first episode of the show, which comes April 13. Which, as Druckmann explains, does make sense narratively. But emotionally, it does change much of what makes the game so special. We’re anxious to see how this new medium changes that. What do you think?
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