‘Last of Us’ Creator Confirms Changes From the Video Game, Calls Abby’s Origin a ‘Shortcut’
“The Last of Us” Season 2 is going to diverge from 2020’s “The Last of Us Part II” in at least one important way.
The new season, set five years after the show’s first, will not only pick back up with Joel (Pedro Pascal) and Ellie (Bella Ramsey) but will also introduce a handful of new characters — none more noteworthy than Abby (Kaitlyn Dever). The character is expected to have a major presence in the post-apocalyptic HBO drama’s second season.
During a press conference Monday in Los Angeles, Neil Druckmann, co-creator of both the “The Last of Us” video game franchise and its popular HBO adaptation, confirmed that Season 2 will fill viewers in on the backstory of Dever’s Abby far sooner than its video game source material. In “The Last of Us Part II,” viewers notably do not learn Abby’s backstory and, therefore, her motivation for her actions at the start of the game until its midpoint.
“There are two reasons why we moved certain things up in the story,” Druckmann said. “In the game, you play as Abby, so you immediately form an empathic connection with her because you’re surviving as her.” A video game, in other words, invites a level of interactivity with its characters that not even a prestige HBO show can match.
“We can withhold certain things and make it a mystery that will be revealed later in the story. We couldn’t do that in the show because you’re not playing as her,” Druckmann continued. “We need other tools, and that context [Abby’s backstory] gave us that shortcut.” Ultimately, he and co-creator Craig Mazin realized they could not simply adhere to the bifurcated structure of “The Last of Us Part II.”
“If we were to stick to a very similar timeline, viewers would have to wait a very, very long time to get that context,” Druckmann explained. “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 that context right off the bat.”
Fans have been speculating for years about how the HBO series will change the fragmented structure of “The Last of Us Part II,” which feels better suited to a video game than a TV show. Mazin and Druckmann confirmed in 2023 that they were already planning on splitting the unforgiving plot of “The Last of Us Part II,” which is twice as long as the franchise’s first game, into multiple seasons.
Now, fans know that they should also expect to see “The Last of Us” Season 2 tell its story in a different order than the purposefully withholding, famously divisive video game that inspired it.
“The Last of Us” Season 2 premieres April 13 on HBO.
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