Season Three and Beyond: ‘The Last Of Us’ Has the Chance To Do Something Ballsy

Warning: Contains Plot Spoilers From “The Last Of Us: Part II” Game

When The Last Of Us was renewed for a second season, adapting the second game, many players — myself included - wondered how the series would handle a key aspect of the game’s story: the dual POV that balanced Ellie’s journey with that of her nemesis, Abby. It’s one thing to play as each character, spending time inhabiting them while navigating various dangers, but it’s another thing for a show to hand equal screentime to a new character we’re poised to loathe. Still, if the show aims to capture the spirit of the game’s narrative - and admittedly, that’s a big “if” — it’s essential that we do spend time in Abby’s shoes, so to speak.

And yet, so far season two has avoided that almost entirely. We saw Abby as she arrived outside Jackson, and we saw her get her revenge against Joel, but she hasn’t appeared again onscreen since episode two. This season has been Ellie’s story through and through, as she grapples with her loss and sets out on her own quest for vengeance against Abby. Next week is shaping up to be a flashback episode, likely detailing how Ellie learned the truth about Joel’s actions in Salt Lake City and how the pair became estranged, and that just leaves the finale. With so many loose ends to tie up, it’s unlikely we’ll get more than a glimpse of Abby before the season comes to a close.

You don’t cast Kaitlyn Dever only to sideline her character entirely, so I’m going to pull out my crystal ball and speculate wildly about where The Last Of Us may be heading because I think there’s a chance the show is going to do something pretty ballsy.

I think it’s going to hand season three over to Abby entirely.

I’m probably going to eat my words, but I’ve been thinking about the main plot beats in the game and I see an easy path for the show to pull this off. Let’s start with the season two finale. Ellie, fresh from torturing Nora, ought to rejoin Jesse and Dina and then find Tommy. Now, in the game Nora coughs up Abby’s hideout at the aquarium. My guess is that Ellie may head straight there, kill another couple of Abby’s crew, then meet up with her friends. She may even decide to leave Seattle entirely with them, because she regrets all the torture and murder she’s doing. But before they can depart, Abby tracks them down to the theater and confronts them, killing Jesse and holding Ellie at gunpoint.

That’d make a pretty great cliffhanger for the season, right? It did in the game, too — and what came next was a shock. Instead of finding out what happens to Ellie, the game rewinds the clock and follows Abby’s actions over the past few days. Remember how episode four was titled “Day One,” as in Ellie’s first day in Seattle? We’ll start there, and see what Abby was up to while Ellie and Dina were scouring the city for her. Turns out she was busy, and it’s the kind of busy that would make a great season of television. Abby disobeys Isaac’s order to lead a raid on the main Seraphite encampment, which puts her on the outs with the WLF. While fleeing her own group, she gets captured by the Seraphites, and is aided in her escape by two young Scars. They need medical attention, so she works with her friends to help them - meaning characters like Nora will return, even though we know what will happen to them in the near future.

Abby faces off against Infected, while also getting embroiled in Isaac’s battle against the Seraphites. She even encounters a sniper, who turns out to be Tommy. Her story has plenty of action but also offers a glimpse at what awaits Ellie: disillusionment. Abby got her revenge, but who she became in the process is a weight on her heart, and now she looks at the factions in her city differently. The whole time we’re watching her, though, we know Ellie is out there killing her friends, doing the very things that Abby may have already come to regret. But violence begets violence, and in the end we’ll wind up back in the theater as Abby confronts Ellie, paying off the season two finale a whole season later.

Will it go down like this? I don’t know. Maybe season three will pepper in some Ellie episodes, though I hope it doesn’t. It doesn’t need to — we’ve already seen her side of the story. Showrunner Craig Mazin has already stated that he expects to need two or three more seasons to fully tell the story of “The Last Of Us: Part II,” and that leaves at least an eventual fourth season to jockey Ellie and Abby’s stories back and forth until they reach their final confrontation on a beach in Santa Barbara. The details may change, and we’ll likely get more flashbacks and other flourishes that are original to the show, but devoting an entire season to Abby’s point of view is the only path that makes sense to me right now. It just seems so obvious.

But I’m not dumb. I’m assuming the series intends to strike a balance between Ellie and Abby, when it so easily could stick to just Ellie’s story instead. The second game was controversial, beloved, and hated in equal measure for forcing players into the perspective of the enemy and examining the cyclical nature of violence and what it takes to break the cycle. Would viewers react any differently to losing Joel in season two and then being forced to watch his killer for an entire season? I doubt it. It’s a risky move. With season three slated to begin shooting next year, there’s still plenty of time for HBO to get scared of any ratings decline and force a shift in the arc. But I look at Abby’s absence this season, and at the casting - Dever, Jeffrey Wright, Tati Gabrielle — and I just think it all hints at bigger things to come. The game was controversial, sure, but it was also excellent. Why even do this thing if you’re not going to do it right?