The Last Of Us Season 2's First Big Change Seems Designed To Protect Abby's Actor

I’ve been waiting for years to see how the creative team behind The Last of Us on HBO would adapt the non-linear events of the The Last of Us Part 2, the game on which the series is based. There was a massive change right from the jump as the season begins with a scene that’s not in the game.

After a brief return to the pivotal ending conversation of the first season, we see a shot of a giraffe. That immediately returns us to Salt Lake City, the place where Joel massacred the Fireflies to keep Ellie alive. The immune teenager was about to be sacrificed in the hopes of creating a cure for the cordyceps infection.

A group of characters that players of the game will be very familiar with stand next to graves that have makeshift coffins draped with Firefly pendants. One of them, Abby (Kaitlyn Dever), swears revenge on the apparently handsome man who perpetrated these deaths, proclaiming that they will kill him slowly.

A Jarring Scene In The Last Of Us

While watching the episode on Sunday night, I found this scene very jarring. This is a huge change from the game that fundamentally alters the story. It undermines the shock of Joel meeting a grizzly end while leaving no room for mystery about why Abby and her cohorts were so eager to track down and torture Mr. Miller. We don’t find out Abby’s reasons for seeking vengeance until halfway through a 25-hourish game.

Smaller chunks of art that exist within a broader piece have to be taken in context of the work as a whole, in this case the entire season (which is one reason why I think episode-by-episode reviews have a fundamental flaw). So I don’t think it’s really fair to truly assess the impact of this scene until we’ve seen the entire season.

Still, I think I have a clearer understanding of this change with a little distance and after reading the show creators’ reasoning behind it. "When you play a character [in a video game], you immediately connect with them. In The Last of Us Part 1, when you are playing as [Joel’s daughter] Sarah, you didn’t have to spend a lot of time with her to really care about her, because you were her," Neil Druckmann, who was also the director and co-writer of the game, told The Verge (paywalled).

“Likewise in game two, it was the same thing with Abby. We were able to keep certain things a mystery for much longer, because you were playing as Abby, trying to keep her alive, fighting the infected. We don’t have that in the show. So we needed something else — through drama, through backstory — to get you to sympathize with her. That’s where we pulled certain events up in the story, in terms of when we reveal them."

This quote made it much clearer to me why the creative team is trying to foster more sympathy for Abby out of the gate – it seems very much like they’re trying to protect Dever. That’s my reading of the situation, and it hasn’t been confirmed, but it would make sense.

By making Abby’s very understandable motivations for revenge clear right at the beginning of the season, it may be the case that more of the audience sides with her and her perspective. That could help reduce whatever negativity that might be directed toward Dever for Abby killing Joel – a creative decision that a terrific actor had nothing to do with other than accepting the role.

I had long suspected that we would not find out the reasons for Abby killing Joel until the very end of this season. I figured that, as in the game, we’d see a flashback to Abby and her father (the surgeon who was about to operate on Ellie) just before Joel kills him. Narratively, I still think that might have been the more effective way to go.

But I think this notion of building sympathy for Abby earlier is actually a very wise and considerate move on the part of Druckmann and series co-creator Craig Mazin.

Death Threats Over The Last Of Us

Laura Bailey, who played Abby in the game, says she received death threats toward both her and her baby that she felt were serious enough to pass along to the police to ensure their safety. She and her son were targeted just because she played a character who killed a protagonist of a video game. Developers of The Last of Us Part 2 also received death threats shortly after the game was released.

None of these people deserve to be threatened with violence over creative decisions that were made in service of a story. It’s abhorrent that creatives face such violent blowback from so-called fans.

Joel’s death is the pivotal moment that drives the entire narrative of the second game (and, inevitably, the HBO show from the second season onward). It’s an essential part of the story that Druckmann and his team wanted to tell.

I hope, for her sake, that Dever has nuked whatever social media profiles she has and doesn’t look at any reaction to The Last of Us on the internet for a long time, if ever.

If, by changing the structure of The Last of Us Part 2’s story, Mazin and Druckmann were hoping to alleviate any kind of pressure or backlash that Dever might face, I can absolutely get behind that. It’s just a shame that it will take some of the sting out of what’s one of the most talked-about moments in video games (and, likely, the show) in recent memory.

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