The Last of Us Season 2’s huge change to Abby’s introduction will have a major impact

The Last of Us Season 2 arrives on April 13, and it introduces a brand-new main character: Abby, played by Kaitlyn Dever. 

Following the premiere, we know there’s a major change to how Abby’s being introduced, and it’s going to have much wider implications for the season as a whole. 

You only learn about Abby’s backstory and her relation to Joel and Ellie around halfway through the game, but Season 2 reveals who she is straight away. 

Neil Druckmann, the game’s director and co-creator of the show, explained the decision ahead of the premiere. 

“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,” he said. “We couldn’t do that in the show because you’re not playing as her.”

HBO

The second game will be split into multiple seasons, so he explained, “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. 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 the viewer that context right off the bat.”

Abby being introduced in this way could have a major effect on how viewers feel about that scene and everything that follows. If you don’t want to know any more about The Last of Us Season 2, look away now, as there are major spoilers below. 

Abby’s introduction changes that big moment

Abby murders Joel very early in the game, and it comes as a major shock. We’ve just been playing as Abby, so we’re naturally rooting for her, but then we learn why she’s actually in Jackson, and it’s heartwrenching.

It does leave one question, though – why did Abby kill Joel? You can make an educated guess, but you don’t know who she is or why she’s done this.

Abby is the daughter of the doctor that Joel killed to save Ellie, so it makes perfect sense that she’d want to kill him. Since we don’t find this out until much later, you’re fully rooting for Ellie when she takes after Abby for revenge.

Naughty Dog

But, with The Last of Us Season 2 showing Abby’s backstory straight away, we might not be happy about what she does, but we’ll understand, and Ellie’s murderous quest for revenge will be a lot more complex from the start. It doesn’t change the story, but it changes how we view it.

We don’t know when Joel will meet his fate, but the Episode 1 title has viewers convinced it’ll happen in the first couple of episodes.

While we wait for Season 2 to arrive on April 3, you can check out the major character from Abby’s story that’s getting a bigger role and all of the biggest TV shows arriving in 2025.