Revealing Abby's motivations early on was the right move for The Last Of Us

One of the HBO adaptation's big changes to the game paid off in this week's episode.

By Saloni Gajjar | April 25, 2025 | 6:00am

Photo: Liane Hentscher/HBO

TV Features The Last of Us

Revealing Abby's motivations early on was the right move for The Last Of Us

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The Last Of Us‘ most recent episode features two types of nightmares. “Through The Valley” opens with Abby’s (Kaitlyn Dever) bad dream about discovering her father’s dead body in a Salt Lake City hospital five years ago. The present-day version of Abby, hardened yet teary-eyed, pleads to her younger self not to enter the operating room where her dad’s brains are splattered on the floor, courtesy of Joel (Pedro Pascal) shooting him in the head in the season-one finale. Of course, Abby knows she went in, and that moment altered her life forever, but she’s desperate to delay the misery even if it’s not reality. And by the end of the hour, in the cruelest twist of fate, TLOU puts Ellie (Bella Ramsey) in a living nightmare similar to Abby’s.

If only Ellie had some warning about not entering the lodge where she hoped to find Joel and Dina (Isabela Merced) alive and taking shelter during a snowstorm. Sadly, she walks into the house in “Through The Valley” only to watch her father figure brutally meet his maker, unable to do anything but scream in agony for a bloodied Joel to get up. With that, HBO’s adaptation presents a tragic symmetry between Abby and Ellie early on in a way the video game decidedly did not. Gamers didn’t know why, while playing as Abby, they were forced to murder TLOU‘s main character. The change to reveal Abby’s backstory almost immediately in the show makes for a complex central conflict that works better narratively.

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Bringing Abby’s issues to the forefront is a punch to the gut, specifically because of how it mirrors what she has just put Ellie through. All Abby wants is revenge, assuming it’ll help. Except now, Ellie is in the same position, vowing to kill Abby and her ragtag crew as they leave the premises after accomplishing their mission. (And it’s a promise she’s already trying to fulfill in next week’s episode.)

Ellie watches Joel’s last gasp of breath as Abby drives the broken golf club into his neck, with no idea why this stranger even did it. Burdened with guilt, the two young women are now enmeshed in a violent cycle of vengeance. Their parallel journeys as two people who lost a parental figure at the age of 19 give the series a genuinely gripping angle that the game doesn’t have—at least not in the beginning, when players didn’t know Abby’s motivations. She was labeled an outright villain and rightly so. Here, she’s more of a flawed antihero. The show spells this out for us through her monologue to Joel, and her speech makes it easier to empathize with Abby’s pain, even if we don’t like it or can’t forgive her actions.

Moreover, watching a sobbing Ellie decide to go after Abby immediately after Joel’s death is a reminder of how, in season two’s opening scene, Abby also begged her friends to help her do the same thing. The show’s writers are crafting an intricate story with these two characters. While there’s no way to fill the void left by Joel’s absence, TLOU has at least set the stage for a weighty confrontation that challenges the audience about who is right and wrong. Why is it okay for Ellie to go after Abby, but not for Abby to go after Joel?

On a logistical level, too, The Last Of Us Part II players had to wait several hours into the game to understand Abby’s connection with the Fireflies and the inciting incident that led to her quest for vengeance. If series co-creators Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann followed a similar timeline, then “viewers would have to wait a very, very long time to get that context. It would probably get spoiled for them between seasons, and we didn’t want that,” Mazin told Entertainment Weekly. He’s right. Imagine waiting until 2027, when season three will likely debut, to learn the details of why Joel died.

Realistically, Mazin and Druckmann (who also co-created the game) must’ve taken notes from the venom spewed at Laura Bailey, the actor who voiced Abby in The Last Of Us Part II. Fans were unhinged when that game was released in 2020, sending death threats to Bailey. Hopefully, the show’s more straightforward dramatic approach will lead to a deeper (and saner) appreciation of this tale.