‘The Last of Us’ Has an Abby Predicament
The series is trying to follow in the footsteps of its source material, but some aspects of a video game can’t quite be adapted for television
On a series set in a zombie apocalypse, a newly introduced villain delivers a menacing statement of intent. Weapon in hand, they brutally beat a beloved character—an agonizing sequence that seems to go on forever. The finishing blow happens as their loved one watches on in horror, powerless to stop it. It’s a seismic moment for the show, one that threatens to upend its standing in the zeitgeist. As it happens, this description could apply to two series: The Last of Us and The Walking Dead.
While The Walking Dead is meandering on AMC+ these days, once upon a time the franchise was a genuine cultural phenomenon. The flagship show’s ratings were among the biggest ever seen on cable, and it became appointment viewing for millions of people every week, myself included. There was one moment, however, when The Walking Dead instantly—and irreversibly—destroyed much of its goodwill. In the Season 6 finale, The Walking Dead introduced Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), an iconic villain from Robert Kirkman’s eponymous comic book series. Wielding his barbed-wire-laced baseball bat, Negan swings it at an unseen victim before the credits roll. In a slight tweak from the comics, Negan ends up killing not one but two beloved characters in Abraham (Michael Cudlitz) and Glenn (Steven Yeun). The brutality of Glenn’s death, in particular, sparked a major blowback from audiences. What rubbed salt in the wounds was that The Walking Dead used Negan’s vicious attack as a cliff-hanger—a cheap ploy to drum up interest that led to a ratings freefall from which the series never recovered.
For much of The Last of Us’s second season, the Negan predicament has been front of mind. Yes, some of The Walking Dead’s wounds were self-inflicted, but the series was simply following the script laid out by the source material. In other words, Glenn’s death was always going to be a tough pill for viewers to swallow. Similarly, The Last of Us was on a collision course with a major—and majorly contentious—moment from the video games: when Abby (played on the show by Kaitlyn Dever) exacts her revenge on Joel (Pedro Pascal), beating him to a pulp before ending his life in front of his surrogate daughter, Ellie (Bella Ramsey). Unsurprisingly, Joel’s death hit like a ton of bricks, continuing an HBO tradition of a Pedro Pascal character getting pulverized to everyone’s dismay.
As we learn, Abby’s father was among those killed by Joel in the Season 1 finale, and she spent the next five years hell-bent on tracking him down. Now, Abby’s actions have made Ellie just as eager to seek retribution, perpetuating a cycle of violence and turning the characters into mirror images of each other. In The Last of Us Part II, this sentiment is further underlined by Abby being a playable protagonist for parts of the game. But this dynamic is where the TV version commits a fatal misstep in its second season: Rather than flesh out the character opposite Ellie, all Abby’s done is ruthlessly take pieces off the board.
Since killing Joel in the second episode, Abby has remained off screen; instead, The Last of Us has almost exclusively followed Ellie in her quest for vengeance, as well as giving us an extended flashback exploring her evolving relationship with Joel during a period of tranquility in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Abby reemerges only in the closing minutes of the Season 2 finale, though she makes it count. After losing three of her friends at Ellie’s hands, Abby holds Tommy (Gabriel Luna) at gunpoint while fatally shooting Jesse (Young Mazino), who only recently learned that Dina (Isabela Merced) was pregnant. When Ellie confesses to killing Abby’s friends, Abby appears to shoot her before the screen cuts to black; from there, we get a brief flashback to a couple of days earlier, when Abby oversees the Wolves’ efforts to build a thriving community in Seattle (despite a bitter war with a religious cult where both sides leave corpses strewn around like mangled expressions of art).
For those keeping score at home, Abby is now responsible for killing two major characters while putting two more in serious jeopardy—doing so with such limited screen time is some Alex Caruso levels of efficiency. But while this makes Abby a formidable villain, it also threatens to undermine what’s likely to be The Last of Us’s endgame: redeeming the character in the audience’s eyes. The Last of Us Part II didn’t just want gamers to play as Abby; it ultimately wanted them to empathize with her actions—to understand that Joel was as much a monster to her as Abby is to Ellie, and that violence only begets more violence. It was a bold move, but taking that kind of risk is why the Last of Us games are held in such high esteem.
The TV adaptation, by comparison, has made a mess of Abby’s arc. For one, she’s barely appeared on-screen, but just as crucially, she’s only been synonymous with Ellie’s suffering. It wouldn’t be the least bit surprising if Abby got a far more prominent role—and Dever were upgraded to a series regular—in Season 3, allowing us to see things from her perspective. But in the same way that Abby let her resentment over her father’s death fester for years, viewers now have a long time to sit with a brutal final scene for the character, and the effects could prove mighty difficult to undo—especially after such a manipulative cliff-hanger that has Ellie’s fate hanging in the balance. (To say nothing of the fact that we already had to wait two years between the first two seasons, which is, unfortunately, becoming the norm for prestige TV.)
If there’s any silver lining, even Negan earned a redemption arc—to the extent that he’s currently coleading a spinoff series with Glenn’s widow, Maggie (Lauren Cohan). But Negan was able to go through five seasons of character development on The Walking Dead after his sadistic introduction; I’d be shocked if The Last of Us lasted five seasons, full stop. The bigger problem for The Last of Us, however, is that Abby’s limited screen time is emblematic of the haphazard storytelling that’s plagued Season 2.
On the whole, these seven episodes have dangled a ton of narrative threads without addressing much. We’ve still only had a handful of scenes with Wolves leader Isaac (Jeffrey Wright) and even fewer with the Seraphites, leaving unanswered questions about everything from the origins of their conflict to the identity of the Seraphites’ prophet. Crucial moments have been omitted entirely, like how Tommy escaped the Wolves after being cornered or how Abby discovered where Ellie and Co. were hiding out in Seattle.
Of course, The Last of Us could fill in some of these blanks in Season 3 and beyond, but what we’re left with is a season that’s felt unfocused, unsatisfying, and unresolved. To be fair, this issue isn’t exclusive to The Last of Us—it’s been spreading across prestige television like a contagion. Last year, Squid Game and House of the Dragon were more interested in building up to bigger and better things in future seasons, alienating fans in the present. It remains to be seen whether these series will suffer a decline in viewership when their latest seasons drop, but when there are so many shows available to stream, audience investment should never be taken for granted. Will The Last of Us learn this lesson the hard way?
Considering the impressive ratings to begin Season 2, one would hope that The Last of Us has enough goodwill to weather the storm. But as The Walking Dead proved, even one misstep can prove costly, and the process of redeeming a villain means less when fewer people stick with the series long enough to see it come to fruition. Abby’s introduction, however brief, has shaken the foundations of The Last of Us as we knew it. But if the show continues to prioritize shock value and cheap cliff-hangers, rather than shoring up its storytelling, she could also be the start of its undoing.
