How The Last Of Us Season 2 Makes Abby Relatable Despite Her Goal Of Killing Joel Explained By Writers

The Last of Us season 2 is set to bring some of the most memorable moments from Naughty Dog’s game franchise to life. The premiere re-introduced audiences to Ellie and Joel, settled into their lives in Jackson, Wyoming alongside family and friends alike. Although the episode was not without conflict, it showed that life in the five-year gap between the show’s first and second seasons was relatively stable.

Then there’s Abby. Abby Anderson is a character first introduced in The Last of Us Part II, and is shown in the TV show to be on a mission to kill Joel. Abby was a controversial, often hated, character in the game, which also forced players to experience much of the story through her point of view. The question of how Abby’s story will be adapted to the screen has lingered in the minds of many The Last of Us fans since the first season was announced, and now those questions will soon be answered.

ScreenRant’s Ash Crossan interviewed Neil Druckmann and Halley Gross about their work shepherding The Last of Us season 2 to completion. Druckmann and Gross co-wrote The Last of Us Part II game, so their touch has likely helped ensure that the show’s new zombie types, Ellie/Joel relationship, and more stay authentic to the spirit in which they were created. The pair explained how they brought game elements from game to screen and broke down the Abby of it all.

Neil Druckmann & Halley Gross Talk Fleshing Out The Last Of Us Game World For The TV Show

The Pair Worked To “Interrogate Every Moment”

The Last of Us season 1 not only faithfully adapted one of the best-selling PlayStation games ever, but did so while also fleshing out barely-seen stories in surprisingly deep and emotional ways. The second season appears poised to do the same, but Neil Druckmann was quick to say the writers refused to be shackled by expectations: “We didn’t want to create a template to say, ‘Oh, that was successful in season one. Now we must have a bottle episode about some side character.’ That would have been, I think, the wrong approach.”

But, Druckman said, “The correct approach was, like, ‘Let’s adapt it [using] the same process that we applied for season one, where we interrogate every moment and try to figure out what can work exactly as-is, what needs some changes, [and] what requires some new material. And that journey leads us to some really interesting places. Sometimes it might lead us to something like the Bill and Frank episode, and if we get there organically and that’s where the story wants to go, we will go there.”

For show fans hoping to get that same Bill and Frank feeling, however, Druckmann had this to say: “I don’t know if we have anything exactly one-to-one like the Bill and Frank episode this season, but we have a lot of moments where those side explorations lead to beautiful expansions of The Last of Us.”

The Last of Us season 2 premiere contained one of those expansions when it came to the character of Eugene, who was made known to game players primarily by environmental storytelling. “The library where you find Eugene’s story in the game was one of my favorite parts,” Halley Gross said.

“In the game, when you were in this library,” Gross explained, “there’s one section where you find all of Eugene’s old VHS porn stack. You can click on it, you can read all the little VHS porns that he’s collected over the course of his life… it’s my favorite beat, maybe, in the whole game.” Because you’re “locked into” experiencing the game world as playable characters, Gross said, the TV series offered a chance to “give life to” what she called a “beloved idea from the game.”

The Writers Worked To Make Abby More Empathetic

They Used “The Drama Of TV To Get You To Sympathize With Her”

Abby borderline steals the show in The Last of Us Part II game, and many players did not like or expect that when the game was released in 2020. The game essentially had players experience the story as Ellie for much of its runtime, then switched them over to Abby, making their stories feel very separate.

Thanks to the nature of television, Druckmann teased that Abby and Ellie’s stories may be more interwoven. “I can’t say much other than to say we couldn’t do much of that in the game,” he said, “We have the option to do that. Now, whether we chose to do it or not… you have to watch the season."

But Abby is a much more sympathetic character in The Last of Us Part II once you have played her story, which Druckmann knows: “When you play as a character, there’s a certain empathetic connection that is made because you are them. You’re seeing the world through their eyes … we don’t have that empathetic shortcut that we have in the interactive medium, but we have drama, we have context, [and] we have backstory.”

“So”, Druckmann added, “There are certain things that are revealed about Abby much later in the story that we pulled up in order to use the drama of the TV show to get you to sympathize with her [and] root for her very early in episode one. Then, everything expands organically from there. Some beats are going to be very similar. Some will be quite different.”

Abby actor Kaitlyn Dever was warned, at least on some level, about how her character might be received. “We were very open with Kaitlyn about what this role is, and what it isn’t, and the kind of reaction you might see from fans,” Druckmann said. “Luckily,” the game maker continued, “we haven’t seen any of that … Fans have mostly been very supportive, and I’m hopeful that people will see the complexity of this character. Kaitlyn is so good. She brings such a ferocity and yet vulnerability to this character.”

Druckmann Explains How They Discovered Where The Last Of Us Season 2 Ends

Plus, Will The Games’ Infamous Rat King Make An Appearance?

The Last of Us Part II is a massive game–so massive that adapting it into a single season of television would be a monumental task. Thankfully, that’s not what the showrunners chose to do. Druckmann explained the process: “We start with the ending of game two. That is the ending of the show. We worked our way backwards and we broke the whole story as if we were just going to make one giant season. [We asked], ‘What would that look like? What are all the major beats that would have to happen?’”

“‘We think this much can fit in the season’,” Druckmann continued, then said, “‘[So,] what is the best breaking point?’” The showrunners worked backwards from there, saying their discussions caused them to tell the story across seven episodes. “Now we know everything that has to happen next and where we’d have to go,” Druckmann said, “but how many episodes or seasons that is–that is our homework.”

When quickly asked about their gut responses to the phrase ‘Rat King’ (a boss from The Last of Us Part II), Halley Gross chimed in with “Oh, no,” while Druckmann said, “I would say you can’t tell the story without it.” Get your incendiary shells ready.