Recently, it has been announced that the actress set to play Abby in the second season of The Last of Us is Kaitlyn Dever, who is known for her roles in Last Man Standing, Booksmart, and No One Will Save You.
Now that we know who will be playing Abby in The Last of Us, it seems fitting to have a recap of who she is, and why she is so important to the second season of the show. Keep in mind this article will be explaining Abby, her backstory within The Last of Us Part 2, and her importance to the story, so there are potential spoilers for the second season of the show.
Abby’s Backstory and Her Importance In The Last of Us Part 2
It seems fitting to start at the beginning and explain who Abby is to those who haven’t played the game. Just like the first season of the show, the first game ends with the realization that Ellie holds the cure to the Cordyceps virus in her brain and the organ would have to be removed in order to find the cure.
After a daring rescue attempt from Joel, he and Ellie both leave to continue their lives in Jackson, unaware that Joel has set their next story into motion. During their escape, Joel intervenes in the surgery that was supposed to remove Ellie’s brain and create a cure, by killing the surgeon in charge.
At the time, Joel was unaware of who this surgeon was and how much it would impact his future, as this surgeon is none other than Jerry Anderson, who turns out to be Abby’s father. Gamers discover this through a flashback within the game, which shows us a scene of Abby walking into the surgical suite and seeing her father’s corpse on the floor.
This ultimately sets the second game and now the second season into motion, as Abby and her friends who were at the time a part of the Fireflies leave the hospital in search of the Washington Liberation Front, also known as the WLF.
After arriving in Seattle and joining up with the WLF, Abby is then fueled with revenge, and after a few years pass, she attempts to track down Joel to murder him just like he murdered her father. Eventually, this brings us to what will likely be the beginning of the second season, as viewers see Abby finally catch up with Joel.
This is where spoilers will most likely feature, so be warned. Now that Abby has finally caught up with Joel, along with her friends who left the Fireflies with her, they decide to capture him and his brother Tommy. They then torture Joel as a form of punishment for his “crimes” until Ellie finally enters the fray.
As Ellie enters the room and subsequently gets captured along with Joel and Tommy, the group of friends who have been chasing Joel for years decide to sadly take his life in one of the most gruesome deaths in video game history.
What makes this such a gruesome death is the fact that Ellie has to watch helplessly as her father figure is beaten to death by Abby. This gives Ellies her own reason to get revenge on Abby, showing the constant endless cycle of vengeance caused by one simple action.
Because of this one act by Abby, the story of The Last of Us season two will begin, leading Ellie on a chase to hunt down Joel’s killer. If the TV show follows the same plot line as the game, there will also be a portion of the season dedicated to Abby and her story, in which we see flashbacks of her and her father, who share the same sort of relationship as Ellie and Joel.
Although Abby isn’t a favorite character from The Last of Us Part 2 for obvious reasons, her story in Part 2 is absolutely amazing, as we see her attempt to find friends who are being hunted by Tommy and Ellie as they seek revenge for Joel’s death.
What makes her story even more interesting is the fact that we see it after playing over 50% of the game from Ellie’s point of view, hunting down Abby and her friends. As gamers play as Ellie, they discover some of those friends and eventually kill them.
After all of Abby’s friends are dead and she is the last one standing, Ellie returns to her friend Dina. Abby’s story then takes the reins as time backs up by a couple of days, to the point where she returns home after killing Joel.
What makes this so important to the overall story of The Last of Us and its second season is the fact that players will now be playing on the other side of their actions. This means that gamers will be able to see Abby discover her lost friends and all the carnage Ellie and Tommy have wrought throughout their adventure.
We then see that perspective playing as Ellie, that actions have consequences, even if we do agree with her decision to avenge the murder of Joel. We now see that even though this is a fictional world, our decisions do have significance, and while from one point of view Abby and her friends are villains, on the flip side, they are the victims.
This is why Abby and her story are so important to the second season of The Last of Us, not just because they teach the simple lesson that each decision has a butterfly effect, but because someone we may see as a villain could be going through the same suffering as us.
All in all, by the end of the story, we see both Ellie and Abby grow into completely new people, as Ellie cannot let go of her revenge and loses everything she cares about. And for Abby, she finds a new reason to live and pushes forward with the intent to keep what she holds dear after losing so much.
We will also see Abby grow as a person and understand the choices Joel and the other characters have made throughout the franchise. We will see the hardships that she had to face as an independent person who had certain choices made for her, leading into the scenarios that form the story of The Last of Us.
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