‘The Last Of Us’ Made A Mistake With Joel And Abby

Game players knew this was coming and fidgeted in their seats to see what their uninitiated friends and family would make of last night’s big The Last of Us episode.

That would of course be (spoilers) the brutal death of Joel, one of the two major leads of the series, at the hands of Abby, the daughter of the doctor he executed at the Firefly hospital trying to save Ellie.

Information we probably should not know yet.

I think The Last of Us made a mistake with how this was handled, along with running into a lot of future game issues I’m not sure if the show will be able to overcome. No, I’m not saying that they should have flipped the script and Joel should have survived this time. Do that and you essentially have to rewrite the entire rest of the series from scratch which makes zero sense.

Rather, I take some issues with the story delivery here, and how this is going to inevitably work differently than the games.

In about 20 total minutes of Abby screen time, we already know her entire motivation for killing Joel, down the exact person he killed and the full reason for her entire mission. This is not how things played out in the game.

While people may have had their suspicions about what Abby’s deal was, the full scope of this was not explained. That came much later, more or less halfway through the game.

I know what the showrunners have said, that they did it this way to give her more clear motivations at the start, given that people could race through a game in a week, but it would be years for people to wait if they did it exactly how the game did it.

Now that we’ve seen this in practice, while maybe no, they didn’t save it for the third season airing in 2027 or whenever it will be, I still believe they should have pushed it further out. More or less, with zero build-up, viewers already know her entire motivation. Is she now sympathetic enough where you understand why she did what she did, since you know the whole story? I think a lot of minds are instantly made up and I think the show will have trouble with the “see both sides” game set-up from here.

This is where being a game comes in, and why 1:1 adaptations are often hard. The player eventually is forced to become Abby. To hang out with her friends, to keep her alive while in danger. This leads to one moment where playing as Abby, you are fighting Ellie as a “game boss.” Here, how does that work? You’ll see both sides and root for Ellie because you aren’t forced to keep Abby alive yourself.

This is also the first time that I think Abby’s size really did come into play. I think when we meet here there’s something to the fact that she’s this huge, menacing character, very…video game boss-y. But flipping that on its head, you eventually expand the concept of h er character through gameplay. Here, we lose that. I still think Kaitlyn Dever did a great job, but it all felt different, and kind of wrong. I want to see how things play out from here, and if it’s going to be nearly as effective as the games. I hope so.

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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.