In a new interview with The Last of Us’ Neil Druckmann, he confirmed what most game-players already realized, that the lead of season 3 of The Last of Us would be Kaitlyn Dever’s Abby. That’s in contrast to season 1’s Joel and Ellie pairing, and season 2’s Ellie and Dina pairing.
This raises some rather uncomfortable questions about how audiences will receive this. It has nothing to do with Dever, who is an excellent actress (watch Justified, Dopesick, Unbelievable, Apple Cider Vinegar and more), but because of what this is doing to the format of the show.
There are sprawling gaps between seasons of The Last of Us, and there are no signs that’s going to change. There were two and a half years between seasons 1 and 2 of The Last of Us, and if you think that they may have gotten a quicker start this time around, that’s not true. A short while ago, Dever said she hadn’t even seen a script and had barely heard what was going on with the third season from Craig Mazin. It’s unclear when filming is going to actually start, but another 2-2.5 year gap until release seems likely at this point.
Season 2 had a challenge in the sense that it required the show to kill Joel in episode 2 in order to trigger the events of the second game. So, Ellie had to carry the season with some support from Dina (her role elevated from the games). That often did not go great, considering the changes Mazin wrote to Ellie as a character.
Now, fans are expected to wait two or more years for the show to return and find it led by a character they have not seen for more than ten minutes, and it will ditch the entire cast of the last two seasons for the vast majority of season 3.
Yes, this is what happened in the game. You play the first part of the game as Ellie, and then there’s a break, and you play the second part of the game in a parallel timeline with Abby. The difference, of course, is that you can play this game over the course of a week or a month, at worst. You can end the Ellie segment and start playing the Abby segment a minute later.
This does not work on TV! A year gap between seasons using this format would be hard enough, but 2+ years to come back with an entirely different cast is a wild decision. It seems like if there were going to be changes to the show, it shouldn’t have been making Ellie dumber; it should have been finding a way to weave these two storylines together for the next 2-3 seasons. This is not going to go well, and non-game players are going to be in for a surprise when they see an entire season of a show led by a character they barely know.
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