The Last of Us offers first look at Abby, Dina and Catherine O’Hara’s mysterious new character
Catherine O’Hara’s mystery The Last of Us character (HBO)
A trailer for second season of The Last of Us has unveiled a first look at Ellie’s girlfriend Dina, her arch-nemesis Abby, and Catherine O’Hara’s mysterious character, as well as the brutal Seraphite cult.
Warning: Cordyceps-ridden spoilers ahead.
Serving as a follow-up to the 2022 television adaptation of 2013 video game The Last of Us, a first teaser has been released for the show’s second season – which is based on 2020’s The Last of Us: Part II.
Once again following Joel Miller (Pedro Pascal) and Ellie Williams (Bella Ramsey) through a post-apocalyptic United States, overridden with a Cordyceps fungus that turns its hosts into violent, zombie-like creatures, The Last of Us season two is set to be even more brutal than the first.
Should the season stay faithful to its video-game origins, Ellie and Joel will become split up early on, caused by the arrival of newcomer Abby (Kaitlyn Dever), who has a golf club to grind with Joel.
Ellie, along with girlfriend Dina (Isabela Merced), sets out on a brutal quest for revenge, encountering militia group the Washington Liberation Front and sadistic cult the Seraphites along the way – all of which is teased in the new trailer.
The arc of the teaser begins with Catherine O’Hara’s mystery character speaking to Joel, although the context of the conversation isn’t clear, and could either be more of a hostile interrogation or psychiatrist-level chat. We’re betting on the former.
“Did you hurt her?” O’Hara’s character asks of Ellie, to which Joel replies: “No.”
“Then what? What did you do?” O’Hara presses, leading Joel to give the heartbreaking answer: “I saved her.”
For fans of the first game and season of The Last of Us, this answer will make perfect sense. For the uninitiated, the instalment ends with Ellie and Joel in a Firefly (resistance group) hospital, with Ellie under general anaesthesia, ready to be operated on so that a cure for all humanity can be reverse engineered from the mutation that makes her the only known human alive that can resist Cordyceps infection.
Joel learns too late that the operation would kill Ellie, and, unable to bear the thought of losing her, murders the surgeons. We wonder whether that might come back to bite him.
The trailer also gives us some key first looks at Ellie’s girlfriend Dina (Merced) weeping over something, Abby (Dever) being cornered by Infected in the snow under a wire fence, Isaac (Jeffrey Wright in both game and TV) pulling a gun on someone and the Seraphite cult racing through some woods with torches in hand.
In the game, Isaac is the leader of the Washington Liberation Front, or, as Ellie calls them, The Wolves.
Elsewhere, Ellie is seen screaming in fear, Tommy (Joel’s brother played by Diego Luna) mercilessly operates a sniper rifle, and a good old-fashioned Clicker screeches at the door of a red-lit subway carriage. Oh, it’s good to be back.
Creators Neil Druckmann and Craig Mazin have previously teased that it might take three seasons to adapt video game The Last of Us: Part II for the screen.
The Last of Us is due to return in both the US and UK next year.
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