Despite winning Game of the Year at The Game Awards 2020, The Last of Us Part 2 is highly divisive, largely due to series newcomer Abby’s interactions with Ellie and Joel. Abby gets revenge by killing Joel at the beginning of the game, something many players found difficult to get past. However, Joel’s decisions in TLOU Part 1 caused ripples affecting Abby and her community even five years later. Abby’s flashback sequences in TLOU2 reveal how she was able to find Joel, resulting in his seemingly sudden death.
Throughout The Last of Us, Joel’s devotion to protecting Ellie trumps everything and everybody else the pair encounters, regardless of the situation. This leads to numerous morally questionable actions on Joel’s part, most notably at the Firefly hospital. In the climax of TLOU Joel forcibly takes Ellie back from the Fireflies, even though they explain that studying her immunity could help cure the Cordyceps brain infection. Additionally, Joel murders as many Fireflies as possible in his getaway - including Ellie’s head surgeon, who happens to be Abby’s father.
Abby’s motivations for finding Joel are primarily to avenge her father, the other Fireflies, and everyone who could have potentially been saved by Ellie’s sacrifice. It seems unlikely that Abby would be able to identify and track Joel given the lack of readily available information in a post-apocalyptic world and the fact that he killed most witnesses. However, Abby was actually put on Joel’s trail by his younger brother, Tommy. The details of Abby’s TLOU2 journey to revenge are explained during her playable scenes.
The Last of Us 2: How Tommy Unintentionally Helped Abby Find Joel
Although Joel’s legend stands on its own, it is his brother Tommy who unintentionally leads Abby to find him. Before Tommy and Joel were reunited in The Last Of Us, Tommy became a Firefly after being convinced to join by their leader, Marlene. Tommy became close friends with Marlene and told her that she could depend on his brother Joel if she ever needed help. Although Tommy eventually left the group, Marlene and Joel worked together years later when transporting Ellie to the Firefly lab.
In one of Abby’s playable flashback scenes in TLOU2, she overhears her father and Marlene discussing Ellie’s surgery. After they decide to proceed, Marlene says that she is going to tell Joel. It seems that the Fireflies are familiar with Joel by name, presumably knowing from Marlene that he is Tommy’s brother. Other flashbacks make it clear that Joel has become infamous in Abby’s community in The Last of Us 2 as several of her former Firefly friends also witnessed Joel’s massacre. With the ultimate goal of revenge, they have likely helped Abby piece together information about Joel and Tommy. However, the catalyst for TLOU2 is when Tommy’s former Firefly colleagues show up to Abby’s new community and tip her off that he may be in Wyoming.
By the beginning of TLOU2, Abby and her friends travel to Wyoming with the hopes of finding Tommy and eventually Joel. Abby becomes overwhelmed while fighting off a horde of the infected, but she is rescued by the brothers. Tommy introduces himself and his brother to her before traveling with Abby to Joel’s eventual place of execution. Their location, names, and relationship to each other are all clear indicators to Abby that they are her targets, especially in a post-apocalyptic world with fewer people. Even though Abby faced many barriers to finding Joel in The Last of Us Part 2, her flashback sequences show that she was able to find him primarily due to Tommy’s prior affiliation with the Fireflies.