It's time for a general TV audience to meet Abby, a pivotal figure from The Last of Us video games that players know all too well for sending them through the emotional wringer.

A first look at actress Kaitlyn Dever as the character arrives in a new The Last of Us season 2 trailer, which dropped Thursday to commemorate TLOU Day. It's the annual fan holiday that takes place every Sept. 26, known as "Outbreak Day" in the canon of The Last of Us, the same day the cordyceps outbreak that transforms the infected into zombie-like monsters reached critical mass.

HBO also released an official plot description for season 2, which, similar to how Sony and PlayStation marketed The Last of Us Part II video game in 2020, is pretty cryptic: "After five years of peace following the events of the first season, Joel and Ellie’s collective past catches up to them, drawing them into conflict with each other and a world even more dangerous and unpredictable than the one they left behind."

Max

Dever's Abby is described as "a skilled soldier whose black-and-white view of the world is challenged as she seeks vengeance for those she loved." We meet her in the story among a group of survivors that includes Owen (Spencer Lord), Mel (Ariela Barer), Nora (Tati Gabrielle), and Manny (Danny Ramirez).

The footage shows Abby in action, first with a solemn lone shot of her crouched by a gravesite. As the trailer progresses, we see Dever recreating a classic sequence from the games, wherein Abby is running away from a horde of Infected that have her pinned down behind a gated fence.

The character became quite controversial when first introduced in 2020's The Last of Us Part II due to the intense reactions from players. To explain any further would be to court spoilers. The reactions got so bad that co-creator Neil Druckmann, head of gaming studio Naughty Dog, said he received death threats. Similarly, Laura Bailey, the actress who originated Abby, revealed through tears in the Grounded II: Making The Last of Us Part II documentary that anonymous gamers threatened her newborn son.

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For the HBO show, Isabela Merced, who joins the cast as a new character named Dina, mentioned on the Happy Sad Confused podcast that Dever "had to be extra secured by security when it came to the filming of this." She said, "There's so many strange people in this world because there are people that actually genuinely hate Abby, who is not a real person. Just a reminder: Not a real person."

Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey, of course, reprise their season 1 roles of Joel and Ellie. Joining them as returning veterans of the show that racked up 24 Emmy nominations and eight Emmy wins in its first go around are Gabriel Luna as Joel's brother Tommy and Rutina Wesley as Maria, Tommy's wife and leader of a commune in Jackson, Wyo.

Previously confirmed newcomers include Merced (Alien: Romulus) as Dina, Ellie's love interest in the Jackson commune; Young Mazino (Beef) as Jesse, Ellie's close friend in Jackson and Dina's ex; Jeffrey Wright (Westworld) as Isaac, the same warlord he portrayed in the video games; and Catherine O'Hara (Beetlejuice Beetlejuice) as a guest star. All are are prominently featured in the new footage.

Though we still don't have a name to go along with O'Hara's role, the trailer at least confirms that she's Joel's therapist in Jackson. He's still clearly reeling from the season 1 finale, in which he slaughtered the Fireflies in order to save Ellie's life, even though it meant a cure for the plague would never be created.

"You can't heal something unless you're brave enough to say it out loud," she tells Joel. "Say the thing you're afraid to say. Say it out loud, no matter what it is, no matter how bad. What did you do?"

The Last of Us season 2 will premiere on HBO and stream on Max sometime in 2025, courtesy of writers and executive producers Craig Mazin and Druckmann. Watch the new trailer above.