The Last of Us Season 3 Set Video Teases a Storyline That Even the Games Didn’t Tell
The conclusion of The Last of Us Season 2 on HBO offered a major confirmation for fans of the game about how the rest of the TV show would roll out. Wrapping up with a major cliffhanger before flipping completely to Abby’s perspective and backtracking a few days, the series revealed in that moment that the show would be sticking to the original structure of The Last of Us Part II game, playing with character perspective and a specific time frame. As a result, fans have been bracing for the next batch of episodes (seemingly the final season) to be heavily focused on Kaitlyn Dever as Abby, and what she did during those three days in Seattle.
Filming on The Last of Us has been ongoing throughout the summer (though paused briefly while the World Cup was partially taking place), with cameras now rolling again. A new set video of the production has arrived online (H/T ComingSoon), and in the video two figures can just barely be seen, and neither of them is Kaitlyn Dever. Instead, it appears that both Gabriel Luna’s Tommy Miller and Young Mazino’s Jesse are back on set and filming new scenes for the episodes, which might indicate that the series is gearing up to tell a story that even the game didn’t have time for.
The Last of Us Season 3 Could Fill in the Gaps of Tommy’s Storyline
One of the biggest narrative changes made in The Last of Us Season 2 was to Tommy Miller’s storyline. Rather than having the character be present for Joel’s death at the hands of Abby, he was defending Jackson from the infected and, as a result, had slightly different feelings about the WLF crew and the trip to Seattle to seek revenge. In the games, Tommy makes his way to the West Coast before Ellie does, hoping to take out the “Salt Lake Crew” for himself, but in the show he makes his way there with Jesse to try and retrieve Ellie and Dina and stop them.
All this unfolds in Season 2, but there is a gap of time where Tommy’s whereabouts are unaccounted for. In The Last of Us Season 2 finale, Jesse reveals that he and Tommy split up to find Ellie and Dina, only for Gabriel Luna’s character not to reunite with her until she’s committed a shocking act of violence that night. What this new set video from the production could be teasing (sans context, of course), is that we may very well get to see what that day looked like from Tommy’s perspective.
the last of us being shot right across the street
— lia’s no 1 fanpic.twitter.com/cbb70c9vow
(@svtjems) August 24, 2026
Now, fans of The Last of Us games know good and well at least some of what Tommy was doing at that time, as the Abby section of the game treats him like something of a boss fight. In the game, Tommy is a menace to the larger WLF, using his ranged sniper rifle to take out soldiers throughout the city in addition to some other violent chaos he causes. There’s a major moment, though, where the WLF believe they have him pinned down at a marina, which results in Abby and her friend Manny working together to try and take him down.
The marina section of Abby’s storyline is a no-brainer, but hopefully what this brief snippet of footage is teasing is that we’ll see more of Tommy’s storyline from his time in Seattle. A whole episode dedicated to it seems somewhat unlikely given the larger narrative ground that the show has to make its way through in just a few short episodes, but revealing those narrative details is something that the game itself never got around to.
The Last of Us TV show has been somewhat controversial for some of the changes that it has made along the way, but one of the best elements about it as an adaptation are the times it has chosen to expand the scope of the narrative and mythology by delivering scenes the games don’t.
Season 1 made this work with its cold open scenes that saw a scientist theorizing in the 1960s how fungi could be the source of a pandemic, while another revealed the discovery of the initial Cordyceps outbreak in Jakarta, and an entire episode brought the story of Frank and Bill to life in a major departure from the game. The Last of Us Season 2 had a handful of these moments as well, most notably a great scene between Jeffrey Wright’s Isaac and a Seraphite he’s interrogating. All that said, The Last of Us Season 3, using its final episodes to tell even more stories that the games couldn’t, is a good use of the time it has left.