Someone standing outside a film set in British Columbia this week watched Kaitlyn Dever do the same thing seven times. That someone posted the video to X. Now the internet is fairly confident it knows exactly which moment from “The Last of Us Part II” is being adapted — and it’s one of the game’s most consequential turning points.
New set footage, shared by the account CaptCanuck66 and first picked up by ScreenRant, shows Dever’s Abby alongside a vehicle that has clearly just been run off the road, surrounded by what appears to be chaos, with her stunt double cycling through the same sequence repeatedly through the night. The location matches Gastown in Vancouver — a neighborhood the production has returned to multiple times since filming began in March — with the setup pointing strongly toward the Seraphite ambush sequence, a pivotal early chapter of Abby’s story in the game that introduces both the religious cult faction called the Scars and, crucially, Lev and Yara, the two characters who fundamentally alter Abby’s arc for everything that follows.
Click here for The Last of Us season 3 set video.
In the game, the scene works as a brutal gut-punch: Abby and her WLF patrol are moving through Seattle when the Seraphites force them off the road and the ambush turns desperate fast. It’s the moment the story stops being a straightforward revenge narrative and starts becoming something stranger and harder to categorize. Season 3 appears committed to recreating it directly, ScreenRant noted — all clues from the set footage align with that sequence, and both Kyriana Kratter as Lev and Michelle Mao as Yara have already been spotted in earlier production photos from the same shoot.
Kratter appeared alongside Dever in the first set photos that surfaced back in March, the two of them on a rooftop in full costume with a small crew, per ComingSoon.net. Movieweb described that earlier footage as Dever and Kratter surveying their surroundings before the clip cut off — quieter, more character-focused than the crash sequence footage, suggesting production has been working through multiple phases of Abby and Lev’s story across these months of filming.
Lev is a transgender boy and a member of the Seraphites alongside his sister Yara, and his relationship with Abby — built out of an unlikely mutual need to survive — is central to the game’s emotional argument. Season 3 will follow Abby’s perspective across the three days in Seattle that ran parallel to Ellie’s story in Season 2, per SuperHeroHype, which means the show is essentially asking viewers to spend an entire season with the character who killed Joel Miller. It’s the same ask the game made in 2020, and it remains one of the more divisive structural choices in the history of the medium.
Kaitlyn Dever leads Season 3 while Bella Ramsey and Isabela Merced return in reduced capacities. Jorge Lendeborg Jr. plays Manny, with Jason Ritter, Patrick Wilson, and Clea DuVall rounding out the new additions. Craig Mazin takes over as sole creative lead following Neil Druckmann’s step back from writing and directing duties, per Hollywood North Buzz. Production started March 2 in British Columbia and is scheduled to wrap in late November, per ScreenRant.
No official release date has been set. HBO is targeting 2027, which puts the show on a similar gap to the one between Season 1 and Season 2. Given everything the season is apparently building toward, fans of the game are likely to be watching the set footage more closely than anyone at HBO would prefer — OutLoud Culture noted the production has already generated significant speculation simply from the presence of blue screens and boats in earlier location shots, hinting at an eventual trip to the Seraphites’ island Haven that the game handles in its final act.
