Jerry Anderson. The hospital. The flashback that gives Abby the context Ellie had from the beginning — a father killed by Joel, a father who was trying to save the world, a death that made the previous game's ending into a different kind of story. The scars are the physical record of what surviving the aftermath of that loss required. The stories are everything that led to Seattle, the whole structure of motive and grief that Abby cannot explain to anyone who was not inside it.

This is the session where the game earns its structural gambit. The second half is not a defense of Abby. It is an explanation. The distinction matters. Explanation does not resolve the moral accounting. It complicates it in the precise way that moral accounting deserves to be complicated.