The past is Jerry, the Fireflies, the philosophy that said one child's life was worth less than a cure. The past is also Owen, and what he and Abby were to each other before everything calcified. The silence Abby moves through in this session is thick with it — the decisions that led here, the people who are gone, the version of herself that believed in the cause enough to do what she did in Wyoming.

The past's refusal to be quiet is the game's thesis and its structure. Both halves of The Last of Us Part II are about people whose pasts will not allow them forward motion without first demanding to be reckoned with. The reckoning does not silence the past. It just changes what it says.