I could see them shifting events around to have that moment take place at the very end of the second season, and they could frontload a lot of the flashbacks with Abby and Ellie and expand on stuff, like they’re already doing with this season, through pretty much all of the second season. Really build to it and allow us to spend time with these characters before the inevitable hammer falls. Then, Season 3 could be Eliie going on the journey with Dinah to find Abby to get her revenge. Could be a great way to rhyme each season. One person gets their revenge at the end of one season, and the other gives it up by the end of another.
I think one of the issues people had with Part II, aside from the whole Abby controversy, was how the events were were distributed in the game. We get a lot of the present day stuff with Ellie, leading up to Abby encountering them at the theater, and then we pretty much follow her, a character a lot of us either had hatred for or didn’t like very much to begin with, linearly for pretty much the majority of the rest of the game.
If you moved all her flashback stuff towards the beginning, those who haven’t played the game are left wondering who this person is. Because she hasn’t killed Joel yet, they don’t have this built-up bias or hold this grudge against her as a character, and are more receptive to getting to know her. We get to see her journey, from when she’s spending time with her father, and her finding her father dead, to when she achieves her revenge. That way, when it happens, new viewers will be like, “Ooooooh, that’s why she is the way she is and wants to do what she wants to do!”
Then again, this first season has been playing around with time with the flashbacks at the beginning of each episode so far, so who knows how it’s going to play out.
