Then there were only two. Arriving at the supposed destination of their journey, the smuggler duo Joel (Pedro Pascal) and Tess (Anna Torv) discover in the second episode of “The Last Of Us” that all members of the Firefly resistance group, to which they are immune Ellie (Bella Ramsey) should have killed the blessed time. As if that wasn’t enough, Tess, already bitten in the previous clicker encounter, as a horde of infected approaches, decides to sacrifice herself to give Joel and Ellie more time to escape.
It’s an ending that’s as heroic as it is tragic, despite the fact that, as in the video game template, by the way, we really didn’t learn anything about Tess during her brief appearance. Unlike Joel, to whom the prologue was dedicated, there was no insight into his tough partner’s past. But that was originally planned differently…
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Tess had a son
As revealed by Craig Mazin and his co-showrunner and The Last Of Us creator Neil Druckmann on the series’ weekly podcast, there was actually a little backstory for Tess of her own in previous script drafts that might even be unfamiliar to fans of The Last Of Us games. would have been new.
According to this, before the mushroom apocalypse, Tess had a husband and a son, but they were both infectedwhereupon she wanted to save her from her evil fate. Although she killed her husband, she didn’t have the heart to kill her son. Instead, she locked him in the basement – which, according to Craig Mazin, he could theoretically still get into mischief as a clicker.
The corresponding scene in the series would have just seen a cellar door being rammed, then a cut on Tess in the present tense, who then talks about how she couldn’t kill her child. In the end, however, Mazin and Druckmann decided against this insertion, as in their view it did not really fit the series and would have in fact been a small duplication of Joel’s backstory.
An even more tragic death
While knowledge of Tess’s past tragedies is indeed unnecessary to invest in The Last Of Us storyline (as the relationship between Joel and Ellie is at its core), it would have made the character’s departure a little more dramatic than it already was. used to be.
The fact that Tess also had a child makes it all the more understandable that she ultimately wants to protect Ellie at all costs to give her the future her son didn’t have (a development that is slow to get going with Joel). Unlike Joel, she already hopes that Ellie actually holds the key to healing and a better world.
When we know that Tess is actually saying goodbye to a young protégé for the second time (only that it is now her whose journey ends prematurely), the ending of the second “Last Of Us” episode immediately feels a bit more bitter. We’ll find out how Joel and Ellie continue their perilous odyssey in Germany on January 30, 2023, when the third installment of the series is released on the Sky streaming service WOW.