The missing smuggler Tess (Anna Torv) after episode 2 of Last of Us? Want to know more about the characters? Well, you are in luck. Last of Us Co-creators Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann delve into abandoned plans to reveal Tess’ past on HBO’s official show Last of Us podcast. The debate is devastating, but it’s also enlightening.
“There was something we talked about, we wrote it, but we never filmed it. It’s Tess’ backstory and the fact that Tess had a child,” Mazin reveals. She had a husband and a son, and they were infected, so she had to kill them. She killed her husband, but she couldn’t kill her son.”
In this backstory, Tess locked her infected son in the basement rather than killing him outright. “Theoretically, he’s still a clicker,” Mazin says.
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“When the camera pushed this door, I heard this thump coming from this basement, so I cold opened it,” Druckmann explains. “Later on, Tess told a story about how she couldn’t kill her son.” Mazin and Druckmann ultimately decided the scene didn’t fit, but even with Tess’ knowledge of the backstory, Tells her arc in Episode 2 in a powerful way.
Tess spends most of Episode 2 protecting Ellie (Bella Ramsey). Joel (Pedro Pascal) is cynical and Ellie believes she will die one day, but Tess is “brave enough to dare to hope,” she says Mazin. For Tess, if Ellie is the key to healing, it’s possible she won’t have to lose anyone like she did again.
Because of this, Mazin says Tess goes into “mother mode” in this episode. This is an explanation that hits harder with the knowledge that Tess had a child. With hope in sight, she will do whatever it takes to keep Ellie alive. This includes sacrificing himself to a horde of clickers so that Joel and Ellie can escape.
Just before she dies, Tess tells Joel, “Save who you can save.”As Mazin and Druckmann point out on their podcast, she reminds him at the beginning of the episode that she can’t save her deceased daughter Sarah (Nico Parker). ,He can Save Ellie. Perhaps there is an extra layer to this as well. Once infected, Tess finds herself not having much time left. By sacrificing herself, she chooses to save those she can save: Joel and Ellie. And by saving them, she still holds out hope that she might be able to save the world.
