The Last Of Us revolves around Joel and Ellie, and the development of their relationship as they experience tragedy, complications, and a crapload of fungus zombies while traversing across a post-apocalyptic America. It makes sense they’re the most recognisable and popular characters in the game since they’re the protagonists after all. In saying that though, it’s time we shine some light on a character in The Last Of Us who gets only a small portion of the screentime yet is just as important and as interesting – if not more – than Joel and Ellie: Tess.
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When we first meet Tess in The Last Of Us, she acts as our guide in introducing us to the game’s world and mechanics. Over the course of the game’s opening hours, we come to understand the world and what kind of character Joel is. Yet we don’t get much of a glimpse into who Tess is.
What we do discover is that she’s clearly the brains of whatever operation she and Joel runs. She clearly wears the pants in their fuzzy-and-undefined relationship, her name carries weight in this dog-eat-dog post-apocalyptic world, and she’s obviously more than just a badarse partner-in-crime to Joel. If anything, he’s like the Robin to her Batman.
Hell, she’s the reason why the story of The Last Of Us happens in the first place as she’s the one who introduces Joel to Ellie.
Tess is smart and tactical in a way Joel isn’t, yet she can be cold-blooded and violent like him should the situation come to it. This all raises the question of how did Tess become the character she is in The Last Of Us? What sort of hell did she go through before we meet her in the game? Was she always like this?
So when Tess’ death sneaks up on us in The Last Of Us, we’re left with several unanswered questions that sticks in our mind. Just before she exits the game in a blaze of glory, she tells Joel, “There’s enough here that you have to feel some sort of obligation to me.”
It’s a subtext-laden final sentence for a character whom we know but don’t really know, yet we’ll sadly never find the answer.
Despite keeping their cards close to their chest when it comes to Tess, it’s clear that the writers of The Last Of Us has some grand plans for her before realising how her story didn’t quite fit into Joel and Ellie’s journey.
Writer and co-director Neil Druckmann revealed that Tess was originally meant to be the antagonist of The Last Of Us who pulls a heel-face-turn on Joel and Ellie. However, this didn’t work out since her betrayal was deemed to be unrealistic.
While this version of Tess was scrapped for the better, it does demonstrate that the writers and developers of The Last Of Us thought a lot about the character and had a heap of ideas for her before settling what we ultimately got. One has to wonder what sort of plans the writers had in mind for Tess.
Here’s hoping we’ll get some sort of deep dive into Tess’ backstory at some point in the future, whether it’s part of HBO’s live-action adaptation of the game or some prequel/side-story Last Of Us game to come out on the PlayStation 5.
Tess played such a small yet integral part in the series that it’s almost a shame she was shuffled off this (fictional) mortal coil before we all really got to know what made her tick.
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