Lacking smuggler Tess (Anna Torv) after episode 2 of The Final of Us? Craving extra details about the character? Properly, you are in luck. The Final of Us co-creators Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann dig into their scrapped plans for displaying Tess’s previous on HBO’s official The Final of Us podcast. Whereas the dialogue is devastating, it’s also illuminating.
“There’s something we had talked about, and we wrote it however by no means shot it. It was a bit little bit of the backstory of Tess, and the truth that Tess had a child,” Mazin reveals. “She had a husband and he or she had a son, and so they had been contaminated, and he or she needed to kill them. She killed her husband, however couldn’t kill the son.”
On this backstory, Tess locked her contaminated son in her basement somewhat than kill him outright. “Theoretically, he is nonetheless a Clicker,” Mazin says.
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“We had a chilly open the place the digital camera pushed on this door and also you hear this pounding coming from this basement, after which we lower out,” explains Druckmann. “Later, Tess would inform the story of how she could not kill her son.” Mazin and Druckmann finally determined that the scene did not match, however even the information of Tess’s backstory informs her arc in episode 2 in a robust manner.
Tess spends a lot of episode 2 defending Ellie (Bella Ramsey), whose immunity to cordyceps might result in a vaccine for everybody else. Whereas Joel (Pedro Pascal) is cynical and believes Ellie will succumb any day now, Tess is “courageous sufficient to dare to hope,” says Mazin. For Tess, if Ellie is the important thing to the treatment, there’s an opportunity nobody should lose folks in the best way that she did once more.
For that reason, Mazin says, Tess goes into “mom mode” on this episode — an outline that hits more durable with the information that Tess had a toddler. With hope in sight, she’s going to do no matter it takes to maintain Ellie alive. As we see on the finish of the episode, this consists of sacrificing herself to a horde of Clickers in order that Joel and Ellie can escape.
Proper earlier than she dies, Tess tells Joel, “Save who it can save you.” As Mazin and Druckmann level out within the podcast, she’s reminding him that he cannot save his daughter, Sarah (Nico Parker), who died on the very begin of the episode. Nonetheless, he can save Ellie. Maybe there’s an additional layer to this as nicely: As soon as she’s contaminated, Tess realizes she would not have a lot time left. She chooses to avoid wasting who she is ready to save — Joel and Ellie — by sacrificing herself. And in saving them, she nonetheless has some hope that possibly, simply possibly, they will save the world.
