How Tess dies in Last of Us show is totally different in the game

HBO’s Last of UsIt is an amazingly faithful adaptation of the videogame source material. Except for a couple of minor changes, the majority of the series feels as if the video game was directly translated to screen. At least the first episode. It is possible to recreate some frames almost exactly as they were in the original game at times.

But one point of total deviation came at the very end of the show’s second episode when Tess’ (Anna Torv) storyline got a big update.

[Ed. note: This story contains spoilers for The Last of Us the game and the first two episodes of the series.]

Photo: Liane Hentscher/HBO

Tess’ death at the end of episode 2 isn’t a total shock, exactly. It may surprise some, but game players had known from the beginning that Tess would be dying. While Tess does die at almost exactly the same point of the story in 2013’s Last of UsThe actual events that surround it, however, are very different.

In the game’s story, Tess is actually killed by FEDRA soldiers, though the fact that she is already infected and sacrifices herself stalling for Ellie and Joel is still the same. On top of that, Joel (and therefore the player) actually witnesses Tess’ death, whereas in the show he obviously only sees its ensuing explosion.

The show may have been able to make this change for a number of reasons. One reason is that FEDRA has not yet been fully established in series drama. While the government response has played a small role in the story so far, it certainly hasn’t been enough for FEDRA’s presence to be felt. Tess’ death at the hands of the infected also serves to make the virus and its hosts seem genuinely dangerous, especially after they were largely absent from the show’s pilot.

The games aside, the show’s execution of Tess’ death is unsettling and strange. While the show clearly loves its weird, gross infected, with their tendril-y fungi strands that writhe and flit constantly, always searching for new hosts, the prolonged voyeuristic “kiss” is almost leering for a show that often isn’t and doesn’t need to be. Seeing a mushroom zombie infect Tess like that doesn’t do much to further our understanding of the Cordyceps curse that killed humanity or give a more impactful feeling to Tess’ death.

Craig Mazin said that the show’s goal was to examine what happens when someone is infected peacefully and not violently. “What does it look like if you just stand perfectly still and let them do this to you?” Mazin asked in an interview with Variety. “Then we landed on this nightmare fuel. It’s disturbing and it’s violative. I think it’s very primal in the way it invades your own body.” Perhaps the best explanation for the scene is Mazin’s own description for it: “To use an overused word, it’s triggering.”

Although there are more practical and unspoken reasons, Neil Druckmann, Craig Mazin, and the showrunners proved it with episode 2, that they have plenty of surprises for both new viewers and veterans to the series.