Toward the top of the second episode of “The Last of Us,” it’s revealed that Tess, Joel’s companion in crime, has been contaminated. To make issues worse, a horde of zombies is en path to the trio’s location. As Joel and Ellie, the sequence’s protagonists, make a break for it, Tess stays behind to sluggish the zombies down by upturning a number of barrels of gasoline and setting off a stash of grenades left behind by a bunch of smugglers and freedom fighters. But earlier than she will be able to spring her entice, she’s approached by a still-human-looking zombie, who kisses her on the mouth — with jellyfish-like tendrils reaching out of his mouth and squirming into hers.
My first response was disgust. My second: Why on earth did the present’s creators try this?
The sequence performs out otherwise within the present than it does within the recreation, the place Tess is killed by brokers of FEDRA, the authoritarian pseudo-government propped up within the aftermath of the zombie apocalypse. Here’s how showrunner Craig Mazin defined the change to Elise Favis, my former colleague, who lately interviewed him for The Washington Post.
“So I would ask Neil [Druckmann, co-creator of “The Last of Us”] a thousand annoying questions, particularly early on,” Mazin stated. “And I remember one of the annoying questions I asked was, why are FEDRA soldiers all the way out here? If the open city is really, really dangerous, it seems like they’re really going way, way out of their way to find Tess and Joel. They might say, ‘hey, they did a terrible thing, but they’re just gonna get killed out there. So what do we care? We’re certainly not gonna let them back in. If we ever see their faces again, we’ll get them.’ And [Druckmann] was like, ‘Okay, that’s fair.’”
The inventive staff opted, as a substitute, to make use of the episode as a chance to put out some floor guidelines — for Ellie and the viewers alike.
“One of the needs we had was to show how the infected take over a city,” Mazin stated. “How do they work? How do they infect? How many of them are out there? What kinds [are there]? And that naturally led to what made sense for that ending, which was for it to be infected rather than FEDRA soldiers. But you’ll see FEDRA soldiers again, just not in Boston.”
That may clarify why zombies kill Tess as a substitute of FEDRA, however past simply the utility the showrunners, it’s value contemplating what the up to date scene does symbolically, and what the change means within the context of the story. What does a kiss imply? We can free affiliate right here. Kisses will be romantic. They can symbolize love. They will be nonconsensual. There’s the kiss of Judas, the kiss of demise, “Kiss from a Rose.” Remember “Cat Person?” Kisses will be tender, moist, dangerous, sloppy, bored. There are bisous, a playful French greeting that entails gentle kisses on the cheeks. Throughout historical past, kisses have meant lots of issues. So what does the zombie kiss imply right here?
There are a number of interpretations that I believe an individual can arrive at in fairly good religion. It’s attainable the showrunners of this horror drama TV present needed a dramatic and horrifying physique horror gross-out scene. But scratching the floor a bit, each the kiss and its tendrils give the sense that Tess is being welcomed into a brand new “community” of contaminated. There’s one thing paying homage to Judas’s kiss in it too; it would sign that if Tess fails to detonate the explosives round her, she’ll finally develop right into a monster and go on to contaminate different individuals — going from somebody trying to save lots of humanity by smuggling Ellie, into somebody who will betray it.
Another attainable that means is related to Tess’s relationship with Joel. Before dying, Tess tells Joel she by no means requested him to really feel the best way she felt (that means: to reciprocate her love). The zombie kiss is a grotesque inversion of what Tess appeared to need very badly from Joel: intimacy, closeness, oneness. But this closeness comes at a price: a lack of each her identification and humanity.
There’s a final interpretation, one which’s much less charitable. The kiss is clearly nonconsensual, a grim fictionalization of rape tradition and the sort of brutish conduct so many individuals undergo even in our present non-apocalypse. (You can learn this as considerate critique or inconsiderate copy.) And maybe the showrunners, who’re males, didn’t take into consideration whether or not it is perhaps merciless or ship a bizarre message to topic one of many present’s most outstanding feminine characters (thus far) to a fair worse destiny than she suffered within the recreation, and in a extra lurid means at that.
These totally different interpretations can, in fact, overlap. Meaning is messy, and you’ll select to imagine a number of of those without delay. I’d additionally warning that there in all probability isn’t a proper interpretation, even when Mazin and Druckmann might need a most well-liked one. A great way of enthusiastic about these readings is as stops on a metro line. You have your vacation spot, different individuals have theirs, and at any given level, you will get proper again on the road and go someplace else. And if, for instance, later within the season, Mazin and Druckmann choose to kill different feminine characters with abandon and in equally grotesque methods, it’s possible you’ll hitch a experience from one interpretation to a different.
Trying to parse the that means of the kiss raises the query of the way you watch TV. In the case of “The Last of Us,” I believe there are roughly two kinds of viewers. There are those that purchase into the fiction of the present and interpret the stuff that occurs on display screen very plainly, as a narrative. Then there are those that watch the present and see it because the product of a whole lot of individuals’s work, and consider the proceedings as borne of creators’ decisions. It’s the distinction between saying “I can’t believe Joel did X” and “Why did Mazin and Druckmann create an episode where Joel did X?”
Because The Last of Us franchise has existed for practically 10 years, lots of people are instinctively within the latter camp, having seen Druckmann specifically elevated from random recreation director to minor celeb inside online game tradition. And my first response (ick!) leaned that means too. Why, I questioned, did these two creators go for what gave the impression to be only a extra disgusting televised demise for Tess? Having spent some extra time with the scene whereas engaged on my recap of the episode — and attempting to consider it by itself phrases — I believe the best way the present performs the scene is the second interpretation, the one which facilities on Joel and Tess’s relationship. The entire episode is about their dynamic, and the way Tess and Joel differ of their relation to Ellie.
With that spin, the scene reads as greater than only a gross-out. And but, I can’t assist however really feel disillusioned. The seek for a deeper that means was enjoyable so far as spending a number of hours goes, however the seemingly right interpretation isn’t that revelatory or attention-grabbing, which is why at first blush it looks like simply a grisly, vaguely sexualized demise of a significant feminine character.
We already knew that Tess needed extra from Joel than she obtained. We already get the horrors of this apocalypse. But past that, for all its glances and gruffness, the present is gentle on significant characterization. Which is what makes deciding on an interpretation so troublesome — and studying the scene as grossness for its personal sake really easy.