Towards the end of the second episode of “The Last of Us,” it is revealed that Joel’s accomplice, Tess, is infected. To make matters worse, a horde of zombies is heading to the trio’s location.As series protagonists Joel and Ellie take a break, Tess knocks over a few barrels of gasoline, killing a group of smugglers and freedom fighters. However, before she can set a trap, she approaches the still-human-looking zombie and kisses her on the mouth. I will
My first reaction was disgust. My second of him: why on earth did the creators of the show do that?
The sequence plays out in a different show than the game in which Tess is killed by agents of FEDRA, an authoritarian pseudo-government fueled in the aftermath of a zombie apocalypse. How showrunner Craig Mazin explained the change is as follows Ellis Favismy former colleague, I interviewed him recently for the Washington Post.
“So I ask Neil [Druckmann, co-creator of “The Last of Us”] There were a thousand annoying questions, especially early on,” Mazin said. “And I remember one of the thorny questions I asked was why were FEDRA soldiers here all the time? They might say, ‘Hey, they’ve done terrible things, but they’re just going to get killed there. So what do we care about? We’re definitely not going to put them back together. If we can see their faces again, we’ll catch them. [Druckmann] I was like, “Okay, that’s fair.”
Instead, the creative team chose to use the episode as an opportunity to lay out some ground rules for both Ellie and the audience.
“One of the things we needed to do was show how the infected could take over a city,” Mazin said. “How do they work? How do they get infected? How many of them are there? [are there]And it naturally makes sense for the ending to be infected rather than FEDRA soldiers. ”
This might explain why the zombies kill Tess instead of FEDRA, but it’s not just about showrunner usefulness, but what the updated scene symbolically does and what the change does in the context of the story. It’s worth considering what that means. what does kiss mean? Feel free to associate here. Kissing can be romantic. They can symbolize love. They can be non-consensual. There is the kiss of Judas, the kiss of death, and the “kiss from the rose.”Remember “Cat person?” Kissing can be tender, wet, bad, sloppy, and boring. There is bisous, a playful French greeting with a light kiss on the cheek. Throughout history, kisses have meant many things. So what does the zombie kiss mean here?
There are a few interpretations that I think one could reasonably arrive at in good faith. But if you scratch the surface a little, both the kiss and its tendrils give Tess a sense of being welcomed into the infected new “community”. If Tess fails to detonate the explosives around her, it could indicate that she will eventually grow into a monster and continue to infect others, smuggling Ellie into humanity. From those who try to save the one who betrays it.
Another possible meaning relates to the relationship between Tess and Joel. Before her death, Tess tells Joel that he never asked him to feel the way he felt (meaning: because he would repay her love). The zombie kiss is a grotesque reversal of what Tess seemed so desperately wanting from Joel: intimacy, intimacy and togetherness. But this intimacy comes at a price. Both her identity and her humanity are lost.
There is a final interpretation that is less charitable. Kissing is clearly non-consensual, a terrifying fiction of rape culture, and the kind of barbaric behavior that many people suffer even in the current non-apocalypse. It can be read as a duplicate… to a fate even worse than she suffered in the game, and in a more ridiculous way.
Of course, these different interpretations can overlap. The meanings are jumbled and you can believe several of these at once.Also note that you probably won’t correct Even if Mazin and Druckmann had their favourites. A good way to think about these measurements is subway stops. You have your destination, others have their destination, and you can always jump right back in line to go somewhere else. If you choose to abandon other female characters and kill them in similarly grotesque ways, you can hop from one interpretation to another.
Trying to parse the meaning of a kiss raises the question of how we watch television. In the case of The Last of Us, I think there are two types of viewers. There are those who accept the fiction of the show and interpret what happens on the screen very explicitly as a story. “I can’t believe Joel did X” and “Why did Mazin and Druckmann make an episode where Joel did X?”
The Last of Us franchise has been around for nearly a decade, so many people instinctively fall into the latter camp, especially seeing Druckmann’s rise from random game director to minor celebrity within video game culture. I’ve seen And my initial reaction (nope!) was slanted that way too.Why are these two creators of him just more disgusting TV death of Tess? I spent a little more time on the scene while working on the episode recap — and trying to think of it on its own terms — the way the show plays the scene is a second interpretation centered on Joel and Tess. I think… relationship. The entire episode is about their dynamic and how Tess and Joel differ in their relationship with Ellie.
With that spin, the scene reads as more than just grossing out. Still, I can’t help but feel disappointed. Exploring the deeper meaning was fun as long as I spent a few hours there, but the seemingly correct interpretation is not. that so revelatory or interesting that it makes you blush at first However A gruesome, vaguely sexual death of a major female character.
We already knew Tess wanted more than she got from Joel.we are already obtain Horror of this apocalypse. But beyond that, for all its glimpses and moodiness, the show shines a light on meaningful characterization. And the scene itself is pretty easy to read as gross.