The Last Of Us creators confirm Tess had a son and explain his grim fate

Spoiler warning: this article contains spoilers for the episode two of The Last of Us - proceed with caution.

Episode two of The Last of Us was yet another rollercoaster ride of emotions. I didn’t think that clickers could get any scarier than they were in the games, but no - that entire museum sequence was pure nightmare fuel.

Fans of the first game probably knew exactly what was coming, but that didn’t make the end of the episode any less heartbreaking when Tess (played by the talented Anna Torv) died shortly after becoming infected. Her death played out very differently than it did in the game, and was far more creepy. However, the whole thing gets far worse when you take into account her backstory, which didn’t make it into the show or games.

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As GamesRadar+ reports, show creators Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann revealed on HBO’s official TLoU podcast that Tess used to have a family who became infected - including a son who’s presumably still out there somewhere.

“There’s something we talked about - and we wrote it, we never shot it - and it was a little bit of a backstory of Tess, and the fact that Tess had a kid,” Mazin said. “She had a husband and she had a son, and they were infected, and she had to kill them. She killed her husband, but she could not kill the son. She couldn’t do it. She locked him in the basement, where theoretically he’s still a clicker.”

“We had a cold open where the camera pushed on this door and you just hear the pounding coming from this basement, and then we cut out,” Druckmann added. “Later, Tess would tell the story of how she couldn’t kill her son.”

In a way, I’m sort of thankful that didn’t make it into the show, because that would have broken me. Tess' attitude towards Ellie makes a lot more sense with this backstory in mind, though, and it adds even more depth to her character.