The Last Of Us Episode 2 Review - 7 Ups & 1 Down

2. Anna Torv's Heartbreaking Goodbye

Of course, this takes us to the most heartbreaking moment of the episode: Tess’ death.

After finding the Firefly base completely decimated, we find out Tess was bitten during the Clicker confrontation. The game’s depiction of this is incredible, and Tess actor Anna Torv more than lives up to it here.

Right from the moment her demeanour shifts after she knows it’s over, brushing off a potentially tender moment with Joel as he patches up her ankle, Torv sells the desperation of needing one win before she goes. I wanna shout out the smaller details of her transformation here as well - the twitches as she nears her end in particular. That idea of the infected losing control of their body is a great, heartbreaking addition to the canon. This gets an up.

But it’s Torv’s farewell speech that hits the hardest. Making subtle changes to the game dialogue, it resonated more for me here. Her admission that she felt for Joel in a way he never did for her delivers a brutal blow that deepens her character, and her instruction to Joel to save who he can is chilling.

Her admission that saving Ellie can start to chip away at the moral debt they’ve accrued during the apocalypse so far also adds a fascinating dimension to her motivation. As she says, she and Joel are good people, but there’s no reason they couldn’t be in the future.