How long were Tess and Joel together?
Not only did it establish how Bill and Frank became acquainted with Tess and Joel, but it also reveals new details about Joel and Tess' relationship. For instance, Bill and Frank met Joel and Tess in 2010; this means Joel and Tess had been in a partnership for at least over a decade before Tess died in 2023.
While the quiet love story between Joel and Tess is important on its own, it also sets up a parallel with the parental relationship between Joel and Ellie. Over time, Ellie becomes the person who makes life for him worth living again.
After narrowly escaping an encounter with some Infected, Tess gets bitten. Knowing that her fate is sealed, she asks Joel to escort Ellie over to his brother Tommy in Jackson, which is a ways away from Boston.
The closest the script sidles toward confirming their status as smugglers with benefits is the dialogue that cracks Joel wide open: "There's enough here that you have to feel some sort of obligation to me." Tess explicitly summoning the implicit nature of Joel's affection, however unnamed or reluctant it may be, is the ...
5 Anna Torv (43) As Tess (Late 30s/Early 40s)
The best guess for Tess is that she's around the age of Anna Torv, the actress who plays her in the show. Torv was 43 at the time season 1 was released.
Joel and Tess' relationship in Naughty Dog's The Last of Us has always been uncertain. It was clear in the 2013 game that they cared enough for each other to form a healthy partnership, but subtle quips also implied they were romantically involved.
Rather than fight him off, which she's proven to be an expert at, Tess just stood there and let him approach her for an open-mouthed kiss, which would allow the squirmy cordyceps fungi to enter her mouth.
Esther is a minor character who is mentioned in The Last of Us: One Night Live. She is Joel's love interest after his brother Tommy apparently paired them up.
Before dying, Tess tells Joel she never asked him to feel the way she felt (meaning: to reciprocate her love). The zombie kiss is a grotesque inversion of what Tess seemed to want very badly from Joel: intimacy, closeness, oneness.
The infected runner wasn't actually kissing Tess. Instead, it was allowing the mutated Cordyceps fungus to spread from itself into Tess. The horror series creators Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann told EW that the infected don't get violent unless they're prevented from spreading their disease.
Is Tess Joels love interest?
Theresa Servopoulos, otherwise known as Tess, is Joel's partner and alleged lover in Boston. She's universally respected throughout Area 4 of the quarantine zone, but it's mainly out of fear. The HBO showrunners planned a backstory for Tess about her life before the outbreak but those scenes were cut.
Having finally grown to love Ellie like a daughter, though, Joel isn't about to let that happen. He shoots his way through the hospital to rescue her, killing everyone in his path and then lying to Ellie about what really happened by telling her that raiders attacked the hospital.
Tess was originally a true villain in The Last of Us, and this abandoned plot would've actually given her much more to do than in the final game. Tess' sacrifice and relationship with Joel is central to the plot of The Last of Us, but the hopeful survivor herself is sadly left behind.
In the game, Tess refuses to “turn,” instead sacrificing herself to the incoming FEDRA soldiers so Joel and Ellie can make their escape without detection. But in the HBO adaptation, Tess—in a pitch-perfect portrayal by Anna Torv—dies while fighting off infected, not humans.
RELATED: The Last of Us PC Port Gets Its First UpdateAs reported by Naughty Dog Central on Twitter, and originally discovered by Reddit user Jeppedepep, Tess was born on 26 Feb 1982 in Rockford, Illinois USA, making her around a year younger than Joel during the events of the game.
Ramsey is currently 19, the age that Ellie is in The Last of Us: Part Two. This means that going forward, she'll be closer to her character's age than she was during season one, during which Ellie is 14.
in order to heal wounds. Having suffered injuries in episode 2, Joel gives Ellie a rag to cover her bite wound and uses duct tape to wrap up Tess' foot in a similar fashion as the game.
Tess dies after being bitten by a Clicker in the museum. Knowing she's doomed, she sacrifices herself by blowing up the Capitol building while it's full of infected, allowing Joel and Ellie to escape.
But in the game, it is Tess who convinces Joel to take Ellie. Joel would have just gone back to the QZ had this request not been made. (Or Tess not died.) Joel agrees to take Ellie partly due to his guilt over Tess's death and his loyalty to her.
In the show, she distracts an incoming pack of infected, which leads us to a rather unique moment. A runner spots Tess and instead of violently charging her as we've seen infected do before, it calmly walks over and gives her an open-mouthed kiss to allow tendrils of the evolved cordyceps fungi to pass into her.
How did Ellie know Tess was bitten?
How did Ellie know Tess was bitten? As Tess questioned Joel about what he really knew about the Fireflies and about her, Ellie realized that Tess was infected, bitten on her shoulder by the runner that she was fighting off in the museum.
These tendrils seem to be how the infected transmit Cordyceps from themselves to their hosts through bites. The reason the zombie seems to kiss Tess likely comes from the infection already present in Tess' body.
Anyway, several months pass after Ellie's and Abby's encounter, and Ellie and Dina are living on an isolated farm taking care of Dina's baby. Things are as peaceful and happy as could plausibly be, though Ellie struggles with PTSD on a daily basis, related to both Joel's death and all the mayhem she caused.
Throughout the episode, Riley leads Ellie on a journey where they explore a piece of the post-apocalyptic world before Riley was planning to leave. Speaking on HBO's The Last of Us Podcast, Mazin describes how crucial The Last of Us's temporal setting is to Ellie and Riley's budding romance in episode 7.
Abby, a former Firefly, was angry that Joel killed her father, the lead surgeon experimenting on Ellie . The encounter resulted in Joel being shot, restrained, and beaten to death in front of Ellie with a golf club.
