Melanie Lynskey made her The Last of Us debut in Episode 4, “Please Hold My Hand,” where she took on the role of Kathleen, the seemingly cold-blooded leader of a group of human survivors in Kansas City. As for the significance of Kathleen, not even fans of the hit video game know where her story is headed because the character was created entirely for the HBO series.
According to an interview with showrunners Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann, the idea of Kathleen came from a need to give the “Hunters” in the game a more nuanced approach than simply cannon fodder for Joel and Ellie. Via ScreenRant:
You have to kill a lot of people in that video game, but for us, violence was quite serious, and we didn’t want to numb people to it. And so when enemies come, it was important for us to ask the question, “Well, why are they enemies? What do they want?” They’re not just evil people. From their point of view, this all makes sense, and it’s justifiable, and that was an interesting thing to explore.
“Everybody’s trying to survive, everybody’s trying to live life to the fullest way they can,” Druckmann said. “But often, the goals are competing with each other, and that’s where the interesting things happen and the different philosophies of how to survive or do the ends justify the means.”
While Kathleen may be an all-new addition to the series, the concept of the Hunters is not. In the game, Joel and Ellie are ambushed by the human survivors in Pittsburgh while the HBO series has switched things up by moving the action to Kansas City where the Hunters have overthrown the Federal Disaster Response Agency (FEDRA) and taken over the quarantine zone. However, the presence of Kathleen adds an interesting wrinkle to the story, so it’ll be interesting to see what transpires as whatever the heck is going on in that basement reaches a boiling point.
(Via ScreenRant)
