Who Is Kathleen in The Last of Us Episode 4? - hong nhung

When Joel and Ellie stumble into Kansas City, Missouri in The Last of Us’s fourth episode, their road trip is cut short by a dangerous band of hunters. The duo is in search of Joel’s brother, Tommy, who may help them reach the lab where doctors are seemingly working on a cure to the fungal infection that turns people into hideous monsters.

It's in Kansas City where they meet Kathleen—or well, where we, the audience, meet Kathleen. Joel and Ellie run into and kill some of her soldiers, but they have yet to be introduced to their leader. Played by Yellowjackets star Melanie Lynskey, Kathleen is the head of a rebel group obsessed with finding a man named Henry. She interrogates a former FEDRA doctor about his whereabouts before she kills him. When the bodies of the soldiers Joel killed arrive back on their base, Kathleen immediately assumes that it was the work of the mysterious Henry. She orders her soldiers to move out, find Henry's collaborators, and kill them on sight.

According to ScreenRant, Kathleen is one of the first original characters introduced to the series. Though The Last of Us draws its source material from the survival video game of the same name, the series has yet to vary too drastically from the story. But showrunner Craig Mazin noted that the series would make some minor adjustments, such as the much-celebrated update to Bill and Frank's story in Episode Three. Now, Episode Four seems lifted from the Pittsburgh storyline of the show's source material, which also sees Joel and Ellie fight their way through a similar ambush. (Watch the scene from the video game below. Look familiar?) But the hunters were missing an obvious leader. Enter Kathleen.

“[An original character] that Craig came up with was the character of Kathleen, who was the leader of who in the game of these guys were the hunters, and they take a slightly different role here," Neil Druckmann, the creator of The Last of Us video game, told ScreenRant. "Because I love the idea that there aren't just good guys and bad guys. Everybody's trying to survive, everybody's trying to live life to the fullest way they can. But often, the goals are competing with each other, and that's where the interesting things happen.”

Mazin also added that the HBO series “didn't have to fulfill a need that the video game had, which was to send NPCs at you.... We didn't want to numb people to [the violence].” He continued.,“So… 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." We’ll see what Kathleen—and the creepy basement room that seems to be holding a monster inside—has in store for us come next week’s episode. Is she evil, is good, or conflicted? What I can say, is that she certainly has it out for that Henry guy.