As Joel and Ellie, the series’s protagonists, make a break for it, Tess stays behind to slow the zombies down by upturning a few barrels of gasoline and setting off a stash of grenades left behind by a group of smugglers and freedom fighters.

The sequence plays out differently in the show than it does in the game, where Tess is killed by agents of FEDRA, the authoritarian pseudo-government propped up in the aftermath of the zombie apocalypse.

That might explain why zombies kill Tess instead of FEDRA, but beyond just the utility the showrunners, it’s worth considering what the updated scene does symbolically, and what the change means in the context of the story.

There’s something reminiscent of Judas’s kiss in it too; it might signal that if Tess fails to detonate the explosives around her, she’ll eventually grow into a monster and go on to infect other people — going from someone attempting to save humanity by smuggling Ellie, into someone who will betray it.

And perhaps the showrunners, who are men, did not think about whether it might be cruel or send a weird message to subject one of the show’s most prominent female characters (so far) to an even worse fate than she suffered in the game, and in a more lurid way at that.

The search for a deeper meaning was fun as far as spending a few hours goes, but the seemingly correct interpretation isn’t that revelatory or interesting, which is why at first blush it feels like just a grisly, vaguely sexualized death of a major female character.