HBO The last of us takes Joel and Ellie – and the show’s viewers – to Kansas City, Missouri in its fourth episode, adapting the game’s Pittsburgh storyline to fit the new location. If you’ve played the games, you know that the bad guys in Pittsburgh are called the Hunters, a largely faceless group that provides fodder for the player to run into. They’re tough and iconic, with the huge ‘RUN’ plow, but that’s about as much depth as you give them. HBO The last of us changes that, giving the faction a face and new motivations.
Melanie Lynskey takes on an all-new character named Kathleen, the ruthless leader of the Kansas City Rebels. Jeffrey Pierce (the voice of Tommy in the games) plays Perry, Kathleen’s best soldier. Because she’s not in the game, we can’t infer much about her backstory, but the fourth episode definitely set up her motivations.
[Ed. note: This story contains spoilers for The Last of Us on HBO.]
Who is Kathleen?
Lynskey’s Kathleen is clearly a villain, the leader of the Hunters. This vicious group wiped out the Kansas City FEDRA. Kathleen’s brother was the first leader of the group, someone Lynskey told EW was “basically Jesus” to the group. She took over when he was killed off, taking a different approach: “What I found very interesting about her was that when she came into the role, she didn’t have a lot of guilt of doing bad things, when his brother did,” Lynskey said. “She found that she was quite heartless and so was able to be quite effective in a way that he maybe wasn’t because she didn’t care about people.”
Her calm, soft voice masks a streak of ruthless violence, as seen in episode 4. We are thrown straight into her story as she interrogates a doctor – the doctor who delivered her – for information about the person she blames for her brother. Death: Henry.
Lynskey described Kathleen to EW as someone you could ignore at first, ignoring her violent influence on the band.
“I feel like there was something about her being someone you might reject, maybe you wouldn’t necessarily be afraid of until you suddenly realised, ‘Oh crap! He’s someone I’m supposed to be most afraid of,” she said. “I wanted her to be kind. I wanted her to be gentle and delicate in the way she looked around. I wanted her to feel like a gentle person, and then to have a surprising capacity for violence. I thought the difference between the way she behaves, the way she talks, and the things she does would be interesting.
And indeed, she is capable of violence: we first see it when she shoots and kills the doctor and sends her troops on a citywide manhunt for Henry.
The last of us’ The fifth episode will likely continue Kathleen’s story, and it will be interesting to see how HBO weaves together Henry and his brother Sam’s story with the Hunters.
