Melanie Lynskey’s Kathleen is Scarier Than Any ‘Last of Us’ Zombie

The Last of Us Episode 4 introduced the HBO show’s most terrifying monster to date: Melanie Lynskey‘s Kathleen. Sure, she’s not a Cordycep-infested zombie, nor is she one of FEDRA’s fascist overlords. In fact, Kathleen is a character who fancies herself the hero. She is the leader of Kansas City, Missouri’s freedom-fighting cell, obsessed with turning the tables on the city’s sadistic overlords. The problem is Kathleen is a woman who has taken her mission too far. She has forgotten the core human qualities of kindness and mercy, instead opting for terror and cruelty.

But Kathleen isn’t just terrifying because she murders kindly old doctors for helping underaged informants or because she commands a city’s worth of soldiers. Kathleen is scary because Melanie Lynskey imbues her with an eerie aura of calm. Lynskey is one of the few actresses who knows how to twist her femininity into a threat. Her chirpy voice, maternal energy, and quiet rage are harnessed in such a way to unsettle the viewer. You know what a clicker is going to do to you — charge and bite — but you might be coaxed into trusting Kathleen at your mortal peril.

Between HBO’s The Last of Us and Showtime’s Yellowjackets, Melanie Lynskey might be, if not the scariest, then the most dangerous woman on TV today.

The Last of Us Episode 4 picks up on Joel (Pedro Pascal) and Ellie’s (Bella Ramsey) journey in the days after they leave Bill’s (Nick Offerman) house. They seem to be making good time heading to Wyoming and might even be beginning to bond. But when a car pile up around Kansas City inspires Joel to try a detour through the local QZ, they are ambushed. While fighting for their lives, they piece together that a local insurgent group has toppled to the notorious FEDRA agents of the city. What they don’t know yet — but the audience does — is that they’ve wandered into a tense standoff between local rebel leader Kathleen and a young informant named Henry (Lamar Johnson).

We meet Kathleen while she’s conducting an interrogation scene. She wants intel on where Henry and his little brother Sam (Keivonn Woodard) are hiding. Her prisoner — or victim, if you prefer — won’t give them up. We glean from dialogue that the man Kathleen is threatening with death and torture is a doctor. He is such a pillar of the community that he was literally the doctor who delivered Kathleen as an infant. Even though he tries to use this personal connection as leverage, Kathleen is unswayed. She only keeps him alive long enough to know whether or not she needs his talents as a doctor or not. When she learns that nothing can be done for the men who fought Joel and Ellie, she kills the doctor. Whether it’s pure strategy, or an expression of rage boiling over, is unclear.

Melanie Lynskey is an incredibly human performer. She plays characters who are grounded with complex, relatable emotions; characters who feel so real that they’re recognizable to us as friends, family, and acquaintances in the real world. So when Lynskey uses her oh-so-relatable energy to depict a woman who has shed all compassion in favor of chaos, it’s chilling. But it’s not anything new.

Melanie Lynskey has been terrifying me in performances for over 20 years. In the 1994 Peter Jackson film Heavenly Creatures, a teenaged Lynskey plays a real-life killer teen alongside Kate Winslet. Lynskey and Winslet’s depictions of two oddball besties who let their retreat into a fantasy world spark matricide haunted me as a high schooler because I could actually relate to the characters. Similarly, Lynskey has received recent raves for playing Shauna, the middle-aged version of a teenager who survived a plane crash through cannibalism and murder. Shauna seems like a retiring housewife most of the time, but is still capable of viciousness when it suits her.

In Kathleen, these qualities crystalize into their final boss form. Lynskey’s character uses empathy as a form of torture. She knows the doctor is experiencing fear and panic because it’s a feeling she’s known herself, when their roles in society were reversed. But empathy does not soften Kathleen’s resolve, but hardens it. She wants her enemies to feel crushed as she once did and she will not be happy until any threat to her cause is eradicated.

The Last of Us Episode 4 ends on a cliffhanger. Joel and Ellie are still trapped in Kansas City. Kathleen is still on the hunt. What happens next will undoubtedly put both parties on a collision course. Who will be a tougher for Joel and Ellie to face? A hoard of flesh-eating zombies or a woman named Kathleen?