New Tomb Raider character reframes one of Lara Croft’s key relationship

[Ed. note: This story contains spoilers for Netflix’s Tomb Raider: The Legend of Lara Croft and the Tomb Raider games.]

The new series Tomb Raider: The Legend of Lara Croft deals directly with the events of the Survivor trilogy games, which introduced — then killed off — Lara’s mentor and adoptive father, Conrad Roth. In the games, Conrad’s death lingered as Lara hardened into a brutal relic-protector. But with the animated series, showrunner Tasha Huo wanted to dig even deeper into the psychological strife of the loss, to understand how the guilt would shape Lara as she evolved into the version of the character from the 1990s games. To do that, Huo invented a new character: Interpol agent Camilla Roth.

In Tomb Raider episode 4, “Big Lies, Small Secrets,” Lara needs top-secret info to chase down the supernatural terrorist Charles Devereux and the organized crime operation known as the Light. Securing it requires a bit of breaking and entering, which is how Lara reenters Camilla’s life — and apartment window. The stakes are high: Camilla isn’t just another Fed, she’s Conrad’s daughter, and Lara’s childhood bestie. Their baggage all comes spilling out in a half hour of crypt-sleuthing, fever-dreaming, confession, and what might be the steamiest scene in all of Tomb Raider (literally, thanks to a hot bath).

Huo also reframes Conrad Roth’s legacy in dramatic fashion. Early in the season, Lara still can’t shake Roth’s death, even as she tiptoes around traps and outswims a giant alligator. His death was her failure, she thinks, and his adventurous spirit is hers to carry on — with as little help as possible, if only to protect her friends. In a way, Lara physically carries the burden of his death, in the form of the jade pendant she’s worn since 2013’s Tomb Raider. Huo, knowing where Lara would go in the future, had to build her hero an escape route from that burden.

“I wanted Lara, who idolizes Roth when we meet her, even in the games, and who idolizes her father across the games, to come to a place where she realized the vision she had of both of those men is complicated and not perfect, and to stop looking up to them as the model of who she should be and realize she has to choose her own path,” Huo says. “So I knew that needed to be a key element in her growth, so it made sense to then pair her with someone who knew Roth in a different way.”

Enter: Camilla, who Lara believed hated her guts. Until their pursuit of the Light brought them together, Lara assumed Camilla “left [her] and never looked back” because of her connection with Conrad. Lara joined the adventurer on his trips into the wild, while Camilla was left behind. When Lara returned home, Camilla wanted nothing to do with her — at least, that’s what Lara thought. What really happened comes to light in the episode.

Huo unravels the history of their relationship in a series of tiny moments that feel totally unexpected in an action-forward Tomb Raider series: awkward reintroductions (“What are you, a professional hiker?”), mumbled declarations (“You never even said goodbye…”), and a flickering of an old secret handshake coming back into memory for two women who had moved in opposite directions. What brings them back to the same page is Conrad Roth, and an understanding that he wasn’t a great dad to Camilla, even if he was everything to Lara.

“There are scenes that actually have been cut for time where Camilla tells more stories about how Roth was when she was growing up as a little girl and how he wasn’t the perfect father,” Huo says. “Yes, she loved him for who he was, but he wasn’t a great dad. He was always out and about in the world and he left her behind, and that’s not someone you should look up to.”

The end of Tomb Raider season 1 establishes Camilla as of Team Lara — something the adventurer needed in this moment more than ever — but in episode 4, there are certain sparks that could lead an open-hearted viewer to think there’s something more between the two women. When Camilla realizes the intruder in her apartment isn’t an enemy, she drops her pistol and invites the sweat-soaked Lara to wash up. The mid-bath dialogue scene that follows challenges the legacy of the “Lara Croft nude code” myth as the two take each other in and talk work, all with the ratatat of a rom-com. Between Camilla flustering Lara with “Are you dating anyone?” to the occasional caress that snaps into fist-pump, the repaired relationship has Korrasami vibes. Or maybe it’s just the kind of deep friendship that takes the hyper-reserved Lara completely off guard.

Huo won’t put a label on Lara or the relationship, but says she’s eager to see how fans respond. “I am happy when anyone ships anybody,” she says. “It’s all fun to see. Everyone’s art is fantastic. It’s great!”

For the writer, throwing the curveball of Camilla Roth into the “unified timeline” of Lara Croft was really about giving the character a chance to expand and evolve toward her legacy form. A female confidante was just one opportunity that was out there for the franchise. And Camilla was in a position to rattle Lara’s misconceptions about her life.

“Roth sacrificed himself to save my life,” Lara confesses at the end of the episode.

“No, he died because that is the life he chose,” Camilla snaps back. And as she begs Lara not to go at it all alone, she reminds her: “The people we love are the treasure you will never find in a tomb.”

“It’s all, to me, a part of helping Lara figure out who I am in season 1,” Huo says of the tear-filled episode, and Camilla’s larger role in the saga. “And how to be different from the men she’s been in the shadows of before.”