Mild spoilers for previously aired episodes of The Last of Us
The Last of Us is such a solid return to the zombie series that dominated ten years ago. I’m really enjoying it as I particularly like zombie and post-apocalyptic shows. So far it’s better than The Walking Dead ever was, although my memory is tainted by later seasons and I expect the quality to lag as the season progresses. The Last of Us is based on the video game of the same name where a fungus is responsible for the devastating pandemic, not a virus. It’s a unique twist on the zombie genre and they set it up well with scenes showing a prediction of the fungus scourge and how it migrated to people in the early 2000s. According to fungus experts it’s somewhat possible. I don’t know if I want to think too hard about this, but here we are.
To nurse my nascent mycophobia, I turned to Jonathan Cale, an assistant professor at the University of Northern British Columbia who studies fungus-tree interactions in forests, and Matthew Kasson, an assistant professor of mycology at West Virginia University whose work has focused on Massospora cicadina, a parasitic fungus that—gulp—infects cicadas, alters their behavior to spread itself, and eventually seals their doom.
“It’s not far-fetched for me,” Kasson says of The Last of Us’s nefarious fungi. “They are stranger than fiction.”
The opening scene of The Last of Us features the second epidemiologist attempting to wave off the first’s concerns about a fungal pandemic by reminding his colleague that fungus can’t survive in temperatures above 94 degrees—leaving us toasty humans safe from their spongy clutches.
Alas: “That’s untrue,” Kasson says. “There are a number of fungi that can persist. In fact, we know the limit of fungal growth is about 62 degrees Celsius”—around 143 degrees Fahrenheit, and more than enough heat to cause a burn—“after which many or most eukaryotes, including fungi, can’t grow.”
The Last of Us makes much of the idea that because cordyceps is a fungus, it can’t be treated with medicine. That’s not true: Antifungals abound to treat common fungal conditions like athlete’s foot, yeast infections, ringworm, and dandruff.
But the show is right that fungi are uniquely difficult to battle, Kasson says. “Fungi are more closely related to animals than they are plants. But it’s really hard to get rid of dandruff because they’re eukaryotes and animals and fungi share a lot of similarities. It’s hard to combat them without combating ourselves. So they have to come up with specialized types of compounds that can kill the fungi without harming the host.”
Options remain scant, even if the doctors and scientists in The Last of Us would probably not have immediately given up on fighting cordyceps. Take it from microbiologist Arturo Casadevall, who last year told the Hopkins Bloomberg Public Health magazine, “Because we don’t worry about the fungi, not a lot of work is done with the fungi. So, we don’t have too many drugs. We don’t have any fungal vaccines, and it all becomes kind of circular.”
Further nightmare fodder: Casadevall believes that we’ve already seen a fungus, Candida auris, adapt to the heat of the human body. “As the world is getting warmer, the fungi will have to adapt,” he said. “Every hot day is a selection event.”
I can believe that this could happen based on the science as outlined in that article. (I’m not scared of fungus though and I’ll still eat mushrooms!) More than that I believe that the anti-science response and fallout would be worse than we’ve seen on TV and movies. If you told me in 2019 that over a million people would die in the US alone while countless others would refuse to wear masks pre-vaccine and refuse to get vaccinated, I wouldn’t believe you. The scenes in The Last of Us – entire cities bombed, a protected zone in which military terrorizes and controls citizens – are likely realistic if not underplayed. Truth is scarier and more insidious than fiction. Hopefully I’ll both live a long time and be long gone before another pandemic though.
I wanted to talk about the devastating third episode, featuring guest stars Nick Offerman and Murray Bartlett. Usually, when there’s a capsule episode of a series it’s filler and I find it annoying. (I’m thinking of the episode of The Walking Dead with Morgan’s backstory.) This episode was about two characters whom we haven’t met before and won’t see again and yet it was completely spellbinding and touching. My heart ached for both the years they had together and how it ended. I won’t get too spoilery in case you haven’t seen it yet, but it was superb filmmaking and I wasn’t upset at all that a violent zombie show veered in that direction so soon in the first season.
This man is so beautiful
I’d say the easiest thing to believe is that the fungus could jump to a human host. The hardest sell is that it would so rapidly evolve, in less than fifty years, a different route of spreading (it uses spore dispersion, not saliva/blood transmission) and develop multiple mutation stages beyond the initial one. Easy enough to let slide, though. It’s speculative fiction.
I’m really enjoying it. It’s nice to watch a show where I come out of most episodes with few notes. Episode 3, I suspect, will feel slightly off in pacing once you have the whole season together, but it still is hugely relevant in terms of setting up the moral stakes of the series (if Ellie is the cure, what happens if her sacrifice is required to save everyone? is that a fair exchange?) as well as the character journey (even in the face of tragedy, life must go on or it’s not life at all). Just good, solid writing all around.
I tried. I watched episode 1, and it was excellent and creepy, but I just can’t. After so many years of watching the Walking Dead, I’m not sure I have it in me to invest in another zombie show.
I think the benefit TLOU has over TWD here is the story is already written. Even with the ambivalence some people had to the second game, the show gives them an opportunity to rewrite and change it if they want, but there’s still a clear end goal in mind. That’s a huge advantage to know where your story is going to end, rather than just writing as you go because the ratings keep driving renewals.
The Walking Dead was originally a comic. I didn’t read it or watch much of the show, so I can only imagine they veered pretty hard from the source material.
I read some of the earlier comics (up to the jail) and for the most part it was pretty on track. Some relationships were changed and the timeline for somethings was rearranged but I don’t remember it being unrecongizable from the show. Of course, I can’t speak to what happens after that and I stopped watching TWD years ago and the show didn’t make me want to go back to the source material.
I almost stopped at episode 2 because I felt it might be once again “unwashed people in tank tops, flannel and cargos (what happened to all the other clothing on earth? Station 11 did clothes really well, btw), smuggling guns and crap,” but I’m really glad I went on. Episode 3 is Rewarding.
My son is obsessed with the games, and has played them several times. We’re both huge fans of the show, and how it’s staying true – yet forging its own path – to the game.
EP3 was amazing… And if you haven’t played the game, you wouldn’t know about Bill, and why he’s important.
I won’t spoil anything here, but I was really glad they went in the direction they did for him for the show.
I’m glad to hear he was in the game. I was curious if that story line was added for the show or not. Sounds like… partially?
@Tealily
It was a shorter story, but I know there were people that were curious as to what Bill’s story really was. In the game, Bill was important to Joel and Ellie. Same as in the show, just in a different way. I can’t really say much more without accidentally spoiling it for anyone who might not have watched the episode.
What they did in the show is not the same as in the game regarding the death part, but I thought it was so much better.
Episode 3 was epic good.
Yes, and definitely not filler. That whole episode encapsulated the ongoing theme of the show and what will end up being the motivation of the main character. It was a geniusly done, while also being incredibly touching.
This. It took a step back and actually explained a lot about what happened to people outside the quarantaine zones, but also lots of other stuff.
Some people are (of course) mad about ‘the gay’ or ‘the woke’, but while the relationship between Frank and Bill is very well done too, there is a lot of things being shown in the episode about other things too.
Episode 3 was beautifully done. It was a heart breaker
1) I was sobbing by the end of episode 3.
2) Watching Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey do interviews together is adorable.
3) The whole fungi science is really cool. But also kind of scary. It definitely seems more plausible. I definitely can see there being QZs in an Omega level pandemic. Watching infrastructure fall apart in a 24 hour timespan in ep 1 was super creepy.
The show is soo good! I was never able to like/watch the walking dead, even though I love zombie movies. My favorite part of episode 3 is its sly twist on toxic masculinity. I don’t want to ruin anything but hahahahahahaha! So clever.
Would just like to say fungi are super important for all life on this planet and not all fungi are bad. Trees often have lots of fungi attached that help them suck up the water for instance. They also change nutrients so plants can take them in. In addition, they clean up a lot of debris, which helps for better soil.
That said, I had heard about the fungi ants and always found that sad.
I don’t think anyone has been arguing that all fungi are bad. If anything, TLoU places the blame for the outbreak on humans and their decision to ignore global warming, not the fungus.