In each The Final of Us video games, you do not actually know a lot, per se, in regards to the ravenous, horrifying, overgrown mushroom folks you are preventing for hours on finish. You simply know that they are unhealthy! Dwelling remnants of a lifeless civilization. Decide up an axe, a shotgun, hell, even a baseball bat and whack ’em lifeless. It is the people who’re much more fascinating on this explicit hellscape.
Now, two episodes into HBO’s The Final of Us tv adaptation, it is clear that we’ll be taught a bit bit extra in regards to the cordyceps an infection. Episode One started within the Sixties, with two docs speaking in regards to the fungus—which is benign in our world, until you are an ant—and its potential to unfold all through the physique and mind of a human. Episode Two took issues… additional. And no, we’re not speaking about The Kiss. In a swerve from the video video games, we flash again to the early days of the pandemic. Affected person zero. (Doubtlessly.) Indonesia’s main mycologist (learn: fungus knowledgeable) will get a mysterious name for assist, which finally ends up being a look-see at a newly contaminated human cordyceps sufferer—who apparently broke unfastened at a flour manufacturing facility. This follows, by the way in which, a flurry of fan theories following the pilot, which observed that Joel and Sarah prevented flour merchandise, whereas their doomed neighbors fortunately loved pancakes.
So did this complete factor actually begin from a some Pillsbury baggage turning bitter? In keeping with the present’s creators—Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann (who additionally created the sport)—the reply is sure. Take a look at this excerpt from Mazin and Druckmann’s current interview with Selection:
Individuals observed within the first episode that Joel and Sarah prevented consuming meals with flour in them, just like the birthday cake, pancakes, and the neighbor’s biscuits. Jakarta additionally has one of many world’s largest flour mills, which appears to attach the fungus unfold with the contaminated flour. Is that idea right?
Mazin: I feel it’s fairly express.
Druckmann: Yeah, we just about stated sure.
Mazin: When she talks about the place these folks labored and what was happening in that manufacturing facility — yeah, it’s fairly clear that’s what’s happening. We preferred the thought of that science, and we attempt as finest we will to guarantee that our analysis all connects. [The mycologist] asks the place it occurred, and the man says a flour manufacturing facility on the west facet of town. We’re completely speaking about — there may be the world’s largest flour mill in Jakarta — in order that’s a wonderful idea and I feel folks ought to preserve operating with it.
There you go, folks. For newcomers to the sequence, I might think about that that is seemingly wanted context for this sequence, which has fungus zombies haunting their goals and such. For the players? Nicely, I will simply say that that is higher than what we got. Take a look at the newspaper clipping Sarah picks up in The Final of Us Half I. Contaminated crops? Actually? I used to be pondering it was corn, all this time.
