THE LAST OF US Explained | How The Infection St...

THE LAST OF US Explained | How The Infection Started And Real Life Zombie Town Inspiration

What is The Last of Us About?

OK, so The Last Of Us centres around a deadly infection caused by fungi known as the Cordyceps. These real world parasites can be found in nature, and what’s most terrifying about The Last Of Us is that there is a basis in science for something like this to happen.

Episode 1 of the HBO show opens with a scientist theorizing the rise of them all the way back in the 60s and like he says, there’s no cure.

But where did the infection originate from, and how did it spread so quickly?

Well, throughout this video we’re gonna be breaking down everything we know about how it began and the theories about how it spread so quickly. If you enjoy the video, then please hit the thumbs up button and don’t forget to subscribe for videos like this every day. With that out the way, thanks for clicking this, now let’s get into The Last Of Us.

The Last of Us Ellie and Tess

Now when looking at where it all started I think that the first place to go to is the game. The PlayStation classic doesn’t give us too much of a backstory on where it originated from, but there are teases found in documents. When looking through newspapers, we come across the Texas Herald which reported on the infection. On September 26th it reported that admittance at hospitals was up 300% due to the infection.

The FDA also released a statement about contaminated crops and that massive recalls were expected. This of course didn’t happen, but the statement did give us a clue about what was happening. It said:

“The Food and Drug Administration’s investigation of crops potentially tainted with mold continues across the country. Initial lists distributed to vendors nationwide warned against crops imported from South America, but now the scope has extended to include Central America and Mexico. Several companies have already voluntarily recalled their food products from the shelves,”

So there are clues that it’s coming from countries with a hotter climate. This was teased at in the initial science report at the start, and 2003 is listed as being one of the hottest years on record.

Now, though it’s not in South America, we do hear a report in episode 1 that there is something strange going on in Jakarta. This Indonesian city is located in Asia, and they might have changed this from South America for us to explore it in a later episode. During filming of the show people from Jakarta posted that things were being filmed in the city, so we could possibly see this coming down the line at some point.

Indonesia actually houses the largest bread and flour factory in the world, so this could be the reason that the country was chosen to be the place it was housed.

Anyway, I think the show will likely follow the same route and there were several clues in the episode that this was attached to food products with flour in them.

Firstly we saw Mrs Adler on her drive being fed it and she later on became one of the main infected people that Sarah encountered.

Joel also said he was Atkins. This is a diet that’s low-carb and because of this he’d be avoiding foods like bread and so on. Now this date was also his birthday, but the pair never had a birthday cake which would also contain the ingredients. Tommy was gutted that they weren’t having pancakes that morning, and they had bacon and eggs instead of things like cereal.

Every clue for how the infection started in The Last of Us

Now, another big clue came when Sarah went to Mrs Adler’s.

She was baking cookies which would include the ingredient but because they were raisin Sarah didn’t end up eating them.

This might not be the case, but the episode constantly kept hammering home the idea that they were avoiding food all the time and those that ended up infected ended up eating it.

Food being contaminated with cordyceps could explain how the virus managed to spread so quickly, especially if it was located in foods that people regularly ate.

Flour is in a lot of products and if it got into this then it could easily spread across the planet.

The game details that once the outbreak had happened that 60% of humanity had either become infected or died out within a couple of months.

The cordyceps can also of course be passed on through bites, and in the game we have the spores as well. This would massively push it across the planet and mean that the infection could spread really quickly.

Now as for the real life inspiration, there’s actually a similar case that happened in during the 50s.

In Pont Saint Esprit a mass poisoning happened in which more than 250 people were involved.

This was a foodborne illness that saw bread being infected by Ergot. This is a fungus that grows on rye, and it spread onto the bread and thus into the food.

At a bakery in the fungus contaminated the food and this was then ate by the civilians in the village. It brought on illness and, in some cases, insanity. It took months for it all to build up, and there were bakers who suspected that something was off in the flour. They named it cursed bread, and those that ate it had fits of vomiting and diarrhoea.

Raisin cookies - The Last of Us

More than 50 people were interned at an asylum, and the way that the infected go crazy in The Last Of Us could be inspired by this.

Now there weren’t any people going around biting others to spread it, but there were some strange occurrences.

A man hallucinated that he was an aeroplane, and he jumped from his second story window, which killed him. As the scientist mentions in episode 1 LSD is created using Fungus, so it’s easy to see how this happened.

In addition to this, an 11-year-old boy attempted to strangle his own mother, and he lashed out in a violent rage brought on by the parasite.

Later doctors named this the Nuit D’apocalypse, which translates to apocalyptic night.

It’s so chilling hearing stories like this, and you can see how real life occurrences like this could end up inspiring what we see in the game.

The main thing with the cordyceps is that they attach to your brain and the parasite begins to override your motor functions and desires. This is why we see people twitching and lashing out at others. The person is still in there which is why the infected can often be found crying, but they don’t have control over their desires any more and will attack all those that they see who aren’t infected.

Real-life inspiration for the infection in The Last of Us

Now in the case of the Ergot poisoning the grains we inspected by the government’s control board. They enforced rules in which it was difficult to purchase products containing flour and the people were very much put on Wartime shortages.

The factory was charged with involuntary manslaughter, with an employee being arrested. It was found in an inquiry that the flour mill in the area had been cutting corners. Bloody always happens that. They’d been mixing rye in with the flour in order to be able to cut the amount of flour they were using. They’d also been using the leftover piles that tend to be on the ground and beside the machines after going through the process. Sometimes these sat for weeks, and they were prone to get infected with mites and ergot.

Just all unsanitary conditions that led to this becoming a much bigger problem.

People were charged for it, and all in all it became a pretty big story in the area.

If it’s all connected to food sources I can definitely see this being something that is linked in, and it is possible this ties in with how the food was spread.

Dunno if you’ve seen Garth Marenghi before, but I’ll play the clip in a bit that I think basically sums up episode 1.

There’s an episode where the water gets infected with something that turns peoples into apes, and they have a bit where some characters hilariously avoid drinking it by pure luck.

Just something I thought of when going back and watching episode 1 and seeing people be like, I’ll not have the cookies mate, I’m not having them if they’ve got raisins in.

Hopefully they can get a shot which will help them cure themselves.

Not that kind of shot mate, dear me.

Anyway, that’s the video and I hope you learned something. I think the show will probably adapt this into it, as the food stuff is in the game, and they seem to be sticking pretty closely to the source material.

Let me know what you think below and if you have any other theories I’d love to hear them.

 

We’re running a competition right now and giving away Wakanda Forever to 3 Subscribers on The 15th of February. All you have to do to be in with a chance of winning is like the video, make sure you subscribe with notifications on and drop a comment below with your thoughts on the episode. We pick the comments at random at the end of the month and the winners of the last one are on screen right now, so message me @HeavySpoilers if that’s you.

If you want something else to watch, then make sure you check out our breakdown of the perfect scene in Spider-Man Homecoming. We break down the entire thing, so it’s definitely worth checking out if you wanna know more.

With that out the way, thank you for sitting through the video, I’ve been Paul, and I’ll see you next time. Take care. Peace

 

Leave a Comment

Show Buttons
Hide Buttons