THE LAST OF US Series Changes How The Infection Spreads and The Co-Creators Explain Why
In The Last of Us video game franchise, the people in the story are infected by the cordyceps fungus by inhaling airborne spores. Well, the creators of the series have now revealed that has been changed in the upcoming series. The infection will not be spread in the same way, instead, it will spread through tendrils.
Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann explained why they made this change during an interview with Collider. Druckmann said that one of the creative decisions they made early on in development is that they didn’t want to use gas masks in the series. This obviously led to conversations about how they could reinvent the fungus to better fit the live-action series. Druckmann said:
“Eventually, those conversations [about not using gas masks] led us to these tendrils, and then, just thinking about how there’s a passage that happens from one infected to another, and like fungus does, it could become a network that is interconnected. It became very scary to think that they’re all working against us in this unified way, which was a concept that I really liked, that got developed in the show.”
Druckmann didn’t explain everything about the tendrils or how exactly they work, but it was done to put a focus on how the infected are all connected. Also, it allows the actor to show their faces. Mazin also went on to explain that all of the changes that were made in the adaptation were to help keep the focus on the two main characters Joel and Ellie:
“I will say that there is a character from the game that has a very interesting point of view about the fungus and his observation of Cordyceps that ties into some of the larger themes about what the show is about, and strangely enough, that ties into the notion of the beauty and potential danger of love, and so, part of what Neil and I wanted to do was just make sure that everything in our story that we built here, as it was inspired by and adapted from the work that he did on the game, ultimately feeds back into the thing that matters the most for us, and that is Joel and Ellie’s relationship.”
Regardless of the changes that have been made, Druckmann previously said that he thinks this is the best and most authentic video game adaptation that has been made. I hope he’s right!
Pedro Pascal stars in the series as Joel, and Bella Ramsey is taking on the role of Ellie in the upcoming video game adaptation. They are joined by Gabriel Luna as Joel's brother Tommy, Anna Torv, Merle Dandrige, Nick Offerman, Storm Reid, Nico Parker, Gabriel Luna, Jeffrey Pierce, and Murray Bartlett.
The Last of Us takes place 20 years after modern civilization has been destroyed by a deadly virus. Joel (Pascal), a hardened survivor, is hired to smuggle Ellie (Ramsey), a 14-year-old girl, out of an oppressive quarantine zone to the Fireflies, a cure-searching organization. What starts as a small job soon becomes a brutal, heartbreaking journey, as they both must traverse across the U.S. and depend on each other for survival.
The series drops on HBO Max on January 15th, 2023.