The Last of Us has gained an incredible amount of success since its HBO adaptation of the original game. What’s even better, the science actually adds up in most cases. However, it should have been much worse.
The first episode of the show includes a 70s talk show with a scientist. This scientist discusses the possibility of a fungus evolving to infect humans if the world were to warm several degrees.
The host and audience laugh off the “ridiculous” notion, but eventually the theory is realized.
The culprit of The Last of Us apocalypse is cordyceps, which is in fact a real fungus. And yes, it does turn its host into a zombie-like creature. In the real world, cordyceps has many variants. However, each variant specializes in a specific insect and has yet to be recorded infecting humans.
Cordyceps infects an organism through its spores, the fungi’s version of a seed. As the spore grows inside the organism, it takes control of the host’s brain and muscles, forcing it to climb higher and higher in order to find the perfect conditions for the fungus to grow and release its own spores to further infect more organisms.
This is one aspect of cordyceps’ true nature the show deviated from. In the show, the fungus infects humans through biting and entering the bloodstream, per the usual in zombie movies. This is one reason why if cordyceps were to evolve to infect humans, it would be much worse than the show suggests.
The original game included this aspect, though. The main characters Ellie, Joel, and initially Tess don masks to protect them from the infectious spores. The show runners stated that these spores simply don’t exist in the world they’ve created.
The show was truly one of the best I’ve seen this year, and if you’re like me and binge watched it with your mom who jumps at every depiction of the cordyceps-zombies, you probably enjoyed it as well. However, I do think the show sacrificed aspects of science that they didn’t necessarily need to sacrifice. It was nice seeing Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey’s reactions to the monsters, but I would have liked to see the depiction of cordyceps’ true nature in the show.
One thing I really appreciate about both the game and adaptation is the recognition that global warming and climate change can cause some truly terrible things to happen. While I doubt cordyceps will evolve to infect humans in the coming years, I do think that if we allow the Earth to continue to warm at the rate it currently is, we are going to be in some serious trouble.
Major weather disasters, water scarcity and the spread of diseases are all results of warming. Malaria has been recorded in countries where it previously wasn’t due to mosquitos expanding their range with the change in climate.
Who’s to say that if our world were to continue to warm that a fungus already known to create zombie-like organisms couldn’t then evolve to infect humans?
Mackenzie can be reached at [email protected] or on Twitter at @mackenzie_films.