The Last of Us showrunner: Fans are right about how the fungus spread

The Last of Us is off and running on HBO. Per Variety, 5.7 million people watched the second episode of the zombie drama this past Sunday, up from the 4.7 million who watched the series premiere the week before. That’s an increase of 22%, which HBO claims is the “largest week 2 audience growth for an HBO Original drama series in the history of the network.” And no doubt many more people have watched in the days afterwards.

The show has inspired lots of questions among fans: what did the HBO show change from the original video game on PlayStation 3? What horrors await Joel (Pedro Pascal) and Ellie (Bella Ramsey) out there in the zombie-strew wasteland that was the United States? And how did the zombie apocalypse start in the first place?

We got a big hint in Episode 2, “Infected,” which begins with a cold open in Jakarta. We’re told that an outbreak happened at a flour mill. A scientist, realizing what this means, says the only option is to bomb the city. “We wanted to make it very character-driven, so it was focusing on this one scientist, and the dread and the realization when she understands that we’re f**ked,” creator Neil Druckmann told Variety.

Speaking of flour, viewers noticed that Joel nor anyone else in his family ate any of the baked goods offered to them in the flashback segment that kicked off the series premiere. So did the fungus that brought the world to its knees spread through flour? “When she talks about where these people worked and what was going on in that factory — yeah, it’s pretty clear that’s what’s going on,” said showrunner Craig Mazin. “We liked the idea of that science, and we try as best we can to make sure that our research all connects. [The mycologist] asks where it happened, and the guy says a flour factory on the west side of the city. We are absolutely talking about — there is the world’s largest flour mill in Jakarta — so that’s a fine theory and I think people should keep running with it.”

Original voice actor for Ellie will play Ellie’s mom in The Last of Us on HBO

Druckmann and Mazin did consider other ways of filling us in on the origins of this particular zombie apocalypse, including ones that were far more dramatic. “Initially, we were going to have much more of an international view of things, but I think where we went was to just talk about where it started, and ground people in the science of it as best we could,” Mazin said. “We had a montage that we were going to talk about doing that we didn’t, but I actually don’t want to say too much about it because, you know — things could go well and we might get to reuse some of those pages.”

As of yet, The Last of Us hasn’t been renewed for a second season, but considering how much success it’s had, you figure that order is right around the corner.

For now, we have the next seven episodes to look forward to, including one where we’ll meet a character we never did in the original game: Ellie’s mom. “I had written a short story after we had shipped the game already,” Druckmann explained. “It was supposed to be an animated short, but it fell apart and didn’t come to be. There was a moment where we almost made it as DLC, but it fell apart. In our conversations, I brought it up to Craig and he was immediately excited by it, or as he would say ‘activated.’ We brought it to life in the most beautiful, poetic way, which is Ashley Johnson playing Ellie’s mom and she was the original actor for Ellie.

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