The Last of Us theory: Was Joel’s daughter Sarah infected?

The Last of Us continues to be a juggernaut new series for HBO. The show’s third episode, “Long, Long Time,” was a 76-minute epic gay love story set amidst the ruins of the apocalypse which managed to improve on the already excellent 2013 video game. “Long, Long Time” marked the second consecutive week that ratings rose for the series, a trend which remains unbroken as of this writing.

Beyond how the episode reinvented Bill and Frank’s story to better make use of the television medium, “Long, Long Time” also expanded on the video game by explaining exactly how the cordyceps outbreak happened in this version of the story.

The big info drop came when Joel and Ellie were wandering through the Massachusetts countryside, and she asked how exactly the cordyceps outbreak occurred. Ellie is an orphan who grew up largely at a FEDRA military school, so while she knows some details about the societal collapse, large gaps were left out about how the fungus actually spread. Here’s Joel’s answer:

"No one knows for sure, but best guess, Cordyceps mutated. And some of it got into the food supply. Probably a basic ingredient like flour or sugar. There were certain brands of food that were sold everywhere, all across the country, all across the world. Bread, cereal…pancake mix. You eat enough of it, it’ll get you infected.So the tainted food all hits the store shelves around the same time, Thursday. People bought it, ate some Thursday night or Friday morning. Day goes on, they started to get sick. Afternoon, evening, they got worse. Then they started bitin’.Friday night, September 26, 2003. And by Monday, everything was gone."

Of particular note in this scene is how Joel stumbles over the words “pancake mix.” This is because it makes him think of his daughter Sarah (Nico Parker), who liked pancakes and was planning to make them for his birthday breakfast on the day that civilization fell.

This made me immediately stop and wonder whether Sarah got infected by eating pancakes just before the outbreak. While we may never know for certain because of her tragic death, a rewatch of those early scenes in the season premiere revealed something even more heartbreaking.

Joel accidentally saved Sarah from being infected in The Last of Us premiere

During the opening scenes of The Last of Us, we find out that it’s Joel’s birthday and that his teenage daughter Sarah had planned to make him a special pancake breakfast. The fun irony of this is that Joel doesn’t even like pancakes; as Sarah says, she’s making them more for herself and to mark the occasion.

However, a wrench is thrown in her plan: Joel forgot to buy pancake mix on his way home from work. Sarah makes eggs and bacon instead, with a few snarky comments thrown in for good measure. A few minutes later, Joel’s brother Tommy shows up, disappointed that there are no pancakes since he was planning to have some too.

Let that sink in for a second. The cordyceps outbreak exploded over the course of a single day, because the fungi got into the food supply through items like flour, pancake mix, and the like. Joel was supposed to pick up a bag of pancake mix the night before Outbreak Day, which means he very likely would have been picking up a package from the infected food shipments that hit shelves earlier that day.

Again, we’ll never know for certain, but it’s entirely plausible that if Joel had remembered to buy pancake mix, he, Sarah, and Tommy might have all been infected with cordyceps and turned into zombies on Outbreak Day. Instead, Joel unwittingly saved all their lives by total accident. And let’s not forget that he also turned down biscuits from the Adlers, biscuits that were almost certainly made with cordyceps-laced flour, since we saw Nana Adler turn after eating them.

Tory Baker portrayed Joel in The Last of Us video game, and is the host of HBO Max’s The Last of Us Podcast. He discussed this fascinating easter egg in a Q&A on the HBO Max YouTube channel, confirming just how close Joel, Sarah, and Tommy came to being infected.

“There have been so many easter eggs already throughout this show, one of which was actually in episode three. If you weren’t listening closely enough, there’s a whole conspiracy about bread and where this virus, this Cordyceps virus started from. And a lot of people thought that it came from bread,” Baker said, recalling Joel and Ellie’s cordyceps flour discussion from Episode 3.

"What were the two things that [Joel] was supposed to eat on his birthday? Pancakes…and cake. And those were the two things that he didn’t get. Joel’s path could have been really, really different."

It’s these kinds of tiny details that continue to make The Last of Us such an excellent show.

The Last of Us Episode 5 premieres on HBO Max on Friday at 9:00 p.m. ET. It will air linearly on HBO on Sunday, with following episodes airing Sundays at 9:00 p.m. ET.

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