People bought it, ate some Thursday night or Friday morning. So the tainted food all hits the store shelves around the same time Thursday. You eat enough of it, it’ll get you infected. There were certain brands of food that were sold everywhere-all across the country, across the world. No one knows for sure, but best guess… cordyceps mutated, got into the food supply, probably a basic ingredient like flour or sugar. Twenty years later, when Joel is asked how it all happened (other than that “the shitty government failed to prevent a pandemic”), he tries to sum up the situation to the best of his knowledge: The series was primarily set in a post-apocalyptic 2023 in the grim aftermath in a global pandemic (albeit far more dystopian than our current reality), caused by a mass fungal infection that transforms its human hosts into grotesque quasi-zombies (shroombies?) that still roam the tattered world two decades following the societal collapse.Īfter a brief prologue that introduces a viral epidemiologist (John Hannah) on a Dick Cavett-type talk show in 1968, outlining the threat of a fungally spread pandemic triggered by climate change, we jump ahead to the fateful Friday in late September 2003, when Texas contractor Joel Miller (Pedro Pascal) and his sweet-natured daughter Sarah (Nico Parker) are celebrating his 36th birthday. It was fascinating to see my distaste for mushrooms validated in such a distressing manner in one of the biggest shows of the year.īased on Naughty Dog’s popular video game of the same name, The Last of Us concluded its acclaimed first season on Sunday night.

Pedro Pascal as Joel Miller, tough pandemic survivor and former contractor Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey in The Last of Us Vitals

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