The world is dying. We are no longer
at the top of the food chain. Cities have fallen to ruin as friends and
neighbors transform into mindless predators. Faceless monsters guard the ruins,
denying us the derelict remains of our past dignity. Humans are going extinct. And
all of it. All of it. Because of this. Hello, Internet! Welcome to Film Theory the fun
guy who's here to talk about fungi. Ladies and gentlemen, it's that time again. Time for the
transmedia landscape to result in us talking about video games here on the film and TV channel.
That's because the Last of Us, just like Sonic, League of Legends and Pokemon before it, is
the latest in a line of games that's been turned into a fantastic movie or TV show.
Take that Game Theory! That's another piece from your toybox that's ours. ha ha ha
ha haa haa. Wait, am I? am I laughing at myself with this joke? I'm in charge of
all of these channels. What's going on here? In case you're not a l33t gamr like all
of us over here. Let me catch you up. The Last of Us started its life in 2013
as a video game that set a new benchmark for cinematic storytelling in the medium.
This story of a wounded man and his surrogate daughter trying to survive a world devastated by
a zombie apocalypse immediately cemented itself as a pivotal piece of gaming history. The
moment that gaming stood up and shouted Yes, we too can have emotional movie quality stories.
Now, to be completely honest, gaming has already had plenty of other amazing stories in the past.
But this was the moment when the visuals and the story both reached a point where no one could
deny gaming's artistic properties anymore. The game was so good that Sony just had to release
it on the PS3 and the PS4 and PS5 again, all in under ten years, no less. And here we
thought rebooting movies happened quickly. Anyway, now here in 2023, the dramatic prestige
video game has been turned into a dramatic prestige streaming series. In fact, as both
top tier gamers and top tier movie nerds, Steph and I were lucky enough to get invited to the
premiere. On that note, this video is #NOTSPON, but considering the amount of free popcorn
that I ate that night, might as well have been. Hey, you invite me to a place where I'm getting
free unlimited popcorn and Diet Coke. I am going to make you hurt. So after meeting
some of the team who worked on the show, who also happened to be fans of Food Theory, that was a fun little twist. And then
stealthing our way down the red carpet. It was time for the show! Honest review: It's great. I get nervous whenever
anyone tries to adapt such a perfectly told story, but I've got to admit they nailed it. Sure,
they made some changes to the source material, which we're going to talk about here in a second, but it never detracted from the core story.
So with yet another series showing that the video-game-bad-movie Curse is not a real thing
anymore, we finished by dancing the night away. Though to be fair, we didn’t
party as hard as some. Now, as you might have guessed at this point,
the zombies in the Last of US function a bit differently from your usual apocalyptic scenario.
In most media, you're dealing with a blood borne virus that's spread through bites, but not so much
here. What makes the Last of Us so interesting is that it's all a fungus. In fact, the show
spends its entire opening scene laying out why a fungal pandemic would be terrifying, using
real science to lay out exactly what would happen. The fungus this scientist is talking
about is a real thing called cordyceps, which we've actually talked about multiple
times over on the sister location Game Theory. It is terrifying stuff, but something
that we shouldn't have to worry about, right? I mean, the show claims that
fungal infections of this type… But then they ask, what if that changes? Man, HBO sure loves using zombie invasions
as a metaphor for climate change. If only Westeros had reduced its greenhouse
gas emissions. What's crazy though, is how quickly things fall apart in the world
of the Last of Us. Seriously, It basically felt like over the course of just a day or two,
everyone everywhere, all at once, suddenly had their brains hijacked by a fungus like it was
a five star Grand Theft Auto rampage. Suddenly zombie runners are in houses in the streets,
planes crashing out of the sky. What happened? And it's here that we actually get to one of
the big differences between the game and the new series, as well as our main theory for today.
How did the fungus spread so quickly in the new HBO series The Last of Us? You see in the game,
part of the reason the cordyceps were able to take control so quickly was through the use of spores.
Like traditional zombies the infected in the Last of Us game are able to spread infection to new
people through bites. And this is true for the new series. There's this really great, horrifying
shot where fungal tendrils are worming out of a woman's mouth to infect someone else. It is
so gross. It was this moment that I'm like, YEEEESS this series GETS IT. But in addition to
marching on the living, the video game version of the cordyceps were able to infect new people
through airborne spores produced in the bodies of the infected. And this creates a huge threat for
all the survivors. There are big chunks of the game where our protagonist, Joel, has to wear a
gas mask to survive. He even keeps one on him at all times, just in case. So, yeah, that's the way
that you get this sort of rapid zombie spread, if the show had airborne spores. But it doesn't. One
of the show's creators, Craig Mazin, previously worked on the series Chernobyl for HBO, which had
a ton of scenes with actors in hazmat suits and gas masks. Mazin found that it was more difficult
to create drama when an actor's face was covered by a bunch of safety equipment. Hence Joel's
gas mask and the fungal spores having to go to. No, no, you're not, Stephanie. These babies are
no longer airborne. Your dance is non-canonical. But if it's not spores, then what is it? What's
causing the zombie fungus to spread? Surely there has to be some sort of an explanation. So I dived
into behind the scenes information about the show, hoping to find some answers. And though I didn't
find an explicit answer. What I found instead was a challenge. in the official HBO Max Last
of Us post episode podcast. They say this: Excuse me? Careful viewers? Do you know who
you're talking to? I've spent the last eight years poring over every frame of movies and
television that I've watched. Over-thinking, analyzing it. You challenge me to search and I
will find it. And you know what loyal theorists? I did! I found the answer to how exactly this
fungal parasite devastated the world so fast. And true to the creator's word, it was in the
small details that were hidden in plain sight all along. How did the world of the Last of Us end?
Cookies. Or more specifically, the flour that was used to bake those cookies. Allow me to explain.
The first thing that tipped me off about flour is this line right here: In the background
of one of the morning scenes we can hear a radio broadcast that specifically talks
about problems happening in Jakarta. It's in Indonesia Joel, learn some geography.
Anyway, the call out of Jakarta immediately struck me as odd. Why, there, of all places? It seemed
oddly specific. Well, in addition to beautiful beaches and tropical architecture, Jakarta also
happens to be home to the largest flour mill in the world. This behemoth run by P.T. Bogasari
flour mills, has 15 milling lines. In fact, it's able to produce more than 4 million tons of
flour each year. If this fungal infection spreads through flour products. Of course, there's
going to be disturbances starting in Jakarta. Hey, guys, this is a future MatPat here. So this
theory was written immediately after I saw the first episode. But ah, episode 2 actually gave
us a little more information about the Jakarta situation in the show. That is very often the
risk that we take when we do theories about ongoing series. Anyway, episode 2’s Cold Open
takes place in Jakarta where a professor at the University of Indonesia is taking a look at one
of the first infected people. We're told that this infected person came from, quote; “a flour
and grain factory on the west side of the city”. And then under her breath, the professor
says “a perfect substrate”. A substrate, in case you don't know, is a surface or material
where an organism; like say, a fungus, can live, grow and obtain nourishment. Basically, this
practically confirms our theory that flour is the reason for the cordyceps outbreak in the
show. So wooo! We got it right. That said, there's still a ton of fun evidence here in the
episode, so I'm just going to hand it back off to past MatPat now so you can keep watching and be
impressed with how we solved this a week early, and then released the video a week later.
What's more, there are also tons of flour mills all over Texas: in Dallas, Houston, San Antonio
and yes, Austin, where the show’s prologue takes place. With so many mills throughout Texas,
the state would be a hotspot for an outbreak, just like we saw with Jakarta. But fungi in
flour, is that scientifically reasonable? Flour is usually made from wheat or other grains. So how
would a fungus get in there? Well, hate to say it, but you know mold? the gross stuff that grows
on food that’s spoiled or been left out for too long? That is a type of fungus. So if the
wheat used to make it has gone bad in any way, there's likely some fungus mixed in there. Even
freshly made flour out of mills has been shown to sometimes contain fungus. According to one study,
there can be a ton of fungus inside of commercial flour. This study took 19 flour samples and 11
wheat samples from 11 different mills across Kansas, Nebraska and the Pacific Northwest.
In those samples, the fungal count in flour ranged from 85 to 8,100 per gram and between 90
and 1,400 per gram in the wheat. In both cases, spoilage of the product was not the source of
the fungus. The stuff was just in there. So if a fungus can indeed be inside freshly milled flour
somehow. Why not cordyceps? So with me suddenly thinking that flour is sus, I rewatched the
episode again. And immediately you see a bunch of little details starting to add up. All throughout
the Prologue we never once see Joel, Sara or Tommy eat anything flour based. To the point where
it's almost a miracle. In the morning, though Sarah planed to make Joel pancakes, she can't
because they don't have any more pancake mix. After school when Sarah visits
their neighbor, Mrs. Adler, she turns down an offer to eat a cookie.
Likely this is because their raisin cookies and raisins are just awful lies masquerading
as chocolate chips. But still, this one move may have meant that Sarah missed a big ol bite
of zombie infection. Already, that’d be enough to raise some eyebrows. But the coincidences just
keep going. That night, when Joel gets home late, they realize that he's forgotten to pick up the
birthday cake that they were going to share. And earlier in the day, they saw Mr. Adler feeding
his elderly mother biscuits. In fact, when he offers some of the extras to Sarah and Joel, they
decline. Joel even jokes that he loves biscuits… Atkins is, of course, a fad diet that recommends
not eating any bread or grain products. Obviously, Joel isn't actually on Atkins here, given his
plan to have pancakes and birthday cake, but it's still an interesting thing for the show to
bring attention to, isn't it? Additionally, in the parts of the first episode set after the outbreak,
we never actually see anyone eating any products made from flour. There's this big open crowd shot
where we can't make out anyone's plate and there isn't any bread scraps on Ellie's empty plate
when she's being kept prisoner. Basically the only thing that we see anyone consuming is Joel
drinking some alcohol. In short, this show goes very far out of its way to never show us its main
characters explicitly eating flour based product. Hey, this is future MatPat over here again, with
some additional evidence that we see happening in episode 2. We do actually get someone eating bread
during the present day. We see Ellie is eating a sandwich, which makes sense because she's immune
to the zombie outbreak. And you notice what Joel and Tessa are eating? Jerky, no bread. I thought
that was just another little detail that was worth pointing out. The only immune person is eating
bread while everyone else apparently isn't. Just cool Little Easter eggs that I found while
licking the wounds of this theory that came out too late. Curse you extended editing pipeline!
Now I know what you're thinking. Wait, wouldn't the fungus just die off while being baked?
And that's a really great thing to call out. Yes. According to the United States Department of
Agriculture, most yeast and mold fungi are super sensitive to heat. Normally, they can be destroyed
at temperatures of 140 to 160 degrees Fahrenheit, or 60 to 71 degrees Celsius. And most
ovens when they're baking cookies are set somewhere between 325 and 350 Fahrenheit
or 163 to 177 C well above those fungi killing temperatures. Even the most heat resistant fungi
in history found in 2011 by scientists in India, can only survive temperatures of 239 degrees
Fahrenheit or 115 C. But all of that being said, fungi in the production lines of baked goods
and bread products are still a massive problem. According to a study published in Food Research
International. They actually found more fungus in goods after they'd been baked than anywhere
else in the cooking process. Basically, they say that the highest fungal counts were seen
in the final processing stages of making the goods right after they'd come out of the oven and were
busy cooling. And considering that the Last of Us spent that whole opening scene pointing out that
the fungus in the world evolved to survive at higher temperatures, it's entirely plausible that
the cordyceps made it out of the oven. And so now, with all of that in mind, I can't help but look
back at the podcast that got me started down this rabbit hole to begin with. And you know what
I realized? The answer has been staring me in the face the entire time. Do you remember exactly
what was said by the creators during that podcast? Breadcrumbs huh? like flour based breadcrumbs?
They told us the answer right there, those cheeky sons of a gun. And just to put the
cherry on top here, the piece de resistance. Do you know what they were talking about
right before this in the podcast that got them to start talking about these little
hints? the intentional trail of breadcrumbs? They were discussing the elderly neighbor, the
first infected person we see, and how she was being fed biscuits. The evidence has mounted
here, folks. The society of the Last of Us TV show fell apart because the cordyceps
fungus evolved to be more heat resistant, to be able to take root in humans, and then
its particles were spread worldwide through flour. The next time you see anyone in the show
taking a carbo load, just know that they're soon to be on the chopping block. So Joel. I
guess you had plenty of reasons to say… Your Atkins diet might be saving
more than just your waistline. But hey! If you want to learn more about the
evil fungus science behind this amazing story, check out our Game Theory, Talking about how
Ellie isn't actually immune to the cordyceps infection. Or if you want more of a strategy guide
on how to survive a post-apocalyptic wasteland, check out our video explaining why musicians
would have the best chance of surviving a quiet place. As always, don't forget to
take a big ol bite out of that subscribe button so you never miss a new theory.
There are a ton of great new movies and shows coming out this year that I can't wait
to analyze alongside you guys. But until then, remember, it's all just a theory,
A FILM THEORY! aaaaaaaaaand cut.
