Turning the action into drama also helps highlight some of the more derivative aspects of the game. There are no around the similarities with station eleven, Zombie, man’s child, I’m a legendand Road. But the program changed Our last into a holistic environmental allegory.
Before the action-packed scenes of Joel and Sarah running away from their home, there’s a prologue: a Jack Paar-like talk show in 1968 with two epidemiologists. One warned that humanity was at great risk from a pandemic caused by a flu-like virus. Others scoffed: The real threat is not just bacteria, but a fungus like Cordyceps, controls its victims by flooding their brains with hallucinogens and turning them into “billions of puppets with poisoned minds,” he says, “with a unified goal: to infect sick for every last person alive.” (Cordyceps is a mushroom that actually has the same effect on ants.) The presenter wanted to crack the LSD joke, but the expert took it very seriously. It only takes a few degrees of global warming to encourage this fungus to spread to humans.
The second episode visits the origin of the epidemic, a flour and grain factory in Jakarta. The fungus clings to the victim on the executioner’s table. “Makes more sense than monkeys,” Ellie (Game of Thrones‘ Bella Ramsey) said at one point, referring to the origin of the outbreak.
For Mazin, zombies are about death, forcing us to come face to face with the corpse we’ve all become. Cordyceps is a great leveling tool, born of our incessant consumption. “I think the underlying theme is this: You don’t want to be too successful on planet Earth,” says Mazin. “I am not anti-progressive, going back to the stone age. But we have to regulate ourselves or something will come and adjust us against our will.”
There is also a real attempt to explore the traditional tropes of the apocalyptic setting, such as the fall into Hobbesian sadism. In the game, Joel and Ellie encounter Bill, an eccentric who has taken control of a town and set up brainless traps everywhere. His story on the show is much more poignant. Played by Nick Offerman, Bill is an all-around preparer eager to take on the apocalypse. But when he catches a survivor wandering in his trap, the pair begin a love story that spans 20 years. As they rebuild the town, Bill eventually discovers the poverty in his worldview. Though some of his paranoid views are correct—the world has ended and the government has been devastated by the Nazis—he has lived a meaningless life waiting for the apocalypse.
At the end of the season, Mazin promises to explore roving lunatics, brutal gangs and religious fanatics that often inhabit the zombie genre and provide simple cannon fodder for players. In a scene set in Kansas City, similar to the Pittsburgh portion of the game, Mazin and Druckmann wanted to discover why these people tricked, killed, and robbed innocent tourists for supplies. their. “Neil and I felt: Let’s get to know some of these people better and not steal their humanity, because that lessens the impact of their sin,” Mazin said.
