Binge’s The Last of Us premiered on January 15 with a dire warning about a looming fungal threat.
During the very first scene, an epidemiologist (John Hannah) explained that certain fungi can infect and control its animal hosts and that humans could be next if such deadly spores were to evolve due to climate change.
“If the world were to get slightly warmer, then there is reason to evolve,” the character explains.
“Candida, ergot, Cordyceps, Aspergillosis — any one of them could be capable of burrowing into our brains and taking control of not millions of us, but billions.
“Billions of puppets with poison minds… and there are no treatments for this, no preventatives. They don’t exist, it’s not even possible to make them.”
While a fictional TV series, show runner Craig Mazin recently revealed that the opening speech was actually based on cold-hard fact i.e. science.
“It’s real — it’s real to the extent that everything he says that fungus do, they do,” the creator told The Hollywood Reporter.
“And they currently do it and have been doing it forever. There are some remarkable documentaries that you can watch that are quite terrifying.”
According to Craig, “from a purely scientific point of view” the fungus wouldn’t do exactly to us what is portrayed, however, “LSD and psilocybin do come from fungus.”
“What I told John was, ‘What we’re doing in this scene is telling people this has always been here.’”
Well… s**t.
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