As I told you in my enthusiastic text about the start of ‘The Last of Us’, the great success of the HBO production is the way in which it is not limited to replicating the already fantastic narrative of the Naughty Dog video game , but it has enriched the adaptation with a will to expand what we already experienced in 2013, and this happens through a good dose of context and information that was left in the inkwell by then.
The first scene of the series, set in the late 1960s, is a good example of this. In it, two scientists discuss on a television program about the potential threat that some species of fungi could pose to the human race; an exchange of opinions that concludes with an ominous and chilling description of what Cordyceps is capable of that ends up sending humanity adrift in this fiction.
mushrooms with ham
But, what is true of what is stated in this introduction? craig mazinshowrunner of ‘The Last of Us’ and, as I always remember, co-host of ‘Scriptnotes’ —the best podcast about scriptwriting you can listen to— has confirmed to The Hollywood Reporter that the fungal effects of yore on insects such as ants are one hundred percent real.
“It’s real. Everything they say fungi do, they do. They do it now and have been doing it forever. You can watch some amazing documentaries that are pretty scary. About your warning — what if they evolve and infect us? ?— from a strictly scientific standpoint, would they do exactly what they do to ants to us? I don’t think so. I doubt it. On the other hand, you’re right; LSD and psilocybin come from mushrooms. What I told you to John was, ‘What we’re doing in this scene is telling people that this has always been here.
But the most interesting – and terrifying – of his statements is found in the fine line he draws between the events of ‘The Last of Us’ and those he narrated in the magnificent ‘Chernobyl’. According to Mazin, catastrophes like the one at the Ukrainian nuclear plant are brewing at this very momentwaiting for the right moment to end up unleashing.
“What was chilling for me is that [la planta nuclear de Chernobyl] it blew up that night, but could have done so a week or a month earlier. What it means right now is that there’s something waiting to blow up, you just don’t know it. It was terrible to tell people, ‘We knew about this, it’s been there, now we’re going to show you the night it finally happened.’ Not suddenly, but finally.”
if it costs you To fall asleep Tonight after reading this, I’m sorry to tell you that good old Craig closed his Twitter account a while ago, so it will be hard to thank him.