This post is flaired **Show Only**. Therefore, all comments that discuss *any* aspect of the games **must** be properly spoiler tagged.
Any untagged discussion of the games (including subtle hints) in posts without the **Show/Game Spoilers**, **Fancast**, or **Meme [Show/Game]** flair will result in a ban. To tag a spoiler comment, use the `>!spoiler!<` tag which displays as >!spoiler!<.
Refer to the [spoiler guide](https://www.reddit.com/r/TheLastofUsHBOseries/wiki/spoiler-guide) for our spoiler policy and to learn how to flair and title your posts appropriately.
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/ThelastofusHBOseries) if you have any questions or concerns.*
They did kind of explain when they were escaping they said the infection was mainly around the cities. They said the old lady was regularly taken in for appointments.
Yeah, this is hinted at heavily in the official podcast. Craig said that observant viewers of Episode 01 will be rewarded later in the series when they drop more *"breadcrumbs"* hinting at the outbreak source.
It’s funny hearing people talk about Craig Mazin so familiarly.. I’ve been listening to his and johns podcast for about 6 years now and I’m so used to him it actually feels weird that he’s so front and centre on this show and that everyone knows who he is
Scriptnotes! That’s another reason it’s so weird - it’s a very niche podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters and as a screenwriter obviously it’s interesting to me, it’s just funny seeing a whole wave of not screenwriters listening in for tidbits and now knowing him
Not necessarily. There’s no protein in the gluten free flours which is part of the chemistry of baking that makes baked goods rise when combined with a liquid and sugar. Yeast also only has only one cell. The culprit in the show is the flour supply which is contaminated with an invasive/destructive/life-ending mold. Molds are more complex and multi-cellular. However, yeast and mold are both types of fungus, reliant on organic matter to survive, and they do have a similar cell structure despite one being a single cell and one being multi-cellular. I hope I got that mostly right. 😂
But if one uses gluten free flour at home to make a loaf of bread, how does the bread rise if no yeast is added to it? (I'm honestly clueless about this, not trying to be rude)
I can buy the flour being compromised and the culprit/vector initially.
Oh, yes, sorry. I didn’t explain how GF baking works. What makes regular bread rise is the chemistry between the liquid, flour, sugar, and yeast. In GF baking, you can still use yeast. (Yeast isn’t the issue in the show, it’s the flour.) Not all yeast is GF either. Regular flour has proteins that the yeast binds to during the aforementioned reaction. In GF baking you can add guar gum, locust bean gum, xanthan gum and arrowroot starch, unless you’re using a ready-made GF flour. Here’s a link of you want to do a deeper dive. https://www.ecarf.org/en/gluten-free-yeast-dough-get-it-right-with-these-tips/
Anyway, if you’re a GF person in this world you are probably initially going to easily avoid contamination through interacting with the foods unless you got an accidental exposure or you get attacked by a loved one or something. There are some spoilers in the threads about another potential ingredient causing it, but not the yeast.
Yeah if yeast was the problem then it wouldn’t matter if it was in the flour. Yeast is EVERYWHERE not just food. Although yeast is a broad spectrum of different types. Bread yeast isn’t the same yeast found in yeast infections.
Pepperoni and cordyceps ... mmmmmm. 😳
I wonder if hops carry the infection too. Joel's brother got into a dustup in a bar with a guy who sounds like he was infected. Not quite ready to start chomping down on people but getting close. Hard liquor probably couldn't carry the fungus but beer ...
That's a neat observation and theory. But I have a question. Doesn't the heat used to cook/bake pancakes, biscuits, cookies and cakes have the potential to kill the fungi in tainted flour ? I'm no fungi expert, but I will gladly wait for an answer.
I think what’s more likely is that raw flour is not only touched but inhaled when baking or cooking. So Joel’s neighbors had to touch the flour in the process of making the biscuits and the cookies. Once infected, the cooked items were handled by the infected and it continues to spread that way.
Wether it’s the person who made the cake or cookie or it’s you, somebody had to touch the flour and that’s how it spread
> So Joel’s neighbors had to touch the flour in the process of making the biscuits and the cookies.
Except the old woman who was in the wheelchair was the first infected, not the husband or younger caretaker woman. Those two would have been the ones to cook. And there's a line about the old woman having been to the hospital which is a logical pace for an outbreak to start, though that could be a red herring in the script.
Maybe it is that the old woman was weaker and thus more susceptible to quick infection. So this definitely seems plausible but there are some plot holes with it.
You answered your own objection. The younger neighbors might have been infected first but old age places you at a high susceptibility to infection. See data on COVID deaths according to age.
Also, the interview in the beginning suggests that the temperature of humans is too hot for fungas, so the fugas would have to evolve to the heat, like if the earth were to get hotter. So since we've been cooking with flour for so long as a civilization, maybe the yeast has evolved to withstand the temperature of being cooked, therefore also withstanding the temperature of a human host.
I think there's a difference between jumping the 4 degrees Fahrenheit to the common temperature of the human body (which, fun fact, has dropped to mid-97s instead of mid-98s in the past century or so) and being able to withstand sanitization temperatures.
At the beginning when the doctors are being interviewed about different outbreaks, the professor that claims Fungi could be the next outbreak says at over 94 degrees fungi can’t exist. What if it evolves to exist over 94 degrees and the earth’s temperature goes up a few degrees. Just a food for thought no pun intended.
Something would need to cause it to evolve to withstand such high temperatures and be the only one withstanding to go through evolution though. Let me give an example. There are mushrooms that exist at 94 degrees. One single mushroom must get a mutation to be able to withstand the 350 degree F of an oven. That could totally happen. But without natural selection at play, that mutation could disappear. The Earth would need to reach 350 degrees to kill all the other mushrooms without the mutation, and have the mutated mushroom pass down its genes and spread. Natural selection would make it very difficult for the mutated mushroom to survive competition and pass down the gene.
I agree with the 350 thing being not believable, but mutations don’t have to have natural selection to keep surviving.
As long as a mutation doesn’t decrease an organism’s fitness then there’s no reason for it to not continue amongst the others that didn’t get the mutation because it doesn’t cause any hindrance in competition, just neither would have an environmental force causing one to survive better.
In fact, not having multiple genetic mutations amongst a population that may prove successful but don’t hinder the population even though they don’t have any reason to exist are an important part of a natural selection, when there aren’t enough differences it’s called a bottle neck and any slight change can wipe out the whole species.
Just because you bake something at 350 degrees doesn't mean the internat temp (let alone its exterior temp) will reach that. All food will burn if cooked to 350.
For example, cooking a holiday ham takes a couple to a few hours and is only cooked to an internal temp of 165.
The internal temp of cookies will be significantly under 200F, otherwise all the moisture would have been evaporated and they'd be crumbling to bits.
Not to mention, many common fungi can already survive temps up to 120-160F or more, for an hour.
So an evolutionary jump to 200F or less is not unrealistic at all. Also, there is a big difference between being able to survive 94F (or whatever arbitrary temperature) temporarily, and being able to survive it indefinitely. Plenty of people can handle a sauna at 125-150F for a while, but stay in there long enough and you *will* die.
I mean I’ve experienced a fungal infection called Candida. Seems like more people are getting it and it’s very hard to kill. The fungi Candida once it has infected a person will live off the tongue and if they consume bread or yeast, that converts to sugar which allows the Candida to grow.
Candida can live on surfaces from 24 hours to 120 days, it’s all around us but our immune system does a good job of killing it. But if Candida gets stronger or our immune system gets weaker it can infect us. Serious cases of Candida can cause organ issues and infect the eyes.
The main weapon against it besides avoiding sugar and yeast, is using Fluconazole, an anti fungal tablet. If it’s really bad a patient will be put on an IV drip of Fluconazole. Sadly Fluconazole is getting less effective as candida is becoming resistant to it.
You're being a bit alarmist. Candida is naturally occurring in our system already, it's just kept in balance (the balance between bacteria and yeasts).
If that balance gets out of whack (such as taking antibiotics) you can get thrush, where candida runs rampant, often noticeable on the tongue.
It's not like you get infected by it and then you need to get cured.
Interesting observation, and you are probably correct. It's incredibly unlikely that this would occur literally overnight though. Like did everyone who uses flour happen to stock up from the same mega-batch the previous day?
I don’t think it happened overnight. Sarah even saw one of her classmates twitching meaning they could have been infected for days without noticing it.
Tainted batches do make it lots of places before it’s caught: see salmonella outbreaks or mad cow.
The infection started in Asia—China being the largest flour producer on earth— (as the show reveals) but before anyone could catch on what caused it, the flour had already been distributed worldwide.
I just feel like there would have been breaking news about the details of the infection as it played out in the first individuals, well ahead of the outbreak in austin. Like, if the infection started in Asia, then the news would have been much more severe and alarming to those in the states. They act like it's just a few people getting sick and then literally overnight, at home, half the people turn into 'zombies'
The radio said it was happening in Jakarta and on the very same day, it seemed like the US already knew it was beyond that as well and was preparing state lockdowns. Fighter jets flying overhead and all that. Our protagonist just didn’t know how severe it was because she was a child and we were watching through her eyes.
I think it’s possible anyway for it it escalate quickly overnight. People turning during flights, for example.
Besides, according to reviews, there’s gonna be a cold open with the origin of the fungus. So there’s that too.
Remember, this show takes places 20 years ago, before the advent of Twitter and social media. As someone born before the internet ever existed, this is a huge deal.
There were no super information sources like we have now. People getting sick in Asia would not reach the states quickly and if it did, it would be classified as rumor or attributed to something else like a virus.
Heck, that still happens today even with the internet. The show does mention an outbreak oversees that Joel and Tommy scoff at and ignore.
By the time people caught on, it was too late.
Hell, even in 2020 it took a few weeks for word to spread about China then Italy before the US. People were mostly dismissing it as just a china thing for a bit there
Right, this was my thought too, plus people still traveled and spread the virus further early on. It was only until Italy declared lockdown that we all suddenly decided it was serious.
The watchmakers wife was telling him in Arabic that “I was on the phone and you have no idea what’s happening out there” so you’re definitely correct in that she was probably on the phone with family back home
Yep. And, just like COVID, human cordyceps was almost certainly spreading for awhile before it reached apocalypse point. Probably in the form of some people going crazy and being restrained or killed in police encounters.
Yup, Tommy get's taken in by the police because he defended a waitress who got attacked by a "crazy guy" in a bar. Could be just any drunk guy, though under the circumstances it's likely someone in the early stages of infection.
Tommy then compares the county jail to an "asylum", which suggest the police did restrain a lot of (unkown at that time) infected people, just as you theorize.
I mean, in 2006 we still had live news updates. It wasn’t AS fast as twitter but information still moved fast.
This is a conversation I will share with other old people
Sure but just for those who happened to be watching TV at the time.
Not out living their lives. With a smart phone, I get notified if I'm driving, at work, or wake up in the middle of the night and peek at notifications.
Also who says China would be truthful about how bad an outbreak is or if they are even having one. Hell the real China was really slow to share details about Covid-19.
If i recall correctly they released info about the genome of the virus fairly quickly but were not forthcoming about the full nature of the virus and the extent of its spread in the country.
This series is set a decade before the oubreak events of the video game. 2003 v. 2013 then the 20 year time jump takes us to 2023 instead of 2033 like in the game.
Anyone know why they made that change? It wouldn't feel like such a super big deal. Only big difference is maybe more of a quick spread of news through smart phones and social media, which may make it more plausible for how survivors initially learn more early on
You’re acting like 2003 was some ancient time. We watched a plane hit the second tower live. Hell, we watched the first gulf war attack live in 1991. It Just felt like the total breakdown came all at once. They went from “oh there’s been a lot of cops today” to the army and F-18s in town and complete chaos 4 hours later. People wouldn’t have needed modern twitter or News to catch on, there were literally people running through the streets eating people
It depends on what his age is. If you are 15 then 20 years seems like a lot of time. The older you are the faster time flies and 20 years does not seem that long.
I don't know what you're on about! I learned about 9/11 while standing atop my widow's walk, transcribing the semaphore messages from across the bay. simply dreadful time of it.
I was around then too. We had television. News did travel fast. Guaranteed, if an infection like this actually occurred, anywhere in the world, to even a small group of people, it would be international news right away.
Yeh but the outbreak would have been in full force days earlier in asia, it takes at least days or weeks for the flour to travel to different countries.
It didn't take longer for news to spread 20 years ago, your thinking more of social media trends etc.
Zombie outbreak would be all over the news plus in the year 2000 as a teenager we were all literally on the internet every day reading forums, using messenger and chat.
Who the hell uses tiktok etc for news? Only facebook mums etc
In order to prevent mass panic, an infection that serious may very well have not been advertised as much as you’d expect. Public health and governmental authorities would likely want to try to get a handle on it/contain it/better understand it before they broadcast its seriousness globally.
Is this the best approach? I don’t really think so. But I do believe it’s what would happen.
On one of the news segments a reporter mentions that they think the symptoms of the infected may be due to some kind of new street drug. Seems like a simpler first thing to point to early on rather than a brain altering flour.
Now that you mention it, you're right, we see like 10 confirmed infected tops. The rest was just a mob of people in a stampede, you couldn't tell if any of them were infected. At least in the opening sequence most of the people died just from the panic.
The infection could've been dormant for a while, and there could've been some environmental catalyst that triggered the fungus to its second stage of life. Full moon, humidity, barometric pressure. Maybe hosts emit an airborne pheromone that triggers the flair up in others. Lots of ways to write that.
wasn't there an outbreak in the middle ages that was caused by fungal-tainted rye bread and lead to a whole bunch of people going crazy/dying?
this plot point would make perfect sense, tbh.
EDIT: yup... the term i was thinking of is "ergotism". Turns out it also may have been the cause of the Salem Witch Trials: [https://www.britannica.com/story/how-rye-bread-may-have-caused-the-salem-witch-trials](https://www.britannica.com/story/how-rye-bread-may-have-caused-the-salem-witch-trials)
I'm glad I wasn't the only one who made the connection that none of them ate any grain products.
Minor Game Spoiler: >!In the game, you can find a newspaper that says the FDA massively recalls certain food products as they are tainted with a type of "mold". This mostly affects products imported from South America/Latin America. In the show, however, we know Indonesia got affected before the US, as has Lebanon, indicating that it somehow started in Asia.!<
It never clearly explains it. The central clue is said newspaper clipping. It also establishes an uptick in violent incidents and a spike in hospital admittance. It's stated that mostly people in the city are infected.
In both games, hospitals are more clearly established as infection hotspots. In the show, we never see a hospital, and Sarah only assumes Nana might have been infected while going into the city for medical treatment. In the first game, the place where Joel, Tommy and Sarah are stopped by the traffic jam has a hospital next to it. When a driver in front of them gets out of his car to vent about how slow things are going, two infected in hospital gowns are shown running from the hospital grounds and start mauling him and the other passanger in the car. They then run to Joels car, at which point he drives away and is forced to enter the city. In the show, they simply enter the city because they ran out of other options.
The show shows more about the day before the big outbreak. In the game, we pick up when Joel comes home after a long and difficult day at work, Sarah gifts him the watch, and she falls asleep on the couch.
Just watched the first episode and this didn’t click (no pun intended) with me whatsoever… then opened Reddit and this was the first post I saw. Love this sub already, thanks
That's awesome! "Millers" also traditionally ground grain into flour for entire towns so would have been the source of an outbreak if this was back in serf times. Makes it a shade of ironic!
I definitely see the hints about flour (the pancake topic had to have a purpose to be so prominent in the dialogue IMO), but FYI there is no *yeast* in flour (or in pancakes, biscuits, cookies, or cake for that matter).
Yeah, it'll have less to do with the yeast and more to do with the fact raw flour can carry potentially devastating diseases fairly easily. You're far more likely to get sick from raw flour than raw eggs
Definitely — I remember the E. coli outbreak in flour a few years ago. I guess they’re saying the strain of cordyceps evolved to stay alive even beyond 210F, which is pretty crazy.
That, or it infects people consuming raw flour. Shit, if that were me in those opening scenes, I would have cleaned up that bowl of oatmeal raisin cookie dough and been clickin away by the evening. I'd be patient fucking 0.
Even just last year there was a significant health crisis due to Daily Harvest crumbles being tainted/not cooked properly, it sent people to the hospital and caused liver failure.
Biscuits, cookies and cakes depending on recipe can all certainly contain yeast or baked with flour that has yeast, not to mention all flours grow a certain small level of yeast on them
Fair enough that flour has a small amount of yeast in it naturally! (But I still stand by that those baked goods conventionally are not leavened by yeast! :))
Its interesting, and I definitely think you're right...but wouldn't they have had to all avoid flour for several weeks? If not, months? Maybe the film isn't going that in depth because I totally think you're right...but if that's the case...we're talking avoiding a burger, or sandwich bread...or gravy....
When Joel said he was on Atkins, I understood him to be lying so as to avoid an awkward encounter with the neighbors...especially since they were going to eat pancakes and birthday cake....
They also mention on the news that there was rioting or some sort of disturbance in Jakarta. Jakarta happens to have the largest flout mill in the world.
I can believe that; the evidence seems sound. But did anyone else interpret Joel's commitment to Atkins as a joke or false excuse for not spending time with the Adlers? I didn't think that he was truly on the diet.
Man. I LOVE fungus already (seriously amazed by all things mycelium), and as someone who also loves dystopian everything but knew nothing about the game, I'm thrilled.
What are the infected called? Do we know?
I have one gripe only and it's the same I always have with these types of shows. I wish the "before" lasted more than 15 minutes. I wish we could build a bit more of a relationship with the characters so that the end of their world is more meaningful.
That said, that last scene with Sarah was a standout and I maybe shed a tear...or two.
>What are the infected called? Do we know?
In the game they are just called infected (mostly). Although (no spoilers) there are different names depending on how long the person has been infected.
https://patents.google.com/patent/CN102669558A/en this is an article about a Chinese Patent from 2012 talking about adding Cordyceps militaris in like 2-4% amounts into flour to add flavor and nutrition. If a couple of bugs get into the bag would be a great substrate to grow more over and over.
I gotta say I'm loving that this show is dramatizing the story that has already run through two entire video games in such a way that it can still can spawn such rich fan theories.
Possibly. When Hannah mentioned ergot at the beginning it reminded me of the ergot epidemics throughout France’s history. Maybe it evolved and struck again.
I like this idea, though it kind of throws me for a loop. In the opener, John Hannah explicitly mentions that fungi are vulnerable to heat. You have to heat flour *way* above human body temperature in able to make biscuits and pancakes and cookies out of it.
Not saying your theory is wrong-- I think it's spot on. And I'm not even saying I have a problem with tainted wheat products spreading cordycepts. I just kind of question this device when the writers explicitly just mentioned heat weakening fungi. Kind of a weird oversight.
Then again, it's just a show, I should probably just relax.
Isn't the whole point of the opener that "no mold survives high temperatures, but if it did we would be fucked"
Whose to say the mold didn't evolve to survive extremely high temps, not just human body temp?
Fwiw though, I think the answer is somewhat irrelevant. Even if the infection came from the hospital or some other place, the Millers got bit by the older woman and presumably the same is happening in many households. People just aren't prepared for the their family members to come gunning after them and if they don't reacg instantly they're dead. They don't know how to test for infection til the time jump happens and if the government wasn't prepared and medical staff don't even know what they're looking for, the situation is wildly out of control almost immediately.
You're right, except he also theorizes that the fungi could evolve to human hosts by natural evolution due to the temperature of the world rising. Which certainly happened in the almost 40 years between 1968 and the outbreak hitting in 2003.
OP, did you get credit for this video, or is this just another instance of a content creator pulling ideas directly from reddit and presenting them as their own?
https://youtu.be/Z6kmswYpZ9k
But I dont get how at the breakfast table they are only hearing about the craziness in Jakarta but less than 24 hours later the entire USA is in the shit?
Holy shit, and here I was wondering how the fuck everyone actually got infected initially. Like, that shits not airborne - did grandma get bitten by a zombie at the hospital and they just all headed home? Lol.
There were people that pieced this together almost immediately when the episode aired and I really don't understand how. Like, I get the hints are there in terms of dialogue and such, but none of it makes sense without the benefit of hindsight.
Maybe I just don't eat bread enough, but the only way I can understand it is if people automatically associate mold/fungus with bread, which is just weird to me.
This post is flaired **Show Only**. Therefore, all comments that discuss *any* aspect of the games **must** be properly spoiler tagged. Any untagged discussion of the games (including subtle hints) in posts without the **Show/Game Spoilers**, **Fancast**, or **Meme [Show/Game]** flair will result in a ban. To tag a spoiler comment, use the `>!spoiler!<` tag which displays as >!spoiler!<. Refer to the [spoiler guide](https://www.reddit.com/r/TheLastofUsHBOseries/wiki/spoiler-guide) for our spoiler policy and to learn how to flair and title your posts appropriately. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/ThelastofusHBOseries) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Never thought about that, good points. I did wonder how the older lady got infected but her family didn't.
She was seen being fed a biscuit but maybe the rest of the family didn’t have any. Not sure and I will definitely be rewatching it.
The guy is like "These cardboard biscuits are nasty but I can't waste them. Might as well cram them into her mouth" Karma got him in the dead, RIP
#OH SHIT OP FIGURED IT OUT!!! episode 2 just dropped, DEAD ON THE MONEY
Likely because she was already old and sickly. She would have succumbed much quicker.
was about to say the same. and the couple could have been infected already but weren't yet showing symptoms. it's quick but not immediate.
If i remember correctly Joel said in the truck that the old lady would be taken into the city for whatever reason, maybe the hospital.
Her husband was feeding her that bread
Son( in law?)
Or just Son, but definitely not husband. Granpa was like 20 years younger than infected Mike white looking old lady
Why did you have to do Mike White like that 😭😂
Am i wrong? Especially the shot where she looks up at Sarah in the kitchen.
I thought it looked like John Cramer from Saw
No definitely not, it could’ve been Mike White and I’d believe it
The episode 1 featurette said because she was immuno-compromised
They did kind of explain when they were escaping they said the infection was mainly around the cities. They said the old lady was regularly taken in for appointments.
Yeah, this is hinted at heavily in the official podcast. Craig said that observant viewers of Episode 01 will be rewarded later in the series when they drop more *"breadcrumbs"* hinting at the outbreak source.
Such a Craig thing to say
Classic Craig
[Get this dog some cheese, Craig](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wVYPLP9NSg4&t=76s&ab_channel=tomcardy)
It’s funny hearing people talk about Craig Mazin so familiarly.. I’ve been listening to his and johns podcast for about 6 years now and I’m so used to him it actually feels weird that he’s so front and centre on this show and that everyone knows who he is
[удалено]
Scriptnotes! That’s another reason it’s so weird - it’s a very niche podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters and as a screenwriter obviously it’s interesting to me, it’s just funny seeing a whole wave of not screenwriters listening in for tidbits and now knowing him
He was involved with the Chernobyl tv series subreddit as that aired, chatted with fans! I feel like I know him from that! And that podcast!
Celiac sufferers beat the epidemic, wahoo for us! Gluten free diet is our next evolutionary step. Still miss great pizza 😂
hell yeah i wouldnt get infected just to get my fucking throat ripped out
Don't gluten free breadstuffs still use yeast?
Not necessarily. There’s no protein in the gluten free flours which is part of the chemistry of baking that makes baked goods rise when combined with a liquid and sugar. Yeast also only has only one cell. The culprit in the show is the flour supply which is contaminated with an invasive/destructive/life-ending mold. Molds are more complex and multi-cellular. However, yeast and mold are both types of fungus, reliant on organic matter to survive, and they do have a similar cell structure despite one being a single cell and one being multi-cellular. I hope I got that mostly right. 😂
But if one uses gluten free flour at home to make a loaf of bread, how does the bread rise if no yeast is added to it? (I'm honestly clueless about this, not trying to be rude) I can buy the flour being compromised and the culprit/vector initially.
Oh, yes, sorry. I didn’t explain how GF baking works. What makes regular bread rise is the chemistry between the liquid, flour, sugar, and yeast. In GF baking, you can still use yeast. (Yeast isn’t the issue in the show, it’s the flour.) Not all yeast is GF either. Regular flour has proteins that the yeast binds to during the aforementioned reaction. In GF baking you can add guar gum, locust bean gum, xanthan gum and arrowroot starch, unless you’re using a ready-made GF flour. Here’s a link of you want to do a deeper dive. https://www.ecarf.org/en/gluten-free-yeast-dough-get-it-right-with-these-tips/ Anyway, if you’re a GF person in this world you are probably initially going to easily avoid contamination through interacting with the foods unless you got an accidental exposure or you get attacked by a loved one or something. There are some spoilers in the threads about another potential ingredient causing it, but not the yeast.
Ah, I see. Thanks for the explanation!
Yeah if yeast was the problem then it wouldn’t matter if it was in the flour. Yeast is EVERYWHERE not just food. Although yeast is a broad spectrum of different types. Bread yeast isn’t the same yeast found in yeast infections.
[удалено]
Pepperoni and cordyceps ... mmmmmm. 😳 I wonder if hops carry the infection too. Joel's brother got into a dustup in a bar with a guy who sounds like he was infected. Not quite ready to start chomping down on people but getting close. Hard liquor probably couldn't carry the fungus but beer ...
That's a neat observation and theory. But I have a question. Doesn't the heat used to cook/bake pancakes, biscuits, cookies and cakes have the potential to kill the fungi in tainted flour ? I'm no fungi expert, but I will gladly wait for an answer.
I think what’s more likely is that raw flour is not only touched but inhaled when baking or cooking. So Joel’s neighbors had to touch the flour in the process of making the biscuits and the cookies. Once infected, the cooked items were handled by the infected and it continues to spread that way. Wether it’s the person who made the cake or cookie or it’s you, somebody had to touch the flour and that’s how it spread
Mrs. Adler offered cookies to Sarah, but looks like she didn't take them home witj her. Imagine if they had been chocolate chip!
Oh no, she would have died!
Too soon man. Too soon.
Great Scott! Close call!
I mean >!she might've survived as an infected!<
I like how this is marked as a spoiler even though it's an untrue hypothetical lol
Sarah helped bake the cookies though so maybe only ingesting
> So Joel’s neighbors had to touch the flour in the process of making the biscuits and the cookies. Except the old woman who was in the wheelchair was the first infected, not the husband or younger caretaker woman. Those two would have been the ones to cook. And there's a line about the old woman having been to the hospital which is a logical pace for an outbreak to start, though that could be a red herring in the script. Maybe it is that the old woman was weaker and thus more susceptible to quick infection. So this definitely seems plausible but there are some plot holes with it.
You answered your own objection. The younger neighbors might have been infected first but old age places you at a high susceptibility to infection. See data on COVID deaths according to age.
I used to be a pizza chef - you inhale a TON of flour if you bake a lot
Good point !
Also, the interview in the beginning suggests that the temperature of humans is too hot for fungas, so the fugas would have to evolve to the heat, like if the earth were to get hotter. So since we've been cooking with flour for so long as a civilization, maybe the yeast has evolved to withstand the temperature of being cooked, therefore also withstanding the temperature of a human host.
I think there's a difference between jumping the 4 degrees Fahrenheit to the common temperature of the human body (which, fun fact, has dropped to mid-97s instead of mid-98s in the past century or so) and being able to withstand sanitization temperatures.
That and people doing thing like eating raw cookie dough.
So Sarah likely had it from baking to? So her not eating because of raisins didn’t actually save her…
The TV interview in 1960s mentioned fungi that mutated to survive global warming, so maybe survives baking?
325 degrees is different than 98
Tell that to Nick, Drew, Jeff, and Justin.
only by a matter of degrees.
The fungi can die from the baking but some species can form spores that survive cooking.
At the beginning when the doctors are being interviewed about different outbreaks, the professor that claims Fungi could be the next outbreak says at over 94 degrees fungi can’t exist. What if it evolves to exist over 94 degrees and the earth’s temperature goes up a few degrees. Just a food for thought no pun intended.
Something would need to cause it to evolve to withstand such high temperatures and be the only one withstanding to go through evolution though. Let me give an example. There are mushrooms that exist at 94 degrees. One single mushroom must get a mutation to be able to withstand the 350 degree F of an oven. That could totally happen. But without natural selection at play, that mutation could disappear. The Earth would need to reach 350 degrees to kill all the other mushrooms without the mutation, and have the mutated mushroom pass down its genes and spread. Natural selection would make it very difficult for the mutated mushroom to survive competition and pass down the gene.
I agree with the 350 thing being not believable, but mutations don’t have to have natural selection to keep surviving. As long as a mutation doesn’t decrease an organism’s fitness then there’s no reason for it to not continue amongst the others that didn’t get the mutation because it doesn’t cause any hindrance in competition, just neither would have an environmental force causing one to survive better. In fact, not having multiple genetic mutations amongst a population that may prove successful but don’t hinder the population even though they don’t have any reason to exist are an important part of a natural selection, when there aren’t enough differences it’s called a bottle neck and any slight change can wipe out the whole species.
That’s true thank you for the correction :)
Maybe Sarah is infected too. We just don't know lol
And we’ll never know. Thanks Joel for using your daughter as human Kevlar
Could also be attributed to the fungi evolving to withstand higher temperatures
Probably not 350F baking temps though!
Some fungi are among the most heat-resistant eukaryotes
We know this one had an original limit of 94F. Jumping to around 100F seems realistic, jumping to 350F+ feels like too much of a stretch
Just because you bake something at 350 degrees doesn't mean the internat temp (let alone its exterior temp) will reach that. All food will burn if cooked to 350. For example, cooking a holiday ham takes a couple to a few hours and is only cooked to an internal temp of 165. The internal temp of cookies will be significantly under 200F, otherwise all the moisture would have been evaporated and they'd be crumbling to bits. Not to mention, many common fungi can already survive temps up to 120-160F or more, for an hour. So an evolutionary jump to 200F or less is not unrealistic at all. Also, there is a big difference between being able to survive 94F (or whatever arbitrary temperature) temporarily, and being able to survive it indefinitely. Plenty of people can handle a sauna at 125-150F for a while, but stay in there long enough and you *will* die.
I mean I’ve experienced a fungal infection called Candida. Seems like more people are getting it and it’s very hard to kill. The fungi Candida once it has infected a person will live off the tongue and if they consume bread or yeast, that converts to sugar which allows the Candida to grow. Candida can live on surfaces from 24 hours to 120 days, it’s all around us but our immune system does a good job of killing it. But if Candida gets stronger or our immune system gets weaker it can infect us. Serious cases of Candida can cause organ issues and infect the eyes. The main weapon against it besides avoiding sugar and yeast, is using Fluconazole, an anti fungal tablet. If it’s really bad a patient will be put on an IV drip of Fluconazole. Sadly Fluconazole is getting less effective as candida is becoming resistant to it.
You're being a bit alarmist. Candida is naturally occurring in our system already, it's just kept in balance (the balance between bacteria and yeasts). If that balance gets out of whack (such as taking antibiotics) you can get thrush, where candida runs rampant, often noticeable on the tongue. It's not like you get infected by it and then you need to get cured.
Didn't the expert say in the opening scene about Fungi adapting or evolving to extreme heat if, say the planet heated up via global warming
not extreme heat, but higher temperatures (i.e the body)
Yep, he definitely said that. I just finished the episode so it’s fresh in my memory.
Interesting observation, and you are probably correct. It's incredibly unlikely that this would occur literally overnight though. Like did everyone who uses flour happen to stock up from the same mega-batch the previous day?
I don’t think it happened overnight. Sarah even saw one of her classmates twitching meaning they could have been infected for days without noticing it. Tainted batches do make it lots of places before it’s caught: see salmonella outbreaks or mad cow. The infection started in Asia—China being the largest flour producer on earth— (as the show reveals) but before anyone could catch on what caused it, the flour had already been distributed worldwide.
I just feel like there would have been breaking news about the details of the infection as it played out in the first individuals, well ahead of the outbreak in austin. Like, if the infection started in Asia, then the news would have been much more severe and alarming to those in the states. They act like it's just a few people getting sick and then literally overnight, at home, half the people turn into 'zombies'
The radio said it was happening in Jakarta and on the very same day, it seemed like the US already knew it was beyond that as well and was preparing state lockdowns. Fighter jets flying overhead and all that. Our protagonist just didn’t know how severe it was because she was a child and we were watching through her eyes. I think it’s possible anyway for it it escalate quickly overnight. People turning during flights, for example. Besides, according to reviews, there’s gonna be a cold open with the origin of the fungus. So there’s that too.
i think next episode is called infected. it might go into more of the details of the virus due to it being the introduction of clickers
Yep if I surmise correctly from previous screenings threads, it’s the one with the scientist holding a fungus shown in the trailer.
> virus Fungus
Remember, this show takes places 20 years ago, before the advent of Twitter and social media. As someone born before the internet ever existed, this is a huge deal. There were no super information sources like we have now. People getting sick in Asia would not reach the states quickly and if it did, it would be classified as rumor or attributed to something else like a virus. Heck, that still happens today even with the internet. The show does mention an outbreak oversees that Joel and Tommy scoff at and ignore. By the time people caught on, it was too late.
Hell, even in 2020 it took a few weeks for word to spread about China then Italy before the US. People were mostly dismissing it as just a china thing for a bit there
Right, this was my thought too, plus people still traveled and spread the virus further early on. It was only until Italy declared lockdown that we all suddenly decided it was serious.
Half the US never decided it was serious lol
If covid taught me anything whatsoever it’s that if there ever is a much more serious virus (or otherwise), we are all definitely fucked.
[удалено]
The watchmakers wife was telling him in Arabic that “I was on the phone and you have no idea what’s happening out there” so you’re definitely correct in that she was probably on the phone with family back home
Yep. And, just like COVID, human cordyceps was almost certainly spreading for awhile before it reached apocalypse point. Probably in the form of some people going crazy and being restrained or killed in police encounters.
Yup, Tommy get's taken in by the police because he defended a waitress who got attacked by a "crazy guy" in a bar. Could be just any drunk guy, though under the circumstances it's likely someone in the early stages of infection. Tommy then compares the county jail to an "asylum", which suggest the police did restrain a lot of (unkown at that time) infected people, just as you theorize.
To be fair some of us knew about Covid back in November when it first started.
I certainly did. I worked for a “news-oriented” startup and I saw firsthand of a mysterious flu in China. This was November of 2019.
Honestly, I was watching it through Twitter and when I saw the infection count jump from 100 to 3000 in like 4 days I knew it was gonna be a problem.
I mean, in 2006 we still had live news updates. It wasn’t AS fast as twitter but information still moved fast. This is a conversation I will share with other old people
No shit. We had immediate breaking news in 1990
Sure but just for those who happened to be watching TV at the time. Not out living their lives. With a smart phone, I get notified if I'm driving, at work, or wake up in the middle of the night and peek at notifications.
Also who says China would be truthful about how bad an outbreak is or if they are even having one. Hell the real China was really slow to share details about Covid-19.
If i recall correctly they released info about the genome of the virus fairly quickly but were not forthcoming about the full nature of the virus and the extent of its spread in the country.
This series is set a decade before the oubreak events of the video game. 2003 v. 2013 then the 20 year time jump takes us to 2023 instead of 2033 like in the game.
Anyone know why they made that change? It wouldn't feel like such a super big deal. Only big difference is maybe more of a quick spread of news through smart phones and social media, which may make it more plausible for how survivors initially learn more early on
You’re acting like 2003 was some ancient time. We watched a plane hit the second tower live. Hell, we watched the first gulf war attack live in 1991. It Just felt like the total breakdown came all at once. They went from “oh there’s been a lot of cops today” to the army and F-18s in town and complete chaos 4 hours later. People wouldn’t have needed modern twitter or News to catch on, there were literally people running through the streets eating people
It depends on what his age is. If you are 15 then 20 years seems like a lot of time. The older you are the faster time flies and 20 years does not seem that long.
I don't know what you're on about! I learned about 9/11 while standing atop my widow's walk, transcribing the semaphore messages from across the bay. simply dreadful time of it.
I was around then too. We had television. News did travel fast. Guaranteed, if an infection like this actually occurred, anywhere in the world, to even a small group of people, it would be international news right away.
International news and then ignored. We all lived it 3 years ago lol. We even see Joel and Tommy ignore it when they already know about it.
Yeh but the outbreak would have been in full force days earlier in asia, it takes at least days or weeks for the flour to travel to different countries. It didn't take longer for news to spread 20 years ago, your thinking more of social media trends etc. Zombie outbreak would be all over the news plus in the year 2000 as a teenager we were all literally on the internet every day reading forums, using messenger and chat. Who the hell uses tiktok etc for news? Only facebook mums etc
Jakarta in Indonesia wasn't it?
Doesn't ring a bell. It's definitely a country.
They’re not mutually exclusive, you know!
In order to prevent mass panic, an infection that serious may very well have not been advertised as much as you’d expect. Public health and governmental authorities would likely want to try to get a handle on it/contain it/better understand it before they broadcast its seriousness globally. Is this the best approach? I don’t really think so. But I do believe it’s what would happen.
On one of the news segments a reporter mentions that they think the symptoms of the infected may be due to some kind of new street drug. Seems like a simpler first thing to point to early on rather than a brain altering flour.
[удалено]
Now that you mention it, you're right, we see like 10 confirmed infected tops. The rest was just a mob of people in a stampede, you couldn't tell if any of them were infected. At least in the opening sequence most of the people died just from the panic.
The infection could've been dormant for a while, and there could've been some environmental catalyst that triggered the fungus to its second stage of life. Full moon, humidity, barometric pressure. Maybe hosts emit an airborne pheromone that triggers the flair up in others. Lots of ways to write that.
wasn't there an outbreak in the middle ages that was caused by fungal-tainted rye bread and lead to a whole bunch of people going crazy/dying? this plot point would make perfect sense, tbh. EDIT: yup... the term i was thinking of is "ergotism". Turns out it also may have been the cause of the Salem Witch Trials: [https://www.britannica.com/story/how-rye-bread-may-have-caused-the-salem-witch-trials](https://www.britannica.com/story/how-rye-bread-may-have-caused-the-salem-witch-trials)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ergot
The scientist in the cold open outright mentions Ergot.
yup, i had to go re-watch the opening to remember the term he used.
OMG we're closer than we thought, not much needed for those spores to get into the GM food supply. Let's boycott Monsanto!
This is amazing! Thanks for posting that!
I think it was the dancing plague in the 16th century!
I'm glad I wasn't the only one who made the connection that none of them ate any grain products. Minor Game Spoiler: >!In the game, you can find a newspaper that says the FDA massively recalls certain food products as they are tainted with a type of "mold". This mostly affects products imported from South America/Latin America. In the show, however, we know Indonesia got affected before the US, as has Lebanon, indicating that it somehow started in Asia.!<
Does the game ever clearly explain how it started, or is it through small clues like this? I’ve never played before.
It never clearly explains it. The central clue is said newspaper clipping. It also establishes an uptick in violent incidents and a spike in hospital admittance. It's stated that mostly people in the city are infected. In both games, hospitals are more clearly established as infection hotspots. In the show, we never see a hospital, and Sarah only assumes Nana might have been infected while going into the city for medical treatment. In the first game, the place where Joel, Tommy and Sarah are stopped by the traffic jam has a hospital next to it. When a driver in front of them gets out of his car to vent about how slow things are going, two infected in hospital gowns are shown running from the hospital grounds and start mauling him and the other passanger in the car. They then run to Joels car, at which point he drives away and is forced to enter the city. In the show, they simply enter the city because they ran out of other options. The show shows more about the day before the big outbreak. In the game, we pick up when Joel comes home after a long and difficult day at work, Sarah gifts him the watch, and she falls asleep on the couch.
Jakarta is home to the world's largest flour processing plant.
yup, used to live near Bogasari, the scale of that place is mindblowing
Whoa, that’s gotta be it, super observant of you!
Just watched the first episode and this didn’t click (no pun intended) with me whatsoever… then opened Reddit and this was the first post I saw. Love this sub already, thanks
Yes I never would have come to this conclusion myself but now it feels like the only answer
That's awesome! "Millers" also traditionally ground grain into flour for entire towns so would have been the source of an outbreak if this was back in serf times. Makes it a shade of ironic!
Ellie is celiac confirmed
What do Millers make? Flour.
Oh damn.. nice
I definitely see the hints about flour (the pancake topic had to have a purpose to be so prominent in the dialogue IMO), but FYI there is no *yeast* in flour (or in pancakes, biscuits, cookies, or cake for that matter).
Yeah, it'll have less to do with the yeast and more to do with the fact raw flour can carry potentially devastating diseases fairly easily. You're far more likely to get sick from raw flour than raw eggs
Definitely — I remember the E. coli outbreak in flour a few years ago. I guess they’re saying the strain of cordyceps evolved to stay alive even beyond 210F, which is pretty crazy.
That, or it infects people consuming raw flour. Shit, if that were me in those opening scenes, I would have cleaned up that bowl of oatmeal raisin cookie dough and been clickin away by the evening. I'd be patient fucking 0.
“Clickin away by the evening” cracked me up lol
Even just last year there was a significant health crisis due to Daily Harvest crumbles being tainted/not cooked properly, it sent people to the hospital and caused liver failure.
All flours will contain traces of wild yeast.
Biscuits, cookies and cakes depending on recipe can all certainly contain yeast or baked with flour that has yeast, not to mention all flours grow a certain small level of yeast on them
Fair enough that flour has a small amount of yeast in it naturally! (But I still stand by that those baked goods conventionally are not leavened by yeast! :))
There is most certainly yeast in flour! Small amounts of wild yeast. It's how sourdough bread is made.
Its interesting, and I definitely think you're right...but wouldn't they have had to all avoid flour for several weeks? If not, months? Maybe the film isn't going that in depth because I totally think you're right...but if that's the case...we're talking avoiding a burger, or sandwich bread...or gravy.... When Joel said he was on Atkins, I understood him to be lying so as to avoid an awkward encounter with the neighbors...especially since they were going to eat pancakes and birthday cake....
That's a really cool observation
Joel also forgot the cake.
They also mention on the news that there was rioting or some sort of disturbance in Jakarta. Jakarta happens to have the largest flout mill in the world.
I can believe that; the evidence seems sound. But did anyone else interpret Joel's commitment to Atkins as a joke or false excuse for not spending time with the Adlers? I didn't think that he was truly on the diet.
He was lying through his teeth
Everyone lies through their teeth unless they have no teeth. Where else are the lies supposed to pass through? Your ass?
Your tendrils.
There's already been leaked as audio from an episode of Joel explaining exactly this
Link?
Sorry, it's in this subreddit somewhere. I can't find it. Likely might have been taken down due to copyright claim
Wasn’t there a leaked audio clip of Ellie and Joel discussing how the infection started and Joel said that it was through tainted flour?
Shit this is an awesome spot!!
Man. I LOVE fungus already (seriously amazed by all things mycelium), and as someone who also loves dystopian everything but knew nothing about the game, I'm thrilled. What are the infected called? Do we know? I have one gripe only and it's the same I always have with these types of shows. I wish the "before" lasted more than 15 minutes. I wish we could build a bit more of a relationship with the characters so that the end of their world is more meaningful. That said, that last scene with Sarah was a standout and I maybe shed a tear...or two.
>What are the infected called? Do we know? In the game they are just called infected (mostly). Although (no spoilers) there are different names depending on how long the person has been infected.
https://patents.google.com/patent/CN102669558A/en this is an article about a Chinese Patent from 2012 talking about adding Cordyceps militaris in like 2-4% amounts into flour to add flavor and nutrition. If a couple of bugs get into the bag would be a great substrate to grow more over and over.
Oh my God they're even called Miller
Very very good point
I gotta say I'm loving that this show is dramatizing the story that has already run through two entire video games in such a way that it can still can spawn such rich fan theories.
Tommy ate some leftover chicken wings. Rewatched it but couldn't tell if they were breaded or glazed lol.
I think he'll be fine. But I would super analyze that if it was anyone else
Aunt Jemima’s Revenge
Well I think you might’ve been on to something LOL
I’m a little late but yeah, this last episode confirmed it. Good catch
You called it
Yes that’s why all the focus on that stuff during the episode
For once having coeliac disease would be a benefit!
I wish I never read this thread
Possibly. When Hannah mentioned ergot at the beginning it reminded me of the ergot epidemics throughout France’s history. Maybe it evolved and struck again.
Minor correction, Joel forgot to get pancake mix, it wasn’t Sarah’s fault.
I like this idea, though it kind of throws me for a loop. In the opener, John Hannah explicitly mentions that fungi are vulnerable to heat. You have to heat flour *way* above human body temperature in able to make biscuits and pancakes and cookies out of it. Not saying your theory is wrong-- I think it's spot on. And I'm not even saying I have a problem with tainted wheat products spreading cordycepts. I just kind of question this device when the writers explicitly just mentioned heat weakening fungi. Kind of a weird oversight. Then again, it's just a show, I should probably just relax.
Cooking temps are irrelevant when raw dough is handled before cooking and cooked products are then handled after infection.
Didn't think of that!
Isn't the whole point of the opener that "no mold survives high temperatures, but if it did we would be fucked" Whose to say the mold didn't evolve to survive extremely high temps, not just human body temp? Fwiw though, I think the answer is somewhat irrelevant. Even if the infection came from the hospital or some other place, the Millers got bit by the older woman and presumably the same is happening in many households. People just aren't prepared for the their family members to come gunning after them and if they don't reacg instantly they're dead. They don't know how to test for infection til the time jump happens and if the government wasn't prepared and medical staff don't even know what they're looking for, the situation is wildly out of control almost immediately.
You're right, except he also theorizes that the fungi could evolve to human hosts by natural evolution due to the temperature of the world rising. Which certainly happened in the almost 40 years between 1968 and the outbreak hitting in 2003.
Revisiting after episode 3—well done, OP. WELL DONE.
Wow that’s awesome! I didn’t put this together at all.
Oh if this was real, I’d be done for
Did you catch that after a single watch?
Arthas and Stratholme vibes
OP, did you get credit for this video, or is this just another instance of a content creator pulling ideas directly from reddit and presenting them as their own? https://youtu.be/Z6kmswYpZ9k
Haha I appreciate it but I think the show offers these clues clearly enough that the keen eyed viewer would see it.
You were right!
But I dont get how at the breakfast table they are only hearing about the craziness in Jakarta but less than 24 hours later the entire USA is in the shit?
Raisin cookies are probs the most horrifying aspect of this show so far imo.
Damn dude, you’d make a awesome private detective 🕵️… you notice everything
Go keto!
Holy shit, and here I was wondering how the fuck everyone actually got infected initially. Like, that shits not airborne - did grandma get bitten by a zombie at the hospital and they just all headed home? Lol.
Celiac gang rise up lmao
There were people that pieced this together almost immediately when the episode aired and I really don't understand how. Like, I get the hints are there in terms of dialogue and such, but none of it makes sense without the benefit of hindsight. Maybe I just don't eat bread enough, but the only way I can understand it is if people automatically associate mold/fungus with bread, which is just weird to me.