We need to talk about that tendril kiss on The Last Of Us
Like the game it’s based on, HBO’s prestige adaptation walks the line between beauty and revulsion, but went further than we expected
TV Features The Last Of Us
[Spoiler warning: The following discusses events from the second episode of the first season of The Last Of Us. If you haven’t seen it, you may want to wait until you have before reading on.]
Whether you’ve played the game or not, the end of “Infected”—the second episode of HBO’s The Last Of Us—had to come as a shock. Although the tragic death of Tess (affectingly embodied by Anna Torv) unfolds in a similar way early on in the game, what happens to her after she reveals to Joel and Ellie that she’s been infected is a very different story. No one could have predicted the creepy way Tess would go out on the show. We all had to watch that gag-inducing fungal kiss of death for the first time together, and for anyone with an aversion to such things (this author included) it was truly horrifying.
Even worse, the director of the episode—none other than co-executive producer and creator of the game himself, Neil Druckmann—had the audacity to film it as an almost dreamy, romantic moment between Tess and the infected host. It was as if the invasive lifeform taking over her body was seeking out a connection to its own kind, keeping her frozen in place while the last remnants of her consciousness anxiously flicked that lighter, trying to turn a spark into a deadly flame. It would be beautiful if it weren’t so gross. On HBO’s official The Last Of Us podcast, Druckmann’s co-showrunner Craig Mazin points out that this scene reflects the show’s theme of love and how it functions. “The fungus loves, too,” Mazin says. “It makes more of itself. That’s what we do when we love each other. A lot of us make more of ourselves. That’s how the species is propagated.” Who knew the sex lives of mushrooms could be so fascinating? Craig Mazin, apparently.
For more context as to how we got here, let’s back up. Of all the changes Druckmann and Mazin made for the show, one of the most fundamental was how the fungus spreads in the real world. In some areas of the game where the fungus is heavily concentrated, spores are floating in the air. Anyone passing through (except for Ellie) has to wear a gas mask to avoid getting infected. The creators were worried that audiences wouldn’t buy the premise that these spores were limited to a fixed area, with the cordyceps so widespread (they also didn’t want to put their actors behind masks the whole time), so they did away with the airborne threat for the show. Instead, the fungus is connected by an underground network (based on scientific studies of actual mycelium networks). The infection is now passed on from a bite or via tendrils invading the body through an existing opening, like the mouth.
And so, with Tess choosing to remain behind to give Joel (Pedro Pascal) and Ellie (Bella Ramsey) time to get away, she becomes a target of the invading infected. Another difference between the game and the show is that she wasn’t originally fending off a horde of monsters, but a far less intimidating squad of FEDRA goons. At this point in the game, they’ve been chasing the trio ever since their noisy escape from the Boston QZ. After the officers catch up with them at the State House, Tess makes a similar sacrifice. It’s a heroic moment, but not quite as charged, or as skin-crawling, as the way it plays out on the show.
The Last Of Us taps into something deeply unsettling about our relationship to fungal organisms. It’s hard to explain why; it’s just primal. If you feel a little queasy watching the opening credits, that’s a natural reaction. The show also wants us to appreciate the aesthetics of these fungi, the organic colors and shapes that make them unique. There’s no better example of this dichotomy than the scene between Tess and the formerly human host with whom she shares her last kiss. Our instinct is to turn away as those mouth tendrils reach out for her, yet at the same time we can’t help but watch it as it happens. Just like Tess.
We have to credit Anna Torv’s fully committed performance, which works in tandem with the cinematography and framing of the shot to make the scene eerily effective. From the moment we met her in the premiere, Torv put her own spin on the fan-favorite character, giving us a version of Tess who’s tough and in control, but underneath it all longs to believe there’s still hope for humanity. We only had two episodes to get to know her (although she may show up in future flashbacks), but she made a huge impact. Like Joel, we’re not going to get over her untimely demise (or the disturbing way it went down) anytime soon. As players have been learning the hard way since 2013, letting yourself get invested in anyone besides Joel and Ellie in this story is setting yourself up for heartbreak. The one-two punch of losing Sarah (Nico Parker) and then Tess in the first two episodes is a warning to viewers and players alike—you may think you know what’s coming, but you have no idea what’s in store. Thanks for the nightmares, guys.
127 Comments
The clickers = “that GOOOOOOOOD shit.”Digging this series, so far. Anna Torv continues to deserve better.
Anna Torv is a really great actress with a really amazing american accent, I do hope she gets something longer-term soon
She was one of the main two reasons I was pissed about Mindhunter being axed (Holt McCallany being the other).
Cameron Britton 😀
Holt was so goddamn good. I had honestly never heard of him prior to Mindhunters and you bet I mentally bookmarked his name.
I just binged Fringe for the first time. I am now a big Anna Torv fan. Great performances on that show and in TLOU. We had so much less time with her here than in the game, and she still makes sure that Tess makes an impression. Outstanding.
yeah, it seemed like she could have been around longer. I’m sure Fincher shows eat up a lot of your calendar, and she does a bunch of stuff in Australia also, but it does seem a lost opportunity not to keep her on HBO where it seems she would belong…cast her and Carrie Coon as sisters and be done with it.I love love Fringe (I miss Walter) but I do acknowledge a lot of its plotlines were just completely dropped; did you feel that way or did that bother you at all?
It actually really bothered me. In fact, I thought the show went pretty far off the rails after Season 3. Whole plots were abandoned, and the nature of the show changed with a snap of a finger.But……I loved the three main characters so much, and the dynamic between them. That dynamic kept me watching both for the fun and to see what would happen to them. Torv, Jackson, and Noble were all so great in it (Reddick as Broyles too!) that I could not do anything but finish.Thanks for your reply! I was so late getting on board the Fringe train that I have had no one to discuss it with! 🙂
I haven’t rewatched it, so I was just going along as it aired and I was like…where did the telekinesis that made no fucking sense even go? I forgave it because I liked the Walternate story, but then the final (later) season didn’t resolve so great…I didn’t buy the developments with the observers. I don’t quite recall the finale. But in the end it stuck a little too close to the LOST template of “it doesn’t even fucking matter what this four toed statue is because we’re here to spend time with the characters.” Now, it pulled that off better than LOST did, because they were right and it was just fun to spend time with those characters, but it was still kind of disappointing on the whole. It looks like the guy who played Lincoln and the woman who played Astrid have been getting some work, but not as much as they should.
SPOILERS BELOW FOR FRINGE-we are probably out of spoiler territory at this point, but just in case: 🙂 1.Aside from the reset of the timeline which I hated, you touched on my biggest gripe with the show. I sat there going: “So….the observers are evil now for some reason? And William Bell too? And…..Olivia sometimes has powers but sometimes not? What?” The plots were just two inconsistent and seemed done purely for the sake of twists in later seasons.2. But man…how great was Noble as Walter and Walternate? He managed to play two very different men with just expressions and bearing and vocal tone. It was pretty incredible. 3. I swear to you: Once the show was over I actually went to the internet to make sure Gabel and Nicole were getting work because I enjoyed their performances and hadn’t seen them elsewhere. I was glad to find that other projects were benefitting from their talents.4. “Now, it pulled that off better than LOST did, because they were right and it was just fun to spend time with those characters, but it was still kind of disappointing on the whole.” This sums it up for me. The end was kind of a mess, but the characters were so fun and great I just could not look away. Also: The alt universe stuff was so well done. Straying away from that was a mistake.
Yeah, the Walternate story was so good, made so much sense, and Bolivia (or was it Fauxlivia), Astridsperger (I know I know that’s insensitive) and…Blinken? no idea! were so much fun and that story made so much sense…and it was surrounded by things that didn’t make a lot of sense (Olivia seeing herself dying, that went nowhere; observers; killing off their kid which was bold but incREDIBly depressing)What was your favorite freak of the week? Mine was the giant rinovirus, I will never forget that and it changed the way I think about illness. All these things that make us ill, they’re like burdocks and needles!
I am not sure what my favorite was (lots of contenders) but I can tell you that the ones that actively freaked me out were the huge snakes embedded inside people and the one that made skin grow over mouths and eyes. I actually had nightmares about both of those. The fact that both of those were re used in season 5 made me smile and cringe at the same time!
I’ll always remember the one with the guy listening to REO Speedwagon, so spot on
Yes, the guy who played Lincoln, Seth Gable (?), just finished the current season of Big Sky, but I haven’t seen Astrid in some time.
I’ve never played TLofU, so the show is a revelation. When I saw Anna Torv in episode one, I turned to my husband and said, “Let’s watch Fringe again.” He agreed. She is stunning. And this morning, after years of not being able to put my finger on it, I suddenly realized who Anna reminds me of: Carrie Coon – as you’ve noted. Yes, I, too, love Fringe, and I miss Walter – and Peter and Astrid – and the dropped plot lines didn’t bother me.
Torv is credited for five episodes so we’ll se her again. The show seems like there will be a flashback cold open to every episode so I’d assume we’ll see her in those.
Binging that show must’ve been a treat. I started watching sometime during season 3 and the absolute slog that was the second half of season 4 and the first few episodes of 5 was tough to get through week to week.I was so, so satisfied with the last run of episodes, though. Really made the experience worthwhile.
Yeah, it really was fun and a perfect binge show. I don’t know what took me so long to watch it. I love sci fi and I love mysteries-my sons were little when it started, so I think I was too tired to watch anything. But my delay made for a nice gift in 2022!You are not alone in thinking that Season 4 was a slog however…………
Honestly, I imagine part of your delay might be that (For a good, long while), it was actually really tough to find on streaming. It bounced across a bunch of streaming services. Honestly, I don’t even have a guess as to where it’s streaming right now.I actually slogged through the first few episodes of season five on my phone at the laundromat, which made both experiences much easier. I still haven’t been able to get my wife to pick it back up and try it again, maybe the idea of binging it might work. I’ve also been trying to get my son to try it (He loves procedurals and cryptozoology stuff) for years.The show was more or less barely watchable from around the point Peter disappeared to the point in five where that one character dies.Now that you’re done with Fringe, though, might I interest you in another fun sci fi procedural that also did not get talked about enough (Well, outside of io9, anyway)? Try Person of Interest. The lead actor is an IRL piece of shit, but the show holds up (Eerily moreso as modern surveillance advances).
SPOILERS BELOW FOR FRINGE-we are probably out of spoiler territory at this point, but just in case: :)1. “The show was more or less barely watchable from around the point Peter disappeared to the point in five where that one character dies.” This was my experience as well. Peter being deleted from the timeline and the subsequent changes was a real misstep. But the actors and characters are so good I could not stop watching!2.I just looked at the dates Fringe was on, and I indeed started a new job (the one I still have today!) and had a toddler and a baby not yet sleeping through the night the year the show first aired. So I think I just missed the original Fringe boat. But it is currently streaming on HBO Max if you are interested in another watch! If your wife and son do get interested, I think binging is the perfect way to watch the show. My wife and I watch a ton of stuff together but I never even tried with Fringe. She is not a big fan of gore, so the first couple seasons would be…….problematic for her. Almost every episode started with grisly death!3.You are actually the second person to recommend Person of Interest to me this month! Will have to try it. Thanks!
PoI is a strong recommend for me. If you watched LOST (And I tend to assume anyone who watched Fringe watched LOST), it’s got Michael Emerson in it and Gawker Media darling Amy Acker (Eventually). Plus bonus Taraji Henson!
My memory of it was that Fringe’s first several episodes were super X-Files derivative and that turned a lot of people off it early on. Once Mark Valley was gone and the show’s direction became clearer, I think a lot of people took more notice but those first few episodes weren’t the best introduction if that makes sense.
Well, given Anna Torv and Mark Valley were married (2008) and then they weren’t (2009) and in a later episode (Brown Bunny, I think) I distinctly recall her dumping his photo in a bin, there’s a lot to unpack there …
She stars in The Newsreader, an Australian show with a second season coming soon.
Anna Torv is so fantastic in this, it’s sad she doesn’t last as long in the story but she did great with the part she had.
“Anna Torv continues to deserve better.”You’re a literal collection of the most braindead normie opinions imaginable. Nothing negative should happen to characters we like because they “deserve better”. It’s like you don’t understand how narratives work. I’ll give you a little break because you’re clearly autistic and just parroting things you hear other people say in an attempt to pretend to be normal.
Oh, the weird fuckstick who’d be more useful to the world as fertilizer is back, now trying to slag me for ::checks notes:: “appreciating Anna Torv.”Always fun to live rent-free in a weirdo’s head. ;-*
It was as if the invasive lifeform taking over her body was seeking out a connection to its own kind, keeping her frozen in place while the last remnants of her consciousness anxiously flicked that lighter, trying to turn a spark into a deadly flame. It would be beautiful if it weren’t so gross. It was, they even set it up as that when they stopped the show dead in its tracks less than 30 mins earlier to make the point that all of the infected were connected to each other.
Well, it made the point that the infected *could be* connected to each other through underground fungal growth where it exists.
Meanwhile, TLoU Joe Rogan is out there stomping on tendrils saying “I’m just being open to debate!”
Who’d have thought yet another creative director in gaming was, in fact, just another failed director/writer who didn’t know how to write human beings.
“Who’d have thought yet another creative director in gaming was, in fact, just another failed director/writer who didn’t know how to write human beings.”
What the fuck are you talking about?
What the fuck are these…hoomans?
to me the funniest was that druckmann is staunchly anti-union in the gaming industry, but happily joined all the tv unions so he could direct his show
Honestly when you remember that in both cases it’s driven by his own desire to benefit himself personally to the exclusion of helping anybody else, it actually makes a ton of sense.
There are plenty of folks who aren’t pro-union but will join unions to work in a closed shop, because they have no other choice if they want to work in those fields. I had a few family members who were not pro-union in the 1990s but grumpily paid their union dues so they could be teachers, because public schools were closed shops in that state, at least at the time.It’s almost like some folks have to compromise on their politics in order to make a living in some circumstances.
Imagine thinking workers’ rights are just “politics” you have to compromise (lol compromise!) your idiotic, self-loathing, capitalist brainrot* beliefs for.*The biggest lie capitalists want you to believe is that workers are in competition with each other so it’s every worker for herself.
What kind of delusional take is this? One thing you can say about him is he can write human beings really fucking well.
“Neil Druckmann—had the audacity to film it as an almost dreamy, romantic moment between Tess and the infected host.”
Wow, I’d hate to know what fucked up shit has happened in your life that you thought that was romantic.
the content slaves are really struggling to wring anything interesting out of this very dull show hey?
No, we need to talk about kevin.
I love the AVClub, but I’m going to have to remove them from my newsfeed due to constant spoilers in their article titles 🙁
So… for me this show is really f’n good. If you took everything I liked about TWD, everything I’d hoped The Strain was going to be, then improved the production values and for the most part writing. But…then like got like legit actors, thats pretty much The Last Of Us for me. Never played the game, don’t care if it’s not correct, just like that the series is good so far.
Incredibly it is correct – the feel, the look, the sound of the show are taken straight from the games (which to be fair have some of the very best production design in all gaming). Stuff like how the infection works are minor mechanical elements and nothing to do with character or story or setting.
I never finished the first game (though I watched through playthroughs of both games) but I do think the change to how the infection spreads is a little disappointing. I agree that in the long run it’s probably not that big a deal, but I think there are a number of great scenes in both games that are based on the fact that Ellie can exist in these spore-ridden environments and other people can’t.Maybe it doesn’t matter, but those scenes stood out to me as some of the more interesting elements of the game’s story. It’s not just that she survived a bite; she’s literally immune to parts of the world that are toxic to everyone else. I dunno, I think that’s a pretty significant part of how she interacts with the world and we don’t have that here.
As someone who played the game, can anyone explain to me how the infected stay alive? They continue to be mostly human, and yet do not seem to eat or drink. I get it that they may chomp someone every once in a while, but that seems to be to infect, not for food. I can see how the fungus ends up changing and controlling them, but I fail to see how it can independently keep them biologically functioning. Anyone?
As someone who played TLoU and read most of the Walking Dead comic, this turn of events is wholly unsurprising.TWD started strong and jumped the shark hard, in both formats. The comic overstayed its welcome by a lot and, to my knowledge (I only stuck with the show until maybe midway through the Governor arc), the show managed to make that even worse.TLoU was, bar none, the best story I’ve ever seen in a AAA video game. Like, yeah, it’s an engaging game, but it almost feels like a glorified visual novel (In a good way).
Both the comics and TV show of TWD have the same issue, which is that you get to a certain point in the story and realize that it’s not going anywhere planned, it’ll just keep running in circles until it’s unprofitable. In both formats I lost interest shortly after Negan arrived.The Last of Us shouldn’t share that problem because HBO series tend not to overstay their welcome and they’re pretty good about heading towards a planned conclusion.Until watching last night’s episode, I also hadn’t realized just how much TWD annoyed me for years by shooting in the same acre of rural Georgia and doing such bare bones set design. The production values of TLoU are so superior it’s a little ridiculous.
Honestly, I can’t say how many shows I can say this for, but…I would just love it if they gave us three seasons spread a few years apart. Give the actors some time to age into TLoU 2 for a second season and by the point you’re closing in on a season 3, we’ll probably have a third game to adapt.
I don’t know if this is written in stone, but supposedly the second game will run across two seasons.
Regarding the comics, Kirkman did the right thing. He actually ended it before he said he would, in an unexpected way. Not saying it wasn’t a slog to get there, but he didn’t drag it out longer than it needed to be, IMO. He actually had some plot threads that I don’t think was ever paid off(i.e. he dropped a side-story in a comic made for charity and it turns out it was about Rick’s younger brother who is alive and well, overseas).
The show should have divested from the comic nearly immediately, instead, they shot for shot welded themselves to every single arc, so there was no reason to follow the show – as you knew everything that was going to unfold. And the way it was done was so paint by numbers it was hardly exciting to watch. And then the comic started doing literally the same arc over and over, showing that the zombies really are at their peak interesting when the world is falling apart.
The main problem with TWD, the show, is that AMC decided to turn it into a long-running franchise akin to Star Trek, that could last 30 years or more. No doubt they felt the need to keep the original series going as long as possible to anchor that effort, especially since the first spin-off’s ratings were in decline.Fortunately, HBO has no such ambitions, so it’s very unlikely the show will outstay its welcome.
I gave up reading TWD comics when I realized it was just the same thing over and over, and I too had felt that it had overstayed it’s welcome.Little did I know that where I gave up was actually about the midpoint of the comic. I think I made the right call.
How much of a disappointment The Strain ended up being pains me to this day.
::sigh::
The Strain got so, so, so weird. I watched it through to the end it was just…shocking. A completely different show from how it began. Much like TWD and L O S T in that respect.
I think the decline happened rather quickly in season 1, and it shouldn’t have gone on as long as it did. It had so much promise pairing del Toro with vampires and giving them multiple seasons to work with, but how the hell does the end result turn into New York is now somehow cut off from the rest of the world, and vampires run society here now. The last season gets dangerously close to the end of True Blood where vampires are running QVC type channels selling products for vamps and that’s just normal life.
The Strain was a terrible mess, but kind of fun if you accepted it as a terrible mess where no one had ever heard of vampires and half the plot threads were just dropped.
The Strain is so weird. Such a good concept but an absolute bore to watch.
The books were SO good. It was such a shame they shit the bed in the series (The Strain).
I have also loved the first two episodes, but I really hope you get to play the game someday if you are at all interested. It is really something-one of the best of all time for me. My wife is not a gamer, but one of the reasons I am really excited about the series is that I finally get to share this story with her. She has loved the first two episodes (like the author of this piece she is really creeped out by the opening credits, but other than that cannot wait for next week!). I have been waiting since 2013 to talk about TLOU with her!
I’m not a gamer nor am I a fan of zombie shows/movies, but this one sucked me in completely. It may have something to do with Pedro Pascal, the top notch quality of the sets, writing, casting etc.I am sorry to see Anna Torv go, so much so I found “Fringe” on FreeVee and am rewatching it. It’s gross creepy snarky fun.
My wife feels the same as you on both counts, but she really enjoyed the first two episodes. I am sure she will continue to, as TLOU is simply a fantastic story. I am really glad that the HBO show means that more people will get to experience it.As I write in the comments below, I just finished watching Fringe for the first time. It is great! I can’t believe it took me so long to watch it. Having played the game, I of course knew that Torv was not going to be on TLOU long. But I thought she did a fantastic job playing Tess.
I just noticed Fringe is on HBOMax, I wonder if they bought it because of Anna and the creepiness that could tie in to TLOU. It’s nice to watch it without commercials. But it does take a couple minutes sometimes when they go back and forth between universes. I’m constantly saying “wait what’s happening now?” When Peter disappears and shows back up and no one knows him…
Take the quality of the first season of TWD, add up a bigger budget with even more high profile actors and with an actual direction and yeah.
“the director of the episode—none other than co-executive producer and creator of the game himself, Neil Druckmann—had the audacity to film it as an almost dreamy, romantic moment between Tess and the infected host.”Wait, what? Who watched that scene and thought it was a “romantic” moment?And it wasn’t a kiss – it was an Infected fulfilling his primary goal – spreading the fungus to another host. Mazin and Druckman have said after this episode aired that the Infected are only aggressive when their potential victim fights back or flees. Otherwise they just approach the victim and spread the fungus into the victim’s mouth. This is not a “kiss” and there is nothing sexual about it. It’s basically the same as if the Infected expelled some of the fungus from its mouth, it grabbed it in its hand and tore it loose, and then shoved the fungus in its hand into the victim’s mouth.
AV and Kotaku both painting that scene as romantic and over-sexualized leads me to believe they didn’t actually watch it and instead wrote articles based on a still shot of the tendrils. We’ve covered multiple times that the point of the infection is to spread so of course an infected would want to use the tendrils to immediately take over a new host rather than let it remain human since it was already infected but hadn’t turned yet.
The creator and directors were the one who said it was romantic. That they didn’t want to make it aggressive and super violent.
The Central Headquarters of Entertainment Blogs has pushed out a narrative about this scene that defies comprehension. I’m just ignoring all of them.
This x100! I do not get the “kiss” aspect of this or even worse, I saw it called “sexual assault” in an article here or kotaku, yesterday.Like wtf? That’s sexual assault? It’s not even remotely close to being a sexual act. Unreal.
You’re obviously free to have your own interpretation, but I think this article exists because Druckmann himself said he wanted it to be an intimate moment, to film, light and present it like a kiss. You can parse all you want whether that’s “romantic,” but beyond that, referring to this as a “kiss” doesn’t seem terribly out of bounds to me. You know phrases like “kiss of death” exist, right?
I think you missed the writer’s point in a couple of different ways. She wasn’t saying it was romantic. It was filmed as if it was romantic. The way the shots were constructed, the pacing, all borrowed from how you would film a kiss between two characters. That’s part of what made it so horrifying. It’s an inversion of something that is normally positive.She also wasn’t saying it was literally a kiss. It was just clearly meant to be evocative of a kiss, in a horrifying way.
I was a bit confused because she was already bit, was it going to infect her more?
yeah, such a weird take on that “kiss”.
It was horrifying. I don’t think that scene was meant to be anything other than the horror of her succumbing to the infection (and getting even more infected).
“That thing that looked very much like a kiss is basically the same as this thjng that very much does not look like a kiss! If you ignore what the people maikng the show have said about it and the obvious visual, it all makes perfect sense!”
The fungus loves, too,” Mazin says. “It makes more of itself. That’s what we do when we love each other.
Clearly there is an intention for it to be sexual in a sense. Whether they succeeded at that or not is up to interpretation.they just approach the victim and spread the fungus into the victim’s mouth.
The way they’ve changed how the fungus spreads, and the amount of contact needed between hosts, seems entirely like something that can be controlled- especially when we are talking about global geography. It’s weird to me that this is being accepted as a method that makes more sense than the reality of something airborne.
“Clearly there is an intention for it to be sexual in a sense.”
Or Mazin was making a fucking joke because stupid people thought this was romantic.
“Clearly there is an intention for it to be sexual in a sense. Whether they succeeded at that or not is up to interpretation.”You are reading a lot into this that is not there. The scene could have had the fungus coming out of the Infected’s ears instead of the mouth, and going into Tess’ ears instead of her mouth, and it would have been exactly the same transference of fungus. There is nothing sexual about this transfer of fungus
Go listen to the director’s podcast, they literally say point blank that they filmed the moment in a way they wanted to feel soft, intimate, and romantic.
When you’re so into pedantry you do it even with completely made up science.
What we have here is a solid show, entertaining and disturbing in a cool way, no one cares about the game and I, for one, would like to enjoy something without it being over-analyzed online ten minutes after it airs.
The Sex Lives of College Mushrooms doesn’t seem quite as appealing.
Guys, this is like the fourth article you’ve done on the tendril kiss, and you’ve offered zero coverage of the time I totally kissed my Canadian girlfriend.
Take your damn star!
We’ve all kissed your Canadian girlfriend.
Cordingly McHot Body would never!
Well, she’s just so polite.
My Canadian boyfriend is making out with your Canadian girlfriend
I had the same visceral reaction to the mouth tendrils, so the end of this episode was as much as a nightmare for me to watch as the reviewer. Bile-inducing. It’s true that it doesn’t make a whole ton of story sense, according to the source material in the game, for the infected to slowly come up to Tess, for her to stand there and “accept” the “kiss” for about a minute on end, before finally hitting the switch on the lighter. I know the directors have retconned it a bit to make the fungus non-airbone, which is a fine change and doesn’t really affect the story, but I can’t remember a single situation in the game where zombies weren’t running screaming at me. And it’s weird for such a badass character like Tess just sort of give in to the zombie at the end, even if she did manage to blow all of them up.
Part of the creepy/familiar aspect of fungus is how much DNA we share (roughly half). We are closer DNA-wise to mushrooms than mushrooms are to plants/veggies.
Why do we need to talk about it?
“It makes more of itself. That’s what we do when we love each other. A lot of us make more of ourselves. That’s how the species is propagated.” Well thats dumb….
It’s a kiss but a hollow, empty, grotesque parody of one, made all the more horrifying by the fact that it replaces the actual emotional moment she wanted from Joel but was denied. The infected take *everything.*
It would really be nice if you’d fucking stop spoiling things in article titles. Thanks.
Poor Anna Torv. The cancellation of ‘Mindhunter’ still breaks my heart, and now this. She was SO GOOD in this (I’m not a gamer but I’m very much enjoying this show so far).
Also, just gonna add a shoutout for ‘Black Summer’ on Netflix here, because it’s a similar-themed show that no one seems to know about. I seriously hope we get a third season of it. It’s tense and visceral, almost documentary-like, and it has some of the most striking cinematography on television/the web.
Lance running for his life in Season 1 is one of the most exhausting and stressful things I have ever seen on TV or film. Black Summer and Z Nation truly were … something else.
Oh noes! Snowflake minimum wage reviewer was triggered! Alert tiktok!
“[Spoiler warning: The following discusses events from the second episode of the first season of The Last Of Us. If you haven’t seen it, you may want to wait until you have before reading on.]”
I’m going to deliberately disregard this (I know I know) but I’m genuinely looking for a reason to continue watching this show after realizing there’d be no spores. So if this full description of the events of the episode that I’m about to read (I know that it wont be the A.V. Club doesn’t do reviews anymore they do recaps) so I’m gonna intentionally spoil this episode for myself to learn if it’s worth my time or not. I’m being the reason this site has gone downhill right now.
The spores were always kinda stupid so the changes they made for the show have worked for me. But YMMV of course.
I honestly find the mycelia concept sort of fussy and implausible compared to the spores—really, we can watch them grow and move in real time?—but it’s ultimately an extremely minor part of the show, so I’m willing to go with it.
That’s my biggest problem with the mycelia change. It’s an actively motile fungi, which is… well impossible. Granted, a strain of cordyceps suddenly evolving to control humans is impossible to begin with, but at least the concept arises from the real world antecedent. The changes in the show have now added a even more ridiculous evolutionary jump to the equation: a strain of cordyceps didn’t just evolve to infect humans, it’s now an actively motile fungi with ‘mycelium tentacles.’ It’s a conceptual change from semi-plausible enough that it doesn’t distract me too much, to a concept that’s basically supernatural.
Nothing against this scene, which I think was very well handles, but the collective freakout on the internet just seems a bit weird. Are there really people watching this who never watched a zombie/vampire/SciFi body invasion film/series before? Don’t go near a Cronenberg film, is all I have to say.
The whole memo lately seems to be to act extra about things on the internet. Look at the reaction to Avatar.
making these kinds of changes to a story for reasons like “didn’t want to cover the actors face” are really shitty and break my suspension of disbelief. Why can’t we cover actors faces? Woof.
Is this sarcasm
Mazin said in an interview that it was mostly because spores don’t make sense – If they got into the air at all they’d blow around everywhere, not just stay contained to small areas like they are in the game. I guess they could have made up some rule like “spores die after x amount of time” or “you need to inhale x amount to get infected” or something but I’m not sure that’s how spores work and is kind of a meh solution. I definitely hope we still get to see them (Mazin hinted we might see them down the line in a second season) but the tendrils aren’t a bad replacement, and do show how the fungus mirrors real-world fungi in its communication.
“break my suspension of disbelief.”
You are an idiot.
This has always been a thing in Hollywood (with exceptions of course). Spider-Man wears a mask to protect his identity yet he keeps taking it off all the friggin’ time. It’s why any time Tony Stark was in his armour but couldn’t take his helmet off we got the shots that made it look like he was in a small spaceship.One of the things that really stood out in Dredd was that Karl Urban wore the helmet for the entire movie because in the comics the character never removed it, where in Judge Dredd Stallone barely wore it at all.What makes this a little stranger that normal to me is that another exception is Pedro Pascal’s other series where taking off his helmet was so unusual that it was actually meaningful.
In the game the characters wear gas masks because of spores for such a small amount of time that this excuse is laughable.SPOILER
Joel only wears a mask in the following scenes:
– When he and Tess are leaving the Boston QZ and you encounter your first Infected.
– In the subway tunnels after the events of this episode.
– In the hotel basement.
– In the university ground floor.(if I’m forgetting any, let me know)For most of the game, when you fight Infected, you don’t wear a mask. You are only in spore-locations for a small percentage of the gameplay.
I think it would have been a lot less controversial if she had gotten the lighter lit JUST before their lips touched (with tendrils in mouth), but part of me appreciates that they went that far with it because it definitely was a moment. I did think the change from FEDRA to infected in that scene made a lot of sense. As Mazin says, FEDRA wouldn’t show up with an army for those 2 or for a small firefly group, as they do in the game. That was a story choice made for gameplay – so you could run and gun your way out of the state house – not realism.
Aww… no photo? 😀
Honestly the switch to a mycelium network just doesn’t work for me.
The amount of biomass a fungus would need to get around steel, glass and concrete in a city would require more than the entire biomass that zombie mobs consist of. Essentially, at this point in the outbreak you would just have entire cityscapes with old mycelium roots but no runners/clickers unless someone was stupid enough to eat a root.
Thank you. Consider on Day 1 the difference in the short amount of time from when Sarah went to sleep and when she woke up, and how quickly society already fell. Based on how they changed the spread, I don’t think it tracks
Considering in the show the fungus was spread through bread/grain products, it makes sense that all of those infected grain products (pancake mix, cookies, etc) would reach the public and the outbreak would result very quickly after that.
On the show, like the game, the initial breakout was due to contaminated food and then spread by bites. I’m not in love with the “tendril” changes, but even in the game there’s no indication it was spread by airborne spores. Spores are only a consideration in high concentrations indoors.
In the show, the mycelium network doesn’t infect anyone, unless as you note, they are dumb enough to eat it. Why would it have to climb up buildings? It’s in the ground. The largest, heaviest organisms in the world are Armillaria fungi, whose mycelium networks cover multiple square miles per individual.In show, similar to the game, the outbreak starts from people unknowingly eating food infected with the fungus. After that it is spread by bites. I’m not a huge fan of the change, but even in the game there’s no indication it was ever an airborne infection. Yes, spores can cause an infection but apparently only in high concentrations in areas that are easily avoidable for most people. All the uninfected humans live in open air spaces and only worry about spores if they have to enter enclosed spaces, often underground.
It wouldn’t have to climb up buildings, it would have to climb down. A lot of people live and work in very tall buildings in most major cities in the world, so any kind of network would need to create connections downward through hundreds of feet of high rise apartment buildings, skyscrapers, and in some cases dozens of feet of street and building foundation before it would actually reach soil to spread out and connect.
Okay yeah this sounds good watching it now. To those grossed out by the tendril kiss, did you not watch Peacemaker?? Yes it’s unsettling but I already overcame these queasies while watching the Butterflies on Peacemaker invade hosts through the mouth. Visually very similar. It’s invasive and it bothers me but it’s not something I haven’t seen.
I didn’t care for it, and it is a case of the game handling her death more elegantly. Niel Druckmann, who withouth his original writing partners, has become a more questionable choice maker, has now decided Tess can’t just die like a boss- she’s got to be pinned against a wall, and more or less violated. He’s sick.
“has now decided Tess can’t just die like a boss- she’s got to be pinned against a wall, and more or less violated.”
Oh, get the fuck over yourself. She’s not a boss? Have you not WATCHED the show?
Fuck you, you sad fuck.
Tess is not being violated here. She’s already infected, so it doesn’t matter that this Infected is spreading the fungus to her. She’s using this opportunity to take out as many Infected as she can. She’s playing for time by not fighting back against the Infected so it gives her enough time to light the lighter and blow them all up.
Why are you fighting with everyone who correctly clocked the gross sexual undertone of this scene? Once again suggesting you to go listen to the podcast, the directors literally use the word “violating” to describe the kiss. Tess is not playing for time here, she literally can’t move because the fungus has already taken over her brain and is making her stand there with her mouth open. Her feeble attempts to strike the lighter are the last of her willpower trying to fight the infection, which is why it takes her so long. The showrunners *tell* us this is how the moment is supposed to be read. I hated it, and it doesn’t even make sense logistically. They knew she was already infected, so what exactly was the purpose of all that? To “speed it up”? What? It very much feels like they just wanted this scene and tried to force an explanation after the fact. Because as efficient as this method of infection supposedly is, I guarantee you we will still *never* see an infected french kissing a dude.
Weird take.
Anna Torv is always great and her performance is here as well, but I do wish they kept her and Joel’s characterizations as “bad people” less nebulous and more concrete. I think game’s opening establishes Tess and Joel’s relationship, and their ruthlessness in a concise manner. That lends weight to Tess’s death scene where Tess is saying they’ve always been bad people, so maybe Joel can do one right thing now. In the show Tess makes a similar plea to Joel, but you have no concept of how “bad” they were to survive. Joel also was more beholden to following Tess’s lead in the game.Yeah, Joel beats the FEDRA guy to death in the show, but it’s because of a traumatic flashback to his daughter’s death. In the game during that scene, Joel and Tess kill multiple FEDRA soldiers and think little of it. By that time in the game Tess and Joel have already killed a bunch of people. When they catch Robert Joel very nonchalantly kneels on his arm with the intent to break it while Tess questions him, then does so. I suspect the show is going to continue to use these flashback cold opens to show more of Joel and Tess’s history (Torv is credited for 3 more episodes). Like they want to spoonfeed the audience with awful things Joel has done in flashback to not frontload it so much the audience has no sympathy for him. Consequently, Pascal’s Joel has been mostly a cypher so far. It seems like an odd choice to me, because a strength of the game’s narrative hinges on Joel being a selfish, callous murderer from the start. Anyway, for reference:
the audacity to film it as an almost dreamy, romantic moment between Tess and the infected host. .Ew. That wasn’t the way I read that scene at all. I saw it as her bravely standing her ground in order to keep the zombies there long enough to blow the place up. How is she going to do what she intended to do, if she runs out of the pool of gasoline?
(Though I’m not entirely sure why she didn’t realize a spark would likely set off the gas just as easily as an actual flame, but whatever…)