The Last of Us: That’s why the series makers have changed the way the fungus is transmitted

• Partly meticulously, HBO’s series adaptation of The Last of Us sticks to the 2013 game.
• However, one important element has been changed to better represent the events and characters: the way the mushroom spreads.
• Instead of spreading via spores like in the game, the Cordyceps uses tendrils and an underground root system.

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Even in the first episodes, the HBO series adaptation of “The Last of Us” impresses with excellent scenes and plot elements that are true to the original. However, the showrunners decided to make a change for the Cordyceps fungus, which turns people into mindless infected people.

While in Naughty Dog’s “The Last of Us” video games, the cordyceps fungus spreads via spores in the post-apocalyptic world, in the series world it’s a lot more vines and an underground mushroom system. However, the series makers had good reasons for this deviation from the template.

That’s why we don’t see any fungal spores in the series

While spores are common among fungal organisms in our world, they are far more deadly in The Last of Us games. They expose you to the Cordyceps fungus, which leads to instantaneous infection. Therefore, survivors always don a respirator when approaching areas heavily contaminated by the Cordyceps fungus.

For the “The Last of Us” series, however, this approach turned out to be too unwieldy and impractical. The main actors and their characters had to wear a mask far too often in the series, which not only made the acting more difficult, but also for the viewer certain distance to the figures.

If the showrunners wanted to be completely realistic, they would have to have the protagonists wear a mask at all times outside the quarantine zone, according to co-showrunner and producer Neil Druckmann. Unimaginable for a multi-million dollar series, and with such an emotional journey it’s important to see what’s going on in the characters’ faces and eyes.

Therefore, this aspect of the fungus was rewritten without further ado. Now you see tendrils instead of spores, as a way of spreading the fungus and the infection. On walls, wrecked cars, dead bodies, and streets, the fungus’s growths and tendrils snake their way, and are all interconnected underground, making them an even greater threat than the spores.

This is how the underground mushroom tendril system works in the series

In our world, numerous organisms, trees, plants, fungi, are connected underground by roots. They exchange water, information and nutrients with each other. Some of these “networks” extend for kilometers. In “The Last of Us” it works the same way, only deadlier for all humans.

In the dystopian world of The Last of Us, the Cordyceps fungus has its own underground system and its tendrils can theoretically expand indefinitely. This makes the fungus something like a single dangerous organism that can react to danger and steer its infected zombies there. Just like what happened in episode 2.

So Joel and Ellie have to be careful where they step and where they are at all times. One false step on a vine and the fungus can alert a horde of infected people. Thinking and showing the fungus as a living organism is a creepy but perfectly staged idea. It defends, develops and expands relentlessly.

So it’s not out of the question, as showrunner Craig Mazin himself said in an interview, that we’ll see the fungal spores from the games in a later season. They would then be another threat for our heroes to contend with and a logical progression from the Cordyceps fungus.