With the premiere less than a week away, The Last of Us HBO TV series’ showrunner Craig Mazin has explained that the decision to replace Cordyceps spores with tendrils was taken as a part of a more realistic approach to the transmission of the franchise’s infamous zombie pathogen. Mazin holds that choosing tendrils as the Cordyceps vector “honors the game” while remaining compatible with fungus biology, and is actually “a bit scarier.”
Series creator Neil Druckmann and showrunner Craig Mazin (of Chernobyl fame) have recently been stressing the show’s loyalty to the original The Last of Us title, and explaining the rationale behind some of the changes it has made from the game. The most prominent of these has been the decision to replace Cordyceps spores with an interconnected network of tendrils. While tendrils were actually part of the game at one point during development, Mazin understands the frustration of longtime fans of the franchise, and comprehensively explains how the tendrils are designed to authentically enhance the realism and the scare factor of the pathogen:
In the game, [the spores] make a lot of sense. The spores tend to occupy a small space, so the characters come across an area where they say “Uh oh… there are spores here – let’s put on our masks.” In reality, if the fungus did spread that way through spores, everybody would be wearing masks all the time, and […] everybody would be infected within a few hours. […] So we wanted to come up with a different vector of infection […] and again, talking to scientists, we came up with a slightly different method that honors the game, feels very similar to the game in really important ways: “biting” matters. But it’s not incompatible with the way fungi actually work. And in truth, I think, we thought it was actually a bit scarier.
The Last of Us HBO TV series premieres this Sunday on January 15.
Source: Extraordinerd
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