This week our hosts offer a look ahead at future episodes of Don't Encourage Us that will cover Remo Williams (1985), Columbus Day (2017), Chrysalis (2020), One Cut of the Dead (2019), and Invincible (2021), and then they delve into the two launch episodes of the widely-praised HBO series, The Last of Us (2023-), starring Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey. Tag along on their heroic journey across yet another post-apocalyptic landscape as they explore thought-provoking themes of survival, morality, and finding shoes and belts that fit after Amazon stops delivering. Sign-up along with the guys as they join Team FEDRA and discuss theories and predictions for the rest of the season, leaving fans with a sense of dread and anticipation for what lies ahead in this captivating adaptation of The Walking Dead, I mean The Last of Us. Check out the first two episodes of The Last of Us on the Max streaming service. Train alongside Remo Williams on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mm8F_IFK1v8 or Tubi: https://tubitv.com/movies/306944/remo-williams-the-adventure-begins?start=true&tracking=google-feed&utm_source=google-feed Celebrate Columbus Day with the Amazon Audible Audiobook: https://www.audible.com/pd/Columbus-Day-Audiobook/B01N48VJFJ Chrysalis is everywhere but here it is on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Stt9eM22D2E One Cut of the Dead is available to rent on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/0MAW0Y3XGU6AE2OYXS520VAFV8/ref=atv_dl_rdr?tag=justus1ktp-20 Tag along with Invincible's wild ride here: https://www.amazon.com/INVINCIBLE-SEASON-1/dp/B08WJMRHYZ --------------------Warning: Spoilers Lurking Ahead------
This week our hosts offer a look ahead at future episodes of Don't Encourage Us that will cover Remo Williams (1985), Columbus Day (2017), Chrysalis (2020), One Cut of the Dead (2019), and Invincible (2021), and then they delve into the two launch episodes of the widely-praised HBO series, The Last of Us (2023-), starring Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey. Tag along on their heroic journey across yet another post-apocalyptic landscape as they explore thought-provoking themes of survival, morality, and finding shoes and belts that fit after Amazon stops delivering.
Sign-up along with the guys as they join Team FEDRA and discuss theories and predictions for the rest of the season, leaving fans with a sense of dread and anticipation for what lies ahead in this captivating adaptation of The Walking Dead, I mean The Last of Us.
Check out the first two episodes of The Last of Us on the Max streaming service.
Train alongside Remo Williams on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mm8F_IFK1v8 or Tubi: https://tubitv.com/movies/306944/remo-williams-the-adventure-begins?start=true&tracking=google-feed&utm_source=google-feed
Celebrate Columbus Day with the Amazon Audible Audiobook: https://www.audible.com/pd/Columbus-Day-Audiobook/B01N48VJFJ
Chrysalis is everywhere but here it is on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Stt9eM22D2E
One Cut of the Dead is available on Shudder or to rent on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/0MAW0Y3XGU6AE2OYXS520VAFV8/ref=atv_dl_rdr?tag=justus1ktp-20
Tag along with Invincible's wild ride here: https://www.amazon.com/INVINCIBLE-SEASON-1/dp/B08WJMRHYZ
--------------------Warning: Spoilers Lurking Ahead------------------------
Reach the pod at DontEncourage@gmail.com
Discourage us on Instagram @DontEncourageUs
Steve: I just don't want to be disappointed. You know, following a series for a while and then thinking this is Walking Dead, part
Jason: two, right? How do you keep momentum? Put the time and effort in to check out the things we recommended and be prepared so you can be extra angry and cut off the episode even sooner.
Steve: What are you sitting on? Oh, it's one of the tendrils. Oh, let's go. You know what I mean? Yeah. I've
Jason: been spin on 'em every night. They're super comfortable.
Steve: They're super comfortable. I thought they were leaves.
Jason: Welcome to, don't Encourage Us, the podcast where we talk about the big ideas behind fiction projects of all different kinds. Books, movies, TV shows, video games, nothing's off limits. So what's our episode about this week? Our
Steve: episode this week is about the H B O show, the Last of Us,
Jason: and we spoil it. We spoil the first two episodes.
We do,
Steve: we do swallow. The first two episodes there is a fungal outbreak that has hit the earth and they're lone survivors who have to make it through a wasteland,
Jason: so stay tuned for that. Yeah, I've been working on my reality show ideas. I've got a few. I'm actually looking forward to that episode.
Steve: Yeah, that's something we're gonna be talking about in the uh, the near future.
Talking about reality shows, are we gonna do current state of reality shows or reality show ideas based on current properties or what are you thinking?
Jason: I think it'd be fun to do, just hit a few of the reality shows that we've seen and talk about what was good or bad about those, and then peel off into our ideas about what reality shows there should be.
Clearly we're hitting this at the peak of its popularity. We're so timely as usual,
Steve: always. I think the formulas, you know, you cast the most shameless people you can possibly count, right? It would be great to be a fly on the wall in those casting sessions and to see the people that come through there and to see the amount of low IQs and just cluelessness that's just passing through.
Who knows how many people they're looking at. Probably a couple thousand or something to get down to that. Whatever. 12 people. This is like the best of the
Jason: worst. Yeah. I wonder how how many times there's someone who they're like, oh man, you know, he or she is gorgeous. Perfect. In every way. Oh, so amazing and charismatic, but they're not willing to have sex if their sister is in the room next door.
Right out. So they're out. Done. Yeah. Can't use them. Wait
Steve: a minute, this one has morals. Yeah.
Jason: Get 'em outta here. Boundaries. There's no way They don't drink alcohol out. Done. They don't. They don't drink way too much alcohol. Yeah. Constantly. And if they do, they fall asleep instead of becoming problematic, then they're out.
Exactly. Easy exclusionary criteria.
Steve: So speaking of reality shows, The last of us. Oh
Jason: yeah. Well, before we get into that, alright, is there anything else that, any other topics that you want to get into in the coming season of our podcast? I guess we'll call it that
Steve: arbitrarily. Yeah, I think we're gonna have some more pitches coming up where we come up with, uh, for the audience who's not familiar with the show, you're gonna have to go back and listen to some of the previous episodes, mom.
Jason: Sure, sure. They will. They'll go do their homework and be right back. And now they're on pausing. Now they know, please continue.
Steve: Where we pitch a TV show or movie idea and the other person critiques it and we dive deep into where the show or movie idea could go. Or maybe the movie idea could become a series or a show.
We debate what could possibly happen. So that's gonna be
Jason: fun. And then we give up at the end and go back to our day jobs. Shel it. Yeah, this is a fantastic
Steve: idea that we, we could definitely sell. What else you got?
Jason: So definitely. Yeah. Hopefully some pitch. Definitely. Hopefully, hopefully, definitely some pitch episodes.
I know I have a few ideas and they are horribly incomplete and kind of boring, so I've got you to fix that. Look out for that.
Steve: We're gonna have, um, special guests coming on board. Oh yeah. We're, we're gonna do some interviews definitely. Hopefully soon. An actor friend of ours will, uh mm-hmm. Will join us for some podcast. High
Jason: Jinx boy. Fingers crossed. Yeah,
Steve: fingers crossed. Well, we'll hopefully dissect a movie that we love or hate.
And most likely this is someone who loves every movie, so that'll be a
Jason: fun one. So we can dissect him,
Steve: find out the why behind Loving Horrible movies.
Jason: Stay tuned for that. Maybe, uh, bring him back and see how many episodes it takes to wear him down to our level of bitterness. Yeah,
Steve: bitterness, sarcasm,
Jason: just the general malaise.
Get him to finally admit Batman verse Superman. Dawn of justice was not a good film, should not be seen on repeat. That's becoming my goal for 2023, watching that to admit it, that it's no good. I think it's
Steve: impossible. There's no way I've known him now for many years and I've never seen it happen. He loves every movie.
Jason: Yep. I mean, and he would say no to that, but the rest of us would say that.
Steve: Yeah, we know that's five stars. Iran Tomato, 0%, five stars.
Jason: All right. Well, I have some ideas as well. There are a few things that you might want to check out if you're gonna be listening to episodes. So again, probably don't bother, but if you are gonna be listening to future episodes, I'd love to talk about the Destroyer series.
Are you familiar with this? Have you heard about this? I'm not familiar with it, no. So the Destroyer novel series show has multiple authors because it's been handed down over the years. Uh, Warren Murphy, Richard Saper, I think, or something like that. They were the original authors, and I know they had a split at some point, will get into the details.
And I think somebody else's maybe writing them now, but since the 1970s, it's been these like, uh, what do you call 'em? Uh, you know, paperbacks that are like Pulp Fiction. Fiction, pul fiction. Thank you. Pul fiction novels about an American soldier from Vietnam who's recruited by a secret agency after his time in Vietnam, and he is trained as a deadly assassin and sent on missions to undermine and destabilize crime in America by assassinating key figures.
Oh wow. So they've been doing this now since like 1971. Literally, I read the first novel. I've got the second novel, uh, stored on my Kindle. And they're actually free, by the way, and we'll tell you how to find 'em when we talk about it so you can get the early ones for free because it's been that long that the eBooks are just floating around.
The later ones, I think you probably have to get off, you know, have to pay for and stuff like that. But there are ridiculously high number of novels. It's still popular today, so they've been cranking these things out and people have been loving it. They actually made a movie in the eighties. Remo Williams.
The adventure begins 1985. Do you hear about this? I've heard of that one. Yeah, I didn't. So that is, I didn't know that was part of that series. That was an attempt to turn the destroyer series. Again, very popular with a lot of people into a film series, and we'll talk about this as well. The lead of that film recently died and there's talk of Amazon resurrecting, uh, or like trying, taking another swing at turning this into a series.
So it's in development. So we'll talk about that, I hope. Also, I recently discovered the Columbus Day Expeditionary Force Series. Hugely popular. I wanna say they're 15 full length novels, but there are also, I think, two novellas and a Amazon, or sorry, audible, uh, what do you call it? A radio drama. Audio drama with celebrity voices.
Wow. So that's how popular this series is. Craig Allenson is the author, and I listen to the audiobook, RC Bray, he's the voice actor. It's not a, a audio drama, it's just, uh, someone reading a book, which normally I find a little bit, you know, people doing different voices and stuff. It's, I, I don't usually like it.
It's not personally something I enjoy. This is amazing already into book three. I have enjoyed it more than anything that I've listened to in a while since probably the World War Z Audio book. Uh, so really good. So be looking for the Expeditionary Four Series by Craig Allenson. We'll talk more about that, hopefully really, really good stuff.
Um, another one, similar audio drama Chrysalis based on a short story that I think was originally posted in chunks on Reddit. And then, I don't know the story, so I'll research it, we'll talk about it. But the Dust Network, which does, uh, science fiction. I think they originally did audio dramas and then they jumped on to doing short films.
And they recently, or I think a couple of years ago, year and a half, released a full length science fiction movie. So this Dust Network has been trying to kind of build up. So one of their biggest products is the Chrysalis Audio Drama, again with some celebrity voices. Amazing. Highly recommend it. That is probably the best audio drama I've listened to ever.
I don't know, have you seen the Invincible Series on Amazon? I have not. Oh, excellent. Okay. So Invincible tells the story of the son of a Superman like figure who discovers and is teenager and he's in high school and he discovers that he's half this like alien Superman guy who's his dad and half a human.
And he's slowly discovering if he has powers and the extent of those powers. And it sounds like something that isn't particularly original or interesting, but it is. I'm trying to think. Let's see. Last year's Amazon shows, I think it's probably my favorite. Sounds great. Like the boys. Yeah, the boys. Season one was good, but the season last year wasn't as good as invincible in my opinion.
I'd totally a matter of preference and you know, of course there's no way to like argue that, but if you check it out and you like it, uh, there's a couple big twists in it, uh, that make it just a fascinating series. It's highly dramatic. And season two, I think it's supposed to be out late this year, so I thought we might talk a little bit about season one and get people through the gap.
Sounds like a good
Steve: one. Oh, all those sound great. What else you got?
Jason: There's a famous Chinese science fiction author, and I believe his name is pronounced six in lieu. He wrote the Three Body Problem. Which the, uh, producers and I guess producers is the right word of Game of Thrones. They are now in the process of, I think finishing up the three body problem film for Netflix.
Oh, wow.
Steve: Yeah. That's a really popular book. You're not the first person to tell me about it. Several people have told me about this, this series that I should definitely read. Yeah. Sounds really
Jason: fascinating. It's three books and then there's like an addendum written by another author that people kind of consider not part of the cannon.
I enjoyed those three books so much that I have since read everything I think written by this author that's been translated into English. So I have so enjoyed his work. I think he's the best writer alive today in the science fiction genre for sure. Um, most interesting, most original, most. Clever, incredible.
And for him to come out of China the way he did, well, we'll talk about all that kind of stuff and my meaningless opinions when we get to that episode. But if that's something that interests you, I highly encourage you to check out really anything he's written. And if you don't like it, think about why and decide if it's worth trying something else.
Because again, I think he's probably the best writer worldwide that I'm aware of writing today. Uh, and the last thing is something that I know you don't like that I still want to talk about. One cut of the dead
Steve: silence. I'm gonna try to watch it again. I think it'll be round four.
Jason: What's a good word of warning for people who, so it's a 2017 Japanese independent film.
It is extremely well rated by people who actually finish it, although many people do not. So what should we say to anyone who might wanna check it out? Really?
Steve: I mean, if you don't want to ruin anything for anyone, Let them wait until the episode is expect the unexpected. There you go. Probably the best way to Yes.
To describe that movie
Jason: in a nutshell. And wait for the unexpected. Mm-hmm.
Steve: Wait. Or just keep watching. Don't stop watching.
Jason: That's the thing. The first, what is it? What did we say? It was like 40 minutes, 35 minutes. Something like that is one thing. Yeah. I think
Steve: it's, it's about, what is it, 35 minutes? It made him, it's somewhere in there.
Yeah, around that. Cuz that's when I always, um, clock out
Jason: and having gotten past that. So I can say it was well worth it, but it was quite, I don't wanna say grueling, it was confusing that this is such a highly rated film. The first 35 whatever, minutes before the twist, people rave about it being one of the best movies of 2017 because this is terrible, right?
Yeah. I'm still there, but I got it. I got it Eventually. So I've
Steve: watched probably about two and a half hours worth of this, the same part of this movie
Jason: so far. You've rewatched just rewatch re the worst part of it.
Steve: I'm always on, what is it, Amazon or something. It's like, you have 20 minutes left to finish this movie.
And I'm like, shit, I have like an hour and 10 minutes left.
Jason: That's amazing. So yes. So that would be the most controversial and perhaps the most interesting episode. But those are just some of the topics that I hope we get to. We have an exciting lineup coming for you. Yes. This year. I
Steve: know, I know you guys can't wait, so you can use this time while you're waiting to re-listen to the other episodes.
We'll give you the Google Drive link. It's in the description.
Jason: So today, you mentioned it before, we're gonna talk about the new H B O series and it is called, what is it again? The The Last Of Us. Oh yeah, the Last of Us. How about a brief summary of the action so far? There's two episodes out. Can you catch me up as if I'd never seen it, but just, you know, quick and dirty.
Yeah. There's a
Steve: summary's, there's a, A Global Plague Pandemic. So the main character, he's kinda like a ex Special Forces guy. He has a daughter, and long story short, there's a CORs. Outbreak. Cor Decept is the fungal infection that takes over like people's brains, makes them like go completely crazy. The daughter ends up, I don't wanna ruin too much about the story, but basically, so this cor Decept is basically like a zombie plague and it hits the entire planet.
And this is similar along the lines of Walking Dead. So this ex special forces guy who I mentioned earlier, him and his daughter and his brother need to escape their town cuz there's like chaos in the town and they don't know really what's going on at this point. It's just looks like some kind of outbreak.
A plague. She's noticed one of her neighbors has attacked her husband and she's an older lady and there's something growing from her mouth. So three of them, they're going through town. There's complete chaos. People are like looting. There are these zombies running around. She ends up getting shot and she ends up dying and her father ends up losing.
His brother doesn't know where he is, just gets caught up in the, in the storm of, of what's happening, and she ends up getting shot by someone in the federal governments kind of soldier. After that, we move into about 20 years later. So this plague has overtaken the, the entire planet at this point.
Everything's a wasteland, so they haven't been able to come up with any kind of vaccine. There's no cure, there's nothing. So there's an organization called fedra, which I guess is the federal government that still exists, but I guess we'll learn more about
Jason: them later on. Right? Yeah. It's the disaster response, I think is what the DR.
Instead of fema. Oh, I see. I think that's right. I kept trying to read the signs, the Federal
Steve: disaster response. Yeah, and there's this group called the Fireflies, which are the rebels that are fighting against federal.
Jason: Well, Fedra has been heavy handed. Mm-hmm. Right? They've created these settlements and they've protected them.
And so they have policies and procedures in place to protect the remaining humans in different encampments in this wasteland. And the fireflies disagree. They're rebels who think that there's a better way to handle this, or they don't like the government, the military government. So they're fighting back and, um,
Steve: they have a way to detect whether you're infected.
So they've gone to the point now where they can detect if you're infected by this CORs fungus, and if you're infected, you are killed and your body is essentially destroyed. So, In the, the second episode, this is where this action starts. And it turns out that there's a woman who is presumably also a firefly, one of these, part of this rebel group, and she's looking for a battery so they can leave town.
And there's this guy who is also, I guess they don't really explain who he is. He's kind of like, I guess, a criminal within this world. And he ends up selling the battery. That was she. He was supposed to sell to her. Mm. And she ends up meeting up with the father figure from the first episode, and together they're plotting their escape.
But meanwhile, there is a woman who's also a firefly who has this. Girl, Holly, what is she? 14 years old. She's chained up in a room and you don't know really what's going on. It seems like she's infected. Turns out that she is infected by the corsets fungus, but she's not getting sick. So she seems to be humanities last hope in terms of figuring out what to do.
And there's this rumor that there are doctors on the west coast that are trying to figure out a cure and they need to transport her to the west coast. That's basically where we are. And these zombies are attacking them as they're trying to make their way out of the city. They finally do make their way outta the city, but it turns out this is a zombie plague is everywhere outside the gates.
There's still a lot of people. Apparently they can survive for 20 years. Or so, or there's still survivors from the people who have been infected, so they have to make their way past them. And there's just a really interesting part that we find out in the second episode, which is anytime you step on this fungus, say a live fungus that's infected someone, even after you've shot them and there's part of it that's alive and there's any kind of disturbance in the fungus, it's part of that massive fungal network.
So you attract all of the infected people toward you and that's when they attack. So that's okay.
Jason: That was a very, uh, in depth summary of what's happened so far. Well, yeah. Yeah. So before we get into the, um, ins and outs of the last of us, did you know about the last of us before the HBO O series started?
I'd
Steve: heard about it as a video game. That's right. And I saw trailer before it, but I've never played it or anything. Just seemed like an interesting concept. I didn't know it was a, a fungal apocalypse, zombie story. I just knew that it was an apocalypse of some
Jason: of some sort. Yeah, it's an interesting angle on a genre or sub genre that's existed for a long time.
I've not heard of that. I have heard of examples of plants being involved in a zombie outbreak, but not specifically a fungus that I can recall. So if it's been done before, I don't think it's been done exceptionally well, or at least not in a popular way.
Steve: There is one movie, I believe it's a British movie, and I can't remember the name of it.
Maybe the girl who knew too much or something, I forget the name it, but that deals with a plague that's based on a fungus, is that
Jason: right? Yeah. Fungi don't usually get a lot of attention. Attention.
Steve: No, not at all until now. So
Jason: the game 2013 is actually famous and considered one of the best games in the last, I don't know, decade or so.
It got remade and was released as a free game for people who have a PlayStation. Uh, and if you subscribe to the network so you can play multiplayer, they, they give you free games every month to kind of offset the cost of that subscription, I guess, and maybe push other games that have sequels coming out and stuff like that.
So I actually did play the last of us. I played through maybe about three hours, three and a half hours. I played past the point where the series is now, and then I quit and I just never went back. So it was interesting to me to see the series come out for a lot of reasons. So, number one, seeing them develop a, a.
Property or like a movie or series based on a video game and do it well, this would wouldn't necessarily be a first, but it's rare that they successfully adapt that kind of stuff. They usually make changes that kind of completely ruin. It alienate the core audience and it doesn't really make it better.
It's interesting to see how they're approaching this one, but also. I thought the game was kind of slow. I know a lot of people love it. Even the initial part, which is meant to be kind of fast paced and keep you sucked in and they, I think it alternates from first to third person at times, and I noticed the way they shot the first, the pilot, it sort of did that where sometimes it was a little bit of a shaky first person cam where the camera was at face height and you're looking out in a way that maybe not a specific character would, but a person would if they were there.
And other times it was more that, yeah, exactly. For pulled back and viewing them from a distance. So anyway, there was a lot of stuff like that. I'm interested to see how it plays out.
Steve: Yeah, I'm interested too, just to see how this diverges from, let's say a Walking Dead type plot. That's the thing with this type of series that I'm always a little skeptical about, is this gonna be something where it becomes a cash grab and they just, Keep going and going and going and going.
Mm-hmm. Until it just kind of fizzles out. Yeah. Or can there actually be an end to this series that's satisfying for everybody? Mm-hmm. You know? But I have this sneaking suspicion that it's just gonna turn into another Walking Dead scenario where it's just season after season after season. Because the world that it's set up is perfect for it.
Right? Yeah. They can end up taking this girl all the way out west and there's no one there. Mm-hmm. Everyone's died and they're back at square one, and then it becomes them roaming the land again, meeting other characters, et cetera. Just like turning it into Walking Dead part two. And that's my only question about this.
In terms of like the viability of the show moving in a very unique way, is it just gonna become another Walking Dead, or does it have some unique voice? That's gonna come out, cuz right now I'm seeing a lot of similarities to the Walking Dead, obviously, but where does it go from here?
Jason: Yeah. That brings up a really interesting question that I was gonna get into a little bit later.
Are we past the peak of Zombie Stories? Is this coming at a bad time? Is it gonna fizzle out because it's, you know, I mean, walking Dead is ending. There were five spinoffs and one of them is already done. They just announced that the longest running spinoff is also ending. They're launching, I believe, two other series.
One in Paris and one set in Paris, one set in New York. I think that's it. Uh, you know, there've been Walking Dead video games and a variety of other things. Right. But it doesn't seem like the Walking Dead franchise has a ton of steam, and that, of course could change any time. But is that symbolic of people getting a little tired of, you know, zombie stories shuffling past the same territory over and over and over again?
Like, does it make sense? Yeah, it does.
Steve: I mean, I think there's a saturation element, right? You know, sometimes Hollywood jumps on a certain bandwagon. Teen comedies or whatever, and there'll be a 20 teen comedies that come out within a two year time span and then they jump onto something else, whether it's the superhero genre or the horror genre, and it just comes, keeps going around and around.
I think with the zombie genre, it's the amount of unique storylines that they can do around zombies. I guess there are a lot of possibilities, but it seems what they always choose is, you know, a couple main characters are gonna follow through a wasteland, trying to figure out what the cure is. It seems limiting.
Jason: Well, let's talk about the tropes. You forgot a bunch of them cuz I think you're dead, right? Like, first of all, other survivors often the enemy. Yes. That whole idea we're we own worst enemies. Mm-hmm. You know? Absolutely. Very, very rarely is there any discussion or talk of actual survival skills, nor is there any concern for the crumbling infrastructure around them.
Like occasionally something will collapse or cave in, but there's no like, hey, everything's, uh, really rusted and dirty and covered in germs and we don't have a lot of antibiotics. So all these jagged edges could kill us. There's no concern of that. Nobody has really like an expertise in survival skills.
Like, hey, I know, uh, we are all very used to relying on things made by other humans to survive when we're even five seconds away from our home. I mean, forget it. While you're in your home, you rely on things made by other humans to survive. There's no like, Hey, did you know there's an alternative to relying on that thing?
You know, there's none of that. I wanna say zero, but there might be like a tiny portion of a percentage, so there won't be any of that. Right. They're not gonna talk about how to get clean water in difficult circumstances or how to stay warm consistently, keep your body heat trapped when you're sleeping and dropping below freezing.
They're gonna skim over all that stuff. Mm-hmm. And no one's gonna care. What are some other tropes for these zombie could, the modern day zombie stories where you're post the peak or the, um, major thrust of the outbreak. Right. It's sort of settled in equilibrium.
Steve: Yeah. I think it's a lot of what you're saying, where the characters are inherently have these survival skills.
But we don't really know why or where they learn them. They never talk about it. They're not, there's also, they not explained. Yeah, they're not explained. It's also this idea that instantly, everyone just groups up. It's like every person for themselves, it's like, mm-hmm. The bad group versus this other group.
But the group that you're following, maybe they're not so bad after all. They're just trying to survive like everybody else. But then little by little, as the season goes on, or as a movie goes on, it's clear there's a villain who wants to take all the resources or who wants, you know, to lead the zombies toward this other group of people to kill them.
So there's always just this, the general human tendency, I guess it skews really bad. There's not a sense of comradery or teamwork. Within a huge group of people, or if they're,
Jason: even though they're all being
Steve: hunted, they're all being hunted by the same enemy right. The entire time. But they don't, they don't like each other, but they don't like each other for whatever reason.
There's always the mysterious character who has very shady background, where you don't really know if they're good or bad, what they're gonna do with the next minute. There's always that character that comes along. There's this sense of general distrust, especially in this last of us, the, the adult character with the, you know, 14 year old girl mm-hmm.
Immediately is like, you're just cargo and then you're gonna, he's gonna have a turnaround where it's, he, she's gonna see more like his daughter and they're gonna go through that whole thing. But yeah, I think it's pretty consistent throughout these movies. The
Jason: same, they're, they're gonna be able to walk hundreds of miles.
Oh, I forgot about that one. Like, no trouble. They're, they're gonna cover tens, twenties, 30, 30 miles, you know, thirties of miles. Is that an expression now? Yeah, thirties and thirties of miles. Thirties and thirties of miles. No trouble. No one's gonna, you know, pull a muscle. No one's gonna be too sore to get up in the morning.
No, just, they're just gonna keep going. Sleep every single night. No problem
Steve: there. Yeah. And the, the point that you brought up earlier, just, it's so funny that they're not worried about any other type of disease. The only thing they're worried about is zombies.
Jason: They're, they're not even worried about getting sunburned, right.
You don't see 'em slathering sunscreen on their faces and necks. No. I'm talking in general, not this show specifically yet, because I don't know what season it is and whatever, but as the show continues on, I imagine we'll see that they'll walk hundred thirties and thirties of miles end up in, in a different type of landscape just for visual variety.
At some point, if it goes on long enough, they'll have to go north or south just so that it looks different. But they won't need to really adjust. You won't see them like making homemade sunscreen. You won't see them like hunting local wildlife like more than once or twice, you know? And it won't even be like a serious hunt.
It'll just be someone in the woods looking through the, you know, the branches and the distance uhhuh, and there'll be a rabbit and then it'll cut to a rabbit like hanging on a spit. You know what I mean? Uhhuh people are like just turning it over the fire or whatever. They're all just proficient hunters, regardless of where they are.
And the fact that they're being hunted themselves. Yeah, it's no problem. There's plenty of food, right? They're just always full. It's practically a garden of Eden. You know? Once you get rid of the people, there's food everywhere. It's no problem. That's how the, that's why the Native Americans had it so easy.
Steve: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And the only technology that still works somewhat is the radio tower. Uhhuh. Yeah.
Jason: That's the only, the radio towers will work. Yeah.
Steve: It's fine. Like there's still some form of electricity or generator somewhere that are operating these radio towers or networks of radio towers all the time.
Yeah. There's always a person that mans the radio. Yep. No,
Jason: there's no trouble finding shoes that fit. No, that's
Steve: just readily available.
Jason: Yeah. I think maybe to be fair to this, this sub genre, this idea of like post apocalyptic zombie fiction, I guess they assume that a lot of the audience would get bored if a lot of the time was spent talking not so much about their relationships with each other and how the characters gonna learn to hope again or whatever.
But instead, the fact that nobody can find a belt and if you use rope it Chas, you know, so they, they're trying to figure out an alternative for belts because pants really weren't made to last hundreds of years without air conditioning just hanging in a store. You know what I mean? Like,
Steve: so then you'd have episodes named like the one where they look for a belt
Jason: sewing, just quote unquote sewing.
That's the one where they make soup. We've got, we've got this group of 30 people and you're telling me not one of us is a cobbler. What are we gonna
Steve: do? Oh God, that's so funny. No one seems to get. Really, really injured. Like something gets infected and they just die. No main character ever. Yeah. Or, or permanent
Jason: wounds, you know?
Mm-hmm. Like nobody's just limping. And in a group of people who did not grow up surviving in an area, they're living outside and they're being hunted. Someone would be limping all the time for various reasons. Oh yeah. You know, we've all seen that. Sure. You know, someone would be in a lot of pain and they wouldn't be able to focus or deal with it, you know what I mean?
There's just a bunch of things. Someone would be sunburned, somebody would have some weird growth on their arm or mm-hmm. Some scrape that's not healing and they're confused and don't know what to do. I mean, they, are they all medical doctors with like wilderness medical training? No, none of them are. So, yeah, I, I predict a lot of that kind of stuff and me being the only person who cares
Steve: exactly, the one person in the audience is gonna worry about all of the practical things.
There's always gotta be one to ruin it for everyone,
Jason: you know? Again, this is, I know I'm nitpicking and I know nobody else cares. So, uh, we'll put time codes in to skip past this rant. But in episode two, they choose to go through a flooded hotel on the first level. I think it's almost like waist deep water.
Yeah. That is idiocy. Because now your feet and your socks, your shoes, your pants are gonna be wet for the rest of the day. You know? I thought about that.
Steve: Did you? I was like, they're gonna get, what do they call it? Like jungle foot or whatever? Yeah. Foot rot.
Jason: Foot rot. Yeah. Yeah. You're gonna get foot blisters for a start.
If it's cold, your feet are gonna be freezing. You're gonna lose all that body heat. It feels miserable. Mm-hmm. All day long. I mean, they should, at the very least, have been trying to get around it, like try to get to the first floor and get around that. That's problem number one. Problem number two, it's a flooded structure that has been flooded for 20 years.
It is unstable, and they're screwing around. They're like making jokes and knocking things over. Forget that they're being hunted. Do
Steve: you remember that scene where they have like a, a wooden plank between the two buildings and they just walk across it like there's no big deal. Like it just, there's just a wooden plank there where someone walked across it at some point they don't even test it.
Yeah. And it's still obvious that it could just break at any
Jason: moment. Right. And who's making lumber? Was this fresh lumber? Because I understand there is some sort of industrial complex because they've referenced making pills, so maybe it's relatively new lumber, but do you trust the quality control there?
Do you really think post apocalyptic factory that's making lumber is really up to the same standards, or is this thing over 20 years old? I'd been sitting outside for how, who knows how long. If I was anywhere other than in the woods, I would be walking so gingerly and I'd have a long stick in front of me.
Right. I was poking things and testing constantly.
Steve: They don't test anything. What's in that water? How deep
Jason: is that water? Right, exactly. What animals have have now moved in, in this area, in that water. What insects, what bacteria? It's standing
Steve: water. That's the other thing about the zombie or you know, zombie-like movies.
I don't really understand how that fungus spreads and how it doesn't spread so they can shoot one of these creatures in the head. Mm-hmm. And clearly the fungus is gonna just explode out everywhere and they're gonna breathe it in, but
Jason: they're fine. That brings us to another thing I wanted to talk about, which I have subhead, the nature of the threat.
That's a good one. So let's explore what exactly is going on here. So you've actually brought up a couple things. The thing you said earlier was about how the, like tendrils send signals Yeah. To the, yeah.
Steve: The rest of the spore colony. I
Jason: guess the infected, that's I guess the colony. The rest of the colon or I guess the infected, cuz the colony would technically include all aspects of that life form, I guess.
So that sin signals the infected. And the other thing you're bringing up here was, what was it again? What were you just asking about? They don't get infected by shooting these, right? How does, how does it spread and infect them? Okay, great question. So what we know about it is this fictional. Problem or fungus is based on a real life fungus that presently only infects or it's actually capable of infecting most or all species of ants.
And there's different versions of this that affect different insects, but apparently they're capable of infecting multiple insects and killing them. But there are only specific insects that they are capable of infecting and controlling as part of their life cycle. So they infect an organism. Whether it's a grasshopper or an ant or whatever, depending on the na, you know, the particular subspecies, I guess, or maybe they're, they have different, they're from different, uh, genes strain or something.
Yeah, whatever. Yeah. So anyway, they infect the ones that they're, they've evolved to infect, they then grow in inside and through means that I don't fully understand, but they attempted to explain at the, uh, cold open for the series, you know, the talk show? Yeah. Okay. We'll get to that in a second. But they then can guide the organism's behavior by triggering the ant to go to a certain, I'm gonna say altitude, but height and plants then bite down with its pincers, for example, and then die.
And the organism can then grow from that and release spores into the environment, which then may also infect the ant. And in other cases they grow different things and so on. But it's always fatal for the host. So that's the basis for this threat. They point out early that this type of threat cannot harm humans.
Like we're not capable of being infected because they haven't evolved to grow in our bodies. They specifically point to our body heat, but that's not the only obstacle. There are multiple obstacles that prevent a fungus like that from infecting a human. So they say, well, it's evolved in the cold open for episode two.
We learned, I think that it somehow infected grain, which then infected humans, or it used grain to transfer spores to humans, or that's implied. Uh, humans got infected and it must have happened enough that the fungus has evolved in order to infect a human, develop the ability to control humans by sort of shuts down higher order thinking.
It drives humans to become a aggressive in ways that are spread the fungus to other hosts. Yeah. So to answer your questions, we have to explore it. I think a little bit more broadly, first question was around how it sends signals, and I do not understand that. So I actually did a little reading and nothing I read explained it.
My point is, fungus does not have a central nervous system. Right. And a central nervous system like a human has can carry an essentially a charged eye on signal, electric signal from one point to another very, very quickly. Not light speed or anything like that, like not anywhere near on that scale, but from a human's perspective, very fast.
Mm-hmm. But not so fast that it would be instantaneous. And that's with that kind of a nervous system, to my knowledge. There are no plants or fungi that have that kind of system. Does that make sense? It does
Steve: make sense. It also makes sense in the context of wouldn't they need to be physically connected, all of them in order to send the signal?
Cause how else does it send? I don't think they are, is what I'm saying, tell they're running around. They all seem to be separate entities, each infected person. I don't see them being connected in some invisible sort of way, so I don't really understand how that signal would be carried across all of them.
Okay,
Jason: so in the scene where they explained first, if you step on part of this fungus, like a tendril of this fungus, it can send a signal apparently instantly, which is very confusing to me, very far away. Like they make a point to say really far. Mm-hmm. I don't know. What do you think that was? Like quarter mile?
Steve: Yeah. Something like
Jason: that. Sure. Okay. So somewhere in there, maybe half that to a quarter mile, let's say. Just to keep it from being too crazy instantaneously or near, instantaneously to a bunch of, uh, infected hosts, humans or former humans, that they were laying on the ground. Yeah. Was the implication that they were laying on tendrils and the signal went from one point in the tendril to another point?
Or is it more like there's some sort of intelligence that then can guide where the signal goes? In other words, if you step on a tendril, does it go in every direction? Simultaneously and any infected that are connected to that tendril are informed, or does it only go in one direction and second part, are they connected to it or not?
If they were lying on it and somehow that allowed, like whenever a infected lays down some of the fungus infected tissue, like sort of connects in a meaningful way with the network, right? Or the system. That's what I assumed, but I couldn't see clearly. I didn't
Steve: see any of those tendrils because they would've stepped on those tendrils as they walked in and they were walking all around that area where presumably these infected were when they walked into that facility because he opens the door and he sees that they're outside where they had just been so presumably they would've stepped on tendrils as they were there walking around the area.
That's what seems so strange to me, like, how's this signal ca being carried in the first place? I think
Jason: for that one, they would say that the experienced people leading the party, the two people who go outside of the gate all the time, they can distinguish between active or inactive. That's what
Steve: they tried to do.
They tried to do that right where he walks in, he's like, oh, it's dry as a bone. The tendrils are dead. He established the fact that these tendrils were dead, but all of a sudden inside they weren't dead and they had sent this signal all the way out to these other, yeah,
Jason: I don't know. And well, so presumably they're not constantly stepping on ones that they have learned trigger an alarm response.
So I'll give the show that I think they at least tried to kind of explain that. I remember what you said. I don't know how to explain it. My guess would be he just made a mistake, right? Mm-hmm. He hadn't seen some that died, and this one was in the process of dying. Or the ones, the people who were infected somehow, you know, reactivated that tendril or something.
It was confusing. He, he made a mistake. But what we don't understand is how do signals travel? Between pieces or functional elements of this fungus. So that's weird. And I'm also unclear if there's supposed to be some sort of primitive intelligence sort of behind everything. They
Steve: kind of allude to that. I hope that they explain it at some point a little
Jason: bit more.
Yeah. I don't know that they will. I mean, they often don't bother, you know, they kind of make it a point as showrunners to say, oh, and we're intentionally not gonna explain how this happened or where this virus comes from because it's more interesting for people if they don't know or whatever. And of course, as anyone's who's listened to this podcast before, which would just be you.
Mm-hmm. Um, knows that I hate that kind of stuff. But on the other hand, what are you gonna do an entire episode where you're lecturing? They probably feel like they've already done too much of that. Yeah. But this is the kinda stuff that I get distracted by. Yeah. I
Steve: mean, it would be interesting if they explain that because it's gonna affect everything moving forward.
Right point now
Jason: that that's the point. You don't know now that when people are in danger, if you don't understand the rules,
Steve: And now that they established this, you're gonna be looking out for that the entire time. Yeah. But if they've just established it as kind of like a throwaway fact that doesn't come into play later, then that's an issue as well as they're roaming the land and these things are everywhere.
They're gonna be tripping over these 10 tendrils. I agree with that. You're constantly Right.
Jason: Right. Is there any reason why they wouldn't be underground or covered by leaves or something like that? Again, good argument for that stick I was talking about. Right. You gotta get the stick you to sweep. Sweep in front of you a little bit cuz why would the tendrils always be above any kind of detritus?
Mm-hmm. You know, all the way, there's not a layer of dust or dirt that got dumped on the part right where you are. I don't know, like I would think you'd be stepping on these things nonstop,
Steve: but it's gonna come into play when convenient for the story. And that's, that's gonna be, if this is foreshadowing, that's what we've got.
You know, we've got our hero. You think everything's fine? Things have been calm for a while. They've been walking for a while. There's been those moments where, you know, you're really getting to know the character and then all of a sudden, uh oh, what's that? Oh, what are you sitting on? Oh, it's one of the tendrils.
Oh, let's go. You know what I mean? Yeah.
Jason: I've been spit on 'em every night. They're super comfortable.
Steve: They're super comfortable. I thought they were leaves
Jason: a little squishy, but they're not wet. It's perfect.
Steve: Yeah. I don't know. I think this is suspension of disbelief
Jason: time. Yeah. I mean, at some point it becomes like, um, infinite zoom.
There is no point at which all scientific questions are answered. Now, there is a point to which I'm satisfied, but it's not gonna be the same for everyone. So as a showrunner, I'm sure it, it's an impossible task to find that appropriate level. But to me, so much of the plot revolves around the rules that govern this thing.
Mm-hmm. You know, like how to understand solutions. The solutions they come up with to problems can either be really interesting or just feel hand wavy. Because if there aren't established rules that govern the threat, then when they come up with something really original that you didn't think of, or that you've been thinking of or thinking about and, and yelling at the screen, you know, it's not as much fun because it's just sort of like, well, this week we learned that you can actually escape because they're allergic to salt.
Right. You know? Oh, that would've been interesting to know, but why would they be allergic to salt? You know, maybe that's what the writers needed to do to get out of an episode. So then the shotgun
Steve: blast to the head question. Mm-hmm. When these fungal spores fly into
Jason: the air. Ah. So how worried should people be if they're not bitten, I guess is the question you're asking?
If they infect you by putting it in your mouth, or I guess your bloodstream, although it's a fungus, so maybe it just gets under the skin, I guess is what probably that makes more sense. So that's how we've seen people infected. Did I miss anything? No. Okay. So if one of them gets, um, ripped to pieces in front of you or just breathes on you, like grabs a hold of you and scratches your skin, are you worried?
See, I just, I just dropped you into the show. This world of the show, you've seen both episodes. You had a, a fight with a clicker. One of these zombies grabbed you and you didn't bite you. You were able to fight it off with the poking stick that I recommended. You always have with you. You impaled it, it's dead, and you look at your arm and you have fingernail scrapes because either fingernails stop growing when you get infected, or they all have weird, curly long Guinness pork or fingernails.
But regardless, you've got a five or four fingered scrape all the way across your forearm. Are you concerned that you're infected or do you just, uh, throw some back teen on that and
Steve: move on? I think according to the rules of the show, I think I'd throw Bactine
on
Jason: it and move on. I think that's what they're establishing.
It doesn't matter what they do to you if they don't French you or lock their teeth on you. But why? If it's a fungus, would that make sense? There's
Steve: my question, right? Isn't it fungal spores? Fungal spores or whatever. Yeah. Right. And in that movie that I mentioned that
Jason: I eps to my knowledge, does not spread by biting.
Mm-hmm. Like insects don't bite each other to spread it. Now again, I'm not an expert, but at least that much seems clear. So like you said, if you shotgun blast one of 'em to the head and you get bits all over your face, are you
Steve: worried? It's really odd because first it's like, Okay. They're fungal spores.
That's probably the basics around fungus that I always thought they spread because they're releasing spores into the air and they're landing somewhere. Mm-hmm. Or presumably being inhaled. But these are totally different. They have to, those tendrils have to enter your mouth. They must not be
Jason: airborne.
They must have traded the ability to survive in the air for whatever abilities they gain to infect humans, I guess. So you're only infected if it's direct skin to skin contact. Because why would it get, I mean, again, bloodstream doesn't really make sense for a fungus, right? Unless I don't. I mean, it wouldn't think so, but affect you using your bloodstream.
But it might use your bloodstream for other purposes. But again, for infection, you would need to expose acal membrane or to something airborne. Break the epidermis, but it's not airborne, right? We're saying it's not air. So episode three, if a bunch of people get infected because of a breeze, then we know that this is all wonky uhhuh.
But let's assume it's not airborne, so you get scratched. You're not worried, or you are worried if it gets in your ear or your nose or your eye.
Steve: Are you worried? I mean, in the real world. Yes. In the right, in the show, according to how they've set this up, I've only seen two things. Someone gets bitten or like when that woman died in the second episode mm-hmm.
Then those tendrils went into her mouth. That's how you get infected. Everything else seems to not infect you a scratch doesn't seem to infect you. So there's something in their mouth. They're delivering this through bites or the tendrils coming out of their mouth. I haven't seen anything else. Have you seen anyone getting scratched and turning into one
Jason: of these things?
No, but I think you're making a good point. So for reasons that I don't understand, the mouth of an infected is the only thing you need to worry about is that other than, you know, obviously trauma, blunt force trauma from their curly fingernails. Mm-hmm. Uh, but other than their mouth, you don't have anything to worry about.
Is that right? Seems to be the case. Yeah. It seems so. If you took, you grabbed one of those weird faces and you took a big bite out of the top of it, right. Their mouth didn't, don't worry about it. Be wor, don't
Steve: worry about it. Okay. I mean, I, I don't know. It seems so odd because you're breaking all the rules, right?
If it's spores and you blast one of them, you're gonna shoot spores out everywhere because it's presumably alive. It's a, a living fungus. But then if they scratch you, you're not gonna get it. Apparently it's not airborne either, so it's only the mouth that transmits it. Okay. All right. Because, you know, they're really close to his face too when he's fighting them off.
Right? It's like
Jason: breathing right on, right? No, no, no. Yeah, it's gotta be mouth to mouth, cont or mouth to skin or mouth to you. Contact. All right. I'll just accept that as a rule. They're basically harmless other than blunt force from flailing their arms around in weird ways, just running into you at full speed.
Right? But other than that, if you were adequately padded or significantly larger, you're fine if you just put a muzzle on it. There shouldn't be an issue. Yeah, you're gonna be, that's right. Is that right? It seems to be the case. Yeah. So far. Far. Okay. All right.
Steve: Maybe. Maybe they think if they make it airborne.
There's too many other problems to contend with in a plot like this. Right? Everybody's
Jason: dead, right? Everyone's dead or in a sealed environment, or you're dead. There's no wandering around.
Steve: Or the plot would be based on those who are somehow immune like that girl. And some people are just immune to infection and they're just part of this whole possible solution to the problem that they can develop some type of, I dunno, a vaccine against a fungus or an antidote or whatever you'd call it.
So
Jason: that brings us to the next part of uh, or the next subsection. Under nature of the threat, the infection, the fungus is not the only threat. There's also Fedra and fedra is a government. Paramilitary. I think probably it's a response group, maybe it's military response group for the emergency. And they are apparently, um, protecting Americans.
I would assume it's outside of America. Things are gonna be different, which I don't know if we'll ever see that, but might be more interesting. Fedra has been, uh, basically a, um, what do you call it, a military, like a coup, like a military coup or something? Basically. Yeah, it's just a military government and they have been applying for harsh methods.
So based on the first episode, cuz we don't really encounter them that much in the second episode. Right. There's not too much about Fedra. No. Okay. No. So in the first episode, did they seem unjustified in their methods? Like did you get the sense that Fedra is the bad guy based on their actions in the pilots?
That's, that's
Steve: a good question. I mean, they wanted you to believe that,
Jason: right? It, they're. It's supposed to be, but based just on that alone, what you saw, would you be like, Fedra has gotta go? I wouldn't,
Steve: no. I mean, everything they've done seems logical. They don't want the infection to spread. Right. When someone has the infection, they have to deal with it, unfortunately, and then, and up killing
Jason: that person right there.
There's no solution, there's no cure. And eventually, very quickly that person will become a threat. Mm-hmm. So when they detect infection, they execute the person and burn the body, right? Yeah. As far as we know, I don't really have a problem with that. Given their very presumably limited resources and ability to cope and their mission, which is to save humanity, right?
Steve: Supposedly. But then you have this rebel group going against them.
Jason: Well, what else has Fedra done? Right? What do we see? We saw that Fedra has strict rules. There's a curfew. There's a curfew. Execute. People who break the rules, uh, publicly. Mm-hmm. They hang them as a way to like maintain discipline and obedience or whatever word you want to use and, and maintain order.
Steve: What else? There's some corruption there with the, the guy that's trying, buying drugs. Yeah. Buying drugs. Oh, yeah. Okay. But
Jason: that's on, that's not on the like top level. Right. On the ground level. One of their soldiers is a oxy addict or whatever. Mm-hmm. And he makes a trade illegally. Yeah. Obviously for drugs.
Okay. But that's not fedra
Steve: presumably. But that's, that's the thing. I'm not seeing Fedra being the villain yet, but
Jason: clearly there's supposed to be this like really bad government. Oh. Like they have work gangs, essentially, but they pay people. They've created an economy. When there is a firefly attack, they respond brutally.
But other than that, I haven't seen anything. They're making sure everybody eats. They're keeping everyone alive. That's my point.
Steve: I haven't seen them do anything that I would say, well, in that situation, they shouldn't be doing that. They seem to be doing everything that you would think some type of government body would need to do, right?
Or else there'd be mass chaos where everyone would just kill
Jason: each other, wouldn't, there wouldn't be anyone left, right? Yeah. There would be a, a small group of survivors here or there that would probably die out
Steve: periodically. So what does the insurgency really. After. Okay,
Jason: so let's talk about the fireflies uhhuh.
So the fireflies are fighting against Fedra because they think Fedra is too heavy handed. And by the way, the way most movies and TV shows establish that an organization like Fedra is bad is that they usually show either ultra unnecessary violence and or the head of the organization living high on the hog.
Mm-hmm. He's got four Rolls-Royces and it's like, uh, one side of the wall. It's people starving to death and they're all dirty. Mm-hmm. And you know, miserable. And then literally on the other side of the wall, he's there at his pool with like two white tigers and you know, all these women in bikinis and he is got big aviators on and smoking a giant cigar and somebody brings out like this amazing platter of food and then he gets angry and swats it away because it's missing the right kind of canape or something, you know?
Right. That's usually how they establish Fedra in this case is the bad guy, but they didn't do that. So I'm a little unclear why the fireflies who are blowing stuff up and like stealing things and destabilizing what seems to be a very fragile island of the last of humanity. Mm-hmm. Right. It's practically in the title why there are good guys.
Like, that's just bizarre. I
Steve: don't understand it either, and it's so, or maybe they're also bad guys, but it's such a flimsy way to establish. Fedra if they're trying to establish him as a villain, which they clearly are, and they want us to be on the side of these fireflies, but I'm just seeing an insurgency that's gonna destabilize humanity altogether and bring ruin
Jason: to everybody.
Right. And then everyone's dead. It's not like fireflies like, Hey, we have this whole, when we have a hospital, we're
Steve: building where we're gonna save these people. And fed's blowing it up.
Jason: Right? Like, like that. When, when we went to, um, like the Firefly headquarters mm-hmm. If they had had elaborate plans for rebuilding the city, you know, with like playgrounds and childcare and like hospitals and like, and the Starbucks and, yeah.
The necessities, you know, like, oh, and everyone will go have, there's a giant dining hall and everyone will go there and eat together and sing songs every night. And you know, or if they had some sort of like solution to the problem, then I'd be more inclined to think that the little girl was serving some sort of purpose in this.
But from all I can tell, the mission is to hand her off someone who is, I guess, immune to a group of people that don't really have a better solution. Mm-hmm. We've been told specifically, there is no possibility of a vaccine or a cure. They've actually said that in both episodes now. Mm-hmm. So then this girl, good for her, right?
But unless there's like dozens or you know, thirties and thirties of other people who thirties are also immune, then I don't really see how that does us any good. And Fedra seems to be the only group that could actually support those people long enough for them to become the new dominant version of humans, right?
Mm-hmm. And survive. I think we're
Steve: gonna have to get into more of like fedra backstory. Order. Yeah. I,
Jason: I think they will. Yeah. And he'll be like, the whatsoever next cold open or whatever will be fedra, like rolling over humans in tanks or something. Maybe
Steve: the fireflies were close to coming up with some type of cure or had a plan that was working and Fedra came in because of his military.
Who That happened?
Jason: The leader of Fedra with his cigar. Yeah. It was like, kill 'em all. You know, I just stepped on the vile. Right. Cause it, I like it like this for some
Steve: reason. I mean, they can't let this one go right. For the rest of the series where they're just bad guys. Fed's after us run, you know, like they can't, they're not gonna do that.
I would hope. Unless this is it and they're trying to just decide like, these guys are real bad. You've
Jason: seen it. Let's move on. Yeah. That actually brings up two points. Number one, this is a very faithful adaptation, which I wanna talk about a little bit in a minute. But they did make one change, and from what I understand or remember from years ago, the woman.
Who gets killed originally in the game. I believe Fedra soldiers kill her. That's a this one significant change. Yeah. Right. So that would, you know, at least from the perspective of a player who's playing the game make you hate Fedra Moore. Mm-hmm. Because when you play the game, you're hiding from feds so it immediate like agents as you're escaping and you're going through like junkyards and stuff.
So that immediately makes them the bad guys. They're going to arrest you or kill you or whatever, and game over. So that's all the justification you need. It's different than a series, but in order to really drive the point home they had. Fedra killed your ally in the game like that. You know the character that's following you around and helping you.
I guess that makes sense. But they did deviate from that and I wonder if that's gonna lead to a blind spot where they don't recognize that Fedra hasn't really been established as bad given the circumstances to everyone who's just watching.
Steve: That's a really interesting point, and it'll be interesting to see how that plays out.
I think a federal backstory is gonna be just a necessity if they wanna keep you hating Fedra
Jason: or they're gonna have to do something really bad, right? The people we care about or don't think are also bad, but I
Steve: think they're maybe assuming that you already think they're really bad. Yeah. Because of the girl dying in the, in the first and and them hanging episode.
So that's
Jason: enough. That's what I'm concerned about with this. And then the other thing is, and this is a question, so as you saw, they made a point, oh actually, and this is probably why we're supposed to think Fedra is bad too, but remember the boy. Who kind of, uh, shuffled into camp. Yep. And he was clearly infected.
And then they did the little scan on him and it turned red. So then next time, and they inject him with something. Next time you see him, his body's being tossed mm-hmm. Onto a burning pile. And that's I think, our introduction to, or a reintroduction to the main character. So anyway, here's my question for you.
Has Fedra been accidentally executing humans who are immune to this, to this, uh, fungus?
Steve: Oh, I hadn't thought of that. But that, that would be something,
Jason: right? Because if they have the ability to tell that you're infected, and we saw like later that the 14 year old girl did actually trigger the same infection, alarm.
The guy scanned her and it also came up red. Remember? Sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So immune, if she's immune, immune people do actually trigger a red response, at least. I don't know if they're infected for the rest of their lives, or they're just infected for like two weeks or a month or something. But it doesn't matter because when new people show up at a settlement, I assume they're all scanned and if they've recently been out in the wild, odds are they're probably, you know, they've been bitten or whatever.
Mm-hmm. So they're gonna show up. And is it possible that the show was trying to say that little boy, for example, would have been fine if they just helped him out? He wouldn't have succumbed. That's a
Steve: really good point. Maybe they're really trying to get us to think that, if you think about that scene, it looks like he'd been wandering around for ages, so presumably infected for a really long time.
Mm-hmm. And was he exhibiting really strong symptoms of an infection according to the chart? Traumatized. No, he was, he looked traumatized and slow. Right. So you weren't really sure until they scanned him. Right. Whether or not he was actually infected. And you bring up a really good point. So maybe that's part of the issue with the fireflies, maybe early on they wanted to make a determination between someone being infected and going full on zombie and someone being infected and possibly being immune.
And Fedra just wants to kill everybody who's infected. And that becomes a, a huge war between the fireflies and, and Fedra cuz Feder just indiscriminately kills everyone who they deem infected without making a delineation between infected and immune and infected and heading towards
Jason: zombie Bill. Do you think that the conflict between Firefly and Fedra is entirely around this idea that Firefly, or maybe they both know that some humans are immune and Fedra doesn't care and is killing them and Firefly is collecting them and an effort to try to turn it into some sort of a cure that could be something that could that be going
Steve: on in the background?
Yeah, it would explain a lot, you know? Yeah. And I think that's something that you could really kind of hook into as an audience member. Like, yeah, that's clearly really evil to just indiscriminately kill anyone who's infected knowing that there's a, a possibility that they may be able to make it. So maybe that's what they were trying to tell us in that scene with the boy.
Maybe
Jason: it's quite possible. My, my concern is that alternatively they were planting a seed not to reveal the source of the conflict or the motivations behind a firefly or any of this other stuff we're talking about. But because at the end of the series, their end game is for the audience to find out, or the characters to find out that there are a lot of humans who are immune.
You know, one out of a thousand or one out of a hundred thousand or something like that. Mm-hmm. So there are enough of them, or there's even a community of them, and this girl can join that at the end. And it's humanity's hope. That's what I'm concerned about. Because that's not a good ending. Not for
Steve: this.
No, no. But then alternatively, could it be a situation where they just continue on and on and on? Like I said, like they head out there, the facility has been destroyed. It was just a rumor after all, no one's working on a cure. Now we're back into what's gonna happen. Our two main characters, they're gonna be fighting these zombies for another season and then another season, and like turning it into a walking dead kind of scenario where they're wandering the earth and
Jason: no one and the zombies aren't the point.
It's just humans dealing with humans and it's less convenient to kill each other than usual.
Steve: I have a feeling that it's gonna go in that direction if it's extremely successful, which it seems to be so far, and they can't kill the cash cow. I have
Jason: never read a summary of the story or the game sequel. So there's a lot of material for them to use and if they stay faithful to the games and the cinematic elements of the games, then I imagine a lot of people know where all this is going.
Yeah, maybe not in the end, but certainly, maybe as long as the show exists or run, you know, for the full run of the show, maybe they already know because at the rate they're going, I don't think they're gonna cover the second game, assuming they stay true to, you know, the original story. I wouldn't imagine they would get through the second game before the end of like season three or so.
I don't know. I don't know how many episodes we're gonna have or how fast the pace is gonna go, but usually it takes a lot longer. It's hours and hours
Steve: of stuff. I do think it has all the, uh, a lot of game winning elements in terms of a, a series. The acting's great. Mm-hmm. I think the camera works.
Excellent. I think the relationships between the characters are pretty solid, so it's got that going for it. That first episode was really well done where the girls discovering what's going on. Mm-hmm. And the pacing of that was really, really good. But time will tell where this heads, you know, I just don't want to be disappointed, you know, following a series for a while and then thinking this is Walking Dead,
Jason: part two.
Right? Like how do you keep momentum? You know, game of Thrones in a lot of ways kept momentum because I think there were multiple stories happening simultaneously. Mm-hmm. So when you hit a natural lull where you need to cover a lot of ground or exposition, or you just need time to pass, then they could spend whatever time they need to in an episode on that storyline, but then jump to other storylines that were peaking mm-hmm.
In that moment. Or even create new elements, uh, or new storylines that could re you know, keep the episodes moving. But in a story like this one, the scope's pretty big, you know, I mean worldwide, I guess, but we're not following people. Multiple groups of people we're following just so far, I think two people.
Mm-hmm. So, you know, it's if in order for that to stay Interesting, that's tricky. It's easier for a film, it's harder for a series, I think.
Steve: Do you think we're just gonna continuously follow
Jason: these two? If I were a showrunner, I would start by being faithful to the show and then I would introduce characters who were in different places.
Mm-hmm. Like not, oh, they're back at the Fedra Run City, Boston, or wherever that was, where initially were not there, but completely removed. Not such that there didn't seem to be a connection, or that they couldn't influence each other someday. But I would absolutely have a group that is thirties and thirties of miles away doing something totally different that seems perhaps like it could be important and connected down the road.
But right now is just a different thing. Otherwise, there's gonna be an episode where they're just walking for a long time. There's gonna be a lot of episodes where they're just walking through ruins, or they're trying to find a group of people to find the next group of people and the next group of people.
Or they find another settlement and another settlement. It's like Walking dead.
Steve: It's, I was just gonna say, it's exactly like Walking Dead. They're trying to find food in an abandoned grocery store, and all the action takes place there. They're trying to find medical supplies, right? They're trying to get a vehicle running.
I think after a while it's just like, where are you gonna take it if you're just following two characters and there's only so many things they can get into, and that. Wasteland.
Jason: Right, right. There'll be an episode where they're stuck indoors for most of it because it's raining, you know, too hard. There'll be, uh, some sort of a bridge that's washed out or something, you know what I mean?
Like it's, if it were me again, it's not, and I'm sure they're doing a much better job than I ever would, but I absolutely would introduce other plot lines, other characters, other stories that are doing radically different things. I might even have like an arctic base of people trying to survive there. I might have an island where the fungus has never made it there, and what happens is it's slowly introduced or sneaks in somehow or something.
Just very different stuff, you know, I might even like have. Something about animals. How are other animals responding to this? And I might have a human or group of humans dealing with animals and how they've reacted to, you know, just very different, separate. So you can jump from one to the other and if these two main characters that we've been following need to cover another 30 miles, we don't have to either jump cut like it's not happening.
Mm-hmm. You know, because that's what four days of travel for them. Right, right. Presumably five, maybe to do it safely could be a week. Are we gonna jump cut that 30 miles or do we just go follow Arctic Base Gamma, where the last 20 people, the scientists have figured out another clever way to stay alive another week and they're trying to do something about, you know what I mean?
Or so whatever. They're not getting along with the military personnel there or something. I know it's a totally different show when you do that, but how are you gonna keep this going? It's interesting
Steve: to have that going. Presumably there's scientists all around the world that are trying to come up with a cure.
Maybe one of 'em does come up with a cure, but they can't get the word out cuz there's no
Jason: internet or whatever. People think of a cure as like you take it and you're back to normal. But that's, I mean, come on. What if the cure isn't as refined or processed as it would be if, you know civilization still existed?
Mm-hmm. And it has horrible side effects or consequences where it kills a certain percentage of people. There's a lot you can do with that. That would be interesting and dramatic and give us a break from, you know, walking through empty towns or you have to keep
Steve: taking it in order to keep the fungus of bay.
Right. And you have to get more and it keeps running out and you know, there's conflict and people trying to get a hold of it. There's mercenary groups trying to deal it. Mm-hmm. On the quote unquote black market. Everything's
Jason: a black market, but, or, or needles become a rare commodity. Uh, and it's the only way to, you have to inject it in your testicles and it makes your hair fall out.
So a lot of men don't want to take it. Don't go to this doctor. I mean, there's just a lot you can do that I guess hasn't been done a lot. This is a series. They're not, this isn't a movie. Can you
Steve: really follow these two? Are these two characters so compelling that you're gonna be able to follow just them for episode after episode, season after season?
Jason: Her snarkiness is not gonna get annoying. Right. You know, like, Hey, he's trying to keep you alive. So, uh, maybe can it. You know? Yeah. And is the
Steve: nature of every episode ever gonna change? No. Unless you introduce other characters in other situations and you follow other storylines, otherwise it's, you know, you know,
Jason: they will though.
But it's gonna be like, oh man, more humans who are bad, you know,
Steve: in a fight for resources. And there's that whole thing and right, oh,
Jason: we can solve your problem, but first we need you to do something for us. Sneak into this thing and steal that, or do whatever and then come back. And then we actually don't have what we promise, or, you know, they've already kind of laid a roadmap for this.
And again, I know they're following an existing property, so for a lot of people, that's what they want. But I don't know, I just direct you to my earlier question is, are we kind of over the hump of interest, you know, for this? I mean, we weekly are,
Steve: I don't know if the audience is Mom, what do you think? Uh,
Jason: yeah, text me when you get there.
Steve: Yeah, we'll see. We'll see what they end up doing. But more to come, yeah, on future, future episodes. About future episodes.
Jason: All right. Anything else to say about the last of us on H B
Steve: O? No, I think we'll just have to wait and see. See if it turns into the last of us walking dead. Part 10.
Jason: Yeah, exactly.
Seriously. Cuz it really could, honestly, it's like Rick Grimes with his kid.
Steve: Mm-hmm. You know, gotta say it's a pretty similar setup. The only big difference here is the, uh, the nature of the, of the virus not being a virus and being a fungus.
Jason: Maybe every episode. Will be like, the cold opens, I think twice in a row have been about the nature of the infection or the, um, fungus both times.
So maybe that's what they're gonna do. I read something that the producer, or the, I think it was the producer said originally their idea of a cold open for episode two was to show you the backstory, like the, um, outbreak story, what happened to the woman Uhhuh, you know, that's in the first two episodes.
So they were gonna show her like losing her family or whatever. And that makes a lot of sense because of what happens to her in that episode. Mm-hmm. So you want to build, you know, an affection for that character very quickly, and that's a great way to do it. But they chose not to, and instead they showed more sciencey stuff.
Now they really, really, really skimmed the absolute surface of the sciencey stuff for that. Mm-hmm. So I don't want to give 'em too much credit, but maybe that's what the episodes are gonna be more and more about is revealing the nature of this part of the threat. You know, maybe we're gonna drift away from like rival groups of humans that are both equally stupid and likely to result in the few remaining people dying and instead shift to like, no, this isn't just your usual zombie threat.
This is a complicated, nuanced threat and solutions exist.
Steve: Let me ask one more question. What did you think about the her death scene and what was happening there? Her and the zippo lighter? Trying to light the lighter. I thought it was pretty straightforward. Do you think that she opened her mouth that way toward that zombie that was headed toward her because she was already infected and like she was just compelled to do
Jason: that.
Oh, interesting. I read it as their purpose is to infect, so the fungus is manipulating them to aggressively infect hosts. And apparently it can't detect if someone's already infected, but if the person isn't fighting, then it isn't violent. Yeah, I see what you're saying. I guess there's no real evidence of that.
It was just the, maybe that makes sense.
Steve: Thought. You know, the thing with the zipper lighter, which I just kept thinking about, was the fact that, you know how they just flip clothes so easily? Mm-hmm. And I was just thinking, why didn't she rip off or try to rip off the lid? Because I thought when she drops it, it's just gonna, oh, snap shut.
You know? Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Like it would just like Interesting. Yeah. It would just tumble out of her hand then close and nothing would happen. That's what I kept thinking was gonna happen. How did it know she was
Jason: there? I think it, it was one of the blind ones, right?
Steve: That one could see. Ah, thank you. It's eyes were still okay.
I looked away for, I was curious about that too. I was too scared and I pulled up and it could hear her right. It could hear her with the lighter, I guess standing there. Okay. It turned, yeah. I was wondering that too. At first,
Jason: I was curious to get into, is that supposed to be sonar? Are they echo locating the clickers or like what's going on there?
Maybe their hearing is really good. I didn't see any giant ears, but I don't even think there's a point to get into that kind of stuff. Maybe the cold open for next week's episode will be an explanation of how these things like detect hosts at all. Yeah. We're gonna
Steve: get all the science in probably 25 different episodes and finally understand
Jason: what's going on.
Yeah, sure. Yeah. It'll be like one long hour long e episode and it'll just be like, for me, that'd be like, you tell everyone else you can skip it. Yep. With the whiteboard, it'll be a guy in a lab coat explaining the whole
Steve: thing, and all the characters that die are gonna be in the classroom, and they're all gonna be nodding at each other.
Yeah. For no reason.
Jason: Asking my questions. Yeah. To the guy with the PowerPoint. And they all have like little lab kits in front of them where they can like look at slides and point out things and stuff. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I would really enjoy that. That would be great. How sad that is. I know. I would too. That would be my favorite episode.
They would answer all the question. I'd be like looking stuff up online, like asking at the end if they recommend any reading,
Steve: jumping on the subreddit.
Jason: All right, good. So that's it. I think that does it for the last of us for today. Yep. All right. So as always, thanks to the, uh, should I even thank the audience for listening? We can if you listen to this. Thank you very
much.
Steve: Thanks so much. We really, really appreciate it. We think of you as, it's Friday, we have nothing else to do,
Jason: but if you exist out there, it's becoming our religion.
Thank you so much. Yep. Uh, and we've uh, mentioned a few of the topics we're gonna get into. In coming episodes, or we'll do completely different stuff. So put the time and effort in to check out the things we recommended and be prepared so you can be extra angry and cut off the episode even sooner when we talk about something else.
Or we'll just do dead heat. Yeah, you never know
Steve: what might happen. We might interview Joe Episcopal.
Jason: Is that a hard get? I don't,
Steve: probably not. We'll just jump on cameo.
Jason: Just hang out at the gym, see if you can.