Show Us More Mushroom Zombies on ‘The Last of Us,’ Cowards
As Season 2 gets underway, we have a simple plea: more zombies, please
I am a simple woman. I long for those most basic human needs: food, shelter, clothing, and terrifying zombie entertainment featuring terrifying zombies.
Well, obviously, you are saying. Any idiot knows that zombie entertainments (zombies entertainment?) are positively rife with zombies. Day of the Dead, Dawn of the Dead, 28 Days Later, Resident Evil, World War Z—even Zombieland, for crying out loud. All chock-full of bloodthirsty undead, stumbling ever forward in search of brains.
So it stands to reason that—with apologies to all 65 of The Walking Dead’s spinoffs—television’s preeminent zombie entertainment, one whose underlying pitch for the undead is both novel and ultra-scary and whose very title presupposes that the zombies have gobbled up pretty much everyone, would star, costar, or at any rate prominently include said ultra-scary, heat-seeking harbingers of doom.
And yet: Season 1 of The Last of Us barely did.
On Sunday, the much-heralded Max series returns for its sophomore season. If you are like me—which is to say human and thus in need of nutrients, vitamins, and shrieking, cannibalistic monsters—you are probably excited. But also, if you are like me, a question might be nibbling away at the delicious meninges cached inside your braincase: They’ve got to show us more mushroom zombies this time, right?
‘The Last of Us’ Season 2 Prep
One great thing about The Last of Us is that its zombies—who are not, strictly speaking, mushroom derivatives but rather infected with a parasitic Cordyceps fungus that kills them and renders them part of a violent hivemind—are very, very scary. (Ha, ha, ha, a Cordyceps takeover is surely the stuff of fiction!) Our first glimpse of one, in the series premiere, comes when Joel’s daughter, Sarah, goes to check on their elderly neighbors just as the Cordyceps outbreak begins in earnest. There, she encounters a classic genre tableau: A river of blood is flowing from the kindly Mr. Adler, who is bleeding from a terrible neck wound, while his wife, who just that morning had been nonresponsive and in a wheelchair, feasts on the body of her nurse.
Sure, fine: seen one nice old lady chow down on the help, seen ’em all. But it’s what comes next that sets The Last of Us apart:
No! No!!! Spores?! I hate it!
I want to see more.
Except that Season 1 didn’t have very many mushroom zombies at all. Whole episodes passed with nary a bloodsucker; the horrific fungal sapiens were few and far between. The menace perpetually loomed, and, yes, the implication that (living) man was man’s greatest threat was not totally lost. But when the ground gave way late in Episode 5, hurling Melanie Lynskey’s cultish Kansas City compound into chaos, it felt like a revelation.
Now. If you are someone who played the video games that the series is based on, you are aware that there are strictly defined stages of zombie development as the Cordyceps infection takes hold, which dictate how the murderous creepies appear. I, however, am a rube, and thus my personal rubric is “Look at that fuckin’ guy!” and “Look at that fuckin’ guy!” and so on. I am a woman of science.
For example—look at this fuckin’ guy:
Look at this fuckin’ guy!!!
Did I truly take these guys in live? No, of course not; I peered through the safe cover of my fingers. But these monstrosities were doled out like scaly beasts in House of the Dragon: few, fungal, and far between. Far be it from me to guess about the alchemy of prosthetics, VFX, and regular human money, but it seems theoretically possible that Ear-Eye Mushroom Guy (Otolaryngologuy?) might not be the budget devastator that Meleys’s last stand was.
As a person who is, let’s say, prone to existential anxiety, I am here for the subtlety of the kinds of human ruin. However, as someone with a gap in my Sunday evenings, I think I am going to need whole screeching hordes of demons to burst forth as they did in Kansas City. Ideally more than once or twice this season. If you’re looking for a slow burn, there’s always cable news.
And so! I offer a simple plea: Please let Mushroom Juggernaut and all his unholy, mildewy friends return and make Season 2 as terrifying and toadstoolish as it can possibly be. I can’t promise I’ll watch in the moment, but I’ll be thankful for the memories.
