Infected Mushroom Deeply Disturbed

[Kayleigh Telega]

GLEN WELDON, HOST: "The Last Of Us" is a huge hit for HBO, and it offers a novel fungus-based twist on a zombie apocalypse. Civilization is in ruins, and its only hope is a young girl who's mysteriously immune to the fungal infection and her gruff, taciturn protector. Together, they must travel across a desolate wasteland peppered with outposts of humanity that house violent factions competing for control or at least survival. I'm Glen Weldon. And today we're talking about "The Last Of Us" on POP CULTURE HAPPY HOUR from NPR.(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)WELDON: Joining me today is Vulture TV critic Roxana Hadadi. Hey, Roxana.ROXANA HADADI: Hello, hello.WELDON: Hello, hello. And joining us also is Jordan Morris. He's a podcaster and the co-writer of the double Eisner Award nominee graphic novel "Bubble." Welcome back, Jordan.JORDAN MORRIS: Hi. It's great to be here.WELDON: Great to have you. Rounding out the panel is podcast producer and film and culture critic Cate Young. Welcome back to you, too, Cate.CATE YOUNG: Hi. Happy to be back again.WELDON: Hey. Let's get to it. So "The Last Of Us" is the story of Joel, played by Pedro Pascal, and young Ellie, played by Bella Ramsey. Twenty years ago, Joel lost his beloved daughter during the rise of the mushroom people. He's been tasked with helping a revolutionary group that is determined to find a cure to the infection that's turning people into shambling, clicking, very violent creatures with mushrooms where their heads should be. Joel and Ellie leave a Boston that's under martial law and strike out across a ruined landscape on their way to Colorado, where they believe scientists can use Ellie's evident immunity to the fungal plague to create a cure. Along the way, they're beset by various groups with very different agendas.The show is based on a series of popular video games of the same name. The television series is created by Neil Druckmann, who wrote the games, and Craig Mazin from the HBO series "Chernobyl." It's been a big hit for HBO, as we mentioned, and a standalone episode featuring actors Murray Bartlett and Nick Offerman went viral, or fungal, after it aired. "The Last Of Us" is airing on HBO now. And we've all seen through Episode 6, so what's happened up to that episode is up for discussion here. Cate, let me start with you. What do you think?YOUNG: I'm really liking the show. My first exposure to the story was as a video game, as many people's was. I played it for the first time, I want to say, like, five or six years ago maybe. And at the time, I remember thinking that now I understood why people kept trying to adapt video games. It was the first time I had played a game that felt cinematic, and it felt like it put the story first rather than, I don't know, the pew pew and the vroom vroom. So it really kind of changed my perspective. It was very immersive, and I really enjoyed it, and I feel like this television adaptation is doing an incredible job of recreating that experience for me. I personally am a little disturbed by, like, how good the zombies look. I didn't like them in the game, and they're a little too real now.(LAUGHTER)YOUNG: But I also think that the show is doing a great job of, like, really grounding those relationships. I mean, perhaps it's just because it's been a while, but I don't remember feeling this attached to Joel and his emotional journey and the different stages that his relationship to Ellie goes through as he kind of deals with his own grief and loss. And it has been incredible to kind of watch Pedro Pascal's performance over the last several weeks and see how his growing attachment to this girl that was just left in his care is preventing him from making the choices that he would normally make if he was on his own. He's now invested in her well-being, and he can't pretend that he no longer is.WELDON: Yeah. I mean, they're really putting both of these characters through it in a really big way, just like they did in the game. Jordan, what do you think?MORRIS: Yeah. I also am a big fan of these games and think this show does a great job of adapting the games - not just the, you know, great characters and the story, but also just, like, locations from the show look like locations from the game, so they do a nice job of, like, making the kind of apocalypse beautiful. The kind of nature is reclaiming the world...WELDON: Sure.MORRIS: ...You know, aspect of the aesthetic is really done well. Everything looks really, really kind of, you know, creepy and beautiful at the same time. This show, like the game, is grim. It can be a lot. I think, you know, a good way to encapsulate that is in one of the episodes, there is a slow zoom on a baby skeleton.WELDON: (Laughter) Yes, there is.MORRIS: It's a lot. I think after every episode of this, I need approximately 3 1/2 episodes of "Bob's Burgers" just to kind of...WELDON: Sure.MORRIS: ...Come down from it.WELDON: Nice.MORRIS: But yeah, I think this is a really cool video game adaptation. I think as Catherine (ph) kind of alluded to, video game adaptations have been not super successful in the past, although I am a stan for the original "Mortal Kombat."(LAUGHTER)WELDON: OK. OK.MORRIS: We'll get to that later.(LAUGHTER)MORRIS: This is a really cool step forward for video games becoming other things.WELDON: Yes, as a matter of fact. OK, so Roxana, you've done some great writing about this show.HADADI: Oh, thank you.WELDON: I know how you feel about it, but talk to me about it.HADADI: I am really liking it with some slight caveats. So I did not play the video game. I was unaware of where this narrative would go. And so in terms of, like, television, as purely a TV viewer, I am enjoying it for what it's doing in terms of, like, standalone storylines, building out this place. There's so much care in the production design and the detail and all the technical stuff. But I feel like because I love this genre and, like, end-of-the-world stuff and, like, what it does for humanity is very much my bag, I am both really enjoying it and also sort of wondering what it is doing that is slightly different from, like, the "Children Of Men" of it all.WELDON: Sure.HADADI: But it's doing it so well that I feel like as familiar as the story sort of feels in terms of genre, I think I'm really impressed by how it's emotionally affecting me, so I'm really liking it. I am very intrigued about where it goes and the fact that it's been renewed for Season 2 already and what else of this story there is left to tell. But yeah, hour to hour, week to week, I'm like, oh, yeah, this is a horrible vision of what could happen. I'm having fun.WELDON: There you go.HADADI: Yeah.WELDON: See, because - I like that you're coming at it fresh, because I did play the video games, and this is the same series of gut punches the video games delivered. But I think many listeners and a lot of viewers are not going to have played the games, and so they're looking at this in this context. OK, so we have "The Walking Dead" and "Fear The Walking Dead," and pretty soon, "Oops! All Walking Dead" and "Walking Dead Go Hawaiian." But also, look, "Y: The Last Man," "The Passage," "The Strain," "The Stand," "Sweet Tooth," "Invasion," "Station Eleven," "Resident Evil" - those are shows just in the last few years that have aired, and most of them - apart from the "Walking Dead" franchise, which you can't even kill with a headshot - most of those shows kind of came and went without leaving much of a dent on the culture, I would say. So if we're trying to untangle - and I think we should - what's setting this apart, I think the platform matters. I think the time slot matters. I mean, we have been, as a culture, Pavlovian conditioned to salivate at whatever prestige content gets aired 9 o'clock Sunday night on HBO. I think there's some of that here. I mean, and I'm not against that. That's the last lingering shred of the monoculture kind of hanging on.MORRIS: Well, clearly, Glen, you're not watching "The Masked Dancer," because...HADADI: "Masked Singer."MORRIS: Me and all my friends.WELDON: I am not. Neither the singer nor the dancer - I think there's both shows.HADADI: Oh, God, are there? Oh, jeez.WELDON: There are both. There are certainly both.MORRIS: If you want to see a giant turnip do anything, it's dance.WELDON: If you want to see a giant foam head do a soft shoe.HADADI: Maybe it is time for the end of the world. Have we considered?WELDON: That's right. I think it's a symbol. I think it's a signal of the end of the world.MORRIS: We're making a good case for it.WELDON: But, I mean, like, so if you are a non-player of the game and you think, OK, so this show has - what? - military outposts? It's got martial law. It's got these little pockets of humanity that seem idyllic, but they house a dark secret. You got mistrust. You got violence. You've got that moment when somebody you love is infected, and what are you going to do about it? I think two things can be true, because as you mentioned, Roxana, this is a genre piece, and so you can be kind of over the genre tropes, but you also have to acknowledge that that's just part of the narrative furniture here, right? Sci-fi got spaceships. Cop shows got luminol, and zombie shows have people walking through, as Jordan mentioned, these ruined cityscapes that are overgrown with vegetation. But, I mean, even the central dynamic of this show is familiar. It's "Lone Wolf And Cub." It's "True Grit." It's "The Professional." It's "The Road." It's...HADADI: "Children Of Men"?WELDON: It's "Children Of Men."MORRIS: It's "Lone Wolf And Cub" if the baby could quip.WELDON: That's true.MORRIS: Yeah.WELDON: It's Mandalorian and Grogu if...MORRIS: If Grogu had a lot of Marvel-esque one-liners.WELDON: If Grogu could sass. Exactly.MORRIS: Right.WELDON: Well, let's talk about these performances. I mean, Bella Ramsey - she was amazing on "Game Of Thrones." She had the one thing to do on "Game Of Thrones." It was only one thing, but she was great at it. Here she gets so much more to do. And, you know, Roxana and I have seen episodes coming up. She's going to get even more to do. And Pedro Pascal - I got to feel like this dude, he has to go back to "The Mandalorian" now, where he is interacting with a puppet with his face covered up...MORRIS: Yeah.WELDON: ...Right? - having the same kind of dynamic. I kind of feel like he's - when he goes back to that, he's going to feel like he's got both hands tied behind his back. But the thing I'm responding to is, even though it's all these genre tropes, it's how much I believe that relationship. That was true in the game. It's also true here, which is why I think it's a series of gut punches, as the game was. What do you guys think?YOUNG: I really agree. I think one of the things that really kind of struck me watching these episodes is that because Joel was kind of presented initially as this big, you know, adventurer, he's ready to, you know, do the big hard thing and go across the country and face the danger, you kind of forget for at least a handful of episodes that he's also, like, a deeply damaged person who has been irrevocably changed by what he's seen and done in this world, and that despite his hard exterior, there's a little nut of love and care that he still carries for his daughter that he is essentially protecting with bravado because it is so painful for him to think about watching his child die in his arms. It's seeing him interact with Ellie and seeing the flashes of that come out that I think are the most compelling to me. There's a scene early on - I forget which episode - where Ellie has to save his life, and that involves doing something really dangerous and surprising, and he tries to connect with her about it because he understands, having been through that so many times, how much that changes a person.(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "THE LAST OF US")PEDRO PASCAL: (As Joel) When you're just a kid, you shouldn't know what it means the first time that you hurt someone like that. I'm not good at this.BELLA RAMSEY: (As Ellie) Yeah, you really aren't.PASCAL: (As Joel) I mean, it was my fault. You shouldn't have had to.YOUNG: It's the attempt, I think, that really kind of tells you what kind of person he is because he's lost so much, and there's so much kind of shaved off the top of his ability to connect with people. But it's still there. He doesn't run into situations guns a-blazing. Like, he tries diplomacy first every time. And there are times it doesn't work, and then he's got to kill some people, but he's not happy about it. And I think that the difficulty that he has over the course of the series is that he knows what the things he's done does to a person's soul, but he also knows that they were necessary for his survival. And I think that that tension is what weighs on him.MORRIS: You know, something that I noticed watching this show is that, yes, it is very grim for, you know, most of its runtime, but the little nuggets of, like, humanity and fun and lightness really mean a lot. They, like, really hit hard. Like, it is just, ooh, give it to me. Give me that little nugget of humanity. Yes, we are all beautiful inside, and we're all connected, just like the mushroom people. Yeah, there's this kind of great little moment where, you know, they go into this kind of bombed-out store, and Ellie sees an old Mortal Kombat machine.(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "THE LAST OF US")RAMSEY: (As Ellie) There's this one character named Mileena who takes off her mask, and she has monster teeth, and then she swallows you whole and barfs out your bones.MORRIS: And I know this is my second mention of Mortal Kombat on this show.WELDON: I was keeping track. I've got it marked down here.YOUNG: You know, well, first of all, I figured out at the top of the season that she's 19, which I simply did not know or believe. And I think the thing that I really love about her performance is that she is able to give us both sides of the person that Ellie is, in that she's very battle-worn, as someone who has, you know, been kidnapped, lost all of her people, living in a federal facility, etc., etc. But she still has moments where she is a child. She gets to be a child. And you forget for a moment that she is not just a person trying to survive. She is someone who is having an extremely difficult childhood that she should not really be exposed to. And watching her have to navigate very adult problems and adult concerns and adult relationships without ever having been taught how to do that. And I think that she makes that tension very real without ever sacrificing the needs of the story.HADADI: I'm also very impressed by the guest appearances. I mean, we've talked about Offerman and Bartlett and they make Episode 3 really resonant and immersive, but I also really enjoy Anna Torv's work in the first couple of episodes.MORRIS: Yeah. She's great.HADADI: I think that she is such a impactful counter to Joel in showing, you know, what does it take to actually survive 20 years of this? Like, what does that do to you? What is the transformative nature of hope? Because that is so much of the early episodes - right? - is if Ellie exists, what does that mean about the potential for a future? And that sort of question hangs over everything.(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "THE LAST OF US")ANNA TORV: (As Tess Servopoulos) This is your chance. You get her there. You keep her alive. And you set everything right.HADADI: And I also really enjoy Melanie Lynskey and the Kansas City arc. I have some sort of issues with how this show sort of presented the resistance uprising in contrast to FEDRA, but I think Lynskey does such a good job using her sort of soft-spoken way in just this complete oppositional effect from what we're used to.(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "THE LAST OF US")MELANIE LYNSKEY: (As Kathleen Coghlan) You're not FEDRA. Lucky for you, no one here has to die. Yeah. We could put you on trial. You're all guilty, so that's how that'll go, and you'll do some time. Easy. But first, you have to do something for me.HADADI: And having Joel and Ellie sort of wander around does allow for a different kind of worldbuilding than you normally get in sort of a genre show.MORRIS: This show is such an "Avengers" of prestige TV actors, like...WELDON: Yeah.MORRIS: ...I assume Elisabeth Moss will show up.(LAUGHTER)MORRIS: I assume Jonathan Majors will show up at some point.WELDON: Yeah. It's an emotional worldbuilding. And even if you haven't played the game, you can see that happening. Every event that happens has consequences. This is what I think sets the show apart from the grim, nihilistic slog that kind of chased me away from "The Walking Dead." I mean, scars are left on people. Real emotional damage takes its toll. You talk about the Melanie Lynskey character. She's the head of an uprising against martial law in Kansas City, and she becomes everything she revolted against because she refuses to grow past the damage that was done to her. I think in this last episode, Episode 6, it's supposed to be this big moment when Joel finally finds his damn brother he's been talking about for five episodes. And that payoff is kind of, I think, deliberately emotionally muted because they've become such fundamentally different people. And there's a real effort to let characters, as you guys say, sit with their feelings (laughter) and with each other as opposed to just throwing wave after wave of, you know, portobellos and enokis and hen-of-the-woods and chanterelles at them.MORRIS: (Laughter).WELDON: I said this in the review. This show is about the mushroom people in the same way that "The Sopranos" is about RICO charges, right? They're always out there. There's always the looming threat. But what happens on screen is what matters. What happens is what the characters do despite them. I think this show is about the extremes people go, not to survive as in "The Walking Dead," but the extremes you'll go to preserve what you guys are talking about, to hang on to empathy, to hang on to their humanity. And if you're looking for another series that kind of plays in this same emotional sandbox, I would really recommend "Station Eleven."YOUNG: Yeah.MORRIS: Yeah.WELDON: But let's talk, if you will, about that episode that Roxana mentioned, Episode 3. I think this is where people really started talking about this show. That's when people really started paying attention. I - it spent most of its running time away from the Joel and Ellie story to focus on Bill, who is a survivalist played by Nick Offerman, who, when we meet him, is just happy as a clam that everything he was paranoid about has finally come to light, and he can just survive in this kind of guarded outpost of his own creation. And Frank, played by Murray Bartlett, he's a guy who stumbles across Bill's armed compound and finds his way, eventually, into Bill's heart. This was one of the biggest departures that the show is doing from the game. I think it's the smartest. Talk to me about this episode. What did you think?MORRIS: This episode is fantastic. Something that the show does format wise, which I think is cool - you have the Joel and Ellie story, and then it takes these little kind of detours. It's like, you know, stories from the apocalypse, and it is a story that's kind of related to the main one. And those are really fun, and it's really fun to see, like, how the apocalypse is affecting other people. The moment when the Nick Offerman prepper character comes out of his house and realizes that everything he would - had been prepping for came true, and this little "Mona Lisa" smile comes across...WELDON: Yep.MORRIS: ...His face, a acting move that basically only Nick Offerman can make, and it is such a huge laugh in the middle of this very grim scenario. Him - you realizing how excited he is to, like, do all of his apocalypse stuff. Yeah. And, like, Murray Bartlett is so great. This guy's got range. He's good in everything; pretty good American accent.WELDON: Pretty good.MORRIS: Pretty good.WELDON: Pretty good American accent. Yeah.MORRIS: And their story is - it is very funny. It is very human. You know, you'll be shocked to know it ends kind of tragically but also very beautifully, like those skyscrapers overtaken by vegetation. The tragedy has a lot of beauty in it.(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "THE LAST OF US")NICK OFFERMAN: (As Bill) This isn't the tragic suicide at the end of the play. I'm old. I'm satisfied. And you were my purpose.YOUNG: See, I actually would disagree with you that it ended tragically. I think it ended extremely beautifully. I mean, perhaps it's just because I'm a romantic, but I found myself incredibly moved by it, I think simply because I'm very much a person who always imagines, you know, where is the light and beauty of the end of the world? Like, I loved "Station Eleven." I - if you follow me online, you know that I'm absolutely obsessed with "Hadestown." Like, these stories about finding love and art and beauty where it's very rare really, really appealed to me. And so, you know, the moment with the strawberries, like, really mattered to me - like, not because strawberries are that novel - like, I don't even really like them that much - but because it's a tiny little thing that they could do to make each other happy in a world where it's very, very hard to do that.(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "THE LAST OF US")OFFERMAN: (As Bill) I was never afraid before you showed up.YOUNG: The only thing that I struggled with is it bothered me a little that even at the end of the world, the queer representation that we get is still white men first.WELDON: Sure.YOUNG: And not only that but because Nick Offerman's character as a prepper also necessarily needed to have been at a certain point on the political spectrum in order to think that that was necessary. That reality is not really acknowledged by the show, like, as heavily as I would have probably preferred, specifically because Bartlett's character is clearly not that at all. And seeing them build a life together, you know, for - what? - 20, 30 years, it's beautiful, and it's very clear that they loved each other deeply, but I want to know more about what that conflict is like. Do they stay together because they feel like this is the only opportunity that they will have for the rest of their lives, or is it because they're deeply connected and they happen to find a way over these differences? Because, like, I'm not going to lie. Like, if it's just me and one other queer girl for the rest of the world, like, I might figure out how to work it out.WELDON: Exactly. Exactly.YOUNG: Yeah.WELDON: I have a theory of the case here that I've been sitting on because people been asking us, when are you going to cover the show, and when are you going to talk about Episode 3? And so I've been sitting on this for a while, but here's my theory of the case, which speaks directly to what you just said, Cate. I knew this episode was coming. I just sat and watched my socials as the episode aired and was, like, this slow-rolling thunderstorm of emotion that happened that I knew was going to happen. And some folks came at it with, like, heart eyes emoji. It's a queer love story for the ages, twue wove (ph), and others were like, this is a cliche gay trauma storyline. Here's why I think it was more interesting than either of those two takes, and it's certainly in the text, but I really think you see it in the performances. I think Murray Bartlett's Frank at first is just totally playing's Nick Offerman's Bill.YOUNG: Oh, 100%.WELDON: I mean, Bill's a survivalist and Frank is a survivor. He knows a good thing when he sees it, and he's determined to worm his way into it. And I'm not saying they don't find twue wove until the 12 of never (ph) but I'm saying you can see in that first interaction between these two actors that Frank is completely gaming Bill, and even more importantly and even more smartly, even more smartly, Bill in some sense knows that he's being gamed, knows that Frank can play the piano better than he pretends to but is so desperate for human contact that he lets himself go along with it. He takes a risk. And that's why I think it's really smart as well as twue wove.(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "THE LAST OF US")OFFERMAN: (As Bill, singing) Take things in stride. Sounds like good advice, but there's no one at my side.WELDON: And the song in question is, of course, "Long, Long Time" by Linda Ronstadt.YOUNG: Yeah. And even I think speaking to that point is that moment when they're at the piano and Bartlett has this reaction. You see it on his face of, like, oh, I've, like, found someone I really, really connect with on a spiritual level. I wasn't planning for that. Like you said, I was just trying to scam him, and now I found myself in a position of, like, being deeply connected to a new person. Like, I thought that was such a beautiful touch but also beautiful performance because, as you say, it moves it from the realm of, like, this is a disaster movie and we have to figure out and lie and cheat and steal however we can to, like, how lucky am I to have found love in the midst of this?HADADI: The only thing that I will say is I think that this episode sort of taken with the rest of the season makes me think a little bit about what this show is trying to say about, like, individualism versus collectivism. How do you survive? What bonds do you make? Who do you prioritize? Especially compared with "Chernobyl," which was Craig Mason's previous project, which felt very much like it was saying, you know, at the seeming end of everything, what do we sacrifice for the greater good? I think that sometimes this show is saying the opposite and presenting that in a positive way. Especially as the season progresses, I think we see that sort of the idea of protecting yourself is given a little bit of approval, more so than the idea of protecting everyone. And I just - I'm curious how people react to that as the season progresses.WELDON: Yeah. I mean, you will see both of these characters fundamentally change over the course of the season. They both have separate but very real arcs in a way that you wouldn't necessarily expect in a show like this.MORRIS: Catherine, I want to go back to a great point that you made about kind of reality of prepper characters. I think that, like, it is so hard not to think that, like, if this was reality, this character would be posting QAnon memes and ruining his family Thanksgiving.YOUNG: I mean, I just feel like that's the unspoken thing that we're - no one's talking about here. Like...HADADI: All I will say about that is that Principal Ava in "Abbott Elementary" is also a doomsday prepper, and I would not say that Principal Ava and Bill are similar politically.MORRIS: Amazing point. Amazing point.WELDON: All right. Well, we want to know what you think about "The Last Of Us." Find us at facebook.com/pchh. And that brings us to the end of our show. Roxana Hadadi, Jordan Morris, Cate Young, thanks to all of you for being here. Dream team.HADADI: Thank you.MORRIS: Yeah, this is fun. Thank you.YOUNG: Thanks so much for having us.WELDON: We want to take a moment to thank our POP CULTURE HAPPY HOUR+ subscribers. We appreciate you so much for showing your support of NPR. If you haven't signed up yet and you want to show your support and listen to the show without any sponsor breaks at all, head over to plus.npr.org/happyhour or visit the link in our shownotes. This episode was produced by Candice Lim and Hafsa Fathima and edited by Jessica Reedy, and Hello Come In provides our theme music, which you are making an umami-rich mushroom risotto to right now. Thank you for listening to POP CULTURE HAPPY HOUR from NPR. I'm Glen Weldon, and we'll see you all tomorrow when we will be talking about "Cocaine Bear."

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