We’re simply three weeks into The Final of Us on HBO, however it’s already turn into clear that the writers aren’t afraid to go off-script from the online game’s model of occasions. This newest episode focuses totally on the connection between Invoice and Frank, characters we by no means truly see interacting collectively within the recreation regardless of an implied lengthy and considerably tumultuous historical past.
These items of the episode are its finest bits, however earlier than we expertise the elongated flashback of their time collectively in Lincoln, Massachusetts, a scene between Ellie and Joel confirms a well-liked fan idea concerning how the outbreak of the cordyceps fungi started.
Ellie asks Joel about the way it began, primarily questioning who Affected person Zero was, and the way it unfold so quick. In keeping with Joel, who offers a historical past lesson for each Ellie and the viewers, the cordyceps fungus mutated, and he provides that the perfect guess is it “obtained into the meals provide.”
He continues, “In all probability a primary ingredient like flour or sugar. There have been sure manufacturers of meals that had been offered in every single place, all throughout the nation, internationally. Bread, cereal…pancake combine. You eat sufficient of it, it’s going to get you contaminated.”
As tainted meals hit cabinets on Thursday and other people ate it, by Friday, Joel says, folks obtained sick and issues shortly obtained worse. “Then they began biting,” he added dramatically.
Although Joel says nobody is aware of for positive, it looks like that is the writers’ method of delivering this info as canon, which occurs to assist the “flour idea” followers have posited throughout subreddits, Twitter, and Discord for the final two weeks. Final week’s episode additional solidifies this idea within the opening scene in Jakarta, throughout which period the mycologist learns that there was an incident at a flour and grain facility in her space.
However essentially the most attention-grabbing a part of all this isn’t simply that the followers obtained it proper. It is that, in the event you recall the season premiere, it appears Joel and Sarah, and to a lesser extent Tommy, narrowly dodged an infection 4 instances on that fateful day: as soon as when Joel and Sarah determined to not make pancakes that morning, quickly after when the pair declined their neighbors’ invite to eat some biscuits with them on their strategy to work and college, later when Sarah took house a batch of oatmeal raisin cookies from her neighbors’ home however by no means ended up consuming them, and final of all when Joel forgot to select up his personal birthday cake after a protracted work day.
In fact, Sarah doesn’t survive that night time anyway, however the refined suggestion, which solely is smart two episodes later, is that Joel would not even be alive 20 years later to information Ellie throughout the US if he’d caught to his authentic breakfast plans method again in 2003. On this method, his Atkins food regimen could have truly saved his life.
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