Hello and welcome to Overthink.

The podcast where two philosophy professors sometimes tie our own weird professional debates to pop culture and history.

I'm David Pena Guzman. And I'm Ellie Anderson. David, the HBO show The Last of Us, got super

popular when its first season came out pretty recently, I think last year. And this show has, I think,

kind of reinvigorated the discourse around zombies.

Granted, zombies kind of never really go away in pop culture since 1968 when Night of the

Living Dead came out. We'll talk a little bit more about that later. But this show, which in fact

has a girl named Ellie as its protagonist, I swear to God, all the young people these days are named Ellie. It was like a somewhat unusual name when I was growing up and now everybody in Gen Z and Gen Alpha has my name. And I'm just like this weird older person with the trendy kids name. I do not know what the trends are for naming. So I'll just take her word for that. The Ellie's are coming for you.

Like zombies.

Exactly.

Oh, my God.

I was going there.

I was going to make that joke, too.

Nice one.

I swear to God, we're just like one mind meld at this point.

But yes, the last of us, what I think is interesting about this show, which is based on a

video game, is that it's actually trying to give a background account for the

possibility that zombies might actually emerge in the real world. So of course it's fictional,

but the idea is that there is some sort of fungus that mutates and starts turning humans into

zombies. And there's this pandemic that leads to the zomification of millions of people.

So I think this feels very timely in the wake of COVID.

And so the show, although it's a fictional thought experiment, differs from other zombie films and TV shows in trying to give an actual scientific account of how this could happen, which I think makes it really scary.

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