Fridge / The Last of Us (2023)

Remember that Fridge and Headscratcher pages are Spoilers Off.

Fridge Brilliance

General

• Melanie Lynskey's performance as the revolutionary leader Kathleen gained some unfavorable comparisons to suburban Mom or "Karen" stereotype. Seems counterintuitive until you realize that some of the history's most heinous authoritarian leaders arose from innocuous origins - Stalin was originally trained to be a priest, Hitler wanted to be an artist, and Mao worked as a librarian.

When You're Lost in the Darkness

• "We lose." "We'll be back." It's a warning about the end of civilization and a lead into a commercial break... but also foreshadowing for how humanity always finds a way to return, even from such an impossibly low point.
• When Joel, Sarah, and Tommy are trying to escape the city, a group of airliners are seen flying dangerously close to one another. Without air traffic controllers to manage who gets to take off and who can fly where, it makes sense that this kind of "Screw the rules, it's every man for himself!" behavior could set in.
• Posters on the wall where the boy is checked out show that the speed at which an infectee turns depends on where they were bitten. Those bitten on the face or neck will turn within minutes while those bitten on the legs can last as long as 24 hours. Given that cordyceps infects the brain, proximity to the brain from the initial infection site would dictate how long it would take for the victim to succumb.

Infected

• Why didn't killing the clickers in the museum attract the horde's attention? The fungal growths in the building were already dead, so the infected inside were effectively isolated from the local Hive Mind.
• There's a reason why the stalker infects Tess by giving her a literal Kiss of Death: the fungus infects humans by controlling their brains, and getting the tendrils in through the mouth is the fastest way to reach it.

Long, Long Time

• The montage of Bill in the immediate aftermath of the FEDRA evacuation of his town is a very well-thought-out portrayal of what to do in such a scenario. Bill quickly utilizes the irreplaceable resources (gas, vehicles, electricity) to secure as many resources that are difficult to replace (fencing, trap equipment, powered machinery) as quickly as he can before they run out, in order to put himself in the best possible position to maintain his replaceable resources (food) for the long-term. His comment in the Home Depot of "well, that was fast" wasn't that the power went out, but how quickly the power grid failed somewhere along its length without human maintenance and intervention, meaning his timetable just got adjusted. It's a welcome change from the usual portrayal of survivalists as hoarding a bunch of guns and nonperishable items.

Endure and Survive

• Sam's magic screen tablet is a remarkably useful device for a deaf person to communicate since it is endlessly reusable, requiring neither paper nor writing utensil.
• The car-pusher, as Joel mentions, was used by FEDRA to clear the highways of old cars. This may be why the only navigable road leads right to the FEDRA gate.
• When Joel gets the drop on Anthony (the elderly sniper in the suburbs) he opts to try and shoot Joel despite the latter begging him not to. According to Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann, Kathleen had a tendency to execute anyone who had failed her. Anthony knew he was dead either way.
• When opening the painted door to Ish's camp, Joel checks the door frame for a trap - like the one that set off in the game.
• Kathleen last saw her brother in jail. The sign in the FEDRA cell acknowledges that he would've had a right to family visits.

Kin

• When confiding his vulnerabilities to Tommy, Joel mentions the time when he was almost killed by a teenage kid (Bryan) and had to be saved by Ellie in Episode 4, before adding that "five years ago I would've destroyed him." Joel in the show receives an Age Lift where he's now 56 - the same age his game counterpart is in "Part II", where he's decidedly not as unstoppable as he was in "Part I" when he was around 51-52. Basically, show Joel is alluding to how if he was at around the same age his game counterpart is in "Part I", he would've been much more capable than he actually is right now - when he's at the same age as the past-his-prime-game Joel in "Part II".

Look for the Light

• Kathleen's harsh words to Henry about Sam end up foreshadowing Joel's decision to place Ellie's survival over the whole world as she's worth everything to him.
• Marlene had to kill her lifelong best friend after she was bitten and became infected—just how Ellie would eventually have to kill Riley fourteen years later.

Fridge Horror

General

• Given that real-world public figures like Linda Ronstadt are implied to have existed in the series' universe, what happened to them after the world went to hell? Could Joel and Ellie potentially come across an infected celebrity in the future?
• Given that FEDRA immediately euthanizes anyone who tests positive, it's entirely possible that they've killed some immune individuals, who like Ellie have been infected but exhibit no symptoms.
• The first sign of infection is erratic twitching; a lot of people with conditions such as epilepsy most likely end up being killed due to being mistaken for new victims.
• What happens to infected people who are pregnant? This is Partially explained in "Look for the Light" with the revelation of Ellie's birth, but the show does nothing to explain what would have happened if Ellie's mother didn't cut the umbilical cord as quickly as she did...
• In 1968, the talk show host who is interviewing Dr. Neuman looks very unnerved at the doctor's prediction that humanity could one day be decimated by an outbreak of parasitic fungus. Considering the host looks to be in his early to mid thirties, it's very likely he would still be alive in 2003, and would be forced to see this terrifying prediction come true.

When You're Lost in the Darkness

• In the first episode, we see multiple passenger planes crashing during the outbreak. While it was mentioned above that the presumable lack of air traffic controllers could affect the flight, a far more realistic possibility is that the passengers or even the pilots could be infected - the first stage of infection is becoming a 'runner', where very early symptoms would most likely present themselves as perhaps a bad rash and intense annoyance. Imagine being tens of thousands of feet in the air in a small metal tube, and the person sat next to you suddenly looks at you hungrily. Even before turning, infection causes loss of motor control and slowed reaction time. They could have made it into the air, everyone breathing a sigh of relief, no one's sick, maybe things are going to be okay... and then the pilot's not able to work the controls.
• Joel and Sarah actually have a few close calls with infected flour. They cannot have pancakes in the morning due to not having pancake mix, they turn down the neighbors' biscuits, Sarah refuses to eat the raisin cookies, and Joel forgets to pick up a birthday cake.
• During Tommy, Joel, and Sarah's driving through town, a theater suddenly opens up with panicked people crashing through the glass to get out into the street. As they run by the car, we see many of them are injured and/or covered in blood. There's no telling how awful the inside of the theater looked; worse still, there's no telling how many people either already turned or have just been bitten. Whatever happened inside must have been an absolute bloodbath.

Endure and Survive

• Imagine the carnage that happened in Kansas City after it was overrun by a horde of Infected with no militia to protect them because of Kathleen's idiocy.
• The sheer size of that horde crushed the resistance in minutes. So, in reality, KC was on borrowed time the second FEDRA went down.
• Given how bulletproof the Bloater was, how much harder will it be to bring down The Rat King later on?

Left Behind

• In "Left Behind," Ellie references having been in "the hole" multiple times—common prison slang for solitary confinement, and apparently how the FEDRA school punishes its students (children) for misbehavior.

When We Are In Need

• David keeps the fact that his community is eating human meat a secret from all but a few...but it's implied that most of the people are on some level aware (or at least suspicious) of what they're really eating, but keep quiet to ensure their own survival, both in regards to David's temper and in avoiding starvation. Thus, Alec's wife is likely quite aware that their daughter is eating his flesh. She's the one who takes the cuts of meat in the kitchen and puts them into the stew.
• You can actually see during the dinner sequence which people were most likely in the know. Most eat at a fast pace, but the hunters are noticeably more reluctant and take slower or tinier bites (one even covers his mouth) and Alec's wife seems to have a slight grimace on her face when she eats.
• David tells Ellie that he was a teacher before the end, working with children around her age. Taken with his declaration that he loves the fighting the most when he has her pinned down, David has almost certainly assaulted other children before.

Look for the Light

• Mutated Cordyceps immunity is revealed to be the result of a new born baby whose pregnant human mother was bitten just before giving birth to her. It's a good thing only Marlene and the surgeon knew about this when they finally get Ellie, because with the extreme lows the Fireflies are willing to go, they would certainly force as many pregnant women as they could find to suffer the same procedure.