If you haven’t played the games, you may have missed a big tease at the start of The Last of Us Season 2 Episode 5: the Rat King is coming, and it won’t be like anything you’ve seen before.
We’ve seen all sorts of infected in The Last of Us, whether it’s Runners, Clickers, or Bloaters. In the first episode of the second season, we were also introduced to Stalkers, an intelligent form of infected that’s faster and more intelligent.
There are two left we haven’t seen. Firstly, there’s Shamblers, which is the final stage of infected (in almost every case). It’s basically a variant of a Bloater that’s mutated as a result of heavy rainfall and humidity, and when they’re killed, they explode and spread spores everywhere, even causing burns to anyone unlucky enough to be near them.
There is one left, and you only face off against it once in The Last of Us Part 2. If you don’t want to spoil it for yourself, stop reading…
The Last of Us Season 2 Episode 5 just set up the Rat King
In the opening scene of Episode 5, it’s revealed that the WLF has blocked off the basement of Lakehill Seattle Hospital has been blocked off.
Hanrahan speaks to someone called Elise, a lower-level member of the Wolves who was tasked with securing the hospital. “We cleared the ground floor up to the sixth, a few scattered infected here and there, nothing we couldn’t handle,” she explains.
“All that was left was the basement; B1, B2, and B3. We were expecting the worst… plus the old-timer said down there was where they brought the first Cordyceps patients in ’03.”
Elise sent a squad down to B1, but “the whole floor was empty… not even rats.” She sent another squad down the next day, but they never came back. Later in the episode, we see spores down there… but there’s something else.
In The Last of Us Part 2, you fight another form of infected in the hospital basement: the Rat King, described as a “super-organism composed of multiple stalkers, clickers, and a bloater that have been connected together by the Cordyceps fungus.”
It is massive, fast, and incredibly strong, bounding towards the player with terrifying ferocity. As teased by Elise, it’s believed the Rat King is made up of the earliest victims of the Cordyceps outbreak, conjoined together by overgrown fungi.
You can’t just shoot it in the head and win. If you deal enough damage, it splits into a bloater and a stalker, which are a bit easier to kill.
Its name stems from a real-life phenomenon in which rats have been found clumped together, often with their tails tied. “The reason that we entertained the idea of these infected fused together is because there’s history in our canon of what happens to them when they sit around for a really long time,” Part 2’s co-director Kurt Margenau also told GamesRadar.
I won’t spoil who fights the Rat King or when it happens in the game – but if the show adapts the sequence in live-action, get ready to be scared.
Keep tabs on The Last of Us Season 2 release schedule, and until next week, read more about Abby’s fate in The Last of Us games, what you need to know about the WLF, and why Eugene is so important in Season 2.
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