Everyone Has Fallen for ‘The Last of Us’s Most Unexpected Thirst Trap

The heart wants what it wants, and sometimes it wants … well … this … Oh, we’re all doomed. You’d think with a show like HBO’s The Last of Us, our thirst tweets would stay talking about Pedro Pascal as Joel Miller’s arms or just everything that is Anna Torv as Tess. But the thirst traps took a turn after episode 5 “Endure and Survive” because … well …

During a horde outbreak in episode 5, Perry (Jeffrey Pierce) and Kathleen (Melanie Lynskey) watch their team perish at the hands of the infected. They’re trying to fight back, and it isn’t working out for them and only gets worse as the horde continues to emerge from a hole in the ground before them. And one of those to emerge is the Bloater.

Played by Adam Basil, the Bloater is … well, a big boy. Basil himself is a 6’6″ stuntman from the U.K. who did work on shows like Game of Thrones and was the stuntman for things like the Beast in the live-action Beauty and the Beast, as well as for Tom Hardy’s Eddie Brock in Venom: Let There Be Carnage. He’s been around, but this Bloater is really taking the cake.

When viewers saw him emerge from the ground in episode 5, I’m sure you could hear a chorus of “daddy” echoing around the world.

This all got worse when we realized what Adam Basil really looks like, too.

Look, both Basil and the Bloater are hot, and there’s probably something to unpack there, but it is coming at a time of year when we are looking for a “big boy” for the rest of winter …

SZA said it right …

When Saturday Night Live had SZA and Keke Palmer sing a song about needing a big boy for cuffing season, we should have known better. What has happened, though, is that we’ve gotten countless fan cams and SNL using their own song to poke fun at everyone’s love of Pedro Pascal, and we now have people using it for videos of the Bloater. It’s me. I’m people.

The point is that SZA was right. The era of the bigger boy is here, and that does obviously include Basil as the Bloater. Would he keep you safe in the winter months of the apocalypse? No, he’d try to infect you with the Cordyceps infection, but if you were willing to be a mushroom person, it’d be nice to find love!

Look, we’d all probably perish if a situation like The Last of Us became a reality anyway, so might as well go out with a bang.

(featured image: HBO)