If you have been trying to make up your mind about which side to take in Pluribus’s broad debate, I’m gonna stop you right there before you waste anymore time wracking your brain on that. Granted, I’ve only known Vince Gilligan’s acutely philosophical sci-fi for like 3 episodes, but I don’t really think the narrative means to make you choose a team between the immune Carol Sturka and the singular consciousness of everyone else who’s been transformed on a genetic level by an alien RNA sequence. Sure, there’s no way for you to ignore the tugs of reliability when one side says or does something that you would’ve too if you were in their shoes. But what Pluribus actually wants, and I think they make it quite clear by the 3rd episode, is for you to think “why not?” Because no matter which side seems saner according to your values, ideals, and perspectives, in a narrative like that of Pluribus, you kind of have no choice when it comes to acknowledging the validity of a conflicting view. That’s pretty smart for a show that could so very easily get held back by the judgment against topics so radical.
Spoiler Alert
Will Manousos Oviedo get in touch with Carol?
You know what makes the worker-bee humans’ sweetness seem genuine in Pluribus? Not only do they give the people who’re immune to the alien virus that’s taken over the world everything they ask for, but they actually observe their needs like someone close to them will? If you want me to fish out the logic of that, I guess it’s because right now, most of the immune people have lost someone who loves them to the hive-mind. So the entire world, well, all except 13 immune ones, now has the memory of loving the majority of these 13 people. You get it? I’m only saying “majority” or “most” because, well, some of these 13 people might not have had anyone who loved them and was alive during the takeover. Carol did have someone–her wife, Helen. And however much she may want to believe that Helen escaped this diabolical prank that’s being played on the world, Helen had turned into one of them before she passed. Carol may not like it, but everyone who’s part of the hive remembers loving her, and I think they still do. So I’m not surprised to see Zosia on Carol’s flight back home. Huh! I still can’t take my eyes off the Wayfarer logos on the plane seats. Isn’t that the same fictional airline from Vince Gilligan’s Breaking Bad universe? It was a Wayfarer plane that crashed with a Boeing right above Albuquerque. What an anxiety-inducing way for Pluribus to confirm that they’re in fact in the Breaking Bad universe. I know, I know. Rhea Seehorn’s role as Kim Wexler in Better Call Saul and now as Carol in Pluribus do warrant some confusion. But it’s as simple as the doppelganger theory, and I believe in that from freakishly real life experiences, I swear! You don’t have to take my word for it though. Just think of it this way. If the Pluribus universe can have Zosia, a real person who looks eerily similar to Carol’s smoke show romantic hero, Raban, is it really impossible that Carol has, or had, a doppelganger in Albuquerque? Now, back to the fact that Zosia stayed with Carol. This could be because Diabate decided to take his name out of the game when Carol literally stood in front of the freaking plane to stop it. A gesture doesn’t get bigger than that. But not much has changed for Carol in the last few hours. She’s still completely bewildered by the idea that she might just be the only person in the world who’s against a global shift where all of mankind has lost what made each of them special. So you can see why she’d be desperate to find just one more person who can see how crazy this is. A name does come up in the list of non-English-speaking, immune people around the world, all of whom have pretty unique jobs, and a bunch of them are cat people. Makes sense. Being around kitties does strengthen your immune system, if you want to go all scientific about it. Coming to the name that grabs Carol’s attention, a certain Manousos Oviedo from Asuncion. Now, Carol’s only interested in this guy because, as Zosia says, he is reluctant to speak with the hive-mind. Finally! Someone who’s not completely on board with the idea of all of humanity being just one person in their noggins! Luckily, Carol speaks a little bit of Spanish. Just enough to get the gist when Zosia connects her with Manousos over the phone and he cusses her off the moment he hears English and the mention of US. Smart guy. Manousos clearly thought that Carol was one of them. So when Carol calls him back and calls him names, she gets him back for cussing at her and communicates that she is immune. A person belonging to the hive-mind would never have spoken that way to Manousos. So I think now he’ll be in a hurry to get back in touch with Carol. It’ll probably be good for the both of them considering they share the same disdain for the MLM-like agency, made of the biggest population of the world trying to recruit them.
Carol’s dilemma
You know what’s the weirdest thing about all this? Carol hasn’t even gotten the headspace to even think about the fact that her wife has died. She sees where Helen is buried in the backyard. She knows just how much Helen isn’t around anymore. But how can she possibly think about that when she knows that the most brilliant scientists in the world are trying to find a way to “fix” her right now. What she doesn’t understand is how they can completely invalidate her choice when it comes to joining the hive-mind. So she fights it in small ways. And you can’t deny that it’s very icky for Carol when she sees a recent acquaintance, who’s also simultaneously every person in the world, hands her her mail and tells her that she’ll be happy with what she finds in the package. I mean, Zosia isn’t wrong. Helen got the massager for Carol because she knew her, and she loved her. It was supposed to be her sweet little way to congratulate Carol at the end of her book tour. So yeah. I can understand why it stings Carol to be handed that gift by someone–everyone–who supports and enforces the very event that killed Helen. I also understand why she wants what she had with Helen to be special–to be just theirs. But the devastating reality that Carol has no choice but to cope with is that, she can’t erase Helen’s memories from the consciousness of the hive-mind. They’ll always know who Helen and Carol were as a couple, what they meant to each other, and what they wanted for each other. To know Helen is to know Carol to a major extent. And that’s an unbelievable violation of all possible aspects of a person’s privacy. How can Carol be expected to be okay with that? And then what do they do? They go ahead and cause a widespread power outage that cuts off Carol’s “Golden Girl” binge session. This woman absolutely needs Betty White’s sardonic wit if she’s to survive this insane amount of emotion and all around blow to her very existence and the way the world works. Power does come back in her house quickly. And Zosia’s called her up to apologize for the inconvenience they’ve caused in their effort to conserve energy. You can see how from this point on, Carol’s fighting them on everything just because she’s fundamentally against everything they represent, even when she probably agrees with what they’re doing. They’ve turned off most of the unnecessary lights to conserve energy, and probably also fix light pollution issues so they can see the stars for a change. Not a bad move, right? They’ve kept the essential services up and running. But they’ve shut down everything else for the night because they don’t work at night. I know a lot of people who’d jump at the opportunity to step into a world like this. Moreover, there’s no crime for them to prevent because people don’t want to hurt people anymore. No one wants to hurt anybody and the world gets to heal? Sounds like a dream for everyone who donates to the Sierra Club. Like Carol over here. So why’s she yelling at Zosia for doing something that helps the world and the environment? It’s simple, really. What everyone in the world had to give up in order to achieve this utopia is too big a price. Losing yourself is a dealbreaker. No matter what you get in return. So for Carol, it’s not about being against conservation. It’s about the principle of it. Just like it wasn’t about Carol not wanting to eat when she dumped the scrumptious meal they’d sent. But when the local Sprouts turned out to be empty, and Zosia let Carol know that they’d collected all the resources, which means they’d emptied out all the stores and the supermarkets, Carol couldn’t just starve. So she stood up for her independence and asked them to put things back where they had been in her Sprouts. It’s a little Karen and obtuse of her to not even think about the fact that it won’t be very independent when she’s making them do the work. But that factor dawned on her when she did see a whole bunch of trucks arrive, and a lot of people were very happy to be refilling the shelves so Carol could have her groceries. Politics is complicated. Who would’ve thought! It was also a pretty cheeky poster the Sprouts outlet had up when Carol was there. “Every meal is a choice?” Is that you, PETA? I mean Zosia did say that they won’t kill an animal ever again. But this virtue signaling could also be about the fact that Carol wasted the food that people lovingly prepared for her. I don’t think she noticed though. I also think she only means to dump on Zosia a little bit–be a little Betty White, you know? And maybe that’s why she goes off on Zosia again and asks for a hand grenade to celebrate the best week of mankind. Funny.
What does Carol learn about free will?
What an especially overwhelming question when it comes to Carol and the world’s circumstances in the odd plot of AppleTV’s Pluribus. How does Carol define free will? She gets to do what she wishes and be who she wishes as long as it doesn’t cause any real harm to other people. Well, I guess being mad at someone is out of the window considering Carol has unknowingly caused two genocides ever since the takeover. That’s rough. But I guess the silver lining is that Carol gets to communicate her needs without attacking the person she’s speaking to. And the way the whole hive has spontaneous seizures anytime an immune person hurts one of their feelings really puts things into perspective, don’t you think? What if the mean things you say have a more far reaching effect? The lesson is that they do have far reaching effects. We’re just unaware of them. In Carol’s case, things are far more direct and extreme. Maybe this is a system the alien technology has put in place to enforce kindness. Kindness is something the hive-mind will never run out of. They will also probably never truly understand or follow sarcasm or indirect social cues. Now that really sounds like a wonderful world. Everyone speaks their mind and things are taken literally to the point that you’re forced to speak your mind? Harsh, but effective. By the end of the 3rd episode of Pluribus, Carol goes through something similar. She’s at a stage where she’s got no leeway when it comes to following certain rules. And when they’re spoken out, they don’t sound too unfair. When Zosia actually shows up with a real hand grenade, it takes Carol a whole conversation, a fight, and a horrifying accident to finally believe that the hive-mind is honest to a fault. Is it being a writer that has closed off Carol’s mind so badly to the reality that people, even real people without alien virus in their DNA, can speak in clear truth and take her words for their literal meaning. Neurodivergent people exist, Carol! But I do sympathize with her discomfort with how these people, people who now share one mind, have practically stolen information, experiences, unique gifts, talents, and one-in-a-million genius qualities from people who didn’t consent to it. Fair. But the hive-mind doesn’t see this act of theft as unethical. See, Carol doesn’t want to lose herself and turn into one of them. But it’s their biological imperative to bring every last human into their hive. It’s the only way they know how to function. So what’s Zosia saying? Are they robots? Well, not quite. They’re certainly fundamentalist in their belief that their way is the right way and the only way. They believe it so much that they equate infecting Carol with the virus to throwing her a life jacket. Whoever has sent this RNA sequence to Earth believes that the way human beings have been functioning is completely wrong. So wrong that they’ve been drowning and they don’t even know it. Really makes you wonder, if they’re smart enough to make a virus and send it to Earth’s brightest minds so that they can create a bio-weapon/medicine to destroy/cure humanities gifts/ailments, are they geniuses or crazy villains? In the beginning of the episode, we saw a memory from the recent past, one where Carol and Helen went to Norway to stay in a gaudy hotel made entirely of ice. Carol groaned and whined the entire time. I mean, the bed was made of ice too! This trip was all Helen. She liked the Rick Steves kind of once-in-a-lifetime-experience sort of trips while Carol’s heart cried for the warm comforter in a nice hotel room. A lot of you probably find Carol too negative for thinking the northern lights looked like screensavers, but I kinda agree with her. But Carol did find it magical when Helen had her head on her shoulder, and the light changed. It was like she could absorb the happiness that Helen was feeling at that moment because she loved her. And now that she’s furious at Zosia, and she’s screaming about how cringe and petty the hive-mind’s idea of a perfect world is. It’s all sunshine and butterflies and happiness. It’s rainbows over bridges, empathy, endless equality, and beauty everywhere you look. The audacity of those damn aliens! This is when Carol has this inevitably heartbreaking realization that the fact that the hive-mind wants the world to be a beautiful, magical haven, that’s something that Helen would’ve really loved, even if she wasn’t infected. The hive-mind is probably in the process of creating the world that Helen would’ve been the happiest in. You know why? The hive-mind is made of the best qualities, the best desires, and the best dreams of mankind. Helen’s part of that too. Her light is in there somewhere. Carol can make them stop bringing up Helen or anything about her ever again. But they can’t make them stop celebrating the best things about Helen the way they know how. Heavy! So I’m not even sure Carol doesn’t totally know what she’s doing when she pulls the pin out of the hand grenade. Is it totally impossible that she’s a little suicidal? Of course, part of her believed that it wouldn’t go off because they would never give her a real, functional grenade. But that’s another quirk about the hive-mind. They will do exactly what you ask for. So careful what you wish for, I guess. And also, I was just about to applaud Carol for going through one episode without hurting people. But that’s not happening. Zosia leaps out of the window with the grenade to protect Carol from the explosion and gets pretty badly hurt herself. They should’ve really told Carol that Zosia would sacrifice herself to save her life! Thankfully, the ambulance arrives quickly in a world run by happy, high functioning, skilled individuals, so Zosia is saved. Now, what does this say about Carol’s idea of free will and the hive-mind’s idea of the same? Carol’s idea of free will relies majorly on a gamble. To give people free will and the resources to be able to cause destruction is to trust them to have the sense and the character to do the right thing. That works out great for our world, doesn’t it? But weirdly enough, the hive-mind’s idea of free will isn’t too different. The only difference is that even though they have access to everything that they can use to cause harm, they have zero wish to do any such thing.
In the world of Pluribus, alien technology has erased all kinds of negative instincts from humans, all except the immune. So the only people who can do anything bad in the world right now are people like Carol. People who can still feel negative feelings and do bad things. So while it shocks Carol to find out that they’ll just hand her another grenade, a tank, or even an atom bomb if she really wants one, how is that any different from the real world? Carol can’t believe that they’ll still trust her with weapons of mass destruction even though she’s just hurt Zosia playing with a grenade. They expect her to know the consequences of her actions and make the choice herself, just like our world. Only, in our world, people who get access to bigger weapons after firing smaller ones are very real, and very bad. Carol won’t pick up another hand grenade again. But how can she keep fighting for a world where someone can, and will, and they’ll hurt someone else with it? Why does everything heavy happen to the sweetest grumps?
