In episode 1 of Pluribus, a bunch of astronomers at the Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex analyzed a “message” coming from the great beyond–600 light years away, to be specific–and realized that it was a RNA sequence. Through the reverse transcriptase procedure, scientists formed a DNA solution, which was injected into mice. When that didn’t seem to bear fruit, a couple of scientists were given the responsibility of killing the specimens and starting afresh. That’s when one of the scientists got bitten by a mouse, and she turned into a zombie-like creature who infected all her colleagues at the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases. Then they began mass-producing the virus that was being spread through their saliva and one fine day, the human species’ era of autonomy essentially came to an end, and the era of humans connected to a hive mind began. There was one major problem though: 12 people around the world didn’t get converted. One of them was our protagonist, Carol. She had lost her romantic partner and manager, Helen, during this transformation process. The virus didn’t kill Helen; she convulsed and fell down really hard, and it was the fall that took her life. Either way, Carol was sad, angry, and confused about this whole phenomenon. The only silver lining in this goddamn hurricane was that until the hive had figured out how to convert people like Carol, they’d be treated like kings and queens. Was that an acceptable deal for Carol? Let’s find out.
Spoiler Alert
Carol Meets Zosia
In episode 2 we see that the clean-up process is in progress in Morocco and the rest of the world. The sequence essentially shows that since the hive connects every transformed human being, and it has the sum of the knowledge that all of humanity has collected so far, a vessel that was once a pauper can be a first responder as well as a pilot. That seems cool, but given how this is being experienced by a hive mind only, there’s no uniqueness to it. Do you get what I mean? I have learned how to play table tennis; I know how to paint, and I am in the process of practicing how to write in an effective way. There’s a sense of achievement to it, and each of those things shapes me as a person. If I merely download somebody else’s knowledge of what I want to learn just because I can, what’s even the point? Anyway, going back to the plot, we see that damned timer again, which tells us that we are 11 hours and 26 minutes into this new age of humanity. Carol wakes up after drowning all her mixed emotions in a bottle of alcohol and decides to bury Helen in the backyard. However, that’s interrupted by Zosia (Carol goes on to name her Raban because she looks like one of the characters from her books, but her real name is Zosia), because the hive has been monitoring Carol via a military drone, the MQ-9 Reaper to be specific, and it is worried that she is going to die of heat exhaustion.
When Carol expresses displeasure, the drone leaves. I don’t want to look too deeply into this, but you should check out the connection between the MQ-9 Reaper and Morocco; hopefully, you’ll notice the commentary on the US Military Industrial Complex. Anyway, Zosia offers Carol some water but Carol doesn’t want to drink it because she thinks that the hive has already figured out how to transform her and it’s trying to use that water to transfer the mind-virus into her system. Zosia assures her that that’s not the case at all, but Carol still throws away the water. As Zosia prepares to leave, Carol stops her as she has figured out that the hive has specifically sent a person resembling Raban, a character from her books (or the original unpublished version of Raban), to interact with her because it thinks that that’s going to comfort her. In addition to that, the hive accesses Helen’s memory and tries to pacify Carol, via Zosia, by talking about how much Helen loved her. That decision backfires as Carol becomes extremely agitated and yells at Zosia. This causes the hive to glitch, and Zosia falls to the ground.
The Hive Helps In Helen’s Burial
Carol drives into town and spots a hive-controlled construction crew that’s stuck because they are glitching too. She tries to help them, but by the time she makes some progress, the hive stabilizes and resumes control of its vessels. On that note, Carol returns home and notices that Zosia has procured a sun hat, a pair of gloves, and a pickaxe from her neighbor’s house to make the grave dig-up process less taxing. But since Zosia is nowhere to be seen, Carol calls the operator (yeah, there’s a 24×7 hotline available just for her) and tells the hive to send her in. As Carol begins digging again, equipped with the stuff that Zosia brought for her, Zosia reappears, and Carol asks her if she’s the reason behind the glitch. Zosia confirms that the hive is susceptible to loud outbursts of emotions and Carol’s expression of negativity did cause it to malfunction. Given how the hive is controlling everything on the planet, Carol asks Zosia if the glitch caused a lot of damage. Zosia tries to avoid giving a direct answer, but eventually she implies that Carol’s outburst has killed millions of people. Well, millions of human vessels to be accurate, because once you have no autonomy, are you even human? You are technically alive but if you are connected to a hive mind, you are not an individual. Maybe that’s why Zosia said that she shouldn’t equate the deaths of millions of human vessels to killing millions of people.
Yet, given how this whole thing is new for Carol, the statistic does upset her, and she ends up puking her guts out. As Carol tries to resume digging the grave again, Zosia says that they have an alternative to this process which’ll not deplete her energy at all. Once Carol approves, the hive delivers a mini excavator via a chopper, Zosia operates the machine, and Helen’s corpse finally gets a place to rest. Now, I’m gonna talk about two things. Usually when there’s a plane or a chopper scene in a movie or a TV show, the production resorts to CGI, stock footage, or some mixture of real footage and CGI. Why? Because shooting a scene featuring a plane or a chopper that’ll take up a few seconds of screentime is not frugal. I learned this from Patrick Willems’ video about Brian De Palma’s The Bonfire of the Vanities, where a plane-landing cost the producers $80,000. Nowadays, I suppose CGI and VFX have become so expensive that doing it for real has probably become the cost-effective option. Hence, in one episode, you get a scene of a plane taking off as well as a scene with a chopper delivering a bloody mini excavator. Regardless of how basic it seems, don’t take these moments for granted.
Carol Meets The Survivors
After burying Helen, Carol decides to meet 5 of the 12 people whose minds haven’t been captured by the hive. Why just 5? Because those are the only ones who can speak English, and Carol doesn’t have the time to learn the languages of all the survivors, and she doesn’t want the hive to be involved in that meeting in the form of an interpreter. The hive accepts Carol’s terms and chooses Bilbao as the rendezvous point for the 6 non-hive-minded people. While en route to their destination, Zosia warns Carol that, so far, the hive has protected her because it controls the human vessels. But it won’t be able to do the same if one of the survivors decides to attack Carol for any reason. Carol understands what the hive is saying, however, she puts that issue on the backburner so that she can stay hopeful about meeting Otgonbayar, Xiu Mei, Kusimayu, Laxmi, and Koumba Diabate. It doesn’t take too long for Carol to realize that all of these survivors have made peace with the new status quo. While Otgonbayar, Xiu Mei, Kusimayu, and Laxmi are still seeing the vessels of their respective family members as their family members, Koumba is waltzing around the world, fulfilling every single desire that has ever crossed his mind. One of these desires entails arriving in Bilbao on the Air Force One. Although Carol is repulsed by it, she chooses to make the most out of it by using the high-tech plane as the spot for the survivors’ meeting. The hive obliges, takes the survivors to the conference room in the plane, turns off all the listening devices, and then leaves with all the human vessels. Once Carol is sure that the hive isn’t listening in on the survivors, she gets straight to the point: she wants ideas on how to fix the world.
As if it wasn’t clear already, the survivors say that they don’t want to fix anything, because they like it as it is. Carol tries to explain that what the hive is offering is temporary. The hive is stalling until they can find a way to assimilate the survivors into the hive, and they need to stop that from happening. Turns out that the survivors aren’t all that opposed to that outcome as well, which means that only Carol cares about having some kind of control over her life. Heck, Laxmi seems intelligent enough to understand what Carol is saying, but since Carol’s outburst killed the vessel of her grandfather, she doesn’t want to support her. Carol tries to help them understand the importance of having one’s hands on the steering wheel, instead of giving it up to a hive. In response to that, Koumba says that the hive has achieved world peace by ending all forms of discrimination and cruelty. Carol counters that by compelling the survivors to ask the hive what’s been the human cost of achieving this so-called world peace. Seeing how things are getting agitated, Koumba proposes that they have lunch and then talk about this matter. This is where Koumba, surprisingly enough, hits a speed-bump: the hive can’t kill. So, even though they have procured the freshest meat available on the market, they won’t kill on behalf of the survivors just to restock the reserves. Koumba does find a workaround: he’s going to do the killing and the hive will do the cooking. But, yeah, that’s not the most important part of this dinner-table chat. That spot’s taken up by the argument between Carol, Laxmi, and Zosia about the ethics of this somewhat hostile takeover.
Carol Gives Zosia a Choice
Initially, Carol tries to prove that Laxmi’s son isn’t actually her son and is only a vessel that not only has her son’s memories but also the entirety of humanity’s consciousness. She tries to show how unfairly Laxmi’s son has been robbed of his identity, that too without his or his parents’ consent (because the hive is programmed to transform anyone regardless of what they want), and replaced with a puppet of a hive mind. When that doesn’t work, Carol shifts to the topic of the casualty numbers. The hive defends its actions by saying that the transition process was initially peaceful, but they had to accelerate the process once the army found out about them. By the way, we don’t exactly learn “how” they accelerated it; as in, how did they go from infecting people via saliva to triggering the whole world to become a part of the hive in one fell swoop? That’s because Carol hyper-focuses on the number of people who were killed during the transition process. Zosia says that the official statistic is somewhere around 886 million. That pretty much bursts the bubble that this was an efficient way of attaining world peace. However, since Laxmi is hellbent on proving that Carol is in the wrong, she reveals that Carol’s emotional outburst killed 11 million people, which means that Carol doesn’t have any right to judge how the hive has gone about this hostile takeover.
Carol understands that her words aren’t going to work on these survivors and she decides to leave for home. Laxmi makes a stray remark, which causes Carol to label all of them as traitors. As she’s walking away from the group, Carol faints momentarily, because she has consumed too much alcohol on an empty stomach. As Zosia and the hive trys to ensure that she is okay, Carol explodes again, which causes the hive to glitch, again. Laxmi hurls a bunch of Hindi expletives at Carol, and as someone whose third language is Hindi, I didn’t really understand what she was saying. That said, I do think Laxmi aptly represents Indians in this day and age. Going back to the plot, Carol wakes up from a nap and learns from Zosia that she has managed to scare away all the survivors except for one: Koumba. No, he hasn’t decided to hang back because he understands Carol’s perspective; he actually wants Carol’s permission to add Zosia to his harem before he jets off to Las Vegas. Carol can’t believe how messed up this is. She points out that since the hive has decided to “serve” the survivors until it figures out how to enslave them, Koumba is exploiting the vessels that the hive is puppeteering instead of working with Carol to return their autonomy. Because if these women regain their individuality, they wouldn’t look twice at a sleazebag like Koumba. She almost flies into another fit of anger because of the unethical nature of this whole dynamic, but she manages to compose herself and throws the ball in the hive’s court and forces it to decide whether it wants Zosia to go with Koumba or stay as Carol’s chaperone.
Carol Stops Zosia From Leaving With Koumba
In the ending of Pluribus episode 2, Carol boards her plane to go back to Albuquerque, while Zosia boards Air Force One to go to Las Vegas with Koumba. In a surprising turn of events, Carol deboards her own plane and stops Air Force One from leaving. Why? Well, the most basic reading of this moment is that, after losing Helen, Carol has become attached to Zosia, and that’s why she can’t allow her to be used by Koumba. But Carol is too smart to think like that. Which is why I think that Carol has come up with a theory, in regards to defeating the hive and restoring the status quo, and she wants to test it via Zosia. What is this theory? Look, initially I thought that Carol was just going to keep screaming loudly until the hive felt defeated, restored the memories of all the humans, and just died. However, that’s a very dangerous method and could lead to the deaths of millions of people. Therefore, what Carol has to do is force the hive to make difficult choices for its individual vessels.
Till now, the hive has taken a “greater good” type of approach to arriving at a decision. Choosing between Koumba and Carol is the first uniquely personal situation that it has encountered, and it ended up siding with Koumba. Instead of being hurt by that, if Carol manages to figure out how and why it did that and then forces the hive to make even more difficult choices, I think the hive will be compelled to relinquish control over the vessels. As in, the hive will install a compressed version of its thoughts and ideas in a vessel and then let it function independently because focusing on such individual choices will distract it from handling the bigger picture, whatever that is. Once a vessel is untethered, that vessel will have its own autonomy, and it’ll come closer to being a human being. Maybe the vessel won’t be the human being it used to be, but it’s better to be a new human being than just a puppet, right? So, yeah, I think that’s what Carol is going for. Or maybe it’s something else entirely. Either way, I am very interested in Carol’s saga and I want to see how she solves this situation before the sender of that RNA sequence arrives on Earth. I mean, that’s clearly what’s going on right? Whoever has remotely disabled humanity’s ability to fight for itself hasn’t done so to achieve world peace. They clearly want to come to Earth and take its resources or use the planet’s population for slave labor. And it’s fascinating to think that a novelist is humanity’s last hope. What are your thoughts on the show so far, though? Let me know in the comments section below.
