Pluribus - We just need a little space.

Pluribus: 1x05 Got Milk.

When is the last time you’ve seen someone drink from a carton of milk in public? With the exception of vaguely coffee-flavoured milk drinks, I can’t recall a single instance in the last decade or so, and yet the ubiquitous tiny milk cartons that the Others drink from are so inconspicuous, so unremarkable, that they only really stand out as unusual when Carol sees them en masse in a park bin. If you’re looking for them, they are everywhere: Zosia, after all, was first introduced into the show loading a dead body into a milk truck in Morocco, and Zosia was drinking milk in the hospital after waking up, and so is a random hospital patient at the beginning of the episode. It’s a trick of perception, where an everyday object occurs in the wrong space, or too frequently to be a coincidence. It also hints at what kind of show Pluribus is: one that rewards very attentive viewing, where every detail matters, even if it is camouflaged in triviality. It’s something to keep in mind. 

At the beginning of the episode, Carol is in hospital, after once again having inflicted injury on Zosia. Seasoned Carol-skeptic Laxmi calls her and blames her for making her son cry (“Why do you do such things? Are you mentally unsound?”), indicating that the effect she had when she gave Zosia the truth-serum had world-wide repercussions once again. This time is different, because Carol has done deliberate rather than incidental harm. She has specifically targeted Zosia, and she is pursuing an aim in direct conflict with the main thing that the Others care about. And so, once Carol gets some rest in the hospital, everyone packs their little backpacks and leaves Albuquerque. Patients are wheeled out on beds and wheelchairs. Cars and buses fill and leave town. When Carol wakes up, she is alone in a whole new dramatic way: the Others have identified her as toxic and dangerous, and are keeping their distance. 

Hello, Carol. This is a recording. At the tone, you can leave a message to request anything you might need. We'll do our best to provide it. Our feelings for you haven't changed, Carol, but after everything that's happened, we just need a little space.

Carol will hear the entirety of this message every single time she calls on the phone, as a reminder of what she has done. It feeds into her anger and frustration, but there is also an almost immediate sense of complete isolation as she computes the emptiness of Albuquerque from a rooftop. The adversarial relationship with Zosia is no longer there to distract her, and as much as the collective vocalisations and the endless helpfulness with a smile have annoyed her in the past, now that they are gone, it is somehow worse. Carol’s reaction to what has happened is not too dissimilar to that of Manousos in Paraguay, but her tolerance for true solitude is not as great as his, and as much as she is a self-proclaimed independent person, so much of her everyday routine has depended on interaction with the collective. Worse, she needs their help even in her pursuit to thwart them, because there is no independent infrastructure available to her. After she records a second message for the twelve fellow individuals, she needs the Others to pick up her parcel and deliver it. The message is well-composed and clearly delivered by a person who is used to speaking to an audience, but there is also an eerie sense here that Carol is sinking into conspiracy theories (they may be correct, but it’s hard not to read that particular rhythm of delivery and reliance on limited facts that way – a very 2025 problem). It is meant to be a rallying cry in which she talks about treasuring individuality and saving humanity, but it is hard to take such lofty goals seriously from a woman who managed to alienate most possible allies within five minutes of meeting them, and is still not acknowledging in any way that their goals may differ from hers because they have emotional connections to the Others that she doesn’t. 
It would also seem a completely unachievable goal for one single woman to pursue if it weren’t for the ferocity and sheer force of will that Carol demonstrated in this episode, which once again relies mostly on Rhea Seehorn alone. The amount of things that Carol gets done in just a day and a half is truly astonishing, and she seems driven by her grief. I think this is the first time that she sleeps back in her own bed, and the empty other side makes her loss even clearer, and now there is nothing to distract her from it. It’s so horrible that she asks for all of the lights to come back on. She also stops drinking (after having been on what felt like a seven day bender), and that new clarity of mind appears to do wonders for her thinking (like when she wakes up the morning after chasing the coyotes away from Helen’s grave and figures out both the mechanism to unlock the gun in the police cruiser and that she could have used the key for the handcuff she’s still attached to – “Son of a bitch!”). 

Carol’s attempts to navigate this new, empty life without the presence of Zosia at her beck and call lead to a lot of accidental discoveries that she pursues with a remarkable single-mindedness. Realising that the coyotes are going through her trash, she asks the Others to remove it, but the cloche from her rejected breakfast causes the drone to crash (hilariously, and perhaps intentionally). So she takes it to a public trash can in the city, where she sees too many milk cartons to discount as accidental, following that little trail of trash like a sniffer hound. She goes to the city dairy, which has been abandoned in a hurry just like every other part of Albuquerque, and finds traces of a substance that is definitely not milk. She also finds bags filled with a powdery substance that has peaked the interest of crows. She applies all the tools she has available to her to it to figure it out but the soil pH test is inconclusive (“basically neutral” is a solid joke though). Carol might be under-resourced for sleuthing, but what she lacks in tools, she makes up for with determination and incredible amounts of stamina – after the coyotes begin to try and dig up Helen’s body she drives out to a building supply store to pick up a boot-load of pavers which she lays by herself, in the burning sun, and she still can’t go to sleep after. Instead she drives to her local Sprouts to figure out where the bags came from (repurposed dry dog food bags, it turns out), and traces them back to a manufacturer called Agri-Jet. She breaks into the building where she finds stock-piled food – and something horrible that we only get to see through her reaction, before the screen cuts to black. 

Random notes: 

Malk – Now with Vitamin R (just me?).

What Carol finds in the warehouse will promptly be revealed in the next episode but it is easy enough to guess in an episode that is very concerned about protecting the dead body of a loved one from scavengers in the B-plot. It’s not really a breathtaking cliffhanger as much as a little wink from Vince Gilligan I think. 

Patrick Fabian becoming a constant presence of this show as the voice of the Others’ Answering Machine Service is great! And he has the perfect Others Customer Service Voice too. 

I liked how Carol struggled for the correct label for – the “Others”, the “affected people” – just like reviewers are. I used joined and unjoined in the past but maybe Trill-speak is ill-suited to this (as would “assimilated” be – they’re not quite Borg either). 

I also laughed at Carol re-recording her second message, realising she was sounding too weird, with all of her little props lined up on the coffee table. “That probably means something!”. 

After laying those pavers, I really hope Carol has held on to her Theragun. I had empathetic back spasms just watching her do it. 

Pluribus - You’ve never been us.

Pluribus: 1x04 Please, Carol.

 

 You can’t touch me. I have agency. 

There’s an alternative version of Pluribus, one that would make for a very different show, in which the unjoined do act together to find a way to reverse what has happened. What would that form of collective decision-making look like in the absence of a synced mind, with opposing views on what actions are justifiable clashing, with consensus being found after a debate? Pluribus would be a more conventional survival show. It would arguably lose what makes it special. We’ll never know what that show would look like, because Carol has alienated everyone else who might have been an ally, and she is going at this all alone, without even a second mind to bounce ideas back on. The only person who may be on her side, who we meet at the beginning of the episode, is even more isolated than her if that’s even possible. He doesn’t communicate with the joined at all, he denies any help from them. He lives in his little compound of a storage facility, raiding it for inadequate supplies (even resorting to eating dog food). He may be scanning the radio waves for others but so far, his only contact has been through those phone calls with Carol, at the end of which he realises that she isn’t one of the collective, but he doesn’t have any way of reaching out to her if he wants to stay isolated from the unjoined. In fact, he doesn’t even know how to spell her name. 

Left to her own devices, Carol approaches this project like she would a new book: the first step is research. She returns home from the hospital in a requisitioned police cruiser, finding strangers in her home trying to fix the damage from the grenade. She writes down everything she knows so far on the white board in her office and decides to test the theory that they can’t lie to her. One of the people helping to fix her house is Larry (the great Jeff Hiller who just this year won an Emmy for his outstanding work on Somebody, Somewhere, which should have gotten more seasons). Carol asks him to come into the house and asks him questions about how the joined feel about her work, and in the ego-destroying process realising that while they are not very good at critique (turns out crowd-sourcing book reviews is not a great way to arrive at a coherent picture), they are indeed incapable of lying, even to spare her feelings. The realisation that Helen thought her Wycaro books were cotton-candy is sad, but finding out that she never even finished her serious novel and thought it was harmless is soul-destroying (in a way, it mirrors how the joined treat her, trying to make her happy that never really work and undermine her agency). 
Armed with this knowledge, she returns to the hospital and asks Zosia, who has recovered a bit from shielding Carol from the grenade, if there is a way to reverse the joining. Her non-answer is enough to give Carol hope. The joined may be unable to provide her an answer that would undermine and endanger the entire project, but Carol is certain that if the answer were no, Zosia would have told her straight-up. 

Carol’s conversation with Zosia also reveals one of the reasons why she is so reluctant to accept the collective’s wishes for her to join them. Her mother sent her to a conversion camp when she was a teenager, and the experience of having others decide what was good for her in such a violent way reminds her of what the joined are doing now, stated good intentions or not. There is very good reason for why Carol cherishes her autonomy and agency, and it is in direct conflict with the biological imperative of the joined. 
Carol quickly arrives at a potential solution for Zosia’s refusal to answer how the process can be reversed. She goes to the hospital pharmacy and gets a vial of sodium thiopental, more colloquially known as “truth serum” (although its efficacy is questionable). To cover up her tracks she asks one of the joined for heroin (“remember last time”, he cautions her, before having a baggy delivered to her). At home, she tests the sodium thiopental on herself, and realises it might be a winner when her filmed reaction to it includes the admission that she finds Zosia fuckable, the kind of statement that the joined wouldn’t have been able to torture out of her if they had tried. 
It’s notable that Carol decides to use it on Zosia, when she could have picked anyone. As much as Zosia is part of the collective, Carol still seems to see her as an individual to an extent, and someone she has made a connection with. It does not work the way she intended. Instead of learning the truth, Zosia has an adverse reaction, seemingly losing the ability to access the hivemind and eventually collapsing while other unjoined assemble around her, crying, pleading with Carol to stop. Instead of doing that in perfect unison, they seem disturbingly out of sync, as if they are all suffering from the effects of the drug. This is a very different reaction to Carol’s previous trespasses, like causing the glitching through her aggression and hurting Zosia with the grenade: she is doing intentional, deliberate harm, and pursuing a goal that is detrimental to the thing the collective cares about the most. At the end of the episode, Zosia goes into cardiac arrest, and it seems to dawn on Carol that she has crossed a line. 

 

Random notes: 

There will be more of this to come but it’s amazing to see Rhea Seehorn carry so much of these episodes by herself: the scene of her under the influence and her reaction to seeing herself on the tape is hilarious. Note the conspicuous crocheted hat as a throwback to her calling fan Moira and her hats “crazy” earlier. 

Some behind-the-scenes details: Tim Keller, the mayor of Albuquerque plays the mayor of Albuquerque (showing how entangled this real-world city is with Vince Gilligan’s decades-long project of putting it on the map), and Rosa Estrada, the on-set medic who saved Bob Odenkirk’s life on Better Call Saul, is the person using the defibrillator on Zosia at the end of the episode. 

It’s interesting to think about Carol’s impulse to ask Larry about what Helen thought of her books: it’s so clear that Carol is still grieving (as fun as the scene of her drugged is, the moment where she cries about Helen’s death breaks both her and the viewer), and yet she can’t stop herself from asking a question that will so obviously hurt her more. Larry tries to spare her but Carol seems set on the pain of it, choosing brutal honesty over the safety of ignorance. Not everyone would!

“Might we suggest snorting the heroin instead?”

Reading List: November.

Non-Fiction:

Eleanor Johnson: Scream with Me. Horror Films and the Rise of American Feminism (1968-1980)

Cory Doctorow: Enshittification.Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It. 

Siddharth Kara: The Zorg: A Tale of Greed and Murder That Inspired the Abolition of Slavery. 

 

Fiction: 

 

Joe Hill: King Sorrow. 

Wen-yi Lee: When They Burned the Butterfly. 

Yáng Shuāng-Zǐ: Taiwan Travelogue. 

Michael Wehunt: October Film Haunt. 

Anbara Salam: The Salvage. 

 

Films: 

 

Wanda (1970, Barbara Loden).

Klute (1971, Alan J. Pakula).

Town Bloody Hall (1979, Chris Hegedus, D.A. Pennebaker). 

Hedda (2025, Nia DaCosta).

Dìdi (2024, Sean Wang).

 

Shows: 

Death By Lightning, Season One. 

Queendom, Season One. 

 

Other: 

 

Embarking on a Drift to the Unknown @ Nexus Arts. 

World Skateboarding Tour Kitakyushu Street 2025 @ Kitakyushu Messe. 

Pluribus - Only I get to remember her.

Pluribus: 1x03 Grenade. 

 

Carol: You’re gonna forget everything you know about Helen. Every memory, every thought she ever had. Get her out of your head. Heads! Never mention her again. Never think about her again. Only I get to remember her, you got that? Only me. 

In this new world of Pluribus, the adage that nobody can truly understand someone else’s relationship unless they are in it is no longer true. Every single person except the other twelve who remain unjoined knows exactly what it is like to be in a relationship with Carol, what it is like to love her. They share all the memories that Helen has of her, and all of the feelings she felt. Grenade does a really brilliant thing in this episode which is to contrast how the viewer might feel about Carol in her relationship with Helen with what Zosia, the representative for everyone, feels when she accesses Helen’s feelings. It’s very easy to look at that flashback (or memory) of their holiday in a Norwegian ice hotel and question why Helen loves this misanthropic woman who never really expresses joy, or admits that the experience of watching the Aurora through this magnificent, temporary structure made of ice is beautiful. Helen is excited by everything, savours the -3C temperature, the beautiful sculptures, the novelty of sleeping under furs on a bed of ice, the colours of the Northern Lights. Carol is cold, questions why they have spent so much money on being uncomfortable, compares the spectacle to a screensaver. And yet, if you pay attention, I think the scene captures not only the dynamics of their relationship but also the reason for why it lasted so long, why they were life partners: Helen knows Carol well enough that she doesn’t need to hear that she will cherish this experience. She knows that Carol would never have spent the money on herself, or admitted to wanting to follow a Rick Steves travel recommendation, that she is most herself when she is complaining but also, in that final moment of the memory on the bed next to Helen, maybe is also in awe of the moment. She treasures this memory enough that it starts a whole episode about Carol’s desperate insistence that she should be the only one who gets to access these memories. Helen was hers, and the idea of sharing her with the entire world is ghoulish to her. It’s a whole different unimaginable level of grief and loss to now have to exist without the physical presence of Helen and yet to be constantly reminded by a woman who is still a stranger that none of these moments are sacred anymore, that their intimacy has been undermined by a hivemind. 

The other insight of the episode is that it takes more than the memories of a loved on and a wealth of information of someone’s preferences to make them happy. Zosia has access to an endless treasure trove of facts about Carol, including a lot of meals that she has expressed appreciation for in the past, but none of that actually helps her to make Carol happy. The attempt to deliver her a breakfast she once enjoyed in the past only reminds Carol how alienating her experience is. It doesn’t make her feel loved and cared for the way it would if Helen were the one delivering these meals, and it doesn’t make her nostalgic to be reminded of her memories of having eaten them in the past. These are meant to be acts of service, but to Carol, they are intrusions into what she holds dear: her individual memories, her agency to make choices about who gets to be close to her. It’s like a transcription error between Carol’s and this collective consciousness, the same way in which the entity’s inability to read her sarcasm – or its almost fatal mistake in erring on the side of assuming it isn’t sarcasm, in spite of everything it knows about Carol – shows the difference between human individuals who get to know one another over a period of time and the instant fake intimacy of having access to extremely personal information. This incidentally also sums up the danger of treating a chatbot like a person just because it can respond back with something that sounds like an approximation of empathy (and it is fitting that the DHL man’s “we’re sorry if we got that wrong” sounds so similar to a chatbot apologising for a hallucination). 

 

Carol, at the beginning of the episode, is desperate. She has just gone through the completely alienating process of realising that her fellow leftover humans are just as much strangers to her as the collective is, and that she is incapable of making a connection with them that could result in any shared action against what has happened. She is once again sitting in the very last row of the plane, as far away from others as possible, while two (now, in their previous individual form, highly experienced) pilots fly her back to Albuquerque. She quizzes Zosia about the remaining unjoined who don’t speak English, and the response is once again disappointing: nobody has any medical background, there is no potential ally in sight. The only remaining hope is the man in Paraguay who evaded detection for so long, but when Carol asks Zosia to call him from the plane’s phone, he reacts the same way that we might suspect Carol would, if someone called her. He tells her in Spanish to stop calling him, to leave him alone, clearly thinking she is part of the hivemind. She has just enough Spanish to insult him in a way that would indicate he gets that she isn’t, but for now, this thread isn’t going anywhere for her. 
Back in Albuquerque, Zosia gives her all the post that was in transit as a little gift. A box contains a Theragun that Helen ordered for her, knowing she wouldn’t do it for herself. She liked using it in Atlanta, it helped with the stress of the book tour, it was meant as a gift to celebrate her success. Carol hates that Zosia knows all this, and demands that she forget everything she knows about Helen (obviously impossible, but I guess what she really is asking for is the pretence of not knowing). Then Carol sinks into the oblivion of a Golden Girls DVD box set, alcohol, and benzodiazapines. There’s nothing else for her to do anymore, her one gambit to save the world has failed. While she whiles away her time, the world is changing around her, but she is not out there to witness it. After she refuses the breakfast meal delivery, she goes to her local Sprouts to restock her fridge, and this is her first encounter with how the world is changing now that a collective conscience is in charge of infrastructure. The supermarket is unstaffed and empty, because, as Zosia explains on the phone, everything is being re-organised to be more efficiently distributed (and we know how inefficient supermarkets are at avoiding wastefulness). Carol is outraged about this. 

Carol: I don’t want you waiting on me. I am a very independent person, I always have been, I fend for myself. I just want my Sprouts back. 

What follows is a beautiful sequence that captures Vince Gilligan’s inherent brilliance at finding the elegant choreography of the mundane everyday, only now made even more artistic by the fact that it is executed by perfectly synced worker bees. Carol of course completely misses the irony on insisting that she is independent and yet is asking to have her very personal supermarket run as normal just for her own convenience. Within minutes, trucks pull up, and people come out of nowhere to unload them into the supermarket. It takes them about an hour to perfectly restock everything. They even turn the soothing store music back on so that Carol can collect her readymeals in the comfort she is used to. Later that night, the power flickers out everywhere Carol can see, and is restored only for her a few seconds later: and for a moment, after being told that this is the collective’s new efficient means of reducing consumption when it is not essential, she seems to be considering asking them to turn it back on all over Albuquerque, to maintain the facade of normalcy, until she concedes. As much as Carol insists on her own independence and on wanting to be left alone, there is still a desire to have her world maintained the way that she knows it, and for that she needs the hated joined to cater to her, like it or not. From Carol’s perspective there is no community and no relationship to anyone else anymore, but she is still on the phone with with Zosia whenever she has questions or feels unsettled by change. 

And then, in a frustrated aside, Carol says “There’s nothing wrong with me that a hand grenade couldn’t fix”. She knows that the joined are doing everything they can to make her happy, she knows that they are bad at guessing what that may be, and yet it only occurs to her what this power means when Zosia shows up at her door with a literal hand grenade. “We thought you were probably being sarcastic but we didn’t want to take the chance. Were you being sarcastic?” Carol asks Zosia in for a drink, like she is craving company and she is reaching a breaking point where any company will do. Carol finally does ask about what it feels like to be part of a shared mind, and Zosia explains that the biological imperative of spreading overrides everything: eventually, the promise that they only want her to be happy and that she has choices to make will be broken, even if they don’t know yet how long it will take to develop whatever it takes to bring her into the fold. Carol has “all this agency” until she doesn’t. Carol is the one who suggests that the mind meld might feel a bit like these perfect moments assembled in Rick Steves travel recommendations, moments that look like postcards but only really develop their meaning when they are shared with someone else, the way that her memory of the ice hotel is so essential for her. Zosia is the one who completes that sentence, breaking Carol’s demand to forget about Helen. Inevitably, and even though Carol seems to be making a conscious effort not to lose her cool anymore in a way that would make the whole world glitch, she removes the pin from the hand grenade, because she still cannot imagine a world where she would be given a live, real grenade because of an unconsidered comment. Carol isn’t made for a world where everything she says is taken literally, out of an abundance of caution. Zosia ends up in hospital after the blast after saving Carol’s life, and Carol is once again confronted with the damage she can do even if she doesn’t mean to, because of a barrier in communication. 

 

In the hospital, a man wearing a DHL uniform tries to reassure Carol that Zosia will make a full recovery and that Carol’s actions after the explosions helped save her life. Carol asks him about the limits of what they would be willing to give her after seeing the damage that she can do, and it appears that there are still no real limits – they might asks some questions and explain consequences if she asked for a nuclear bomb, but the answer would still be “yes”. Carol thinks about this, but it feels like she’s not really planning anything that has to do with an actual atom bomb, she’s more mulling the weird dissonance of being in a cage and yet being given seemingly unlimited freedom about what to do in there, according to a completely alien logic that doesn’t seem to have even the most utilitarian concerns about limiting the damage she is allowed to do.

Random notes: 

I am guessing that a lot of viewers would have had a very negative reaction to Carol’s behaviour on her holiday, and it amuses me to no end that Vince Gilligan took the experience of dealing with Walter White fanboys who hated Skyler for spoiling the fun and then really went for it with Carol Sturka. 

The Theragun shout-out in this episode feels specifically tailored for the 35+ audience who is also desperately battling the ravages of time on the human body with the help of a massage gun. I rarely endorse products but this one deserves a rec.

“That’s an affirmative, Carol.”

“Are you the Grinch who stole supermarkets?”

“You donated twice to the Sierra club so we thought you’d understand.”

The supermarket sequence reminded me that this could have been a different and much worse show if any preppers or survivalist or avid conspiracy theorists had made it into this brave new world (they might still be out there, evading detection, but I kind of hope not). The prospect of being able to demand weapons would play out very differently. I guess it would be interesting to see how the joined would react to a genuine, existential threat to their continued existence, and it’s unclear if part of the reason for why the ultimate answer to the atom bomb question would still be yes is that Carol seems unlikely to be willing to do that kind of damage. Every time she has caused harm, she has tried to remedy the situation somehow, proving that she does care. 

I think one of the biggest condemnations I can find against what the joined represent is the unanswered question of whether art still exists in this world, if they have some kind of collective pursuit of artistic expression that may differ radically from what existed before (what would it looks like? Would the instinct for expression still exist?) but is still a form of art. The Golden Girls on DVD is now thrice a thing of the past in this world: an old TV show on an outdated medium (that will hopefully make a comeback though!) watched in a world where, by what we’ve seen so far, television shows have ceased to exist. 

I was quite charmed by Zosia’s enthusiasm for etymology, and what it would feel like to have all the language of the world in your head if you were genuinely curious about the origins of meaning and language. It’s also difficult not to see a spark of individuality in how passionately she makes the connections. 

 

I'm in Japan for two weeks so the next reviews will be delayed. 

Das Lied zum Sonntag

Barry Can't Swim feat. O'Flynn - Kimpton (on Loner)

 

 

Pluribus – We just want you to be happy.

Pluribus: 1x02 Pirate Lady.

Pluribus isn’t exactly an “end of the world” scenario as it would traditionally occur. There is no threat from zombie hordes, no armed gangs roaming the wastelands, no collapse of the vestiges of society, no resource scarceness that necessitates violent competition for what is left. What has happened instead is a complete and radical change in how humanity functions, as the intro of this episode shows. The “joined” are cleaning up the chaos. They are removing dead bodies. We don’t see it explicitly addressed, but it seems that the infrastructure that allows society to function, like water and electricity, is continuing as usual – it is fair to imagine that people are still showing up for these jobs, even though they may now be doing them with perfect efficiency. Pluribus isn’t get providing any answers on where this is all going, if the goal is just to continue as before, except as a hivemind, or if once the remaining thirteen who have not been absorbed join, this new version of humanity will take a different course entirely. I am imagining that the biological imperative of spreading would eventually reach towards the stars, but who knows if Pluribus is even interested in pursuing this question in the future. 
The pre-credit scene introduces us to a new character who will only be named at the end of the episode, because Carol doesn’t bother to find out her name when she meets her. Zosia (Karolina Wydra), currently engaged in removing a dead body from a car wreck, has been sent on a mission. Every single one of the perfectly coordinated steps to getting her from wherever she is (Morocco, maybe) to Albuquerque, New Mexico, happens in silence, because there is no need for verbal communication. She drives herself to an airport, pilots a massive plane, receives a complete make-over at her destination, and arrives fully groomed at Carol’s house. Carol is attempting to bury Helen, a ritual that is in direct contrast to what is happening with dead bodies everywhere else in the world: as efficient as the joined are in their removal of the dead, nothing about the process looks like a funerary ritual that has any meaning. Carol wraps Helen’s body in a quilt that is clearly meaningful and beloved. She works the compacted soil of her garden with a shovel, to little avail, taking no breaks in the unforgiving sun. The difficulty of saying goodbye for her wife is as physical as it is emotional, and this is a deeply human experience, one that Carol later doesn’t name as one of the things that has been lost in the joining but that must play on her mind regardless. Loss and grief have become meaningless in a world where every person who passes remains fully present through their memories in the remaining collective, and this makes Carol the loneliest person left on the planet. 

At the core of the episode is the question of how an individual like Carol can meaningfully connect to a person who is no longer an individual, but part of a collective. It’s not something that has been previously asked of humans, as much as different concepts of individualism and the collective exist across cultures. It makes me think of Ursula K. Le Guin’s stories about people from different species coming into contact and trying to bridge these fundamental gaps in understanding. Zosia has been sent there – hilariously – because she physically resembles the Raban of her book covers (“someone we thought you may like”), a fact that sets her off to a bad start because it’s how Carol is forced to realise that Helen’s consciousness was absorbed into the collective before her death. She was the only one who knew that Carol initially wanted Raban to be a woman but chickened out. When she accusingly and incredulously holds up the cover of the book next to Zosia’s face – a scene that is maybe the funniest so far – she realises that the only other person in the world she really cared about now exists in this stranger’s head, who can recall the love she had for her, and all their shared experiences. It’s deeply, profoundly violating, especially considering that Helen died because of the joining (Carol calls them “ghouls”), and results in Carol screaming at Zosia, which causes her to seize.

It turns out that the joined are vulnerable to Carol’s negative emotional outbursts. When Carol goes off to get help – because whatever else may still be happening, I think in the moment it is impossible for her not to react with a level of responsibility and care towards someone who is having a medical emergency – she realises that everyone is affected. She attempts to save a construction worker trapped in midair but eventually the seizing stops and the joined return to their normal, helpful selves. It shakes Carol up enough that she makes a phone call: “The pirate lady can come back if she wants”. And so she does, and helps bury Helen, first by helping her dig with a pickaxe, then by delivering a digger via helicopter. It’s a monumental step for Carol to admit that she cannot finish this essential task by herself and to accept support from someone she blames for what happened to Helen. If things were different, if this weren’t a story about a collective consciousness, this moment would create intimacy and some kind of personal connection between these two women – how can it not – and the question of this episode is what kind of connection can still exist between Carol and any representative of the collective, when there are no longer the kind of individuated feelings that form the basis of any human connection between two people. 

The other question that I was beginning to ask as the episode unfolded is whether the collective is capable of deception and lies. They make it clear that they cannot do deliberate harm (not just to the remaining unjoined but also to animals), but Zosia’s evasiveness when Carol asks her how many people she has killed by inducing the seizures hints that they can withhold information when they think it would hurt one of the thirteen. Later, it’s Laxmi (Menik Gooneratne), one of the other remaining unjoined, who reveals to Carol that she killed 11 million people with one emotional outburst, an incredibly, unimaginable number to be personally responsible for. 
Carol asks Zosia to arrange a meeting with those of the unjoined who can speak English. She wants to meet them without needing a translator. What she expects to find is five other people who feel as she does: an obligation to some kind of resistance against what has happened, horror at what occurred, a shared goal that would ease her loneliness. Instead, once her plane lands in Bilbao, she finds people who have brought their families with them – family members that are joined – and therefore have had a completely different experience from her, and different ideas on how to proceed. It’s also interesting that all of these people are from different cultures, and how deeply American Carol’s approach is – her comprehension of what is happening is influenced by her cultural idea of the importance of individualism, by her consumption of pop culture, all of which exists in a different context than that of these other people. Her attempts to explain why they must resist and find a way to reverse what has happened are mixed with the unwillingness to even listen to where other people are coming from, or to comprehend why someone whose son or husband is part of the collective would have come to different conclusions. Instead she is brash, insulting even, paternalistic when Kusimayu (Darinka Arones) explains that she wants to join her aunt and cousin in the collective, to share herself. Carol also reveals that she is the only one who hasn’t bothered to ask what the experience is like (“You don’t ask a drug dealer to describe their heroin.”) Laxmi is set against her from the start because the seizures she induced have killed her grandfather. Mr Diabaté (Samba Schutte), who arrives late and on Air Force One (“It was available to any of you who asked”), seems specifically designed to piss her off. He has fully embraced what has happened, assembled a harem of beautiful woman, is living life to the fullest. 

I am not convinced things are as bad as you say. As we speak, no one is being robbed or murdered. No one is in prison. The colour of one’s skin, by all accounts, now meaningless. All zoos are empty. All dogs are off their chains. Peace on Earth.

It would be easier for Carol to make her arguments if the world looked different than it does, if this were a more obvious dystopia instead of a world that looks more peaceful than it did a day ago. As much as this is an attempt to find fellow fighters in her resistance, Carol also seems to want to make a connection to the only remaining people who are still individuals because she is so lonely in all of this, and she fails spectacularly in both of her goals. Instead of connection, she finds friction. Instead of identifying a common enemy, she makes herself the enemy, when another emotional outburst causes not only Zosia and the other people tasked with serving them seize, but also the beloved family members. Carol is a liability not just to the joined, but also to these unjoined who have loved ones they care about. If she was alone before in a world that felt empty and very quiet, she is now even more isolated and lonely in one where she is incapable to connect even to the people who share her extremely rare position. 

In contrast to all of these traumatising experiences of failing to connect, there’s Zosia, who is ever-present, ever-accommodating, and rarely leaves her side. She is the loneliest person on the planet, cut off from any kind of meaningful connection, and it feels like something has shifted when she wakes up in her hotel room and asks Zosia how she is on the phone: she must already know that the answer will contain the hated “we”, but it’s still an attempt to reach out to something that has become unattainable. Later, Mr. Diabaté wants Zosia to join his harem and Carol is the one who has to make a choice, because Zosia is unable to choose when either of them could be hurt by the answer. She lets her go, but then dramatically races down to the tarmac to stand in front of Air Force One and stop it before it can take off. 

Random notes: 

I cannot overstate how funny the scene with the book cover is, especially because it’s so clear that the cover must have initially been of a female Raban, who now has a beard drawn on her, something that mirrors late 90s and early 2000s films that inserted a male love interest for its female characters at the last second to counteract the otherwise obvious gayness. 

I’m thinking about how much it isn’t just Carol who would be so eager to see any signs of individualism in Zosia – a woman who has offered to tell her how much Helen loved her, who looks like her ideal woman (what a great throwback to that fan question in episode one by the way), who contains all the memories and emotions of her wife – but also probably what viewers instinctually would look for. Does Zosia care about Carol more than she does about Mr. Diabaté? Is Zosia eager for Carol to choose her? There can’t be a conventional yes here, but the fact that there’s a desire for it alone means something. It also once again reminds of how eager humans are to see some kind of individual consciousness in chat bots, because talking to something creates feelings and connections, even if there’s no there there. (but of course the interesting thing about Pluribus is that Zosia is very much not an AI). 

The massiveness of the production of bringing the six unjoined together mirrors the massiveness of Pluribus as a show – as much as Mr. Diabaté is living life to the fullest, enjoying all the potential spoils of being catered to by the entirety of civilisation, it also showcases Vince Gilligan’s creativity when given an incredible budget. 

Zosia explains that the joined had to accelerate the process because the military found out about them: the 886 million who died when the event occurred were the price they paid for it. 

The one point of friction between the other unjoined and the joined is the idea of valuing non-human life as much as human life. They are unwilling to kill animals for food, or do deliberate harm to even insects (Mr. Diabaté ensures he can still get his non-vegetarian meals when he asks about being permitted to kill himself): I wouldn’t rule out that some animals may even be part of the collective consciousness, considering they can contract the virus. We won’t know what any of this feels like unless Carol starts asking some questions though.  

A minor point, but it’s interesting how Carol’s awkwardness in navigating other cultures contrasts with Zosia’s inherent ease, and how it wouldn’t even have occurred to Carol to think about if racism still exists in this world. 

 Nuclear football: a red herring, I hope. 

Pluribus – Your life is your own.

Pluribus: 1x01 We Is Us. 

I want to preface the first episode of Pluribus, Vince Gilligan’s new, very expensive and very eagerly awaited show, with some thoughts on AI. Pluribus is not a mystery box show, or at least doesn’t seem to be: the very first episode answers most questions about the central mystery. Astronomers at a telescope array find a identify a repeating radio message from 600 light years away. One of them realises that it translates into a nucleic acid sequence that scientists begin testing on animals. Inevitably, and following horror tropes, this – not quite, but kind of – virus, makes the jump to one of the scientists when she is careless in the handling of a lab rat, and then it spreads. As soon as a person is infected, after an initial period of seizing, it creates a paradigm of proliferation, first through kissing, then through the synchronised effort of everyone affected to create the most effective delivery mechanism. At the point where these events intersect with the heroine of the story, Carol (an astonishingly great Rhea Seehorn), airplanes are spreading the virus and it has gone worldwide, and nobody remains disaffected. 
Pluribus isn’t explicitly about AI, but the questions it is interested in are the same thorny question that the advent of AI asks. I am not a believer in the likeliness of an Artificial General Intelligence arising, and I think that the risk of the ideology of AI lies less in what the catastrophising warnings imagine humanity would look like in an apocalyptic, Terminator-esque scenario: it’s the environmental destruction, the squandering of resources, the idea that humanity is outsourcing the creation of art and relying on a deeply flawed technology that can genuinely do less than its proponents promise, that worries me. But Pluribus is creating a world in which humanity is fundamentally changed to an extent that it is no longer recognisably human. Individual thought has been replaced with a hive mind that strives collectively. The argument is that this version of the world no longer has conflict and war, or even hierarchies, and this does mirror the idea that a AGI tasked with solving humanity’s problems would come to the conclusion that humanity is inherently flawed and has to be changed radically, or removed, for the AGI to fulfil its task of improving it, because programming could never be precise enough to account for the complexity and wealth of human experience. Maybe it is a jump to find parallels between a person who sees what the currently existing versions of AI are doing to humanity’s perception of reality and wishes to opt out and Carol’s refusal to buy into the happiness of being part of a hive mind, and the show is too smart to be an outright allegory, but it’s difficult not to see these connections. 

Pluribus’ first task is to create a character that would conceivably, even in the throes of profound grief, having lost everything she cares about, refuse the comfort of the hive mind. Carol Sturka is such an expertly written character that it takes only a few scenes to feel like she is established and complex. Her first introduction is a stop on her book tour: she is reading a scene from The Bloodsong of Wycaro (the “fourth book in a trilogy”, which gives a perfect summary of how long Carol thought she would have to labour at this and how she is now trapped in it). The room is filled with enthusiastic women and a few men who are clearly deeply engaged in the world she has created, but unfortunately, she is not particularly passionate about this project: she manages to sit through the signing in a way that indicates that she has become a professional at it, connecting to her fans, feeding them exactly what they want to hear, but in the car she deflates and it becomes clear that she hates everything about this. Her manager Helen (Miriam Shor) supports her, listens to her cynical remarks about her work and the people who read it, tolerates her misanthropic feelings about the life she feels imprisoned in. The viewers also realise, if they are paying attention, that Helen is her wife – a secret that she, the writer of heterosexual romantasy, is hiding from her fans. Helen jokes that Carol should be honest when a fan online asks her about her inspiration for her ravishing corsair, and it’s clear that this has been a point of contention in their relationship for a while – Carol insists on naming George Clooney, “to be safe”. In the bar after, Helen encourages her to finish her “serious” book, and the pieces fall into place. Carol wants to be a serious writer, but the romantasy books are making money. It’s like a monster of her own creation, and the only thing that helps her get through it is Helen. 
When Helen collapses and the world stops, Carol reveals herself to be both incredibly resourceful in trying to find help and willing to quite literally step on anyone else to safe the one person she loves. Unfortunately for her, all the old sources of help – an emergency hotline, the hospital, doctors – have stopped functioning. From about halfway through the episode, Carol is entirely alone, while everyone around her is in the throes of arresting seizures. This loneliness continues when everyone wakes up, because now Carol is alone in her individuality, while everyone else is connected to the hive mind – and Carol is dead, perhaps as a result of her fall or maybe because a percentage of people have a bad reaction to acquiring the virus. As much as Pluribus is a show about a miserable woman surrounded by artificially happy people, I think it’s more salient or meaningful to think about Carol as a woman who has found her one person in the world whom she loves – while finding almost everyone else distasteful and unbearable – and has now lost that person to the same entity that is asking her to join them. Carol’s loneliness and isolation hit harder because she had managed to build herself a life with someone else, and that person is now gone. 

The concept of the hive mind is a brilliant variation of the Body Snatcher theme, because this entity isn’t inherently evil. As soon as everyone wakes back up, the “drones” (I’m not yet sure what terminology I’ll stick with, but this seems apt for now) begin cleaning up, putting out fires, helping the injured, removing the bodies. The government representative (or rather, an undersecretary who happened to be wearing a suit when the rest of cabinet was wiped out) that Carol talks to once she has made it home is insistent that these accident – foreseeable, when a whole civilisation is stopped in its track wherever individual people have fond themselves in the moment – were unintended. The two creepy children who announce to Carol in unison that she has left spare keys under a flower pot five years ago wish to genuinely help her, but there is something so inherently unsettling about how they speak, how people act when they have become synchronised, that the resulting horror is almost worse than if the entity were genuinely evil. 

As impossible as it is for Carol to grasp what has happened even after this spokesperson explains it to her, the true horror for her hits when she realises that the goal of the hive mind is to figure out what makes her – and eleven others – immune, so it can be fixed. It is inconceivable for this entity that anyone would refuse to be subsumed, but Carol seems steadfast that she wants to remain herself. What does happen when she says no? 

Random notes: 

There is so much to be said for this first episode, but I want to start by saying that it made me think about the specific craft that goes into being a great television actor, which I think is a separate skill from being a great movie actor, in the same way in which acting in theatre is different from acting on screen. Much has been said about the “risk” of Pluribus relying on Seehorn in a show that doesn’t have famous movie actors in it, as has become the norm in these expensive exploits, and I think similarly to The Pitt, this first episode proves the value of seasoned television actors.   

There’s a wealth of detail in the author reading scene, and it’s fun to speculate if Vince Gilligan may have put some of his own feelings about overly dedicated fandoms into it – especially the guy who rocks up with a custom-made sharpened cutlass who corrects some technical details in Carol’s writing. 

It’s interesting how Helen’s “You make even one person happy, maybe that’s not art, but it’s something.”, originally said to give some grace to Carol’s romantasy books, reverberates through the new reality of the hive mind wanting to make everyone happy. 

There are echoes of a lot of other films and books and shows in this first episode, but Carol’s first contact with the virus – when a man crashes his car in the parking lot of the bar – reminded me of Stephen King’s The Stand, which has just recently been readapted and also received a fleshing out in The End of the World As We Know It: New Tales of Stephen King's The Stand, a collection of stories by a collection of great writers set in the same universe. 

One of the most visually gratifying aspects of Pluribus is the choreography of what happens, from the contrast between the chaos of scientific cooperation in the opening scenes, when the astronomers try to decode the radio message, to the arrested world that Carol wanders through, where people are frozen in whatever they were doing the moment the virus hits, to the synchronized efforts of the affected, perfectly effective, goal-driven, no movement wasted, like a Fordian fever dream. 

I think the quietly most affecting moment of this first episode, when Carol realises the extent of the horrors, happens in the hospital: she seems content to be quite brutal in her attempts to get help for Helen, but when she walks up to the counter, she stops a baby carrier from falling to the ground and while the audience doesn’t see what is in there, it’s clear from Carol’s face that the baby is seizing too, and that this drives home the horror for her. Again, astonishing acting from Rhea Seehorn.