Pluribus - Table of Contents

Season One: 

 

We Is Us

Pirate Lady

Grenade

Please, Carol

Got Milk

HDP

The Gap

Charm Offensive

La Chica o El Mundo

Pluribus - I know you are there. I’ll help you.

Pluribus: 1x09 La Chica o El Mundo.

Carol: They are not evil. They wouldn’t even kill an ant. 
Manousos: And isn’t it evil to value a man the same as an ant. 

The first scene of Pluribus’ final first season episode leaves Carol, Manousos and even Koumba behind. It is a reminder of the perspective that are missing with these three. Carol lives in a suburb that borders the desert. In this episode, she demonstrates that she isn’t even sure about her neighbours’ names. Manousos is a Colombian immigrant to Paraguay who appears to have lived alone in his apartment, alienated from his mother long before she became part of the hive. Koumba has left whatever community he may have had behind: if he has a family, those are not the members of the hivemind he has chosen to surround himself with. Carol may be playing house with Zosia for now, but she is also deliberately attempting to sever her from the hivemind, if only by pretending to use a singular pronoun. Manousos won’t even talk to the hivemind. Koumba uses the Others as puppets for his elaborate re-enactments that are taken from pop culture. With these comparisons to draw from, Kusimayu’s (Darinka Arones) life with the hivemind looks completely different. In her small Peruvian village, the hivemind is continuing the same communal life for her that she is used to. It is probably fair to assume that Carol, Manousos and maybe Koumba were living fairly insulated lives even before the event that changed the world, but Kusimayu was deeply embedded in a tightly-knit community that gave her meaning. Her immunity puts her on the outside of that community, which is all she has known. It’s no wonder she is so eagerly awaiting the arrival of the plane that will bring the “cure”. 
Carol’s now empty suburbs haven’t really inspired me to think about the loss of culture, of whole ways of existing within community, that are also a result of the hivemind taking over. Before the cure arrives, we see what Kusimayu’s was like: warm, close. Once the cure arrives, the entire village assembles and sings together, interpreting the ritual into something that looks like a coming of age. Kusimayu doesn’t seem hesitant, but she is petting her beloved pet goat that she already knows will not be part of whatever happens after. She is saying goodbye. She breathes in the vapour, she becomes part of the hivemind (Arones perfectly captures the moment), and then everyone packs up and leaves. The gate to the animal enclosure is opened, the baby goat following her for a bit down the road. Whatever warmth and community existed has now been optimised into an indistinguishable, unified mass. This might be the end of conflict, but it’s also a flattening, a destruction so vast, so incomprehensible, that it’s impossible not to become radicalised against the hivemind in the process. 

This scene makes clear the stakes of what will unfold later, the inevitable showdown between Manousos’ unflinching, uncompromising willingness to fight back, and Carol’s compromised position now that she built a kind of life with Zosia. When Zosia shows her Manousos’ approach in his ambulance (a drone tracking as he makes his way towards her), she says she will see him because of the effort he has made, but she says she will “send him on his way”. She goes into their first meeting with a clear picture in her mind of him as a potentially dangerous stranger (especially when he emerges from the ambulance wearing a machete), and as Zosia the person she wants to return to once it’s over. They are both so stubborn that their first meeting seems doomed from the start. 
Carol wants to talk in the house, Manousos wants to talk in the ambulance. He thinks the Others have ears everywhere, she relies on her phone to translate their conversations. Their personalities make it difficult to find a compromise or to even carve out the space to have a conversation, and when they do talk, there is so much miscommunication and misunderstanding. Much of this is comedic: when Manousos throws her phone through a sewer grate and it keeps tinnily translating from a distance, when Carol gets animated and speaks much too quickly for him to follow, throwing in the bits of Spanish she knows against his English that he acquired with so much dedication and zeal from his tapes. To Carol, Manousos is just a strange man who has arrived at her house making demands of her. The fact that he is not “one of them” alone doesn’t make him trustworthy. They are very much not on the same page: Manousos reveals he is ready to “destroy” the Others if they can’t find a way to reverse what has happened (“If we can’t fix them, they’re better off dead”), while Carol has already found ways to accommodate them, has comfortably carved out a compromise for herself that she can live with. How horrifyingly frustrating and disappointing this must be for Manousos, who has faced so many obstacles on his desperate way to the one woman who has given him hope only to find her not to be the person he thought she was. Carol is so cagey about why exactly the Others have returned after their abandonment and how she has come to acquire all the information she now has about them that he gets deeply suspicious about her. When he swipes her house for bugs and finds a sensor in her liquor cabinet, she is so upset that she doesn’t guard her voice in how she talks to Zosia on the phone about it (devastatingly, reading between the lines of what Zosia is not willing to tell her outright, she realises it was Helen who was trying to monitor her drinking) – there is inevitably an intimacy there that Manousos must pick up on, even if he doesn’t understand every word she says. 

Having seen Manousos’ resourcefulness and determination, it’s not a surprise to see him develop a new plan without Carol’s help immediately. It has taken Carol weeks to fill up her whiteboard, but Manousos manages to gather at least as much information as her in the span of one interrogation – calling the Others for the first time to send Carol’s “chaperone” to his house, armed with the information that they cannot lie to him. Carol, seeing Zosia’s car in front of the neighbours’ house she has moved Manousos into temporarily and very much against his wishes, is outraged and deeply hurt when Zosia explains to her that the hivemind loves Manousos just as much as they love him, and that Zosia has told him “everything”, the kind of violation that would specifically injure Carol the most. There is nothing here that is just for her, no genuine privileged intimacy. It’s one of the big heartbreaking moments in the episode, when Carol realises that much of what she thought she had with Zosia as a person was imaginary (“You’re mine. You were my.. chaperone. Mine.”), that there are real hard limits to having an intimate relationship with one single member of a hivemind.

Then Zosia lies down on the ground because Manousos is testing a theory, and is bringing all the tools and research he has conducted to the table. Off in the other house, he has shouted at another Other, scrambling the hivemind the same way that Carol has done before, unintentionally, but in his case with the stated objective of research. He monitors the frequency he found back home, the only one with a question mark after it, and finds it scrambled now, in chaos, while “Rick” is seizing in front of him. Carol races over and finds him softly comforting the man, promising rescue, in a moment that has so much unexpected gentleness to it. It moved me deeply: here’s Manousos, who appeared to have nobody back home he really cared about, wanting to save the world because he deeply cares about the people who have been subsumed by the hivemind. He is trying to reach through, to promise comfort and salvation.
It feels like another vital difference between him and Carol. I think Carol’s determination to reverse what has happened is much more grounded in a feeling that this is what she is supposed to do, because even in a world restored she would be missing Helen, her one person. She cannot return to the life she had before because Helen is dead. Manousos seems driven by a genuine love for humanity – why else would he be so insistent to still follow the old protocols of civilisation, taking nothing that isn’t his, paying for everything he takes. Maybe Carol wants to be hero, but Manousos genuinely wants to save the world. 
Carol fires the shotgun at him (because no moment in this show is wasted, everything will come into play later) and Zosia explains to her that they once again have to leave now that Manousos has become a threat to them. Faced with Manousos’ titular ultimatum: save the world or get the girl – she doesn’t even have to think about it. She’s narrowly survived being left before, and Manousos is not the person that will help her defeat her loneliness. She gets into her car and leaves to follow Zosia. 

During the whole honeymoon period in which Carol travels the world with Zosia, sharing beautiful experiences, an unseen clock is ticking in the background that she isn’t aware of. They are working their way towards the moment of Kusimayu’s assimilation into the hive. It’s heartbreaking because to Carol, each of these memories and moments must feel like their connection is growing, like they are becoming closer, but it only works if Carol’s refusal of the cure is still valid – and we, the viewers, have already realised that it isn’t, that the hive has found a way around the contract. They finally begin talking about it and Zosia says that this is only the beginning of happiness, that there is so much more of it to be found in the hivemind, and Carol begins to realise when Zosia once again relies on overly vague phrasing to avoid lying to her. “That would be correct” she says, when Carol says that her refusal to have her stem cells taken from her body means she can never be changed. I wonder if she would have even remembered if she hadn’t been thinking about the period of time when she was freezing her eggs the moment that Zosia mentioned to her that Helen installed the sensor in the liquor cabinet, if that little detail has just been bouncing around in her brain this whole time waiting to be picked up again in this moment. They have her eggs, they can create stem cells from them. It’s a monumental betrayal, and it hurts even more because Zosia, the person she has been falling in love with and who she has, in her mind, fashioned into something she isn’t, is the one betraying her. 

Carol: If you loved me you wouldn’t do this. 
Zosia: Carol, Please understand: we have to do this because we love you. Because I love you. 

There’s nothing more violating than to have that choice taken from her by someone she loves, and to be told that this violation is because of love: it reveals their entire relationship as a charade, with no shared trust or truthfulness. Carol returns (“You win. We save the world.“) to her cul-de-sac in a helicopter, flown by Zosia, with a heavy box attached: this is literally a nuclear break-up. Manousos, who has been reading his texts about electric engineering, painstakingly translating it with a dictionary, asks her what’s in the box. And of course it’s an atom bomb. 

Random notes: 

The third instance of goat-based emotional violence after Severance and Yellowjackets, and, I would argue, by far the worst. A moment in 2025 television tailored specifically to hurt me. 

I think Zosia knows exactly what she is doing when she says “we don’t think he’d ever hurt you”: she is seeding mistrust with what she doesn’t say. 

“I don’t speak snap”. 

“Mi esposa. She didn’t like my glug glug glug.”

I thought that was a pretty dark reveal about Helen, but also a reminder that we’ve been following a more-or-less functioning alcoholic this whole time, and that this must have been something that had effects on her relationship: I don’t know if the show will ever go back to show us more of that darkness, or if we’ll only get hints. 

“It wasn’t me this time. Screw you too, Laxmi.”

Manousos’ very unhappy expression about being locked in the boot of the car is… lols. 

I also laughed about Carol reading The Left Hand of Darkness, a whole book about how people with radically different conceptions of being can learn to communicate with each other and form relationships. 

Pluribus – Whatever makes you happy.

Pluribus: 1x08 Charm Offensive.

  

Eight episodes into the first season of Pluribus and one episode from its season finale, it feels relevant to talk about the pros and cons of the hivemind. The arguments for them are subtly represented on the show, but the remaining Unjoined characters who are fully on their side, or eager to join them, have left the stage (I do wonder if the first of them have already gone through the process of having their stem cells harvested, a “cure” developed just for them), and everyone remaining is still either on the fence (hivemind agnostic, like Koumba, “preferring not to” when it comes to joining) or actively working against them (with ever fibre of their being, like Manousos, or making compromises on the way, like Carol). There is no more war, no violence, no racism. The hivemind is optimising human civilisation – everything they do that isn’t connected to caring for the remaining Unjoined is designed to waste as little resources as possible, streamlined. It is also geared towards a single purpose in a way that humanity has never been before: to spread the virus, first to the remaining thirteen, then to the literal stars. From the current status quo it looks like they are in a race against time with their inability to “pluck a fucking apple” as Carol puts it, disbelievingly, again this episode, but they are working on a giant antenna to transmit the RNA sequence further, to pay it forward to whoever or whatever else may be out there. The similarity to a virus is never more obvious than in their single-minded pursuit of spreading. This single-mindedness is the least human characteristic they have. 
Then there are the other things, the little losses that come with this transformation that I think in a really subtle way the show wants us, and Carol, to mourn, because it might seem minor in comparison to the universal ambitions but says a lot more about humanity. The hivemind is incapable of creating anything new. It is a perfect repository for every thought, ever piece of music and art and writing, every dish and every sport and game, but it is inherently incapable of coming up with something that hasn’t existed before. Like an LLM, the hivemind is not creative. It’s not just art that has stalled forever, a museum of humanity collecting dust in the connected minds, but relationships have as well. There are no new friendships, no crushes, no love, just as much as there is no more hate and conflict. It’s stasis. It lacks everything that defines humanity in its messy imperfection and its glorious, confusing complexity. 

 

That’s why it is so fitting that an episode in which Carol both  pursues her quest for more knowledge about the Others and seems to give in to her attraction to Zosia (nothing here is either/or, it’s messy and confusing, it’s deeply human) also returns Carol to the writing desk to continue with Wycaro’s fifth book in the trilogy. The pursuit of writing seems ill at ease with Carol’s goal to stop the collective, but at the same time her newly found joy and freedom to write again, in a world where art and creation have stopped, is maybe the most triumphant moment she’s had since everything went wrong. Carol’s struggle against the Others is not optimised, is not single-minded. There’s a perfect contrast here to principled, unflinchingly uncompromising Manousos, who pursues his goal with a zeal that mirrors what the Others are doing. Manousos, physically broken, still turns down any help offered as soon as he is able to do so. He still demands the bill at the end of his hospital stay out of respect for “the real people who were here before”. He takes nothing that they offer because they have nothing to give, and it’s predictable that he will feel deeply betrayed that the one ally he believes to have in Carol is currently playing house with Zosia. 

The other massive difference between Manousos and Carol is their respective capability to live in solitude. Carol has been forced to live as isolated and alone as him and it has broken her. The spends the first part of the episode recovering from the mental destruction of complete loneliness. She lets herself have Zosia, because she knows that without her, she was ready to die. It’s a necessary compromise. It also allows for a new approach to her goal to find a weak spot in the Others, as she slowly realises that being around Zosia means she can find out more about them. She is asking questions for the first time. At first it seems like this is to understand Zosia better, that she is slowly weakening to her appeal: until she goes back to the plotting white board, and puts the dot points on it, and an agenda emerges. 
The Others sleep together in a sports arena, to save energy, to preserve resources, but there is also an inescapable charm to this human puddle, the comfort of contact, sleeping while hearing others breathe next to you. The episode surprises us when Carol spends the night there, and Carol surprises herself, but it feels like she is recharging her batteries after her period of loneliness. Then comes a period that for all intents and purposes looks like courtship: romantic dates. A shared massage at a spa that reveals the vital information that the individual bodies feel while the collective body knows. Carol’s entire agenda from that point out could be read as an attempt to work the gap between feeling and knowing, to isolate Zosia into new experiences that her body is feeling, that the rest of the collective may be witnessing, but isn’t experiencing as acutely or as directly as she is. Zosia describes it in a way that sounds a lot like “noting” during meditation: allowing feelings to pass, being aware of them, but not falling into them. It feels like a vital difference, like a little crack between individuals and the collective that can be worked at and widened with dedication. 

At the same time as Carol is subtly pursuing this goal that only really becomes obvious at the end of the episode, when Zosia talks about her memory, Zosia seems to be changing too. She is pushing all of Carol’s buttons, flirting with her in exactly the way she knows (again, illegally accessing Helen’s feelings and whoever Carol may have dated in the past, presumably) Carol responds to. Turns out Carol likes to be mean-flirted with (not exactly a surprise), and however determined and undeterred Carol may be to stop the Others, it’s impossible not to respond to something she’s primed to be into. She is having a nice time, and maybe there’s a point where Carol has stopped fighting the idea that this is in conflict with her mission (although the way she writes out “They. Eat. People” on the whiteboard, and underlines it is also her reinforcing her boundaries, reminding herself who she is falling for here). Zosia responds with excitement to finding out something new about Carol when they go hiking together and Carol talks about how the sound of trains is “the loneliest sound in the world” and how much she loves it. These dates feel like they are out of a romance film because they are getting to know one another better, something that should be impossible for the hivemind to do. This is new, not just for Carol but also for Zosia. The remaining Unjoined are the only way for the Hivemind to have new experiences, to experience creativity and the excitement of new information, and yet they are doing everything in their power to absorb them. 

 

I think that everything that happens in the second half to episode flows from the moment in the spa when Zosia talks about how the collective perceives things. She gets goosebumps because this is when she formulates a plan, but I’m unsure about how much actual decision-making went into kissing and sleeping with Zosia, and whether her writing Wycaro is part of it or a by-product of Carol embracing the idea that she can live in this world fully and still pursue her plan. Zosia asks her what her best day writing was and it seems like the Others have already taken a guess, because she then takes her to a diner where Carol used to write before she even had enough money to buy a laptop, with time stolen away from her temp job and stolen supplies from the office. When she recounts the memory, inside this place that she remembers so vividly, it’s almost like she can physically feel the sensation of fastening the clip around her finished pages. It’s the first demonstration of the difference between consuming a memory like someone would media, from a distance, noting but not affected, and living it with all the details and emotions attached. It does in the end horrify Carol that the Others rebuilt this place from scratch and even flew in her old waitress from Florida, because in the end this is just another manipulative attempt to use nostalgia against her, to charm her with memories they should not have access to. It’s a grand gesture but at the same time so much that it ceases to be fully human, and only serves as a reminder of the un-humanness of the Others. 

It feels like this moment of conflict with interrupt whatever is happening between her and Zosia but in the end it doesn’t, because Zosia kisses her first, and then Carol falls into her like she’s been starving in the desert. It doesn’t feel like part of the plan, it feels like pure emotion.

The next morning, Zosia wakes up in an empty bed and finds Carol typing away in her office, finishing the first chapter of the new Wycaro novel. She gives the pages to Zosia to read and gets a very different kind of feedback than she did from Jeff Hiller’s Larry previously: it’s not an aggregated review from too many sources, it’s personal, passionate excitement, a fan reacting to a story she loves, offering theories and solutions. It’s the kind of artistic collaboration that I feel like she might have never had even with Helen, who wouldn’t have read her novels deeply enough to come up with lore reasons for why Raban is now a woman. Carol has freed herself from the millstone of her career, from making that choice back in the day, and it’s glorious. As much as she wants the world to return to what it was before because what the Others are doing is “psychosis, unsustainable”, this is still a world to finally allow her to write the way she wanted to. It also reveals that Carol’s dislike of writing the Wycaro novels was much less grounded in them being romantasy, but in the fact that she had to obscure herself, cut off an important part of herself, to publish them. 

Carol wants Zosia to use “I”, and she struggles with it, it takes conscious thought and hesitation to do it like she is translating from a foreign language – until they’ve spent weeks together, and Zosia is fully emerged in their new life together, and Carol asks her what her favourite food is. As hard as “I” was for Zosia before, it comes seamlessly once she talks about her childhood in Gdansk and having mango ice cream after the borders opened. Like Carol in the diner, it’s like Zosia can taste the ice cream as she talks about. It throws her back into her own body. It’s the difference between feeling and knowing. 

The moment is interrupted when Zosia announces that Carol is expecting a guest. 

Random notes:  

 

What can I say, I love mess. 

I’m very anti-collective but never more so than when considering what surely must have happened to most of the pets who are no longer with their owners, in a world where zoo animals have been set free. It’s surprising there’s not more dogs around. I hope we get to see Bear Jordan, who is a very good boy, again. 

I really love the board game scene: there’s a blink-and-you’ll miss it moment where Zosia points at the cupboard where they are, once again illegally accessing Helen’s memory. There’s Carol considering playing Chess against a collective that would possess the knowledge of every Chess Master. And then there’s Carol playing a game she used to play with her cousins against Zosia, and the question of whether Zosia deliberately lets her win a few times or if just a game that Carol has played often enough that she’s simply better at it – maybe having encyclopedic knowledge about its history isn’t quite enough (but it helps to distract Carol, who complains she’s “playing cards against fucking google”). 

Carol: This isn’t going to turn into that orgy scene at the end of that Matrix movie, is it?
Zosia: Not unless you want it to. 

The hiking date helps Carol to find out that the Hivemind communicate through something not too dissimilar to radio transmission, and it’s hard not to connect that fact to the one frequency Manousos found that he put a question mark next to. It’s interesting to think about the contrast between the idea of the mechanical act of disrupting a frequency and what Carol is doing with Zosia to isolate her from the collective. 

I’ve been thinking about the fact that Zosia kisses her first, which on the one hand matches that the Others often attempt to anticipate her needs but on the other hand feels more transgressive than anything they’ve done before: it almost feels like a storytelling decision rather than a character one, because how messy would it be if Carol kissed her first and any possibility of ascertaining consent from Zosia’s side was gone? 

 

“All the brains in the world and you can’t navigate a fucking pronoun.” 

 

“Someone has to put the world right even if it means you all leave me again, even if it means that I’m…” UGH.

Pluribus – I am not one of them.

Pluribus: 1x07 The Gap.

Nothing on this planet is yours. Nothing. You cannot give me anything because all you have is stolen. You don’t belong here. 

My name is Manousos Oviedo. I am not one of them. I wish to save the world. 

Before Pluribus came out, I hadn’t thought about Douglas Coupland’s 1998 novel Girlfriend in a Coma in a while. It was one of those books that I read at exactly the right moment, and there are entire years in my mid- to late teens where Coupland’s descriptions of the suburban life of his protagonists merged with my perception of suburban Vienna. Girlfriend in a Coma is an end-of-the-world novel: at the halfway point or so, everyone but the protagonists disappears, leaving the world empty. It’s not a survival horror novel in the traditional sense, there’s no physical threats or lack of supplies, but the impact of that scale of loss causes psychological trauma, trapping the heroes of the story in amber as they are finding (frequently, maladaptive) ways of coping with their new, arrested lives. The other novel that I kept thinking about while watching The Gap was Marlen Haushofer’s The Wall, a seminal 1963 Austrian novel in which a woman becomes separated from the rest of the world by a transparent wall that traps her in a mountain hunting lodge – as far as she can tell, the rest of the world has disappeared entirely, and she has to find ways to survive with the limited supplies available her, with nothing but a cat, a cow and a dog to keep her company. The two separate stories that unfold in The Gap feel like they exist on the same continuum between empty suburban malaise and survival in the wilderness. 

They are both tales of existential loneliness. Carol’s is also another exploration of grief, as she has to find ways to fill her days without ever interacting with another person. The only other voice she hears is Patrick Fabian’s, again and again, as she hears his answering machine message over and over whenever she makes requests of the Others. In the beginning, as she is making her way back from Vegas to Albuquerque, she makes petulant requests, both furious and frustrated by her abandonment. She requests an ice-cold red Gatorade and then complains about it being lukewarm after the drone delivery. It’s the kind of powerless “can I speak to the manager” complaint that doesn’t provide with the one thing she desperately needs, human contact, but at least gives her a feeling of control. She stocks up on all the fireworks available (in my mind, fireworks and petrol stations shouldn’t mix, but what do I know) and returns home, living her own version of Koumba’s life without the ability to use the Others as props. She goes golfing and finds her golf course reclaimed by nature – it’s hard not to feel awed by the presence of a bison, munching away at the manicured grass. She replaces her police cruiser with a Rolls-Royce she repossesses from a country club – a car ironically sporting a Just Married message and balloons – and loads it up with her golf bag, which now includes the gun she’s taken from the police car. After a day trip to Jemez Springs, she visits the Georgia O’Keeffe museum in Santa Fe, and the way she looks at the paintings showcases how important the artist is to her. It’s a moment of quiet contemplation, and laden with memories, maybe implying that this is something else she shared with Helen. Then she takes O’Keeffe’s 1939 painting Bella Donna (another reminder how beautiful deadly flowers can be) home with her to replace a print of it, an act that stands in beautiful contrast to all the over-the-top things that Koumba has committed with his seemingly unlimited freedom. It’s not like the Others would still appreciate original art the way that she can, so she might as well be able to look at it whenever she wants. 

Throughout these scenes, Pluribus comes as close to a musical episode as Vince Gilligan will likely ever come in his travails. The silence of an empty world is oppressive, and so Carol fills it by singing her favourite songs, chosen, deliberately, to focus on still being fine at the end of the world (the opening scene cuts off just before she sings that word in R.E.M.’s It’s the End of the World). Carol is of course not fine, and she has also turned out to be the kind of character that doesn’t sit comfortably in solitude and quietude. In all of her acts – setting off the fireworks, howling along with wolves (not coyotes, sorry) to the point where even they go quiet on her, requesting a lavish dinner filled with all the nostalgic dishes she has previously denied herself, dressing up for the occasion, going to a restaurant where she and Carol shared an anniversary – she is trying to prove to herself that she can exist like this, in complete loneliness. She is putting on an act witnessed only by herself. None of it is meaningful if it isn’t shared with another person, and none of it assuages her loneliness. Carol is not in any physical danger. She has plenty of food, she is not in danger of running out water, the power is on wherever she goes, if the golf course becomes overgrown she can request it to be curated back into playability: but existentially, mentally, she is just as close to death and Manousos will be at the end of his journey in this episode. 

How will Manousos judge her decisions, if he ever does reach her? His refusal to engage with the Others in any way is heroic, and he voices his ideological reasons for that refusal in the episode. They cannot give him anything because all they have is stolen. Manousos refuses to partake in that plunder in any way. He drives his old car, he uses a paper map, he harvests rain water and catches fish. Whenever the Others approach him to remind him to hydrate like a wellness app on a phone, he doesn’t engage. When he takes petrol from stranded cars, he pays by leaving money under the windshield wipers. It’s rare to see a character who is so staunch in his convictions, so ready to rather die than give in. On the literal way to bridge the gap between himself and the woman who has given him hope (kudos to everyone who pointed out the parallel between Helen’s speech about making a difference in one person’s life and what Carol has inadvertently done for him), he is also learning to bridge the language gap by learning English from Books on Tape. He is a man on a mission – to save the world – and he is willing to do whatever it takes to fulfil that mission. Before he enters the most perilous part of his journey, the Darién Gap, the Others once again warn him against going on: this foot-journey undertaken by migrants from South America to Central America features dangerous flora and fauna, from venomous snakes to the chunga palms and their bacteria-covered sharp spines. Before even entering, Manousos is met with the discarded luggage of those who have previously undertaken the journey, a haunting image that reverberates beyond the confines of the show. 
What really captures Manousos undertaking is the contrast between him, a lone man making his way through the impenetrable rain forest, and the absolute awe-inspiring spectacle of nature around him. He seems lost in it, and it seems impossible that he will ever find his way through it. This place seems utterly indifferent to him, which is an effective and stark contrast to the Others up to that point, following him around to tempt him into giving him. As much as humanity has radically changed, this place feels untouched by either humans or time itself. His failure to make his way through on his own feels inevitable: eventually he does grow weaker, and stumble into the horrifying spines of the palm (and later cauterises his wounds with a heated machete – his physical suffering in the episode vs Carol’s spiritual one). He falls down, ready to die, before a helicopter appears overhead and someone rappels down just before he loses consciousness. It turns out that even this inhospitable place, so far removed from civilisation, can be penetrated by the Others. 

In the end, we come back to Carol and her fireworks. More than a month has passed, and nothing she does distracts from her loneliness anymore. When one of the fireworks falls and threatens to explode right into her face, she seems willing to accept her own death. She survives – but drives to a hardware store the next day to pick up some paint, in another gruelling Carol home-improvement project. She paints a message on the drive-way big enough to be seen by the drones that are surely overhead and monitoring her: and sure enough, a while later, a car drives up. Zosia, fully recovered, gets out, and Carol hugs her, sobbing. As the camera zooms out, the writing becomes legible: come back. 

Random notes: 

Carlos Manuel Vesgas is amazing in this episode. 

Other comments have pointed out that Manousos journey of suffering, of sticking to his ideals, of refusing temptations, is Christ-like. 

It says a lot about Carol’s feelings for Zosia that she writes a message instead of going the usual route of the telephone. As much as she keeps insisting that nobody is themselves anymore, or one specific person, she has a relationship with her, even if it is just an imagined one.

The scenes of Carol contemplating O’Keeffe’s art were genuinely moving to me, they felt like the only moments where her solitude was somewhat quieted, or where she could still find meaning in something she was doing by herself. Rhea Seehorn!

That being said, Carol smashing golf balls into downtown office buildings looked like a lot of fun, and of course one of Carol’s way of letting off steam would be destructive in that specific way. 

My partner and I have been joking about the fact that the main things we watch at the moment are Pluribus and Thai GLs, two things that have barely anything in common, but this episode was particularly funny for its blatant product placement and grand over-the-top gesture. 

random mixtape - i can't speak this way.

 

 autoclave | paper boy. helium | hole in the ground. sleater-kinney | stay where you are. snocaps | heathcliff. bicep | opal (four tet remix). joanne robertson feat. oliver coates | always were. mount kimbie | carbonated.

Pluribus - But she’s so lonely.

Pluribus: 1x06 HDP.

 

There are a lot of gnarly questions about how the Others are reshaping the world that remain unasked on the show, primarily because Carol is so single-focused on reversing the process that her interest in what they are actually doing, day-to-day, is limited. We’ve seen several instances now where it turns out that the other unjoined, unafflicted, unassimilated have gotten more insight into the reality of this new world simply because they are engaging with the new hivemind of humanity in a more curious way than Carol does, and so it seems almost unavoidable that Carol’s horrified tidings of what precisely they put into their neat little milk cartons aren’t actually a surprise to Koumba Diabaté (Samba Schutte, giving a great performance in this episode). Carol may be sure that the Others cannot lie to her, but at no point has she thought to question them about anything other than a cure for what she considers something that must be healed, and any information about how the world is being reorganised – more effective, more centralised, more streamlined – has arrived by accident. It is proof of the inherent limitations of Carol acting on her own rather than in alliance with others, who may be able to contribute their own perspectives and ideas – Carol is quite literal the opposite of a hivemind, and as much as we’ve seen limits to the hivemind’s emotional intelligence, and how it is still learning as it is adjusting, Carol has her own personal disadvantages that reduce her ability to act effectively. Carol has just spent a breathless night investigating what goes into the milk – Koumba simply asked, out of curiosity. 

The reveal of body parts in the Agri-Jet warehouse is presented as the horror film scenario that Carol would feel it is: she films it with a shaky camera, convinced that this will finally put the other twelve over the edge. What could be more horrifying than industrially organised cannibalism and the visceral reality of that on the ground, shrink-wrapped body parts in a warehouse waiting to be commercially processed into food? It’s not just the inherent human taboo against cannibalism, it’s also the juxtaposition of this rationalised process with the rituals of grieving, the care and love that goes into burials and funeral rites, that we have just seen through Carol’s eyes. Death would have a completely different meaning to an entity that contains the thoughts and memories of many of the dead (and, presumably, all of them going forward), and maybe this is the ultimate rift between humanity in the past and humanity as it is now. If the essence of a person lives on forever in the hivemind, the body ceases to have the same kind of meaning that it would have had for their loved ones before everyone became connected. 
It’s a revelation so shocking to Carol that she does not entrust it to the drone delivery service. Instead she sets out in her car to go and find Koumba, who has spoken about wanting to live in the Elvis suite in a Vegas hotel. The first time she met him, he seemed perfectly engineered to piss her off, personally, but he is near enough that she can talk to him without involving the Others. Koumba has been living it up in Las Vegas, using the Others as props in complex scenarios. We see him play poker against someone playing the role of a super-villain in a James Bond set-up, showcasing that there truly is no limit to the resources the Others will expand to try and make the remaining Unjoined happy. It shows how radically different from Carol Koumba is – Carol was just eager to resume her regular life, apart from trying to save humanity, whereas Koumba is living out every childhood dream he could have ever come up with. It’s hard to predict if he could ever be bored by getting everything he ever wanted, or if his capacity for appreciating these new wonders is endless (maybe the key to happiness is never asking if any particular experience is authentic, or if the people he is dealing with are only expressing scripted emotions towards him). When Carol arrives, his revels end, because all the Others leave as soon as she approaches Las Vegas. The cordon sanitaire is moving along with her, leaving the city empty and deserted. I think that’s an interesting image because it also gives Koumba a very keep sense of how isolated Carol truly is, and he expresses that he is aware how lonely Carol is, an admission she herself would never make. 
As mentioned, Carol’s great reveal is cut short when Koumba plays a video of John Cena – who is always up for a cameo – explaining why exactly the Others are putting people into their drinks. This infomercial is such a brilliant contrast to the first scene of Carol narrating her findings like she’s in the Blair Witch Project: a rational, informative explanation of why exactly cannibalism has become necessary, even if the Others would prefer it if it wasn’t and realise why Carol is so horrified by it. It turns out that they aren’t just vegetarian, and unable to cause deliberate harm to animals including people, but in fact vegan: unable to even pluck an apple, or harvest staples. They are facing a caloric deficit that they are meeting by making use of the bodies of the deceased, hiding this gruesome fact behind the neat packaging of the milk-cartons and the use of marketing language (human-derived protein doesn’t quite hit like corpse-meal). This is in fact Survival Cannibalism, except it won’t suffice to feed humanity for long – as Koumba explains, most will starve within the next ten years, a clear design-flaw in the alien virus (and an interesting reveal – it seems like the paradigm not to do harm overwrites survival). When Carol thinks she has found an inconsistency – the Others have told her they are vegetarian, and this is decisively not vegetarian behaviour – Koumba reminds her that they are capable of semantic deception (“All the fucking lawyers in the world have survived” she says), a point that she should have kept in mind when she expressed she wouldn’t consent to having her stem cells harvested from her body (nothing in this show is superfluous, especially not her throw-away comment in the ice hotel that she has frozen her eggs at some point). Not only has Koumba found out about the people-eating by questioning, he also knows that the Others cannot tailor the virus to the specific genetic make-up of the survivors unless they harvest stem-cells, a process so invasive that it requires specific consent as to comply with their directive not to do harm. Carol is relieved to believe she will be able to maintain her individuality for the time-being, but the And Then There Were None clock has started ticking. Koumba says he will, for now, remain himself, presumably until he gets bored, but plenty of the other survivors will likely jump at the chance to join their loved ones. 

I think what is at the centre of the episode, and maybe deliberately obscured by the fact that Carol believes herself safer than she did before, is Koumba’s care for her: his concern about her loneliness, his small acts of kindness that Carol maybe doesn’t even really process in the moment although she is heart-broken when she realises that he is also eager for her to leave, so that the people he has connected with in his own way can return. He covers her with a blanket when she falls asleep on the couch, he makes her breakfast, he asks her to stay in touch. The breakfast itself is such a meaningful ritual after Carol has refused the Others trying to tempt her with nostalgia. It is hand-made by someone she still considers a person, made the way he would make it himself (after a good week of never doing anything for himself, you would think). It’s an act of care between two people who aren’t even really friends, but are, in their own way, alone apart from each other, even if they have reacted to that aloneness in radically different ways. Carol assembles a little egg-avocado-bacon sandwich from it that he is empathetic or curious enough to try make for himself, and appreciate – exactly the kind of quirk that now maybe has stopped existing and therefore intrigues him even more (maybe this is another subtle nod to AI, and its inability to create anything truly new or surprising). I know that Manousos, who has received Carol’s first videotape and finally found a reason to leave his compound, is on his way in his antique car, but there is also a different world in which Carol hasn’t so terminally alienated everyone and finds companionship easier than through a man who has to travel half a continent to get to her.

 

Random notes: 

Carol going back into the house to vacuum up what she now knows is corpse powder after at first leaving to speedily! The aversion to being around anything connected to corpses runs deep, and this is a major way in which the Others are different. 

THAT IS NOT JOHN CENA!

In the back of my mind is was asking if A DEPRESSED PERSON COULD MAKE THIS about all the interior decoration choices that Koumba has made in his Vegas suite but he seems so content in this life that it is difficult to imagine him having doubts or existential dread. It is delightful to have a person so entertained by endless options and so far, incapable of boredom. 

Koumba and the others have a groupchat that Carol has been excluded from after a vote! They have regular zoom calls! They are also trying to solve the caloric deficit problem but it doesn’t sound like they have come very far. Carol’s solution: “Maybe tell them to pick a fucking apple”. There’s a radical difference in Carol’s approach to the ethical dietary restrictions and Koumba just accepting them for what they are, meeting the Others where they are at. 

“Regrettably, as of this time, I prefer not to.” What a perfect summary of his character. 

The moment where we find out that the woman who has been delivering Manousos’ meals is his mother, and that Manousos mistrusts the Others in part because he obviously has a difficult relationship with her and very much does not recognise her as his mother anymore – it’s interesting, because both Carol and Koumba seem to be entirely without family, but Manousos has had the opposite reaction to having his mother be an Other than the other survivors have had with their family members. I’m curious to find out more about him. 

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.