Pluribus: 1x03 Grenade.
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). 
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.
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.
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.
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.
No comments:
Post a Comment