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.