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.
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