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.