Pluribus Season 1 Episode 3 is one of those strange hours of television where nothing “big” happens, and yet I found myself more clenched and uneasy than I ever am watching any so-called thriller.
I’ve lived through all kinds of fictional mayhem — shootouts, invasions, disasters — but there’s something about Gilligan’s quiet unraveling of Carol’s world that gets under my skin in a way bullets never could.
It could be because the danger here isn’t external. It’s existential and… polite. And it smiles big, unsettling grins while it takes your life away.
The flashback to Norway is the perfect example of what this show is doing that I didn’t even realize until halfway through the episode.
It’s Carol and Helen at the Ice Hotel, and I swear, you can feel the cold right through the screen.
Carol hates it — the bed is literally made of ice, she’s convinced she could have frozen her eggs there, yolks and all — and Helen is absolutely glowing, telling her to look at the sky, to look at the northern lights, to just be in the moment.
Carol’s whole spirit is fighting the experience, the cold, the absurdity, the “screensaver quality” of it all. And yet… she looks. She can’t and won’t express it, but she feels it nonetheless. Maybe it’s only because of her love for Helen that she can try, but you can see the spark.
For someone supposedly “the most miserable person on earth,” she’s the only one I’ve seen on this show who knows what love actually looks like. It’s not blissful harmony with a dash of serenity, but about bending a little because someone else is actually worth the effort.
Back in the present, watching her on that plane while she’s not even sure who’s flying it, and asking because she’s been whisked around so much she’s lost track of the pilots like she’s an unaccompanied minor — I had a flash of panic.
The Joining is so polite. It’s so damn polite, and that politeness scares me. The way they’re constantly soothing her rough edges as if they’re the sandpaper to her unhoned wood makes me quiver. Even the way they say “Carol” makes my skin crawl. I don’t know how Carol can stand it.
When she arrives home, the Joining (what do we even call them? The hive?) delivers the last of her mail, which is a huge “last” in itself, but it’s even more significant as it contains Helen’s last gift to her. She bought Carol a Theragun as a welcome-home present.
Helen knew and understood her wife. And while Carol might have enjoyed it despite the expense if Helen had delivered it herself, it was like a hot potato she couldn’t wait to drop. The hive knows too much about memories that Carol cherishes.
What she had with Helen was theirs alone, and now it’s coursing through the hive of humanity, sullying its beauty. Carol may not have allowed herself to relish the moment in the ice hotel, but Helen wouldn’t have recalled that moment as anything ugly.
Carol deserves the privacy of her loss, but more importantly, she deserves the sacred nature of her memories. How you experienced something is just as important as the experience itself, so when she demanded they wipe Helen from their collective mind, I understood.
I understood that even as someone who might, at least a little, embrace a memory of my dad, the sound of his voice, the expressions on his face coming to life with the help of AI. I’ve done it. I’ve cried over it. But I also have real family with specific feelings about those moments to add context.
All Carol has is a hive mind, infusing any “memory” Helen shared with it with the interpretation of them all. The beauty is gone, sucked out of the one for the sake of the many. It’s not the same.
The grocery store scene might have been the moment I almost turned the episode off, not because it was bad, but because it brought up something I’d rather not think about.
Like Carol, I would have expected the store to be stocked. After all, she’s the last free-thinking woman in America. But it was empty, and she needed it back. Sure, they could provide her favorite meals from the memories of many, but Carol is independent.
She fends for herself and doesn’t want to be coddled. She wants to be who she has always been, no apologies or excuses.
At least when she got irritated, they didn’t argue. In an hour and a half, the whole place was stocked again. And watching that, I wondered, is this the message? That if everyone put themselves aside, they could take care of the many without issue?
I mean, they didn’t tell her to adapt or get over it or put up any fight whatsoever. They just fixed everything instantly. They reminded me of ants, falling into place for the sake of the colony. And in case you’ve forgotten, ants don’t get respect. We step on them, poison them, and break up their colonies with our feet.
But they just get back to work, seemingly without anger or frustration or anything else that all of us would do if we encountered the same.
And let’s be real. Framing humanity that way is horrifying because a world with no friction is a world that doesn’t need you. You are expendable, especially once your sense of self and accomplishments have been absorbed by the hive.
But after all of that, Carol was eating a frozen dinner while watching The Golden Girls. Not the plentiful fresh produce or what might be the last of the fresh meat, but garbage you can pop into the microwave. The food that will last well beyond the shelf life of the rest.
Why? Probably because enjoyment is better shared. Everything tastes better when you’re with someone you love. Her body needs nourishment, but her broken heart won’t allow her to enjoy the last vestiges of humanity.
When the electricity went out, I knew exactly why it happened. A colony that works all day doesn’t need electricity while they sleep. But Carol isn’t part of that — yet.
It was the icing on the cake for Carol. The worst week ever, capped off by no electricity? Why not? She sarcastically asked for a grenade, as it could be the only thing that might bring her a little joy.
If you thought the message of the Pluribus Season Premiere was a little heavy-handed about individuality and its beauty and purpose, the grenade stunt should clear that up.
Nobody with an ounce of common sense would deliver a live grenade to someone who asked for it off the cuff. But when everybody is behind the wheel, there is no common sense.
The melding of the minds tossed that out the window. It shows how uniquely human and individually driven something like common sense really is that a hive wouldn’t retain it. It’s entirely pragmatic.
That pragmatism saved the day when Zosia grabbed the grenade and lobbed it out of a movie-quality window, but she was injured. Carol was horrified. She never imagined anyone in their right mind would deliver a live grenade.
Because she was drinking and enjoying an entirely fabricated moment with a representative of the hive, not a rational human, and Carol forgot that for a second. She was living in the moment, tossing around ideas and… a live grenade.
Carol doesn’t want to hurt anyone, not even herself, but the hive mind has no idea how to deal with someone like Carol anymore. They cannot sense what an individual feels, as they no longer feel at all.
You could see that on Zosia’s face, as she grinned broadly after being injured. It was a macabre grin for the purpose of assuring Carol that help was on the way. Her sense of self has disappeared. Without that, injuries mean nothing.
Even at the hospital, the fellow in the soccer uniform was putting on a play for Carol’s expense without understanding why. Their goal is only to make her happy long enough that she survives to become one of them.
At least they aren’t playing with the notion that Carol and the others get to live the lives they choose any longer than the time it takes the hive to join with them. That momentary ruse has disintegrated.
But without motivation, the drive for success, or happiness as a goal, what is there? What’s the point? Will there be innovation, or will things just carry on as they are until the next big boom?
Innovation is sparked not by results but by the journey and the satisfaction of creation. If you can’t be satisfied, why would you create?
Carol hasn’t been snowed like the other English speakers she met. But the insane conversation about giving her a nuke just because she asked in an apparent quest for her happiness was enough for her.
I’m trying to imagine how much is left to save. How often does Carol need to rile things up with a couple of million emotional deaths to keep some semblance of the people who inhabited the bodies that are still moving intact?
Giving someone everything they ask for without reservation or their personal achievement doesn’t make them happy. It makes them dependent.
Carol will not go gently into that night, and that makes me happy. I need to see the fight, the will to live, the desire to accomplish something.
The thought of losing that fills me with dread.
Finally, as the credits rolled, I exhaled.
Carol’s future seems tied to the hive mind’s ability to solve the joining for the last 12 humans on earth.
But I have a sneaking suspicion that the hive’s future relies on Carol’s compliance, and she’s going to be kicking and screaming the entire way.
It’s your turn! Get your little arse into the comments section below.
Are you feeling Pluribis as deeply as I am? I want to hear from you!
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