The countdown clock — or, more accurately in this case, the count-up clock — has reached three days, three hours, 11 minutes, and 14 seconds once we return to the present after a cold (freezing, actually) open that takes place roughly seven years earlier. And one of the subtle-yet-significant aspects of Carol’s new life is that she hasn’t had the opportunity to mourn, even though she’s plainly desperate to do it. Consider how important it was for Carol to give her partner, Helen, a proper burial, and how quickly afterward she was whisked away on a global adventure to find the small handful of English speakers who share her predicament. She wants to be left alone for a host of different reasons, including her temperamental disdain for the blissful mind-meld being pressed on her. But the quixotic battle she’s opted to wage has naturally taken her away from processing not only her partner’s death, but also the death of humanity and her own impending, inevitable surrender.
In order to survive this stretch while she’s still fully herself, Carol insists on an agency that she surely knows is a fiction. She’s particularly insistent on being able to control her memories of Helen, despite Helen’s memories getting uploaded into the collective’s cloud. Private experiences that she and Helen shared are not only known by nearly every person on Earth, but optimized as another accommodation that the Others are convinced will make Carol happy. The assumption is that if they can use what they know about Helen to reanimate her for Carol to some degree, it will ease her suffering and make Helen seem “alive” to her in some small, eternal way.
To that end, Zosia honors Carol’s request to be left alone but leaves her with the mail that had been in transit for her before — waves hands around — all of this world-upending craziness happened. And with her warm, beatific, have-a-nice-day smile, Zosia nods toward a priority-mail package, telling her, “We think you’re really going to like what’s in the box.” Had Zosia said absolutely nothing about the contents of the box, she might have been right about that prediction. Carol would have received the Theragun massager as a last little gift from the woman she loved, who wanted to surprise her with something nice at the end of their book tour. But when she phones Zosia and hears about what Helen was thinking (“You tried one in the Atlanta airport. But you said it was too expensive, so Helen bought one online”), it disgusts her. Helen was a person to her and now this conversation between the two of them is known by nearly everyone, used here to feed the algorithm on what, presumably, will make Carol happy.
Though being part of the collective mind-meld seems to have a certain from-each-according-to-his-ability-to-each-according-to-his-needs quality, the appeal to Carol and other outliers is the opposite. The assumption is that giving people whatever they want and whenever they want it will be enough to mollify them and bring them into the fold: trips to the Guggenheim and the beaches of Croatia, the perfect breakfast they had in Provincetown before seeing the Indigo Girls in 2012, access to Air Force One and sexy stewardesses, the expensive massager they came across in Atlanta that one time, an honest-to-goodness hand grenade (more on that in a bit), etc. That type of luxury is indeed tempting, but it’s insulting, too, to assume that humankind could be so easily bought off. Are we all such sellouts? Why should intergalactic invaders even bother with lasers when they can reproduce the croque monsieur we had that one breezy afternoon in Montmartre?
Yet in the Others’ defense, Carol must have seemed like a good mark. From what we understand about her, she has surrendered whatever ambitions she carried as a serious author in order to write the fourth book in the hunky space-pirate trilogy. In the opening scene in a Norwegian ice hotel, she’s too obsessed with where her latest book has placed on the best-seller list to appreciate the Arctic vacation that selling out has afforded her. Who would blame them for assuming that a woman who fixates on where her novels are placed at an airport bookstore cares about money and material things? But at the end of that same scene, Carol does pause and look up at the northern lights, and we can see that they’re more than just a “screensaver” to her. She may be a crank who “loves feeling bad,” as Helen puts it, but her depth of feeling is not to be underestimated.
At this point in Pluribus, Carol is asserting an independence that she does not have, like a defiant form of playacting. She can tell Zosia to forget about Helen, but that’s not possible. Her attempt to go food shopping was always going to be a charade, given the gentle enslavement of humanity, but here it involves a complete restocking of an entire Sprouts market on her behalf. (The collective has sensibly consolidated food and other resources, as it happens.) She would have no power if the grid weren’t restored specifically for her little cul-de-sac. The best she can do is reject Zosia’s accommodations whenever she can: Pouring a perfectly fine bottle of Aquafina into the grass, dumping the B&B breakfast into the garbage, waving off the Instacart service in favor of a vastly more wasteful trip to the grocery store.
She does procure a hand grenade, however. “There is nothing wrong with me that a fucking hand grenade wouldn’t fix” is what she tells Zosia, and though “We” suspect Carol is being sarcastic, they can never be too sure. The delivery of the grenade leads to the most substantive conversation that Carol has had with Zosia, who’s more direct with her than usual. A question like, “How long do I have left until you turn me into a worker bee?” would usually draw a response along the lines of “Please, your life is your own.” But Zosia doesn’t deny the Others’ plans for Carol and the other anomalies. (“Sorry, Carol. We have a biological imperative.”) The best she can manage is that the change will be for the best, likening humanity to a drowning person in need of a life preserver.
At the end of Carol and Zosia’s talk, Carol’s detonation of the quite-real grenade sends Pluribus in a whole new direction, where violence is possible and the endless accommodations offered to Carol might include a rocket launcher or an atom bomb. (“We wouldn’t necessarily feel good about it,” says a friendly pod person in a DHL uniform. “But we would move heaven and earth to make you happy, Carol. Would you … like an atom bomb?”) It doesn’t seem to be in Carol’s character to launch a bloody one-woman revolution, but if they’re willing to give her new tools to fight back on humanity’s behalf, who is she to turn them down?
Mizzenmasts:
• There’s been some consternation here over what to call the hive mind on the show. Thinking of them as “aliens” doesn’t quite work because the phenomenon happened more through a virus than a typical invasion, and I erred in using the term “Celtiberian,” which was a reference to an ancient language used here on Earth. So for now we’ll stick to the official term for them used in Apple TV’s promotional materials, the “Others.”
• A small but perhaps significant moment in the opening, when Carol snipes, “I could have saved that hundred grand and frozen my eggs right here, yolks and all.” She and Helen intended to start a family and it never happened.
•Having “the gal from TGI Friday’s” pilot her previous flight disturbed Carol enough to where Zosia has provided the mortal vessels of two pilots with a combined 51,619 hours of flight time. (“You doing this because she freaked me out?” “That’s an affirmative, Carol.”)
• Such is Carol’s commitment to humanity that she can’t stop obsessing over a hotel bed made of ice in the flashback, yet she refuses to leave coach for the comfort of first class on her own private flight.
• I’m excited to meet Manousos, who seems like Carol’s Paraguayan partner-in-crank and suspect her frustration with him (“¡Chinga tu madre, cabrón!”) will be appreciated. None of the Others are going to talk to Manousos like that.
• Anyone else in the mood to watch old episodes of The Golden Girls? The sound bites from this episode are enticing. (“It must have been just the excitement of the moment, but they said the only way to prevent the eruption was for me to crawl through their legs, up the volcano, while they gave me my birthday whacks …”)
• A humbling itemization of Carol’s refrigerator: “You’ve only got tonic water, half a carton of oat milk, a jar of green olives, a jar of black olives, a jar of red olives …”
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