The following Pluribus episode 4 recap contains some spoilers.

While watching this episode of Pluribus, I thought immediately of Kate Wagner’s perfect rebuttal to the weak but widely circulated online argument that we should just Let People Enjoy Things. We should not, I believe and Wagner argues, simply let people enjoy things, especially when the “things” in question are the product of mega media conglomerates (Wagner is largely writing about the final season of Game of Thrones and Avengers: Endgame in her takedown of the Let People Enjoy Things way of thinking). Arts and cultural criticism is as important as the arts and culture itself. A Let People Enjoy Things mentality kills meaningful discourse and reduces art to mere product to be consumed.

In “Please, Carol”, Carol Sturka returns home and begins writing down everything she knows about the hive on a big dry erase board in her office. She knows they’ll give her anything she wants. She knows they want to make her like them. There’s one thing she has a hunch about but wants to test: The hive is weirdly honest. Can they lie to her?

The delightful Jeff Hiller guest stars as a member of the hive helping clean up Carol’s yard after the grenade explosion. Carol invites him into her home to test her theory. Her inquisition opens with asking how the hive feels about her novels in the Wycaro series. Jeff gushes about how much the hive loves the work but avoids specificity until Carol presses, at which point he mentions a specific description of a gown on a particular page. She pushes. Does the hive think her work is on the same level as that of Shakespeare? Hivemind Jeff Hiller says oh yes, yes it does. Carol’s romantasy pirate series is absolutely in the same league as the finest works of William Shakespeare. Even Carol knows this flattery is false, empty.

In what is a very accurate display of the self-harm artists often like to inflict, Carol wants to know what Helen thought of her work — not just of the Wycaro series but of her unpublished novel, Bitter Chrysalis (sorry Carol, but that title is horrible). Hivemind Jeff is reluctant to tell her, tries to point out Carol told the hive Helen was off limits. There are traces here of the DHL guy’s anxiety last episode. Carol has often exposed pressure points in the hive’s otherwise seamless flow.

Here is the truth: Helen thought the Wycaro series was the equivalent of cotton candy, and she didn’t even finish Bitter Chrysalis, though she agreed with Carol’s agent that it was fine enough to publish without any detriment to Carol’s career. Carol gets the answer she was looking for in that she confirms the hive cannot actually lie to her, but it comes at personal hurt. Is there anything more devastating for an artist to hear their lover thinks their work saccharine and easily forgotten once consumed?

And yet.

Hearing what Helen really thought about her work is far more meaningful and human than anything the hive has to say about her work. I feel like my Pluribus write-ups every week are just turning into screeds on what AI cannot replace. Last week: our deceased. This week: critics. AI does not know what makes some art distinguishable from others, which is why the art it produces is so accurately described as slop. Ask AI to write a film review, and it’ll merely scrape existing ones, identify patterns, and regurgitate an amalgam of the most popular opinions, the equivalent of a bunch of different flavors melted down into glop at the bottom of a dumpster. In the same way, the hive cannot distinguish between Carol’s work and Shakespeare’s work. It’s all just part of the same soup of information they’ve downloaded from each other.

The hive functions almost like a review aggregator in this conversation between Carol and Jeff Hiller. The hive defaults to praise for Carol’s work, perhaps due to the hive’s desire to make Carol happy, but I think they’re also going with a majority consensus, which the hive deems mistakes for truth. If the hive has access to all human experience and emotions, surely there are plenty in the hive who think Carol’s work is actually trash, but instead the hive defaults to the majority opinion shared by Carol’s superfans. While not explicitly AI tools, platforms like Rotten Tomatoes and Letterboxd similarly speak to the problems with attempting to simplify or codify criticism. These platforms can be useful and interesting, but we should not mistake the aggregation of criticism for criticism itself. Averages belong in mathematics, not in critical evaluation of the arts, which requires nuance, specificity, and yes, difference of opinions!

Which brings me back to Kate Wagner’s “Don’t Let People Enjoy Things,” truly one of my favorite treatises on criticism in recent years. Look at Rotten Tomatoes, and you’ll see Avengers: Endgame has a whopping 94% on the Tomatometer. This is higher than Cheryl Dunye’s The Watermelon Woman (92%). So ask a robot, and it’s likely to conclude the studio blockbuster propaganda machine is “better” than the small budget queer Black film that is one of the greatest lesbian films of all time and that, I think we can all agree, is doing something more substantive than the 2019 Marvel movie.

The hive defaults to safe, easy criticism, the kind embraced by the Let People Enjoy Things crowd, the kind that is not criticism at all. It’s just platitudes. The hive can’t even tell Carol what it really likes about her work or what distinguishes it from Shakespeare’s. AI will never produce good art, because it does not know what actually makes art good. “In the face of both Trumpism and LPET-ism, in a society ruled by scam politics and near total entertainment, it is surely a strange time to be a critic,” Wagner writes. “As the day-to-day misery of this lucid nightmare wears people down to stumps, and the last refuge of joy and escapism is sought in mass culture, it may appear somewhat cruel to take entertainment to task. But the far worse alternative would be a world without criticism—a world well-wishing people are now working to build for their bosses, one where monopolistic media conglomerates cater to our simplest desires and most superficial political awareness.”

This is the world Pluribus depicts, one where Carol’s only hope of accessing real, meaningful criticism is to ask the hive to share her dead wife’s real thoughts about her work before the joining rendered criticism dead. Once again, Pluribus acts as a warning. In our current moment, there are fewer and fewer places publishing cultural criticism, especially literary criticism. The literary critics who do exist are having trouble finding work. This is bad! There are already a bunch of AI tools out there being marketed to aspiring writers that claim to be able to evaluate and review their books. But an AI’s assessment of literature is just like the hive’s; it cannot actually think and therefore cannot actually pinpoint or explain literary merits beyond just regurgitating consensus and stolen ideas.

I’ve often encountered the mentality in writing spaces that there’s someway to “hack” the publishing process, a formula for writing a bestseller. I’m married to a New York Times bestselling author, and there are people who sometimes want to know how she did it. They think she can provide some sort of roadmap for them to follow. But my wife will be the first to admit it doesn’t work like that and, while her first novel was indeed fucking brilliant, the confluence of factors that led to her making the list amounts to, essentially, luck. The writing itself took work, a lot of it. There are no shortcuts. When it comes to Carol’s work, there’s a conversation to be had about art that satisfies a formula and fanservice (which, I think, is what Helen ultimately meant by her comparison to cotton candy) and art for art’s sake (Carol’s unpublished novel). But at the end of the day, good art cannot be hacked. And if we just uncritically deem everything enjoyable, it’s no longer art; it’s empty entertainment.

Helen’s real thoughts about Carol’s work hurt, but at least they are real; they are human. Helen would never claim Carol’s work to be on the same level as Shakespeare’s; the question itself is absurd, something Carol sharply uses to expose the flaws in the hive’s system.

Beyond these thoughts about criticism, the other part of this episode I’m most interested in is the reveal Carol spent some time in a conversion therapy program in her youth, sent there by her mother after she came out. Of course Carol is especially disturbed by the hive; conversion therapy was the same, an attempt to assimilate her into a way of thinking that would strip her entirely of her personal selfhood, agency, and desires. She tells Zosia the staff at the conversion camp were just like the hive: all smiles, no souls. I’m so fascinated by the allegorical work Pluribus does, because it can be read in so many different ways. In this episode, the hive takes on many meanings — from AI to conversion therapy. It’s easy to see the hive as a metaphor here for conversion programs that seek to depersonalize queer and trans people, melting them down into a homogenized populace. This is the goal of so many oppressive tools and systems.

I had hoped Carol’s queer identity would be significant in the series’ narrative, and it very much is so. She is someone who has already lived through an attempt to melt her down into glop. Of course she’s fucking angry and terrified it’s happening again and on such a massive scale. Between her queer identity and her life as an artist, Carol knows the dangers of assimilation and homogenized thought.

More things to discuss in the comments:

• As a reminder, I’m not really doing traditional recaps for this series and instead am picking just one or two threads to go long on. But I’m open to discussing the episode in full in the comments! So get in there!
• So the joining can be reversed! Carol doesn’t know how yet so neither do we, but the possibility of it opens up a whole new world for the show’s trajectory.
• I’m super interested in the ways the show depicts Carol having to revert to analog methods in order to learn about and organize against the hive. The hive basically amounts to a massive surveillance program, because only one person has to witness her doing something for them to all know and immediately mobilize. A dry erase board hidden behind sliding doors in her office is her only hope of keeping her schemes private. I’m reminded of the ways Chicagoans have started organizing against ICE by using 3D-printed whistles — circumventing the supply chain, surveilable tech, and other means of production and systems easily controlled and corrupted by the enemy. Analog methods of resistance are so essential!
• I love love love the opening of this episode, which focuses on Manousos Oviedo, the guy in Paraguay who didn’t want to talk to Carol. Breaking Bad was always good at long, dialogue-less scenes, and it’s nice to see that continued here in Pluribus. It’s done so well in this opening. The dog food moment is quietly brutal.
• We also learn Carol has used heroin in the past. I’m curious about what experiences with addiction she might have, because I think that would add yet another interesting layer to some of how she’s responding to what’s happening to her and to the show’s meaning-making.
• Oh you KNOW I gasped when Carol watched the replay of herself calling Zosia “fuckable.”

Before you go! Autostraddle runs on the reader support of our AF+ Members. If this article meant something to you today — if it informed you or made you smile or feel seen, will you consider joining AF and supporting the people who make this queer media site possible?

Join AF+!