Well folks, I’m doing it! I’m recapping Pluribus every week. For those of you who might be familiar with my work via my Yellowjackets recaps, we’re going to do these a little differently! I’m not going to break down the episode in full and recap beat-for-beat. Honestly, there are plenty of other places where you can find that style of recap for Pluribus and I’d rather offer something different. So instead, I’ll be touching on just a few themes and threads that stood out to me in each episode, with a large emphasis on the real-life connections to be made to some of Pluribus‘s sci-fi devices and allegories, especially when it comes to the ways I see the series as a total indictment of AI, big tech, and capitalism. So if that all sounds interesting to you, you’re in the right place! And I want to hear from you! If nothing else, I hope these recaps can be a place of discussion, so I’ve also suggested some additional conversation topics at the end! Let’s chat in the comments! Let’s return to the era of TV recapping that was super interactive! Starting with this Pluribus episode 3 recap!

While watching this explosive (ha ha) episode of Pluribus, I couldn’t stop thinking about griefbots.

Griefbots — sometimes called deathbots or death avatars or, the term I find most disturbing, AI ghosts, all of these terms of course sounding ripped from an 80s/90s sci-fi dystopian film — are AI programs and products designed to immortalize the dead via technology. They’re large language models sold as grief companions or ways for people to mourn the loss of their loved ones, trained on recorded videos and audio, old text messages, social media posts, even diaries of the deceased in order to mimic them. Using technology in order to thwart the actual impact of death and “soothe” mourners is a concept so popular in sci-fi there have been multiple Black Mirror episodes that deal with it in some way (“Be Right Back,” “Black Museum,” and “San Junipero” all come to mind). For years, I’ve read fiction submissions for various literary journals, and it feels like at least a couple times a year I usually encountered a dystopian short story about a griefbot, many of them reiterating the hollow promise at the heart of these technologies and the dangerous allure of wanting to preserve the dead via private tech companies. Episode three of Pluribus, though, might just be my favorite piece of art about the failures and horrors of griefbots.

The episode opens with a memory, one that belongs to Carol and to Helen (side note: I’m glad we’re getting some pre-joining flashbacks so we can see more of Miriam Shor!). In it, Carol and Helen arrive at one of Norway’s ice hotels. Helen regards it all with childlike wonder: the bed made from an ice block, the romantic fur blankets, the complimentary ice brandy in a decanter, the gorgeous view of the Northern Lights from a window on their room’s ceiling. Carol, of course, regards it all with her usual pessimism. It’s cold, uncomfortable, and the aurora borealis looks like a screensaver. Helen is undeterred in the face of her negativity, which is perhaps why they work so well.

In the present, Carol returns home after her failed meeting with the other immune individuals. And when Zosia makes another reference to her past with Helen, Carol flips out. Luckily, no one ends up dead this time, but Carol has another very real angry breakdown as she demands Zosia and the rest of the hive forget about Helen, forget about all the memories they took and stored from her when Helen joined the hive shortly before dying. Carol wants to grieve privately, meaningfully. The hive keeps trying to connect with her through creepy gestures that nod to her life with Helen, but if there’s any relief grief in those gestures, it’d be hollow. Carol knows that. These people did not actually know Helen. They cannot actually remember. They just stored the data of her memories and are regurgitating it.

That’s exactly how griefbots function. Carol wants the hive to “forget” Helen, but they can’t, because much like a lot of data centers that fuel AI, the data is not actually permanently deletable, at least not easily and not from the consumer side. As an essay in The Hastings Center — an institute and journal for bioethics — puts it: If someone were to prompt a griefbot with their grandmother’s recipe (drawing from a plotline on Star Trek: Discovery), what would prevent that AI from sharing the recipe elsewhere or even putting out a cookbook with the recipe in it. When we share information with AI, it is no longer ours. To share an entire life raises a whole matrix of ethical and moral issues. It also ultimately takes grief away from us, turns it into a product sold as the solution. Carol wants to be able to mourn Helen authentically. The hive just spits back the data they’ve memorized; it doesn’t actually mean anything. In real life, deathbots can actually get in the way of the grieving process and violate users’ autonomy by making them dependent on the service the deathbot provides. While there are of course ways to seek support, there is no way to hack or shortcut grief. Despite Carol begging her not to, Zosia continues to bring Helen “back.” She references the Northern Lights memory, and suddenly it isn’t Carol’s anymore. It’s just reduced to a piece of data encoded in a technologically altered human race.

The tech billionaires who love AI are also obsessed with immortality, and those things go hand in hand. Large learning models are sold to us as collective, instant knowledge somehow greater than the power of actual human thinking, all the while turning out slop and hallucinations. Griefbots suggest death is not the end and commodify the mourning process, but denial about death gets us nowhere, and an avatar of a dead person is not that person come back to life. Nothing Zosia says can actually bring Helen back. The hive isn’t literally selling something to Carol in terms of financial gain, but they are in essence trying to sell her on a way of life — theirs. In which nothing, not even death, gets to be a private experience.

The Helen of the opening sequence is so full of life, brimming with that childlike wonder. Zosia and the hive’s rendering of her is about as real and feeling as a screensaver. Carol is right to be pissed the fuck off.

On that note, I’m also interested in the ways this episode reiterates the harsher parts of Carol’s personality. I am so interested in this character because she is not “good.” She is not some good-hearted hero fighting for humanity’s survival. She is brash, offensive, self-centered, misanthropic. She has so far proven to be rude, racist even to many of the other survivors immune to the hive, all of whom we’ve met so far are people of color and from countries outside of the U.S. Carol supposedly wants to rally around a common cause and yet only pushes these people away, frustrated when they don’t see things the exact ways she sees them. But self-isolation and self-pitying will not get Carol anywhere. If she can’t figure out ways to meaningfully connect with people, she’ll never reach the freedom from the hive she craves.

It’s ironic, of course, that in the face of an enemy that is quite literally a collective, the path toward fighting back would also be to build a coalition, but again, that mirrors our real world, too. The billionaires and fascist government officials are so damn good at consolidating and preserving their power. We’re helpless if we try to take them on as individuals rather than collectives. I was at an event organizing against book bans in Florida recently, and we all lamented just how organized the Moms of Liberty (a hive mind if I’ve ever seen one…) are in their efforts to get books banned in classrooms and libraries. We’re up against a well oiled machine, and the only way is to organize better, smarter.

Carol is up against the most well oiled machine there is. But they’re starting to show their flaws, too, as evidenced by their willingness to hand over weapons of mass destruction simply because she asks for them. But Carol, so used to doing things on her own, likely cannot in this case. I like that she’s a pill. It complicates things for the better.

More things to discuss in the comments:

• I mean, the literal grenade. And just the overall concept and philosophical underpinnings of how the hive has a biological imperative to make Carol happy no matter the damage done to themselves.
• There’s something about the entire eerie Sprouts sequence that did have me thinking about labor and the ways grocery store workers in our real world — from the truck drivers to the stockers to the cashiers and baggers — are so undervalued by society at large and often taken for granted as given parts of our lives. Carol wants to return to “normal” and to “independence,” but restocking and operating the Sprouts requires the work of others. And the general disposition of the hive also made me think of how Trader Joe’s employees are rumored to be trained to flirt (a fallacy, apparently, but they are encouraged to be “nice and friendly”, and if you mistake that for flirting, that’s on you) and the workers at Publix — the dominant grocery chain where I live — are also known for catering so extremely to customers’ whims, especially in the deli sub line, and always with a smile plastered on their faces, no matter how rude someone is being to them. The spookily choreographed Sprouts sequence in Pluribus is exactly what corporate grocery chain executives want to choreograph in real life. THOUGHTS?
• The cinematography in this episode! It was written and directed by Breaking Bad alum Gordon Smith and actually felt the most visually/stylistically similar to Breaking Bad of the three episodes so far. I caught at least two cool shots where reflective surfaces were used (in the DVD disc during Golden Girls and in the topper for the delivered breakfast platter), and I felt like that was a cool visual device, this idea of reality being reflected back to Carol with slight distortion.
• Carol wanting to know WHERE exactly she fell on the bestseller list was so funny to me and such a realistic portrayal of author anxiety. Although I will say, if they’re talking about a bestseller list without naming it explicitly, it means they’re talking about the NYT list, which only has 15 slots per category, not 20. Sorry to be a stickler for publishing industry details but alas!

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