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, which contains spoilers for the episode!
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. They also want to automate so many of these jobs and replace the actual workers, rendering the grocery shopping experience deeply inhuman and very similar to this sequence. 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!
You’re in Florida!?!? I knew it! Stay involved! They’re bringing more anti-LGBTQ nonsense for session again.
Also I wasn’t planning on it… but yes a show about a pandemic/ AI ghost bot hive mind… but with lesbians is right up my alley!
yes I’m locked IN to fighting the good fight for florida.
and yes, welcome! I feel like there’s SO MUCH to find interesting about the show already
First, I am SO glad to have your insights every week on this show. I never would’ve connected the grief bots thing, but it is so true.
Obviously, boo Louis CK sucks, but he has a moment in a special that I think of when it comes to people. He goes really quiet, and is clearly building to a moment and a guy yells “woo!”. Louis’s response is basically, “what is wrong with you that you can’t handle silence? Are you hollow? Are you so afraid of your own thoughts?”
Maybe it isn’t true for all of them, but those are the kind of people I think who want grief bots. Yes it’s painful, but denying a part of the human condition is sick to me.
I LOVE the narrative choice to flesh out Helen as she continues to haunt the story. The first two episodes I liked her, but now I love her. I like the idea of the audience growing closer to Helen throughout the season, which brings us closer to Carol in a different way. I am now viscerally on Carol’s side. I want to tell the collective to keep Helen’s name out of there mouths and minds.
I feel like plenty of people will be on Carol’s side with the ice palace. I want to see her react the same way where ever they choose to travel. I could watch Carol complain and Helen talk her down into appreciation a hundred times.
I really like the detail that it seems the collective’s message gets filtered through the person speaking. For example when the individuals line up to go into Sprout’s, the guy says, “can I sneak past you?”. I feel like if another individual had been in the front of the line, the message would’ve been the same, but the word choice would’ve changed. Maybe I’m looking at it too deeply though.
I like the idea that Carol’s abrasiveness actually works on the last person the hive discovered to be immune. Seems like they might actually be pretty similar, and wouldn’t that be fun for her to deal with! :)
Thanks again for taking the time to write this up weekly and having a place for us to post our thoughts!
yes yay thanks for sharing your thoughts!!
super into the idea that language gets filtered differently through different “individuals.”
and yes hoping for more Helen flashbacks! I have a feeling each episode is going to play with form/timeline differently. but would be so great to get more Helen consistently over the course of the season
*Spoilers* – This episode showed us there are cracks in their demeanor . Zosia when Carol tries to staunch the blood. She kinda smiling but you see the fear in her eyes on that close up after the explosion. Then nervousness on the guy’s face when Carol asks for the nuclear code. There’s signs of flaws in the system.
I actually didn’t read Zosia’s reaction as fear. To me she was just in pain, and even through that she was still trying to make Carol feel better. Which I found worrisome because I kind of hoped there was still some part of the host alive in the bodies and that in a real life-or-death situation, something human might “come up.”
But I do agree about the DHL guy scene. His nervousness when Carol asks for a nuclear bomb felt genuine. Which doesn’t make any sense, because why would they hand Carol a nuclear weapon if they’re nervous about giving it to her in the first place? Are they afraid of going extinct?
yeah I think we’re kind of gradually learning the full extent of the hive’s biological imperative and priorities
i LOVED that scene with the DHL guy. i feel like it was such a good and unsettling performance
The grocery store scene highlighted Carol’s selfishness. It almost seemed like one of the most pointed capitalist parts of the show. The hive is consolidating resources to divide and share amongst themselves (presumably) and then Carol’s selfish ass is like uh no, fill out this entire sprouts JUST FOR ME. I thought in that moment she looked sick, like she felt bad when she saw it all happening but her stubbornness kicks in and she can’t admit when she was wrong. When she saw all those trucks line up JUST FOR HER she could’ve said “no nevermind just bring me these specific frozen meals” but she is stubborn in her hatred for the hive. And I thought showing her eating a simple (and gross-looking) frozen meal further highlighted her selfishness. She had them stock an entire grocery store just for her, and then opted for a crappy frozen meal? Ridiculous.
ABSOLUTELY! It was so representative of the culture of convenience that big corporations have cultivated where people feel like they can have constant easy access to things with little regard for the labor behind-the-scenes. Carol thinks she’s just sticking it to the hive, but she’s replicating these systems, too
I do think a lot of Carol’s selfishness must be understood as part of her shock response to both the loss of Helen and the loss of the world as she knew it. She wanted her grocery store because it was familiar, in a moment where almost everything familiar has been taken away. She doesn’t yet understand how the Hive is organizing society now. I do think over time she will appreciate that requesting a functioning grocery store is the same as requesting Air Force One in terms of sheer indulgence.
The grocery store scene initially reminded me of the way wealthy people felt entitled to force essential workers to put themselves at risk during covid lockdowns so they could have restaurant food etc, which was actually much worse because the wealthy weren’t experiencing the same level of shock as Carol and in Carol’s case, the Hive people aren’t at risk of a deadly respiratory infection and aren’t motivated by economic need.
oh 100% yeah Carol is in the muck of grief and it’s heightening some of her existing anger/brashness/myopia in a totally understandable way.
the grocery store sequence also reminds me of what the tech overlords WANT grocery stores to look and feel like in the near future/now — totally automated and “seamless,” replacing the real workers with robots/AI
Wow, I couldn’t disagree more on this point. To me, if Carol were truly selfish, she’d be acting like the guy from Senegal. She’s the one who refuses to fly first class or accept a homemade meal, she doesn’t want to be assisted or treated like a child.
For me, the supermarket scene was actually really sad and it actually reminded me of COVID. I lived through that period alone and my only escape was going to the supermarket. It was the one normal and familiar thing I still had.
I don’t think Carol was doing groceries to prep for some fancy dinner. I think she was there trying to touch something human, something she used to know. I don’t think she realized the scale of the work it would take to actually return the market to what it was.
To me Carol is just a woman grieving a life and a world that doesn’t exist anymore. And she’s probably bitter that she didn’t appreciate it when she had it.
I lean much more strongly into your take. If Carol was acting on pure selfishness, she could have napped in her car while they set up the store. She stood there for around 40 minutes, just watching them. She parked in the parking lot! She could’ve parked right in front, and who would she have bothered?
The trip to the grocery store was a desperate bid for normalcy, which failed spectacularly.
i really lean closer to some mixture of these readings. i do think Carol is desperate for normalcy in a changed world (reminds me of Covid for sure but also REALLY reminds me of craving normalcy and humanity in the era of proliferated AI…even those of us who try to avoid it at all costs are sometimes accosted by it in the form of google AI overviews and other attempts to normalize the tech). i still also think there’s a deep self-centeredness to her (that i appreciate as character development!), evidenced by the memory that starts the episode but also by the ways she interacted with all the other immune folks last episode. I agree she is distinct from the guy who wanted a private jet. but I think she’s still flawed, and hey, I wouldn’t expect someone to act perfectly under these circumstances by any means
It’s too easy to say this act is purely self-indulgent or purely a plea for normalcy in her grief. To me, this episode really cemented just how murky this new world is to navigate for the “normies” like Carol.
Donna M’s comment, “over time she will appreciate that requesting a functioning grocery store is the same as requesting Air Force One in terms of sheer indulgence,” really gets at this. 100% agree she went to the store seeking normalcy amidst her grief, and of course she couldn’t have anticipated what it would take to actually experience that. The reality is, though, that whether for Air Force One or for a glimpse at normalcy, Carol utilizes the labor of those she said she wanted nothing to do with for her own gratification.
The thing is: when you’re one in thirteen people in the entire planet not in a hive mind, how in the world can you possibly fight back against these systems in meaningful ways? I’m really excited to see how this show explores that!
So excited to see you recapping this, Kayla!
I hadn’t thought of griefbots but your discussion actually underlines for me how much worse our AI versions are than this speculative scenario. This Hive actually has Helen’s memories, which are linked to her embodied experience of being a human in relationship to Carol. If I give a dead loved one’s diaries and social media to an LLM, I’m still just getting a robot’s pathetic attempt at mimicking my loved one’s words. At least the Hive members were once human, even if much of their humanity has been compromised.
The other thing that stuck out to me about this episode is the way the Hive appears to have eliminated class distinctions (and there are definitely lots of right wingers saying this show is about communism), but Carol still cares about class distinctions in people’s appearances. First she was alarmed by a former TGI Fridays waitress flying her to Spain, so they got two white men to fly her home. (Also, that whole scene reminded me both of that cartoon with a populist saying ‘fuck experts, let me fly the plane’, AND the ironic MAGA fixation on white men being the only qualified pilots as they put unqualified fascists in every top position.) I wondered why the Hive didn’t give the DHL guy a lab coat before he went to tell Carol about Zosia’s status, knowing how she continues to react to the uniforms of waiters or delivery people.
omg of course the right is saying this is a show about communism LOL they love missing the POINT.
yeah I am definitely super interested in the ways Carol’s own biases and assumptions are being replicated here even after everything about the world has changed so radically. shows how deeply ingrained those things can be. all the allegorical work is working so much better because of how complicated Carol is as a character. this isn’t some straightforward parable with her as the hero, and I’m into that
This is funny because when we were watching it I joked to Gretchen that truly wouldn’t mind just being able to fly first class and read my books but still get room service breakfast BUT then I was like, actually well I’d probably be really depressed because you’d be dead, and then I was like, I think if my grief was that profound I would accept a Gretchen-esque Zosia just to ease it all a bit, cuz I would be so sad. Then Gretchen was like “have you seen the AI dead people thing” and showed me a commercial of someone showing their baby her dead AI-animated mother and i said absolutely not that is terrifying and i hate it, no thank you, yikes. and then this is what your recap was focused on!
The only thing that would feel worse than grief would be feeling like everybody else had a piece of something and someone that was only mine.
This especially is just so on the money — “Thile 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.”
also like… how could your actual memories of this person not get mixed up with the generated animated version of them, you know? i certainly wouldn’t want an AI version of me out in the world after I die, creating fake memories for my child. We live in a country where people on all sides of the political spectrum already prefer a neat narrative about a person even if it’s not entirely true than they do the actual truth — how many AI-generated videos are contributing to a person’s perspective of this or that celebrity even if that video wasn’t real? I fear most people don’t care.
Anyhow, great recap! Great show! I love this show and your recaps
“The only thing that would feel worse than grief would be feeling like everybody else had a piece of something and someone that was only mine.” unrelated to the episode (but maybe related?) but I think about this all the time when famous people die and the general public has all these emotions about it and offers up memories, etc and what that must feel like for the people who ACTUALLY knew that person. I think it’d make me a bit angry as someone who knew the real version of that person. in a way, the hive is placing Helen on a pedestal as if she were a famous person because it’s their only “in” for a connection with Carol. interesting!
which yeah ties into what you’re saying about memory-mixing too — confusing the AI standin for the actual person and how that impacts perception and memory over time. I definitely think we’re going to start to see that happen with celebrity holograms/AI vids. kids especially won’t really be able to separate those representations from the real people. SCARY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Why do you think the hive had to invent an avatar in Zosia for Carol to interact with? Is it really possible Carol is such a misanthrope that there was no special person in her life besides Helen? No cynical best friend? No drinking buddy? No parent or sibling or extended family member? I’d love to understand more about what it is like to be part of the hive mind and I think the best way into that would be letting Carol interact with someone she knew well in the before times.
yeah I’m wondering about Carol’s life beyond Helen, too! i do get the impression her life was somewhat small. but i too would love to see her interacting with an individual she knew from her past who is now part of the hive.
OH another conversation topic: Carol dropped that one line about having frozen her eggs, and undoubtedly that will become significant information right? If Carol is immune, could her offspring be, too? What if the hive ends up intercepting her eggs in order to further study her DNA? Presumably, they have the information already that she froze her eggs because they have all of Helen’s memories…or even the memories of the medical pros who performed the extraction.
I liked how clearly this episode conveyed that Carol’s sense of herself as self-reliant is simply wrong; even beyond the Sprouts sequence, we see that pre-Hive, Helen managed a *lot* for Carol, from her authorial social media to being kind to hotel staff. (I wonder if we’ll ever get to see how they met, and what initially attracted Helen to her…)
I’ve had an essay brewing in my brain for the last week or two about Pluribus, Buddhism, and the Fermi paradox which I’m probably going to have to sit down and write at some point (I’ve considered pitching it to AS, but I have no idea if it’s the type of thing y’all would be interested in). There’s *so* much to talk about in this show