Hi and welcome to the final Pluribus recap of the first season! My apologies for the lateness; I’ve been with my wife in Virginia visiting with my family and enjoying the holidays. But there was only so long I could stay away from the extreme pull this show has on me, so here we are! Enjoy this Pluribus finale recap! As a reminder, I don’t break down these episodes in their entirety, though there are plenty of places you can find that style of recap for this show elsewhere. Instead, I like to dive deep on some sort of real world connection, the show’s metaphorical work, or just a particular moment that stands out. There are suggestions for additional conversation topics at the end, but feel free to discuss anything! This recap and the subsequent comment section contain spoilers. And again, sorry this is late! I’m looking forward to discussing the finale and the season as a whole with you!
In the Pluribus season one’s conclusion, Manousos finally arrives after his long and hard journey to Albuquerque. He expects to find the version of Carol Sturka he saw in the tapes shipped to him — which it turns out he did watch — the Carol who was investigating the hive and determined to figure out a way to undo the joining. Instead, he finds a Carol who is playing house with Zosia.
Well, Zosia is smart enough to get out of there before his arrival. But Manousos will eventually meet her in the episode and get her to tell him everything about her involvement with Carol. Before then, Manousos tries to get Carol to talk to him about their potential plans in his ambulance, without phones. He doesn’t want the hive to be able to hear them, and he knows they have drones.
Carol thinks all these precautions are very silly, even though she herself hated the hive spying on her via drones in the immediate aftermath of the joining. Carol thinks placing her phone in airplane mode is enough to mitigate the hive potentially listening in, and she could be right, but she could also be wrong. The hive can practically telepathically communicate, and we don’t yet know the full extent of their technological capabilities. Carol seemed to previously understand that going analog or at least low tech — the dry erase board, the mailed tapes filmed on a camcorder — was the only way to circumvent the hive’s watchful eye. She once shared Manousos’ paranoia and mistrust. But here she is, wanting to use the translator technology on her phone to make her interactions with Manousos easier, defaulting to a shortcut.
Because Carol has adapted to the world around her. She has new empathy for the hive due to her growing personal relationship with Zosia. She has essentially grown closer to her oppressor. When the hive abandoned Carol, leaving her in isolation, it was essentially a form of torture that made her feel dependent on them. She wanted them back, even if that comes at a cost.
Carol’s gradual acceptance to her new reality and adjustment to make it work for her is, indeed, how certain groups of people respond to a rapidly changing world where our freedoms are taken away from us. It’s hard to look at Carol’s behaviors throughout this episode and not see her whiteness and, more specifically, a correlation with white feminism. She reacts to Manousos as if he’s dangerous and violent, securing her house. She reacts to his fears of the hive as if he’s being ridiculous, but that was once her! She has abandoned her own worldview and principles in favor of comfort.
We all made fun of the women in the pussy hats holding signs that said “If Hillary had won, we’d be at brunch” at the 2017 Women’s March, but it wasn’t just that the sentiment underplayed Hillary’s own evil policies or positioned the casual luxury of brunch as something to prioritize in the fight against the literal rise of fascism but also the fact that a lot of those women…were back at brunch like nothing happened days, maybe even hours later. Certain groups of white liberals merely adjusted to life under Trump, perhaps gesturing at protest but still benefiting from certain systems the ruling class profits off of, relying on the convenience of Amazon, talking about the evils of certain companies without participating in targeted boycotts.
None of the extreme methods Manousos uses in this finale in order to test his theories about how to undo the joining are any more aggressive than the methods Carol used a few episodes ago. She literally drugged Zosia, handcuffed herself to her, risked not only Zosia’s death but another mass death event by upsetting the hive. As Zosia herself points out to Carol, Manousos warned the hive before he put them into their catatonic state. If you find yourself bristling at his actions but not hers, I encourage you to interrogate any subconscious biases behind that.
When the hive abandons town again following Manousos’ actions, Carol makes a telling choice. She goes with them. She spends her days traipsing all over the world with Zosia on a never-ending idyllic lesbian date, from reading Ursula K. Le Guin poolside to taking a warm couples bath in the city to shacking up in a cozy ski chalet after hitting the slopes. It is a fantasy more intimate than Diabaté’s, but it is a fantasy just the same. Her motivations here are complicated of course, rooted in grief, in abandonment, in complete lack of control over this world imposed upon her. But it’s hard to deny that Carol is making this new reality work for her, finding the luxury in it, adapting her expectations and worldview so that she might enjoy this new world rather than do the difficult work of trying to fight and undo it. Again, we can see this response to our own reality time and time again, people adapting their own lives and behaviors to make room for world-changing forces like fascism even as they claim to oppose it. It is natural to seek comfort in end times, but complacency is different than comfort.
It is only when Carol is made aware of a direct threat to her personal bodily autonomy that she snaps back to reality. She learns the hive is indeed attempting to harvest stem cells from her frozen eggs, which as I understand it from comments left on these recaps, would be quite difficult and also require fertilizing the eggs to make embryos. But regardless, they are trying to do it, and they seemingly do not need her consent in order to do so. There is something lovely about the comfort and love Carol creates for herself with Zosia in the apocalypse, but it is not real, and it seems like it also has been a distraction. The hive has been busy preparing her eggs while she has been lost in the swirl of grief, desire, and desperation for a life that feels as close to normal and fulfilling as possible.
It’s not a perfect 1:1 comparison, but I’m admittedly reminded here of the ways certain reproductive justice movements largely led by white women and centered on contraception and abortion access often excluded the women of color who were losing the right to choose to have kids as they were being forcibly sterilized. Carol’s view of the harms caused by the hive has become limited to only really focusing on herself. It’s a threat to her own bodily autonomy and freedom that snaps her out of things and convinces her to return to Manousos (with an atom bomb?!) to work on a way to save the world. Manousos asks her to choose between the girl (Zosia) or the world, but he might as well ask her to choose between herself and the world, a more accurate question ultimately since Zosia isn’t really an individual girl. Carol wants it both ways: to maintain her autonomy and selfhood while also indulging in the supposedly utopic world provided by the hive. For much of this episode, she isn’t seeing beyond herself. The hive’s use of her eggs is an undeniable violation. It takes a threat to her own personhood to make her want to fight back again.
Again, between her willingness to adjust to her new circumstances rather than be too uncomfortable and her renewed desire to resist once she’s personally violated, this all feels very familiar. It is how many privileged groups respond to oppressive forces, even when those forces do impact them directly. Sometimes, it is easier to ignore and adjust, to protest but still ultimately become complacent. Increasingly, Pluribus feels like a fascinating study on how different people respond to the end of the world and to threats on personal autonomy and creative freedom. Between Carol and Manousos — and Diabate and some of the other immune individuals — it’s clear there is no perfect response. But season one ends on what I see as a somewhat hopeful note. I may be critical of the path Carol took to get here, but I am still glad she arrived, redetermined to fight for a world where people can make real choices about their lives and express their individuality. The hive claims happiness and a world without friction, but it is also a world without play, without creativity, without imagination or mess or passion or, hell, hobbies. That’s not a world I want to live in, and Carol doesn’t want to either, even if it means a hard and long road ahead.
More things to discuss in the comments:
- So Manousos has clearly unlocked something having to do with radio frequencies? Can someone who knows more about this sort of stuff weigh in with theories?
- Why exactly does Carol need the atomic bomb?
- I started writing out some notes on potential parallels between this narrative and The Left Hand of Darkness, the essential Le Guin novel Carol is seen reading, but it got too unwieldy for the confines of this recap so I scratched it, but I’d love to discuss with Le Guin fans in the comments!
- The opening sequence of Kusimayu joining the hive is a fascinating one, because I suppose there are probably different ways to view and interpret it, but I personally viewed it through such a horror lens. What are your thoughts?
Comments
I want to push back on interpreting Carol’s decision to find a new normal with Zosia prior to Manousos arriving as a parallel to white liberals finding a new normal under Trump.
Carol does not know Manousos is coming – she does not know she has a single living ally in the fight against the hive. She just endured 40 days of isolation from humans – solitary confinement is considered a form of torture by pretty much all human rights organizations. This is not a temporary situation for her. Prior to Manousos’s arrival – it was a future of isolation or finding some sort of new normal with the hive and the other survivors who want to live with the hive. She chose the latter. And she was still trying to find a way to unjoin people in the hive. She tells Zosia this in episode 8.
I’m all for calling out Carol’s extreme privilege- both in terms of wealth and race – but I think this projection about white women’s performative activism under Trump onto her behavior is flawed.
I will agree that her reaction to Manousos was flawed – however so was Manousos’s reaction to her! And neither of them have the knowledge that we have as viewers. Carol has no reason to believe that Manousos isn’t violent. She has not seen him researching or traveling to get to her. A man shows up with a machete to her house.
You make a good point about her lack of knowledge about Manousos as being more than just a man with a machete turning up at her house, although at that point I do think she is still too attached to this fake happy life when she could at least consider that Manousos might help achieve what she had previously wanted. Once her individuality is threatened she is ready to give him a chance.
I’m sorry but I’m going to have to disagree a little regarding Manousos. Carol is the one who initially tried to make contact with him with the multiple phone calls on the plane. She knows he has viewed her tapes. He is coming all the way from Paraguay, and she knows he is not in contact with the hive, therefore he is not excepting help from them (similar to how she was in the beginning). Why should she have fear of him? Does not make sense. I know she’s watching him through her door peephole, as he smooths out his hair, tucks his shirt cleanly in his pants, etc. making himself more presentable. Especially when he is the first to introduce himself and states his mantra in English no less, knowing now he has learned English for communication with her (his name, he’s not one of them, and he wants to help save the world).
Carol should have no fear of him and should be excited to finally have someone to work with on dismantling the hive, if only it was not for her personal attachment with Zosia/hive.
thanks for the pushback, genuinely! it helps to hear people interpreting things differently and gives me more to think about it. i do think when i’m writing about her creating a new normal I’m referring almost exclusively to her behaviors AFTER Manousos arrives and even more specifically after she leaves him to go off with Zosia. agree she was still trying to find a way to undo the joining in ep 8 but I think she abandoned that mission pretty swiftly after Manousos’ arrival and certainly wasn’t thinking about it when she left with Zosia. she expresses 0 curiosity about what Manousos was trying to do with the guy from the hive, even though it was quite clear he was onto something.
Thank you for responding and taking my response with kindness! Much appreciated.
I agree that it’s likely that Manousos is onto something – and that is clear to us, the viewers, and to Manousos, having seen his discoveries about RF signals. However, I think it’s important to remember 1. Carol doesn’t know any of this and 2. is likely in a trauma response watching Zosia seize in a manner parallel to when Helen died. I rewatched the scene where Carol enters the Wilson’s house, and tried to view it without our knowledge. We see Manousos’s hands around/near Rick’s neck, and Rick is seizing. Carol assumes Manousos caused the seizure, and we don’t know how. She doesn’t know at this point that Manousos warned them of what he was going to do. Then, when she tries to comfort Rick and he’s coming out of the seizure, Manousos immediately scares him into another seizure, without explaining to Carol at all. Recall Carol’s reaction to learning how many people she had killed before – loss of bodily functions: ability to walk, throwing up, passing out. She clearly has a strong aversion to harm and is horrified by Rick seizing. She has no idea Manousos was doing this to try to rescue Rick. Then, Manousos gets his radio transmitter and comes back to play the signal. We hear Manousos whispering to Rick, but given how far Carol is from them, it’s unlikely she heard. She knows nothing about Manousos’s research – she just watched him cause the hive to seize twice, after the trauma of watching Zosia (who has been emulating Helen for two eps) seize. Without the knowledge we have, why should Carol assume Manousos does not want to harm the hive? In their previous conversation, he called them the devil. I’ll push back that it was clear to Carol he was making progress and add that to her, what he did likely appears quite violent and was traumatic to her.
I know I’m coming off as a died in the wool Carol defender, but I’m actually quite critical of her actions judging Koumbe, her treatment of the other survivors on airforce one, and her lack of grace for differing reactions. But I think in this situation, her reactions follow quite logically from the knowledge she has and as a trauma response.
I don’t agree with her vacationland spree, but I do think Carol leaving Manousos makes sense given her priors in interpreting his actions
And to your point at the end, I ultimately disagree that his machete is enough to justify Carol’s fears. He takes it out in plain sight at a great distance from her and isn’t wielding it as a threat. Carol’s the one who comes in guns blazing later on. In many ways she’s the more dangerous person here
I had been disturbed enough by Carol hooking up with Zosia in the previous episode, but if she had completely given up on reversing the joining it is just about understandable, although not okay. But the fact that she had accepted this fake life with Zosia to the extent that she was hostile to Manousos as a threat to that was very disturbing. She knew it was fake, her gender neutral pronouns for pre-joining Zosia’s ?late partner was proof. (For the record in theory pre-joining Zosia’s sexuality shouldn’t matter because she’s not consented regardless, but if my body was used to seduce a man that feels slightly worse than the already horrific idea of it being used to seduce a woman).
Anyway at least Carol got back to wanting to save the world in the end, although disappointing it was for very selfish reasons.
I saw the joining of Kusimayu and the immediate loss of individuality and culture only as a bad thing.
yes fullllyyyyy agree with this reading of the Kusimayu scene. i like the juxtaposition of it being framed tonally and visually as this really peaceful process when in actuality this stripping of cultural specificity is quite violent
I love all your recaps of Pluribus!
I have been thinking about one of the aspects in particular that I don’t remember being addressed yet (but I may be wrong) – about what happens when people’s needs are in conflict with each other. And then thinking about how actually what I mean is desires/ wants. Because what the collective are bringing when they fulfill requests is wants not needs. And thinking about the different relationships each has to desires/wants. It feels to me like Carol experiences wanting as something suppressed by others – she is in scarcity mode, and perceives what she has as what she is able to wrest from others. Which leads to moderation issues and difficulties with connecting and trust. In many ways embodying capitalism/ colonialism. Manousos experiences wanting as something suppressed by the self, in service of an ideal. He ignores what his own self is telling him, by extension making it hard to listen to others and to be flexible.
I’m thinking about how the capacity for choice is the heart of autonomy . And how that capacity for choice is contingent upon consciousness and desire.
I’m thinking about how this show is exploring what consciousness is, the challenges that are inherent in having choice, having free will, how we deal with harm and pain. How these are still such fundamental questions.
And I appreciate that this show is so far giving us autonomy, time and space to consider for ourselves what that means.
all interesting things to consider and contemplate!
Kusimayu’s ‘joining’ was brutal to see. The whole facade the Joined spun to convince her to surrender, with the singing, the coaching from those who used to be family, all the trappings of an Indigenous community, turning off like a switch once no longer needed.
It is a trap in the same way Zosha is pupetteered to convince Carol she can have white girl brunch, drone delivery, and a wife again. We saw the real Helen, before she was murdered, and the actual relationship the Hivemind’s acting out through Zosha has conflicts, fights, and figuring out who is sober enough to get the car to start.
And Laxmi’s entrapped too. The Joining/Others/Hivemind puppeteer her son as if he’s a perfect, obedient, loving son.
The Hivemind lets Diabaté play out his James Bond movie fantasies (and conveniently collecting stem cell precursors from him? Not sure how that works with sperm.)
What’s in common is that the Hivemind uses nostalgia on everyone to get them to give in.
Manousos’ cynicism saved him. The hive rolled out the person who was his mother to try and win him over, to which he countered with the reality that his mom was an abuser.
And nostalgia, especially for things that weren’t really there, is part of the fascist program. You’re right to point out Carol’s white girl stuff to white girls like me, but almost all the survivors are getting played.
And we know Carol knows. She hasn’t forgotten the conversion therapy, and the carcerial technology (the sensor in the liquor cabinet as well as the breathalyzer) she’s subject to. She need to remember that Helen was a person, not the optimized, compliant companion Zosha’s been turned into.