Let’s start with the cold open—emphasis on the “cold.” The Pluribus season-one finale, titled “La Chica O El Mundo” (translation: “the girl or the world”), begins in the mountains of Peru, on Day 71 post-Joining. A young woman named Kusimayu—one of the handful of unassimilated humans left on Earth—has decided to go through the process of connecting to the hive mind. We witness her final minutes as an individual. She pets a baby goat, while her fellow villagers sing a song. In another context, this could all pass as some kind of ancient tribal coming-of-age ritual: charming, moving.
Then Kusimayu inhales some mysterious fumes. She collapses, convulses for about a minute, then rises with a smile. The singing stops. The villagers douse their fire, pack up their stuff, and begin hiking off to join up with the rest of the collective. Trailing behind, Kusimayu’s beloved baby goat bleats. She pays it no mind.
How are we supposed to feel about this? As this Pluribus season has approached its end, I’ve seen more and more rumblings online from viewers whose patience is being tried. Too many long scenes with no dialogue, I’m hearing. Too many episodes where the plot barely moves. Also, why won’t Pluribus creator Vince Gilligan and his writers clearly establish the Joined as the villains—or explain in any meaningful detail how the Joining works?
I think I’ve made my position on this alien infestation pretty clear. And if not, I hope my use of the word “infestation” here is clarifying. I believe the Joined have good intentions and that they tell the truth as they know it. I also think this doesn’t matter—which is why I also don’t care much about the particulars of the Joining. You can be the “happiest” entity in the universe, but if your life consists of working all day and then heading straight to sleep—without taking a few hours to yourself to read a romantasy novel or watch The Golden Girls—then that is, objectively, A Bad Thing. Individuality matters. For me, what happens to Kusimayu is chilling.
As for the way Pluribus has been telling its story…I feel like we had these same arguments about Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul? Look, Gilligan loves process. He loves to create impossible situations for his character, and then to explore the ramifications in full, rather than rushing to a resolution. He likes to watch people think their way through problems—and so do I.
The problems Carol faces in this episode are trifold. After the opening credits, we jump back to the Day 60 arrival of Manousos in Albuquerque, where he immediately creates three complications for Carol: 1.) the language barrier between them; 2.) the vast difference between how radical they want to be in their approach to the Joined; and 3.) the deep fear within Carol that the arrival of Manousos means saying goodbye to Zosia.
Let’s take these one by one, starting with the language barrier, which generates some sublime comedy. The credited writers for this episode are Alison Tatlock and Gordon Smith (the latter also directed), but it’s very Vince Gilligan to consider every potential snag his characters might face and then to come up with entertaining results. In this case, when Manousos pulls up to Carol’s house in his ambulance, after they’ve exhausted their respective English and Spanish vocabularies, Carol pulls out her cell phone and opens an unexpectedly annoying translator app.
The whole business with the app is hilarious. First of all, it’s not entirely accurate. The app can’t determine that Carol means “listening device” when she says “bug.” (A confused Manousos: “Insecto?”) When it can’t figure out a translation, it inserts the phrase “unknown word or name.” And it won’t…stop…translating. Even when a paranoid Manousos grabs her phone and tosses it down a storm drain, we can still hear it babbling away.
This brings us to the second complication, which is that Carol sees the Joining as a problem to be solved eventually, while Manousos sees it as an emergency. He doesn’t understand why Carol would be using a phone the Others could monitor. Her best, most reasonable explanation for why she engages with them at all is that she still thinks of the Joined as humans, who can be saved. Manousos though says these “weirdos” are better off dead.
Carol’s lack of urgency is also due to her having learned to trust the Joined—or at least to trust Zosia. She believes these folks are fundamentally harmless, given their “no kill” ethos. (Manousos, unmoved: “Isn’t it evil to value a man the same as an ant?”) Also, since she’s forbidden them from harvesting her stem cells, Carol’s sure she’s in no danger of being absorbed into the hive mind against her will.
The yawning gap between how Carol and Manousos intend to approach this crisis provides some rich drama. Carol is understandably wary of the machete-wielding Manousos, who insists they hide from the Joined by talking in his ambulance. (Carol: “No, we talk in the casa.”) Carol also really wants Manousos to see that her new friends aren’t so bad…which is why her heart sinks when he finds a motion sensor she wasn’t aware of stashed inside her liquor cabinet. Carol learns from Zosia that the sensor was installed by Helen to make sure Carol wasn’t sneaking booze when they were going through fertility treatments. But this explanation hardly placates Manousos, who is now also very curious about Carol’s chummy relationship with her “chaperone.”
This brings us to complication three and to the point where this episode’s drama intensifies to “harrowing.” After Carol banishes Manousos to a neighbor’s house, she panics when she sees him over there talking to Zosia. As is the collective’s way, Zosia tells Manousos “todo” (“everything”) about their relationship…because, after all, the Joined “love all jerks the same.” The situation then gets worse when Manousos attempts an experiment. He screams in the face of an Other named Rick, then uses his radio and the unique signal he found back in Paraguay to soothe Rick and to try to coax some humanity back into him. (Meanwhile, back at Carol’s house, Zosia is convulsing. It’s all quite frightening.)
The plan doesn’t work. But for Manousos, it’s a solid start. As for Carol? She’s not ready to accept that Manousos’s aggressive presence in Albuquerque now means Zosia (and everyone else) will leave again. Nor is she ready to engage with Manousos’s pithy challenge: “Do you want to save the world or get the girl?” It’s more complicated than that. Manousos feels he’s lost everything. Carol still has something—someone—to cling to.
“La Chica O El Mundo” takes a couple of unexpected turns at the end. First, Carol leaves Albuquerque for an extended vacation with Zosia, visiting a hot spring, a beach, a luxury urban hotel, and a ski lodge. They look to be having a great time in their little bubble of abundance, shielded from the emptiness of the world just outside their range of vision.
But there’s trouble in paradise. During a conversation at the ski lodge, Carol senses a hesitation in some of Zosia’s answers about the future. After further probing, Carol learns the Joined are actively planning to convert her. They can access her stem cells from the eggs she froze with Helen, and they’re about a month away (or maybe two or three) from figuring out how to make them usable, at which point Carol will Join. “If you loved me you wouldn’t do this,” Carol says. Zosia replies, “We have to do this because we love you.” She then adds, unconvincingly, “Because I love you.”
We close on a cliffhanger, as Zosia deposits Carol and a big crate back in Albuquerque, via helicopter. Carol tells Manousos, “You win. We save the world.”
What’s in the crate? Oh, just an atom bomb. We’ll have to wait for season two to learn how Carol plans to use it—if she has a plan at all. But we don’t need to wonder why she’s feeling so apocalyptic. We can see it in the stricken look she gives to Zosia before she steps off the helicopter and says goodbye…perhaps forever.
Just consider Carol’s history. Think of her as a teen, glowering her way through conversion camp. Think about her family, shaming her so profoundly that as an adult Carol continues to hide who she is from her fans. Think about this persistent pessimist being lucky enough to find a wife who understands her moods—and then losing her in the Joining. And now here’s Zosia, who outwardly affirms Carol while secretly planning to change her. Imagine how devastating all of this must be. With Zosia, Carol insists—sincerely—that she’s the best, happiest version of herself. But it’s still not enough. Damn it all.
Stray observations
- • There’s some fine visual storytelling in the sequence where Manousos tries to make amends to Carol by retrieving her phone from the storm drain, using his machete to attract the phone’s magnetic charging case. (There’s also some good comedy, as the phone translates his mumbling: “Nine thousand kilometers for this shit,” followed by, “Shut your trap!”)
- • There’s some more fine visual storytelling in the scene where Carol grills Zosia about her Manousos encounter. Behind Carol’s head, entirely unremarked upon, we see a flash from the ambulance’s lights, as Manousos goes off to find an Other to yell at.
- • Because Manousos has isolated himself, he’s never spoken to any non-Joined besides Carol. He’s surprised to learn that not only are they uninterested in helping her, they openly find her irksome. (“Screw you too, Laxmi!”) After abashedly admitting she’s not well-liked, Carol tells the dour purist Manousos, “But I bet they’d love your sparkling personality.”
- • This goes unexplained, but I’m going to assume that Manousos’s conversation with Zosia has a lot to do with why he shifts from “they should all die” to trying to save Rick.
- • I’m not entirely sure what to make of Manousos, who can come across as obnoxiously single-minded. (The scene where he snaps his fingers at Carol to request assistance doesn’t exactly coat him in glory.) Deep down, he does seem to be a thoughtful and sensitive person. But is he open to changing his mind? During Carol’s 14 days away, do you think he asks the Joined for any drone deliveries?
- • Without persuasive evidence, I can’t think of the Joined as malevolent. They’re a nuisance, yes. To put this in Fantastic Four terms, they’re like the planet-eating alien Galactus, who has a biological need to feed. Unlike Galactus, the Joined care about the organisms on the worlds they consume. The problem is that they refuse to accept individuality as a preferable alternative to assimilation. We can talk more about the metaphorical implications when the show returns. Until then, kiddos…be yourselves.
Noel Murray is a contributor to The A.V. Club.