The <i>Pluribus</i> Season 1 Finale Is a Heartbreaking Allegory for the Dark Side of Love
SOURCE:Time Magazine|BY:Judy Berman
Vince Gilligan's Apple TV sci-fi epic ends its first season with a heartbreaking allegory about the emotion that makes us human
This article discusses the events of the Pluribus Season 1 finale.
Roughly 15 minutes before the end of the first season of Pluribus, the show’s protagonist, Carol Sturka, is confronted with an arresting question: “Do you want to save the world or get the girl?”
There are layers to this inquiry. It comes wrapped in a scrim of humor. Posed in Spanish by Manousos (Carlos-Manuel Vesga), who made the perilous journey from Paraguay to New Mexico to meet the one other person on Earth—Rhea Seehorn’s Carol—who might help him defeat the new global hive mind and restore humanity as we know it, the English words issue from a smartphone translation app that addresses her as “Unknown Word or Name.” That these potential allies must communicate via an electronic intermediary underscores that they are among the last living individuals, not just isolated by their respective languages, but also cut off from the new species-wide consciousness shared by the Others. At the same time, saving the world and getting the girl are prototypical superhero quests. Superman wouldn’t be Superman if he had to decide between vanquishing Lex Luthor and winning the heart of Lois Lane.
Carol Sturka, though? She has to choose. Whether they’re sci-fi epics or crime dramas, and whether they center on flawed heroes like Carol or villains in the making like Walter White, Vince Gilligan’s stories embrace the dark, difficult, ambiguous aspects of human experience. In imagining Earth’s population mentally fused to form a billions-strong network of collective intelligence that verges on omniscience, his eerie new Apple TV series Pluribus has surfaced profound insights on what it means to be a person. The Season 1 finale, which arrived as an early Christmas gift on Tuesday night, took the form of a wrenching allegory about how love—that supposedly generous and purifying emotion—can make us selfish to the point of self-destruction.
Carol (Rhea Seehorn) and Manousos (Carlos-Manuel Vesga) attempt to communicate Courtesy of Apple
The episode opens, in typical Gilligan fashion, thousands of miles from Carol’s desert cul-de-sac, in the tiny Peruvian mountain village where Kusimayu (Darinka Arones) lives with her adoring female relatives. Among the 13 people in the world who are known to be immune to the Joining, this young woman may be the most eager to assimilate with the hive mind. Now, she gets her wish. Having apparently used her stem cells to synthesize a virus custom made for Kusimayu, the Others deliver a metal capsule to the remote village. At a ceremonial gathering of sorts, amid her neighbors’ call-and-response chants, she breathes in white vapor from the container, seizes, and is set gently on the ground. Soon, she opens her eyes, a beatific smile spreading across her face. Joining her Joined kin, she frees her livestock from their enclosure, the way animals have been liberated from farms and zoos around the world. But in a haunting final shot, the adorable baby goat that she’d particularly loved runs after her in distress, bleating. Kusimayu just walks away, content yet empty of the individual attachments that make us human.
This ominous vignette looms over the remainder of the finale, as Manousos and his ambulance finally reach Albuquerque. His timing isn’t ideal. In the previous episode, Carol grew closer to her so-called chaperone, Zosia (Karolina Wydra, who has been phenomenal this season), probing her for details about her life pre-Joining, lying awake next to her at the arena where the Others sleep side by side, and reminiscing about the origins of her writing career at a freshly rebuilt replica of the diner where she used to steal time from her temp job. Carol was smart enough to realize that this was all Zosia—who is, after all, the person in the world who bears the closest resemblance to her ideal lover—trying to curry favor for the Others. And for her part, Carol was using their time together to study the Others’ habits and vulnerabilities. But then Zosia kissed her, Carol’s longing for intimacy kicked in, and by the next morning, their hookup had inspired her to write a new chapter of her Wycaro chronicles in which the heartthrob Raban was suddenly a woman. (Shades of Orlando! Carol, a Virginia Woolf fan? Yeah, that tracks.)
By the time Manousos arrives, Carol is dating Zosia—to the extent that it’s possible for a person to date a representative of the entire human race—and isn’t looking forward to seeing her leave in order to make him comfortable. (He hates the Others so much, he calls them “the weirdos.”) “I am not one of them,” he greets Carol. “I wish to save the world.” Manousos may be the only person on the planet, pre- or post-Joining, more stubborn than Carol. While she’s begun to see the good in the Others’ communal lifestyle, he has no reservations about killing them all if the Joining can’t be reversed. Carol flies into a jealous rage when she walks in on him questioning Zosia, then threatens him with a gun when his experiment on a different Other causes Zosia to have a seizure. An angry phone call from her nemesis, Laxmi (Menik Gooneratne), confirms that Manousos has hurt Others around the world. But, being an individual and thus terminally irrational, Carol only really cares what happens to her girlfriend. When Zosia explains that the Others love Manousos “the same as we love you,” Carol whines: “You’re my chaperone. Mine.”
It’s this sequence of events that prompts Manousos to ask her whether she wants to save the world, as he does, or get the girl. At first, she chooses the girl. Cut to Carol reading Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Left Hand of Darkness poolside as Zosia swims. We see them frolic on a beach and sip tea in a perfect bubble bath. Though Pluribus, to its credit, never comes out and says what we’re supposed to glean from this montage, for me, it felt like we were seeing Carol’s version of Mr. Diabaté’s (Samba Schutte) hedonistic exploits, flying Air Force One and staging casino nights straight out of a James Bond movie. All that has changed since she scolded him for using beautiful Others as living sex dolls is that Carol has allowed one of them to seduce her.
When she finally admits this to herself, she and Zosia are at a ski resort, snuggling in Fair Isle sweaters in front of a roaring fire. The setting brings to mind that crushing cold-open flashback from earlier in the season, to Carol and her late partner Helen’s (Miriam Shor) ice hotel vacation, where even the Northern Lights couldn’t cheer up our gloomy hero. Suddenly, Carol says something painfully self-aware: “I don’t think I’m good at just feeling good.” She taps into Zosia’s AI-like reservoir of knowledge to explain to her the chemicals that produce what we call happiness. “Fun fact,” says Zosia. “A study of zebrafish seems to imply that oxytocin is responsible for the development of empathy in vertebrate species, about 200 million years ago.” Empathy. The very quality that seems to have left Kusimayu when she ignores her poor goat.
Seehorn and Wydra at the fancy ski resort Courtesy of Apple
The poignant moment passes when Carol admits she’s uncharacteristically happy and Zosia takes the opportunity to tell her that even more joy is possible—if she’ll consent to the Joining. She pries out of Zosia, who is constitutionally incapable of lying, that the Others have gotten access to her stem cells thanks to the embryos she froze with Helen. In three months or fewer, they’ll be able to do to (they would say for) her what they did to Kusimayu. And they will do it, Zosia insists, because they love her. “I love you,” she adds. Maybe this isn’t exactly a lie, but it’s not entirely true, either; for the Others, there is no I because there is no individual identity.
This breaks the spell. The next time we see them, Zosia is dropping off Carol at the cul-de-sac, in a helicopter whose other cargo is a shed-sized shipping container. They’re looking at each other fondly but sadly, like, well, a couple who discovered their fundamental incompatibility on their first big vacation together. “You win,” Carol tells Manousos, sighing bitterly. “We save the world.” He asks her what’s in the shipping container. Carol: “Atom bomb.” End of season!
It was established several episodes ago that Others would ultimately give Carol a nuclear weapon if she truly wanted one. It also seems safe to assume, considering that her anger alone has killed millions of Others, that detonating this bomb anywhere on Earth would wipe out the lot of them. So Carol and Manousos now have all the power. Will they only use it as insurance against a forced Joining while they search for a cure? Or will they annihilate the Others and start over? Whatever they decide, that beautiful and illogical, endangered, 200-million-year-old quality that apparently defines vertebrates—empathy—is sure to play a role.
One wonderful thing about Pluribus, at a time when Netflix reportedly wants characters to “announce what they’re doing” for the benefit of viewers distracted by devices or activities, is the way it trusts viewers to follow along as it navigates complex, sometimes contradictory ideas. (“I just always assumed the target audience was smarter than I am,” Gilligan once said. “If I get it, they’ll get it.”) Love that is discerning and specific and that fills emotional voids within individuals is part of what makes us human. Our capacity to love is, in fact, one of our most endearing traits as a species. It’s also a tragic flaw. With oxytocin spewing from our hypothalami, we’re liable to put our own happiness and that of the people we love over the good of humanity as a whole.
Pluribus has often seemed to be in conversation with other postapocalyptic stories. Here, it’s injecting nuance and ambivalence into the overarching theme of The Last of Us’s first season, which ends with Pedro Pascal’s Joel massacring health researchers and foreclosing the possibility of a cure for the disease that decimated humanity, just to save the life of his surrogate daughter, Ellie (Bella Ramsey). While we may, yes, empathize with Joel’s choice, its wrongness is obvious. What’s thrilling about Pluribus is its moral uncertainty. Some things, like the future of humanity, are more important than one woman’s happiness, it suggests. But in a war between billions of pod people who’ve achieved world peace (never mind that they subsist on human remains) and two fallible, self-righteous curmudgeons with an A-bomb, who are you rooting for?
