Pluribus Is Going to Make You Wait

Spoilers below.

“The girl or the world.” That’s the English translation of the Pluribus season 1 finale’s title, but it’s also a condensed version of the ultimatum Manousos Oviedo (Carlos Manuel Vesga) gives Carol Sturka (Rhea Seehorn) near the end of the episode: “Carol Sturka,” he asks. “Do you want to save the world or get the girl?”

The individual or the collective? It’s the one big question Pluribus has been poking and prodding for the entirety of its first season, and like Carol, the show itself refuses to settle on one unimpeachable answer. Every time the Others who occupy the hive mind demonstrate themselves to be patient, happy, and perhaps even perfect, they do something unsettling or otherwise taboo. (As Carol underlines on her white board multiple times, “THEY. EAT. PEOPLE.”) And yet every time Carol herself tries to make an argument for the importance of each distinct, autonomous human soul, she encounters the ugliness that same individualism has wrought: the selfishness, the destruction, and the isolation of humanity.

At the beginning of the finale, as Manousos steers his (borrowed, not stolen!) yellow ambulance from Panama City into Albuquerque, Zosia (Karolina Wydra) ducks out, temporarily shattering the domestic bliss she and Carol have found in the days prior. The Others believe (correctly) that Manousos wants nothing to do with them, and that, in fact, he might be eager to hurt them if granted an opportunity. Somewhat reluctantly, Carol agrees to speak with him.

Despite having been first to send a call-to-arms to her fellow humans—the ones immune to the hive mind, anyway—Carol has soured on the whole saving-the-world plan. She hasn’t abandoned it entirely; she still seems eager to glean as much information from Zosia as possible, curious if it might be useful in the long-term fight. But, whether she likes it or not, the Others interest her. They appeal to her. She’s a fantasy writer, after all—what fantasy writer wouldn’t find an alien race at least worth studying? Maybe even up close? And yet the closer Carol gets to Zosia, the more she starts to think of her Raban-like “chaperone” as an individual rather than an Other. She’s come to like Zosia, whom she’s convinced to start using first-person singular pronouns rather than plural ones. The more Carol can make herself believe Zosia is like any of the ordinary humans lost to the hive mind, the more she can make herself comfortable in the hive mind’s new world.

As Manousos has already demonstrated—thanks to his daring, dangerous trek through the Darién Gap—he has no such weakness for comfort. Upon his arrival in Albuquerque, he delivers to Carol the exact speech he practiced over his multi-thousand-mile trek: “My name is Manousos Oviedo. I am not one of them. I wish to save the world.” It’s a commitment from which he has not wavered, not even once.

This meeting has been a long time coming, and so it’s fascinating to watch Carol and Manousos have such an awkward, anti-climatic first interaction. They stand several yards away from each other, their mannerisms stiff and skeptical. They’ve craved this human companionship for weeks, and yet, now that it’s here, they realize they can’t trust a human the way they can an Other.

Carol attempts to use an app on her phone to translate for them, but Manousos throws the device into a sewer drain, only to fish it back out again when it becomes clear Carol won’t talk to him unless he’s less…paranoid. Poor Manousos. It’s not as if his paranoia is unwarranted. The Others—or, as Manousos calls them, the “weirdos”—are certainly watching. But his insistence to Carol that “they’ve stolen everyone’s soul,” and that “if we can’t fix them, they’re better off dead” fails to resonate with her. She doesn’t see the Others as evil, necessarily. Or maybe she does. She’s not sure. Manousos is sure.

Inside her house, Manousos searches for bugs—the spy variety, not the insect kind—and tries not to grow increasingly irritated with Carol’s stunning lack of urgency. (When he snaps at her for her phone, she replies, “I don’t speak snap.” She, of course, snaps at him later when she wants him to leave.) Despite his thorough sweep, Manousos doesn’t find any bugs…not until he searches Carol’s liquor cabinet, where, it turns out, Carol’s late wife, Helen, planted a sensor. Over the phone, Zosia gently reminds Carol that she and Helen had been in the process of freezing Carol’s eggs at the time. Helen had wanted to keep an eye on her wife’s drinking habit. The revelation is a complicated one for Carol: She obviously feels hurt, even betrayed. And yet none of that softens her obvious grief for her dead wife, whose grave Manousos silently notices in her backyard.

When it becomes obvious Manousos isn’t going anywhere, Carol attempts to set him up in a neighbor’s house. Initially, he refuses; the house does not belong to him. (As we’ve seen in earlier episodes, Manousos is already awaiting the world returning to normal—and he doesn’t want to be caught with stolen property on his hands when it does.) Exasperated, Carol leaves him alone and retreats to her liquor cabinet and her Golden Girls DVD. But she wakes a few hours later to discover Zosia’s little blue sedan sitting outside Manousos’s (borrowed) driveway, and she rushes over to discover the two deep in conversation.

Skeptical as to why the Others returned to Carol after “abandoning” her earlier this season—for a Biblical 40 days, I might add—Manousos has called the Others and requested Zosia’s presence. To Carol, Manousos points out that she herself told him he should talk to the Others, to see what they’re really like. “Not to her,” Carol practically snarls.

But when Carol drags Zosia away, Manousos simply calls the Others and orders up another one of them. It makes no difference if they bear Zosia’s face; they all share the same knowledge anyway.

Meanwhile, Carol tries not to take out her frustration on the innocent Zosia, who has, of course, told Manousos “everything.” (Including, presumably, the sex stuff.) “It’s just not in us to lie to you,” Zosia says, by way of apology.

“Yes, but to me, not to him,” Carol replies.

Zosia tries to explain. “I know this is hard for you, but we love him the same as we do you.”

Carol reacts to this as if she’s been slapped in the face. “No,” she says. “You can’t love him the same. It’s not the same. It’s different.” She stammers: “We—you’re—you’re my…” She sighs, leaning back on her coping mechanism: cynicism. “You’re my chaperone. Mine.”

She demands Zosia stay away from Manousos, and Zosia gently drops to the ground, pulled into another of her potentially deadly seizing episodes. But this time it’s not Carol who’s prompted this reaction. It’s Manousos. When Carol sprints back into his (borrowed) living room to find him leaning over another of the seizing Others, she catches him in the midst of an inexplicable process: First, he references the wonky radio frequency we watched him record in his journal earlier this season. Next, he screams into the face of the Other, causing the latter to slip into yet another seizing episode. Finally, Manousos crouches close to the Other’s face, clutching their hand close to his radio as he whispers in their ear, “Rick. I know you are there. I help you. I am here. You come back, yes?”

So what, exactly, is happening here? The most obvious explanation is that Manousos has discovered a means of communicating with the human souls still “inside” the hijacked bodies of the Others. We know from episode 8 that the Others communicate via a “natural electric charge,” which is how Zosia is able to silently cue her fellow Others to turn a city’s lights on and off or to make a passing train blow its whistle. It would seem Manousos has figured this out on his own, but he’s also discovered that their electric charges do something to his radio. Here’s at least one question answered: We know now why Manousos recorded the radio frequencies in his journal. It seems he was looking to understand—and interfere with—the Others’ electromagnetism.

What we can’t yet know is whether Manousos’s attempt to contact the aforementioned “Rick” actually works. Before Manousos can further explore the possibility, Carol fires a pump-action shotgun over his head, demanding he leave Rick’s body alone.

In the aftermath, the Others abandon Albuquerque, presumably for another 40-plus days. (Their feelings for Carol—and for Manousos—haven’t changed, of course. They just need a little space!) It’s only after they’ve scattered that Manousos finally asks Carol the big question: “Do you want to save the world or get the girl?”

At first, her answer seems obvious. She drives off, leaving Manousos behind with his textbooks on electromagnetism, circuits, data acquisition, and crystallography. She goes off to be with Zosia: strolling along the ocean shore, sharing tea and a bathtub, staying together in a luxurious (and aggressively open-concept) ski chalet, reading The Left Hand of Darkness by the swimming pool. (This last one is a hilarious, fascinating meta-reference, given that Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1969 sci-fi novel follows an ambisexual alien species that the book’s protagonist struggles to comprehend.)

At the ski chalet, a visibly nervous Carol asks Zosia if the OG Zosia—the “unjoined” one—had a partner. Although Zosia doesn’t say it directly, her response implies that the OG Zosia’s partner, whoever they were, must have died before the Others came along. Carol’s reaction to this is interesting to watch; it’s clear she wants to forget OG Zosia existed at all, but she can’t quite bring herself to do it.

“I don’t think I’m good at just—feeling good,” she admits. She tells Zosia she’s happy, really happy, with every “happy chemical” floating through her bloodstream, but she seems to doubt it will last. Sure enough, Zosia breaks her reverie with a seemingly off-hand comment.

“And it only gets better,” the Other says with one of her characteristically warm, almost maternal smiles.

It takes Carol barely more than a beat to register what Zosia is referencing: the “joining.” The Others still desperately want Carol to become a part of their hive mind, and after some light interrogation, Carol realizes they’ve discovered a way of harvesting her stem cells without jamming “a giant needle in [her] ass.” But how? Finally, the answer dawns on her: her eggs. The ones she had frozen when she was with Helen. She asks Zosia if the Others have them in their possession, and Zosia confirms. She estimates Carol has somewhere between one and three months before her stem cells are ready and the Others can initiate her joining.

Zosia insists that the joining is an act of benevolence. It’s a joyous occasion, as we witnessed at the very beginning of the finale, when the young Peruvian girl named Kusimayu willingly joins the Others, all of them singing and smiling around her. “I promise you,” Zosia tells Carol, “[Kusimayu] is happier than she’s ever been.”

Carol isn’t so certain. Her free will is what makes her human. She doesn’t want to not be human. “If you loved me, you wouldn’t do this,” she says.

“Carol, please understand we have to do this because we love you,” Zosia replies, before switching tactics. “Because I love you,” she adds.

This last distinction almost works. Carol wavers. But she knows it’s ultimately an empty gesture. There is no “I” among the Others.

Instead, she returns to Albuquerque and to Manousos, now holed up in his (borrowed) Albuquerque home, where he’s studying furiously for his saving-the-world mission. When he hears the approaching whir of a helicopter, he steps outside to watch its descent. Perplexed, he crawls onto his belly as it deposits a square shipping container mere yards from his doorstep. It’s a package for Carol, he soon realizes, but it’s only after she exits the chopper that he learns what’s inside it.

After having bid Zosia a silent, wistful goodbye, Carol watches as her “chaperone” flies off into the distance, then she sighs and turns to face Manousos. “You win,” she tells him, sounding more exhausted than resolved. “We save the world.”

“Carol Sturka,” he begins, following her as she ambles toward her front door. He points at the shipping container. “What is this?”

Carol practically shrugs. “Atom bomb.”

And so ends the first (fantastic) season of Pluribus: with the all-too-human threat of nuclear destruction. It’s both a fitting ending and an effective one, delivering a wicked cliffhanger and a symbolic reckoning wrapped in the same package.

What, exactly, does Carol plan to do with an atom bomb? Does she intend to use it, or did she simply wish to demonstrate to the Others (and to Manousos) that she had the power to obtain it? Pluribus won’t give us the satisfaction of knowing—at least, not yet—and that’s to its credit. Vince Gilligan’s latest drama has little interest in obvious answers or in obvious plot beats. It’s a simmering pot of a series, and it’s going to make you sit, wait, and wonder.