Watching the season finale of Pluribus left me with a specific kind of existential dread - the kind that makes you appreciate inefficiency, like waiting in a long line or having a messy argument, just to feel human.

As I sat there yesterday, processing the journey of Carol and the silent “Others,” I realized this show isn’t just about an invasion. It’s a meditation on what we lose when we try to fix the flaws of the human condition.

I’ll admit, I came into watching Pluribus with a bias. Apart from managing to avoid any and all spoilers, I’ve loved Rhea Seehorn and her acting since Better Call Saul, and seeing her play Carol - a cynical, borderline alcoholic “negative Nancy” — felt like a masterclass in grounded humanity. The way she played a flawed but quintessential human, deserved all the accolades coming her way. If the writers wanted me to find her unlikable, they failed - probably, mostly, in comparison to the hellscape they otherwise created as the premise for the show.

To me, Carol’s misery felt like something she wore with pride. In a world of forced smiles and “Them”, her grief for Helen was the only thing keeping the soul of humanity in her alive and giving her strong purpose. If she let go of her pain, by joining the Others, she’d be letting go of her self. The show seems to argue that suffering is essential to identity; without the mess of emotion, we’re just hardware. Carol’s bottle episode was an absolute masterclass in acting, capturing the jagged, raw edges of a loneliness so profound that her eventual catharsis when Zosia returned felt genuinely earned. Watching her navigate the silence made me feel that her cynicism is a survival mechanism for an earlier world where performance (like her Wycaro writings) was mandatory, and now, after the joining, for a woman who has lost the only person who truly saw her.

Also, loved Vince Gilligan’s signature style. Keep taking your time man and let the scenes breathe. Even if it means repeating a voicemail message twenty times!

I couldn’t help but see the “Others” as an analogy for the steady, inevitable march of certain things - like technology, modernization, globalization, monoculture or like a mind virus or an all-consuming ideology (religion, collectivism or tech-utopianism) - the Hive Mind basically captures everything in its path, as if driven by a biological imperative. They will get to the remaining 13, eventually.

The Hive Mind is also, clearly, a metaphor for modern AI. The “Others” act like a sophisticated algorithm, running a “Persuasion Protocol” to keep the remaining humans compliant and happy. The scenes with the Vegas Poker and the Waitress in the diner recreated solely for Carol’s nostalgia reveal the Hive’s performative nature. The nodes aren’t “happy” for themselves; they are acting out a version of happiness, to make their subjects happy or satisfied and to serve the algorithm’s goals - does not seem unlike perception created by modern social media to me. When Zosia - who I’m convinced is just a personalized model distilled from the world model for Carol, - said “I love you,” I didn’t see a mutation of the virus or a change in nature. I saw the ultimate manifestation of personalized, sycophantic AI. The Hive sent Zosia - knowing that she was Raban in Carol’s eyes - and ensured that it made it clear that it loved the Wycaro universe. Zosia knew Carol wouldn’t respond to “We”, so it gave her an “I” - we get this uncanny behavior in today’s AI already.

The scene that hit me hardest was the conversion of Kusimayu, the Peruvian village girl. Watching her join the hive felt like witnessing a literal death. Everything that made her her - her quirks, her fears, her history - was gone in a flash, absorbed into the collective. The ritual was portrayed as beautiful and communal, which only made it more horrifying. It felt like a commentary on community vs. individualism - where the writers seem to suggest that the former, in small settings, is where humans thrive. The village seemed like a rejection of cold urbanization - and Kusimayu’s life before the virus showed up seemed to have been one of idyllic simplicity, and collective joy. But once the villagers joined the hive mind, the “warmth” was clearly performative. Kusimayu longed for what she had in the past, and expected based on what the only family she knew said the joining felt like. The moment she was “in,” the ‘Persuasion Protocol’ was satisfied, and the real girl was gone - and any joy she felt seemed, at least in my ‘human’ judgment, shallow. Or rather, alien and not ‘human’. I felt really bad for the poor little goat.

Pluribus had its moments - even in simple scenes. I found it hilarious and telling when Carol sat in economy on an empty 747 to Bilbao. Why not a private jet or an efficient smaller plane? To me, it symbolized the literal-mindedness of an AI. An analogy that came to mind for The Others’ decision to use a huge aircraft to fly a single person - it’s like how we use supercomputers to create and watch cat videos. At the same time, the scene also underscored Carol’s defiance and her yearning for things to be normal - where she would sit in economy, not first class.

Another striking scene was the Sprouts Museum: Seeing that perfectly stocked, glorious grocery store felt like a monument to human achievement hiding in plain sight. Yet, that sterile efficiency lacked the ‘transactional friction’ that makes life real. It was a museum of a civilization, not a living part of one.

Of course, a big plot point was the Human Derived Protein (HDP). To me, this was the ultimate symbol of the “sacrifice” required to maintain the facade of perfection. If the Hive creates a perfect world without hunger or war, the energy and cost has to come from somewhere. The HDP feels like the literal consumption of humanity to fuel the utopia in the show - and the writers seem to say that you can build a ‘perfect’ world, but it is built on underlying human sacrifices (not literal, but blood, sweat and tears).

I was struck by how the Hive Mind affected humans from different cultures from the Indian and Asian families who opted to stay with their kin, or were not averse to joining, to the Mauritanian in Vegas finally living his best life. American individualism was the outlier, while for others, this collective oneness was an inevitable, or even desirable, evolution of the family unit.

Watching the two holdouts, Carol and Manounos, was a fascinating study in character. Carol resists through emotion. Her grief makes her malleable, but makes her resistance more powerful, IMO. On the other hand, Manounos resists through cold, hard principles. I noticed he didn’t really have a character arc as he traveled from Paraguay to Albuquerque - he stayed the same “Get off my lawn” libertarian. He’d pay his hospital bills in a dead world just to maintain the contract.

The irony? When Carol and Manounos finally met, they didn’t trust each other! Carol, faced with a human (albeit with a machete, driving thousands of miles in an ambulance), felt safer trusting an all-powerful Hive Mind. It’s a cynical take on modern life: we trust the “Known Evil” of the algorithm more than the “Unknown Variable” of a fellow human. But it is exactly what makes us human!

It would be interesting to see what transpires in season 2 - Carol is standing there with that nuke - alongside Manounos, a dangerous, single-minded foil, who hasn’t undergone similar emotional transformation. Whether she pulls the trigger or not, the show has already proven its point: The only way to achieve a “perfect” society is to kill everything that makes us human.