This article contains spoilers for the entirety of Pluribus Season 1.
I’d mentioned last week that it was rare for a show to keep its viewers guessing what it was actually about eight episodes into its Season 1 run. Pluribus has done exactly that, with Charm Offensive leading me to believe that this show might just be a simple tragic love story. With its finale, La Chica o El Mundo, Pluribus does yet another 180, bringing me right back where we started, leaving me feeling like a complete fool (complimentary).
I suspect Carol feels similarly foolish. After going through a full character development arc in just the first season, Carol’s also right back where she started: hating the hive, determined to isolate herself until she finds a way to reverse the virus.
Pluribus‘ excellent season finale forces Carol to come face to face with reality and her own self, with Manousos representing her sheer force of will in wanting to save humanity, while she grapples with her desire to just let her guard down and be happy for once. Carol’s feelings about the hive have become complicated, as have my own. While Pluribus started Carol off with an extreme anti-hive mindset, the show slowly lulls us into a false sense of security as we start to delude ourselves into thinking that maybe they’re not so bad after all.
Who could resist the allure of having a million bodies dedicate themselves to you and your every whim? When the world presents itself to you on a silver platter, who are you to resist? Even the hive’s more disturbing tendencies are quickly hand waved away. Oh, the plurbs eat dead bodies? Well, of course there’s a perfectly reasonable explanation for that. They’re insanely pacifist (which, of course, means the hive must be inherently good), which means they won’t even pick an apple or eat a plant. They’ll simply grind down dead bodies into apple juice and drink it from a milk carton.
Pluribus presents the hive as a weirdly positive and friendly force, yet if you read between the lines, you start to see just how insidious it can be. It’ll always tell the truth, but that doesn’t mean it won’t lie by omission. They won’t hurt any forms of life, but that also means they’re basically dooming the entire human race to starvation within 10 years. They won’t jam a needle up your butt to get your stem cells without consent, but they’ll certainly stop at nothing to find some other way to get you plurbed. Including stealing those eggs you froze years ago in case you ever wanted the option of having a child. The hive will do these things in the name of love, and for a while there, I bought into the fantasy and drank the hive kool-aid. A whole month of isolation will do that to you.
La Chica o El Mundo brought me straight back to reality. The hive is a metaphor for colonialism and the erasure of entire races and culture. Submitting to the hive would mean betraying the human race. And accepting their fake positivity in the name of happiness would mean selling out your own individuality.
This is best exemplified in the cold open of the finale, where we see Kusimayu submitting to the hivemind virus. As the plurbs present the virus to her in her little Peruvian village, they chant and sing traditional Quechua songs. As soon as Kusimayu gets assimilated into the hive, however, the singing comes to an immediate halt. There’s no longer any need to keep up the act. Now that Kusimayu has given herself up, the plurbs can go right back to work, packing up all of the food and resources, converting clothes into cloth, and releasing the livestock. The baby goat that Kusimayu had been petting just minutes before runs after her, calling out. But Kusimayu, now lost and no longer human, shows no care for it and walks away.
It’s a particularly chilling scene that depicts the erasure of Kusimayu’s entire culture and people. An entire population that made up this unique Peruvian culture gets snapped out of existence, just like that. And for what? So that they can all just go sleep together in a community center and build an antenna the size of Africa to transmit the virus to some other civilization while starving to death? This scene reminds us of just how high the stakes are. And if you were on the fence before, there’s no doubt about it now. The hivemind virus is evil, and this is the end of humanity as we know it.
Carol, who’d been deluding herself this entire time, finally comes back to her senses when Manousos reminds her of what she’s lost sight of, and when she realizes she’s been letting herself live in a bubble. A doomed love story, this is not. In fact, I’d say it’s more like an abusive relationship with the hive love-bombing Carol, making her think she’s special, before pulling the rug from under her feet and forcing her to submit under the guise of love. The big reveal isn’t even a reveal at the end of the day, considering that Pluribus has been showing this to us time and time again. The hive doesn’t love the survivors because it’s not capable of love or empathy. It ‘loves’ the survivors because of what it can take from them. But maybe we just weren’t ready to accept that. Or maybe we just tricked ourselves into thinking it could be genuine because, hey guess what, humans are more than capable of lying to themselves for the sake of self-preservation.
Pluribus‘ explosive and darkly funny final scene sets the stage for what’s to come in Season 2. And I, for one, am looking forward to see where Carol’s character arc goes next.
Pluribus is now available for streaming on Apple TV.
