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overthinking entertainment
Pluribus: HDP - Season 1, Episode 6
Carol shares a horrific discovery and learns new truths in the process. Mr. Diabaté lives life to the fullest in Sin City.
Carol records her discovery from the packaging warehouse, which is filled with hundreds of shrink wrapped human body parts. She considers sending the tape to the other immune, but instead decides to drive to Las Vegas, where Diabaté is living in the penthouse of the Westgate. The Others suddenly cease playing the roles Diabaté has assigned them and leave the city. When Carol arrives, Diabaté reveals he already knows and shows her a recording in which John Cena explains that the Others cannot kill any animal or plant; hence, to sustain their bodies, they supplement their diet with human-derived protein (HDP) from dead bodies. Diabaté also reveals that he and most of the immune stay in touch over video calls from which Carol is excluded due to majority vote. The next morning, Diabaté reveals the Others have learned how to convert the immune—by drawing their stem cells and customizing the virus to them—but require their consent to do so. Carol calls the Others to firmly refuse consent before leaving. Three days prior, Manousos receives the first of Carol's messages and realizes he is not alone. Taking Carol's address from the package, he begins driving to Albuquerque.
posted by Frayed Knot on Dec 05, 2025 at 7:04 AM
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Henceforth, I shall be using johncenas as a standard unit of measurement.
posted by fairmettle at 7:09 AM
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Me to Mr. Nat, while watching: but he can't drive to Albuquerque. The Darien gap is in the way!
Mr. Nat, after watching: The title of the next episode is "The Gap".
Well then.
posted by nat at 7:31 AM
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Taking Carol's address from the package, he begins driving to Albuquerque.
That drive will require something like 167 hours, so maybe 2-3 weeks? I wonder if he'll eventually give in and accept assistance from Pluribus.
Note that the confirmation that Carol got from Pluribus about her non-consent was very carefully worded, something like "we will not take any stem cells from your body." Nothing about deriving stem cells from shed hair or skin ("windfall", one might say) or, more likely, from her frozen eggs. Carol commented on Pluribus's lawyerly language before that, so I expect this "loophole" to come up.
I'm a little surprised that Pluribus takes the sort of turbo-Jain attitude toward food that they do. Waiting for windfall is a little weird, given that fruit consumption and seed dispersal while the fruit is still on the plant is very much how many plants are propagated, to the extent that they have evolved ripeness signals to that end. I wonder if they carefully remove and scatter seeds from fruits that they eat.
Given that starvation is going to hit a large number of Pluribus at once, they're going to have a "bumper crop" of HDP fairly soon, at which point the remainder will have plenty of sustenance for a while, followed by another die-off when that runs out, etc, resulting in a weird punctuated cycle. I wonder how far Pluribus's moral calculus goes: will especially old hosts voluntarily limit or cease eating so that the food supply is efficiently allocated to the hosts that can do the most work? Or will it be evenly distributed despite that leading to more death overall?
posted by jedicus at 7:37 AM
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It definitely wouldn't be the first voicemail I left, but possibly the second and if not that then certainly my third voicemail would be a request to shorten their autoresponse to, "Leave a message at the beep. Thanks!"
Given that starvation is going to hit a large number of Pluribus at once, they're going to have a "bumper crop" of HDP fairly soon, at which point the remainder will have plenty of sustenance for a while, followed by another die-off when that runs out, etc, resulting in a weird punctuated cycle.
One of the things I learned reading In the Heart of the Sea is that if you wait for someone to starve to death before eating them you aren't going to get much in the way of nutrients. Cannibalism favors the proactive.
posted by Parasite Unseen at 7:48 AM
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I was wondering how they were going to subvert the alien invaders eating people trope... and the answer was Koumba saying "Is this about them eating people?"
And "they were very dramatic" about the videos she had been sending.
It turns out the rest of the uninfected have been doing a much better job of figuring out what's going on than Carol has.
There are twelve other people left on earth and they take a vote to leave you out of the group chat? And I thought the voicemail breakup last episode was savage!
John Cena is having the best career right now.
I'm worried about the stem cell thing. They promised Carol that they wouldn't remove stem cells from her body without her consent. In a previous episode she mentioned that she had frozen some of her eggs. But do those have stem cells? Maybe they would have to be frozen embryos?
The thing where the hive mind can't even grow and harvest vegetables, so they're doomed to starvation within a decade? Dark. That makes the virus an extinction event, transmitted from planet to planet.
posted by simonw at 7:54 AM
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The thing where the hive mind can't even grow and harvest vegetables, so they're doomed to starvation within a decade?
My impression was that many/most of them will starve, but with planning there is likely a stable-but-precarious population level that can be maintained by careful arrangement of windfall-prone crops. I'm imagining small population centers surrounded by fruit and nut orchards. Up until fairly recently it was common for peasants in parts of Europe (particularly Italy) to survive almost entirely on chestnut flour for long stretches. All Pluribus really needs is enough of a population to maintain the broadcasting equipment.
I wonder what their view on chicken eggs is. Without a rooster, hens will lay unfertilized eggs. Are those a windfall?
One detail about this episode that I loved was Diabaté mirroring Carol's breakfast sandwich construction. It showed both the effort he was making to be kind and hospitable to Carol and also that he valued a real human connection, at least to a point. Overall he was quite ready to return to, essentially, the holodeck.
If Pluribus uses Carol's eggs (or some other method) to come up with a way to turn her, I wonder if she could bargain for her continued independence by offering to, for example, perform some critical link in the development of farming robots. If Carol pushes the "on" button on a farming robot, is that enough distance for Pluribus's ethics?
posted by jedicus at 8:26 AM
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What about bacteria and other prokaryotes? I can imagine them cooking up some kind of vat grown food. If they can't even harm bacteria then I guess they can't use antibiotics, so that would be an issue. What about diabetics? If they can't use bacteria (or yeast?) to produce insulin are the diabetics just destined to become food earlier?
Maybe they could do some kind of genetic/biotech engineering to give themselves chlorophyll and photosynthesis. I think it would be possible to create food from raw materials without anything strictly biological (though almost certainly deeply impractical except under the most extreme situations).
I suspect they might not have any intention of surviving beyond antenna construction and beginning the broadcast, so if the currently available resources are adequate for that they might not be too concerned. Though, upon further reflection, they'd probably want at least a small stable population to maintain the antenna and make sure the broadcast continues as long as possible.
posted by thedward at 8:38 AM
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They filmed with John Cena on a sound stage in Miami, apparently as he left the set he said: "I can't wait to find out what the hell it was I just said".
posted by simonw at 8:46 AM
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The vote against Carol was gutting, after she learned her videos had been delivered without a response. They way this show dramatizes her loneliness against the backdrop of sci-fi logic puzzles is so powerful; it's never about the mechanics of the Joining as much as it is about this hurt woman unable to stop herself pushing the world away. Excited to see how the similar Manousos affects her when their paths eventually cross.
posted by migurski at 8:49 AM
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Personally I never thought John Cena's sunset flip powerbomb was particularly good; it was as just impressive for a guy his size. Although I guess now that he has the skills of everyone else on Earth (minus thirteen people) he can probably teach it a little bit better.
posted by Parasite Unseen at 9:04 AM
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I have so many questions about their food rules. Given that everyone should be the world's best scientist and survivalist and farmer and so on, it seems like they should have many more options available.
The moment where Carol realized that literally nobody on the planet wants to be near her was a tough one!
And what I really want is a whole season about getting from Paraguay to Albuquerque solo. Immediately upon realizing his plan I got so excited! Maybe he'll encounter hippos and avoid traps set by FARC
posted by Acari at 9:10 AM
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presumably the Darien Gap is no longer filled with cartel drug runners and murderers, but still filled with dangerous animals and landscape? maybe the hive will pilot the ferry for him...(and yes, I want to see his whole road trip. spinoff!!)
posted by supermedusa at 9:48 AM
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The timer goes from +12D 12H for Vegas to +9D 18H for Paraguay, so there's a difference of at least 2 days 18 hours for "The Gap."
posted by Deminime at 9:55 AM
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They had to cook (at the very least) the HDP to make it shelf-stable, so they are okay with killing single-celled organisms.
posted by Mogur at 9:59 AM
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There's certainly a level of hypocrisy involved. The Others are still traveling by air and driving, both of which will result in the immediate death of, at the minimum, insects. And apparently harvesting a field of grain by hand is a problem, even though it's functionally equivalent to picking-up fallen fruit — most grains are harvested when the plant is dead.
posted by nathan_teske at 10:14 AM
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I'm excited for next week's episode too. The show prompted me to check out the fascinating Wikipedia article on the Darien Gap, and the implications around it are pretty cool for the show—like, it's kind of delightful and astonishing to me that in our post-Panama-Canal age, there's a 67-mile part of the world that's still considered impenetrable to the convenience of swift human transport; it's stumped collective government actions, but is still navigable by individuals doing things that collectives don't want them to do. And Manousos (etymologically related via Aldus Manutius to the Latin noun for "hands"?) seems to have shown he doesn't want to take assistance from the joined.
posted by Deminime at 10:20 AM
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"Pick a fucking apple!"
I love her.
posted by banshee at 10:22 AM
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I was wondering if the extraterrestrial signal was a way for hostile aliens to weaken or destroy humanity as a prelude to invasion. The restrictions on food might be part of the plan.
posted by TheophileEscargot at 10:29 AM
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I still think this is a defensive, not offensive measure by aliens. They're trying to ensure no other planet in the universe ever produces life that's a threat to their own world.
posted by simonw at 11:05 AM
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It turns out the rest of the uninfected have been doing a much better job of figuring out what's going on than Carol has.
The Joined knows that Carol is working against them and obviously has watched the videos. I don't think the other Unjoined are better at finding things out, just that the Joined realized that they need to get ahead of her reveal so when asked directly they didn't try and sidestep it (like we see with Carol's inquiry about unjoining). They made the promotional video with Cena to get the other Unjoined onboard with the cannibalism, and it worked. But also what use is having more information if they just say "Well that's troubling" and then go on with their Bond cosplay?
Interestingly, the first season of Peacemaker with John Cena is about an alien plot to take over Earth. Spoilers for s1 Peacemaker The aliens consume an amber drink, which is milked from a giant space cow. They took over a bottling plant to distribute it so it's amusing to make Cena the spokesperson for alien eats given the plot of s1 is him stopping an alien takeover with the finale involving him destroying the source of their food.
posted by miss-lapin at 11:27 AM
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miss-lapin: "Interestingly, the first season of Peacemaker with John Cena is about an alien plot to take over Earth. Spoilers for s1 Peacemaker>!The aliens consume an amber drink, which is milked from a giant space cow. They took over a bottling plant to distribute it so it's amusing to make Cena the spokesperson for alien eats given the plot of s1 is him stopping an alien takeover with the finale involving him destroying the source of their food.!"
I totally forgot this when watching last night and I love the meta nature of it. Delightful.
I'm also here with team hypocrisy. There are so many things humans do on a daily basis that result in the death of insects, small mammals, and so on.
I am also here with they are totally going to harvest Carol's cells from her frozen eggs, which raises the question, can that be done without destroying the eggs' potential for life? I expect we'll get one of those hypocrisy issues on that one, too.
I really like Samba Schutte's performance, but it just makes me sick at the loss of bodily autonomy for everyone Diabaté brings into his hedonistic behaviors; particularly the women he's presumably engaging in sexual acts with. I can't imagine the trauma that these women will experience if they ever regain their individuality. Hopefully if it happens, everyone has massive amnesia of what occurred. I felt like Diabaté's imitation of Carol's breakfast sandwich is a tell that at some point he will help Carol bring back individuality because he's grown tired of everyone he engages with not being original.
I think it's significant that we have not seen Zosia. I still wonder if her status is key to the liberation of humanity.
posted by Atreides at 11:41 AM
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There's a big addiction subtext to the show, and the bodily autonomy aspect plays into that: how much regret do addicts have about the things they did while addicted? Obviously, a lot. I'll never forget the person at a sobriety meeting who passed out on their baby and the lifetime of suffering and guilt and self-loathing to which they consigned themselves. But at those sobriety meetings, there's also a consistent thread of, "Be a different, sober person," and a sense not of forgiveness but at least of acknowledgment. Carol's interesting because she's kind of a fuck-up, and that's why I care about her. But addicts and their loved ones know that the hardest part is loving the whole person.
Even if the person passed out on and suffocated their baby? Do they deserve love or kindness? Yeah, that's the hard part, and for many, the limit of forgiveness. For Carol, one has to imagine that the 11 million included some babies.
posted by Deminime at 11:58 AM
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I think the thing with the frozen eggs will be another "how honest is too honest" moment as the Others admit, yeah we were totally going to do that but there were competing priorities, you know what with all the mass dying off and higher definitely-not-cordyceps-as-Pontypool purpose.
posted by Slackermagee at 1:12 PM
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The moment where Carol realized that literally nobody on the planet wants to be near her was a tough one!
It really was. Imagine being a queer teen sent to reeducation camp because your parents found out somehow that you liked a girl. Then eventually finding love with someone who loves you in spite of yourself. Then that person is taken away in an instant in a monumental event that wipes pretty much everyone's personality except for 11 other people. Imagine that those 11 other people are way more into the easy-to-get-along-with, human killing and guzzling hive mind because you're "not likeable" enough. Imagine trying to connect with one of them anyway, and seeing the disappointment cross their face when you suggest hanging out. Luckily you've been through this enough times that you quickly regroup and pretend you don't care. Caring has probably gotten you into more trouble and pain in your life, so it's actually easier just to be unlikable.
Rhea Seehorn is so good at inhabiting Carol. You could see the child in her instantly hide her need for connection under a joke.
posted by oneirodynia at 1:24 PM
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"Imagine that those 11 other people are way more into the easy-to-get-along-with, human killing and guzzling hive mind because you're "not likeable" enough" I don't think that's the only reason they are rejecting Carol. They all seem very invested in the idea that the Joined still have individual identities, which the Joined play into. It's interesting that they can't outright lie, but can radically misrepresent themselves by "roleplaying" as individuals.
Carol being unlikable simply makes her easier to reject, but I suspect even if she had approached them in a more placating way, the end would be the same because what she's suggesting is that they reject the illusion that their loved ones are still with them. Given all they have lost, I can't really fault them for desperately holding on to what comfort they have, however illusory. And it's questionable if Carol would be be behaving this way if Helen hadn't died during the transition.
posted by miss-lapin at 1:58 PM
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miss-lapin: "Given all they have lost, I can't really fault them for desperately holding on to what comfort they have, however illusory. And it's questionable if Carol would be be behaving this way if Helen hadn't died during the transition."
I was just thinking about this. You'd basically be, at best, engaging with a weird cosplay of someone else inhabiting your loved one's body. I would be so more horrified and angry, for example, if the brilliant joy that is my child was suddenly replaced by a "we" telling me it's a good thing. A good example is how our guy in Paraguay told Pluribus to eff off because they pulled his mother out of the warehouse, so to speak, and tried to pretend like there was some kind of connection. And he hated his mom (so it seems?).
Yeah, take my kid and strip away everything that makes him him, and I'd be raging storm of fury to do whatever it took to bring him back, not to mention, inflict whatever pain I might on the hivemind for harming my child in the first place. But this is also true for all my loved ones.
posted by Atreides at 2:23 PM
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Carol being unlikable
I would drink and talk shit about the rest of humanity with her all day and night if I lived in that world. I guess maybe she is unlikeable...to a bunch of losers. Stealing drugs, demanding answers, sleuthing the alien conspiracy? Fuck those a-holes, Carol, you are the best!
posted by snofoam at 3:11 PM
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Let me clarify, I don't find Carol unlikable, but the other Unjoined clearly do.
posted by miss-lapin at 3:46 PM
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I think she's unlikeable to the audience. I find her hugely relatable, but difficult to like. Like George Costanza or Gaius Baltar before her, I see a lot of the less attractive parts of myself in her. Of course she has to start here to go wherever it is she's going.
Rhea Seehorn remains, of course, fantastic.
I didn't expect to find the episode where we confirmed Pluribus' (reluctant) cannibalism to be so... sweet. I've enjoyed the series enormously up to now, but this is the turn where where I fell in love with it, though I don't really know why.
I have a strong sense that Pluribus is the child and Carol and the other unjoined are the adults.
posted by Grangousier at 4:24 PM
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It is not clear to me that the TV audience is supposed to find Carol unlikeable, but it does seem like a majority of the remaining unjoined who have met her do.
posted by snofoam at 5:11 PM
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Stem cells can be obtained from Carol's frozen eggs, and also from Koumba's freely and abundantly donated sperm.
posted by kandinski at 5:38 PM
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> A good example is how our guy in Paraguay told Pluribus to eff off because they pulled his mother out of the warehouse, so to speak, and tried to pretend like there was some kind of connection. And he hated his mom (so it seems?).
When Manousos goes into his apartment, we saw a photo of a man and a boy hanging on the wall. For a second I thought "is that his son that they've joined, or his dad?". After the "mum was a bitch" reveal, I think the photo is meant to represent that Manousos was close to his father, but not to his mother.
posted by kandinski at 5:41 PM
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Given that the Joined know Carol intimately enough that they found someone who looked like her hero as a woman and that they didn't know Manousos was Unjoined until significantly after the others, I'm wondering what is going on with him.
posted by miss-lapin at 5:54 PM
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migurski: "They way this show dramatizes her loneliness against the backdrop of sci-fi logic puzzles is so powerful; it's never about the mechanics of the Joining as much as it is about this hurt woman unable to stop herself pushing the world away."
OMG yes I agree entirely. Carol's isolation is the dramatic tension in the show I find exciting. Rhea Seaborn is an immensely appealing actor. Carol is an unappealing and difficult person. But she's also absolutely right! She's doing exactly the right thing to try to save humanity.
But she's so unpleasant even the other few unjoined want nothing to do with her. Not even Diabaté who by all accounts is totally nice and sympathetic. He could be playing poker and cavorting naked in a hot tub with all the women he could want. But he makes time for Carol, pleads her case to Pluribus about how lonely she is, makes her breakfast and eats it just like she does. But even he has as limit with her.
And yet Carol is the sympathetic protagonist of the show. I'm 100% on Team Carol here. It's a fascinating tension.
posted by Nelson at 6:41 PM
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This was a nice interview with Samba Schutte:
We actually shot Episode 6 first. For me, that was the first scene, the first episode I filmed when I got the show. Coming to Vegas was really interesting when I knew I was going to be there for two weeks. As soon as I got there, the security guard was like, "You're the guy!" I'm like, "What do you mean?" He then walked me outside, and there was this huge poster outside, and I knew, "Oh my God, this is going to be a crazy experience."
posted by oneirodynia at 6:54 PM
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And yet Carol is the sympathetic protagonist of the show. I'm 100% on Team Carol here.
Same, and I thought that maybe Diabaté would have been bored with his Bond fantasy life and be ready to talk to someone new. He not ready for that, AND he was horrified that she might stay and prevent his play friends from coming back!
Carol is an unappealing and difficult person. But she's also absolutely right! She's doing exactly the right thing to try to save humanity.
I'm not sure she is, but I'm still on Team Carol. I want good things for her!
I wonder if we're going to lose some of the Individuals to the stem cell treatment. There was at least one woman from the meeting in the beginning who wanted to Join with the others. I could see more giving their consent.
posted by gladly at 6:55 PM
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One thing I don't understand here is that I have been assuming that the next step for the hive is to start building an enormous transmitting device the size of Africa... but there's no way they could do that without destroying billions of plant and animal lives.
posted by simonw at 7:52 PM
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Oh my lord, I am so far from being on Team Carol. She represents the worst qualities of wealthy white America! She's destructive, she expects everyone to see things her way, she presumes she knows more than anyone else, she ignored everyone who didn't speak English, she sees the rest of the world as there to serve her. She chooses to drive a cop car! ACAB and by that I mean Carol.
posted by The corpse in the library at 8:17 PM
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Wow, I was not sure this show could sustain an interesting show on this concept, but I am very much on board after this episode.
Most of the world living on the absolute minimum calories needed to survive and in immanent danger of starvation while the very best of all food is reserved for a handful of people. And who-knows-how-many hands are diverted from the effort to feed everyone so that those few people can have anything they want.
As Carol was leaving the casino, all I could think was, "How many people starved to death so that he could have that row of cars and keep them full of gasoline?"
Good thing it's only science fiction.
she ignored everyone who didn't speak English
I wanna say this show is totally pandering to my liberal white guilt with their commitment to twisting that knife in Carol the Ugly American, but maybe they're not actually doing it for me.
posted by straight at 10:26 PM
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If the Joined are transmitting already, where from?
Turbo-Jainism I like as a coinage jedicus.
And John Cena playing Locutus of Borg was absolutely not predicable to me. I appreciate the mention of the parasitic mind control alien theme from Peacemaker. Add to that Starro the Conqueror which Cena was also part of in Suicide Squad. But the motives as to this mind virus and its creators are absolutely not clear to me at all. I agree with each new theory about motive and plan and each one contradicts the last.
I also loved Diabate trying his breakfast Carol's way. Really trying to engage with her. But when it looked like she'd be staying longer that engagement went quite chilly. Did not love his sexy time creepiness. Can the whole planet provide consent on behalf of those women? It's... troubling. Mind control and groupthink SUUUUUUCK.
And I love Our Man In Paraguay so much. Absolute respect for him knowing precisely who he is, and knowing THAT IS NOT MY MOTHER. Knowing your own mind, and your own point of view, and living to one's own principles is not easy, but that's exactly what it looks like. He is an outcast, knows that the Joined are not on his side, and is continuously resistant. But also, his is not the only way. Carol is our focus. She resists in her way. But impressively, Mr. Bond and the Unjoined Zoom crew are ALSO in their way keeping their own minds intact (so far). And that Bartleby the Scrivener "I would prefer not to" stance is also resistance, though less complete.
I want to know everything now. But I can wait. And each serial keeps me hooting and hollering and weeping. Good tv.
posted by artlung at 10:40 PM
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Oh, and Carol is not outcast because she's unlikable. She's outcast because she is a threat. She assaulted the Joined. Drugged them. Killed thousands (not with complete foreknowledge of the danger) by inflicting emotional stress on them. But that in itself shows how STUPID and brittle this biological scheme is. The Joined are incredibly vulnerable, they lack the ability to resist anything. In the movie Aliens the marines go into the hive and they are told they can't fire live rounds in there. Too dangerous. One marine says: "What are we supposed to use, harsh language?" Well, on this organism, the answer to that would be YES.
posted by artlung at 10:47 PM
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There's certainly a level of hypocrisy involved. The Others are still traveling by air and driving, both of which will result in the immediate death of, at the minimum, insects.
It's crazy that the hivemind doesn't have completely consistent and logical moral reasoning the way humans all did before the joining. But it's not clear they're doing any moral reasoning. They always talk about these things in terms of what they can or can't do. They don't seem to have made a choice not to lie; they are unable to lie.
Part of my brain keeps assuming I'm watching something by the writers of The Good Place rather than the writers of Breaking Bad.
posted by straight at 10:52 PM
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Damn. Last week we were talking about how drinking that amber fluid is evidence the joined are incapable of having aesthetic preferences when in fact they were drinking it because they are starving to death.
posted by straight at 10:55 PM
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One detail about this episode that I loved was Diabaté mirroring Carol's breakfast sandwich construction. It showed both the effort he was making to be kind and hospitable to Carol and also that he valued a real human connection
That's funny because the vibe I got was more, "Huh? Never thought to eat it all mushed together like that. Hmm, that's actually pretty good." And also that while most of the world is dumpster diving so they don't starve to death, Carole and Diabaté are eating avocado toast.
posted by straight at 11:00 PM
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So, is Carol a stand in for how the elite live, hating everyone around because they're sycophants, and the few you do meet who aren't, you can't get along with?
posted by oldnumberseven at 11:08 PM
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And he hated his mom (so it seems?)
I can think of several senses in which he might say, "That's not my mother; my mother's a bitch," that don't mean he hated her.
posted by straight at 11:10 PM
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Carol a stand in for how the elite live, hating everyone around because they're sycophants
I like this show because it seems to be tugging at those kinds of themes from several directions. I hadn't thought of how much they're like billionaires surrounded by yes-me. That's good.
I don't know how to do the not-linking-to-Twitter thing but people can google the source if you want:
Being a billionaire must be insane. You can buy new teeth, new skin. All your chairs cost 20,000 dollars and weigh 2,000 pounds. Your life is just a series of your own preferences. In terms of cognitive impairment it's probably like being kicked in the head by a horse every day.
posted by straight at 11:15 PM
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It's not just Carol who is a stand in for the elite. Diabaté can barely phone in his concern over the cannibalism because he wants to get back to playtime with women whose ability to consent is dubious at best. And the rest of the Unjoined are apparently similarly unconcerned as long as their needs are being met.
posted by miss-lapin at 12:20 AM
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There are a few things I am definitely unsure about in this show, and the nature of the survivors is one of them.
It could be that resistance to the virus only occurs in certain personality types, which is why we see some frankly odd behaviour, or it could just be random.
I've got to say the others initial reaction feels a lot less reasonable now they know that the virus is going to lead to 90% of humanity dying. One could have argued before that the virus was a good thing for humanity, but clearly it is a mal adaption... perhaps there is a solution for the frankly crazy requirement to not harm anything (as others noted, living is to some extent accepting causing harm to other organisms, I suppose we the argument here is whether you do it with purpose).
Thinking about it the do not harm principle is interesting. It makes me think of the three laws of robotics, which as well as having do no harm also included through inaction do not allow harm to come. Without that second one there are quite a lot of loopholes one can deploy: the example from Asimovs story was a robot dropping a block, intending to catch it before it hurts someone, and then, once released, no longer being compelled to do so.
posted by Cannon Fodder at 1:11 AM
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she ignored everyone who didn't speak English
She wanted to start planning against the joined with the rest of the survivors. She wanted to communicate without letting the joined know what she was saying, so she chose people who spoke English for the first meeting because that's the language she knows. It seems like a practical decision, and based on some of the languages the uninvited spoke, it's not clear that they could have been part of the communication without involving the joined for translation. She assumed everyone would be on board, so she probably also assumed that together they could figure out how to communicate without letting the the other unjoined over time.
posted by snofoam at 2:04 AM
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Here's a convincing argument on Reddit from a stem cell scientist that frozen eggs (and sperm) are not useful sources of stem cells.
The "from your body" language is so clearly important though, especially given Carol's joke about how the lawyers all obviously survived as part of the hive mind.
posted by simonw at 3:50 AM
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she ignored everyone who didn't speak English
She wanted to start planning against the joined with the rest of the survivors.
Carol had her reasons for only inviting the English speakers, just like she has her reasons for driving around in a police car (to meet with a Black man, yet). For a successful novelist, she can be seriously blind to how others will perceive her actions
posted by Zonker at 4:58 AM
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They had to cook (at the very least) the HDP to make it shelf-stable, so they are okay with killing single-celled organisms.
I'm not sure I see human skin, liver, brain cells being cooked as "killing single-celled organisms." Reading the Wikipedia entry for unicellular organism: it distinguishes single cell organisms from those which form colonies which function and so need each other to survive. Obligate colonies must live together to survive. When a person accidentally, say, slices off the tip of their finger those cells don't go off into the world and live on their own in any meaningful way. Not in the way amoebae split and results in a new amoeba.
For those saying Carol is a Cop and ACAB and there they are eating avocado toast in the gratuitous extravagant desert city of Las Vegas: sure, that is so.
But the Joined stopped human reproduction, art, going for walks, joy, music, literature, writing, gardening, dance, parenting, farming, truffle hunting, science, any independent thought or action. No more MeFi. No coffee, right? Coffee beans must be cultivated, right?
Actually did they stop reproduction? Are the James Bond ladies using birth control when Diabaté acts out his plays? Are the remaining Unjoined married having sex? What is "parenthood" to the Joined?
And they are doing science, but only in service of making the Unjoined, Joined.
Carol may be a bastard, but the Joined has total totalitarian, cultic control of every human being, and stopped doing everything good human beings were doing. So then it's a matter of how you view the argument: is the removal of poverty, war, and genocide worth the removal of human survival, of independent human thought? It seems to me if the starvation is known to be inevitable to the Joined that their plan was and is the ultimate auto-Genocide.
Privilege sucks, but suicide is only a valid fix to the problem of privilege to a nihilist.
posted by artlung at 7:14 AM
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This show is existentialist in the tradition of Camus. It engages with so many themes without having easy answers for anything. The turbo-Jainism makes me think of people who profess that overpopulation is a huge problem, while not really admitting that any "solution" to that problem results in the death of billions (and never volunteering their communities to be marked for death).
With all its resources and bodies (and how unreliable Manousos's car is), Pluribus could definitely carve out at least a rudimentary road through the Gap to make him happy if they wanted to before he gets there.
Lack of conflict is a nice break, but it's one of the arguments against heaven. If everything is perfect already, what's the point of continuing to exist?
posted by rikschell at 8:03 AM
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Stem cells can be obtained from Carol's frozen eggs, and also from Koumba's freely and abundantly donated sperm.
Stem cells famously are extracted from human embryos, not eggs or sperm, but they would have both of the ingredients here for a fertilized, two-for-one absorption into Pluribus
posted by Flashman at 8:53 AM
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That drive will require something like 167 hours, so maybe 2-3 weeks?
In an MG? In an MG that couldn't get out of the garage? More like 2-3 months, if ever.
posted by Thorzdad at 9:22 AM
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I used the word "plan"--"...their plan was and is the ultimate auto-Genocide..."
I want to take that back, that word "plan." There may be no plan. No want. No will. They may not have any kind of "want" at all. Do they "want" to play James Bond? Do they "want" to eat dead human tissue? Do they "want" to avoid Carol? Do they "want" to centralize food processing? Do they "want" to not "pick an apple."
There's no "want," and no plan, and no will to speak of, other than the impulse to spread the Joining pathogen, and avoid harm to any being. It's not put paid that the virus itself is carrying out a coherent "plan" whose origin was in a some being's "mind."
Pregnant women can get "pica" - the impulse to eat dirt or clay, particularly when they lack iron and other nutrients, but cravings specifically for things one does not normally consume feel analogous to the lack of will the Joined have. Pregnant women can crave foods they usually wouldn't, because in some sense "the body knows," maybe.
Much as I think the X-Files guy might have aliens in his back pocket coming to earth... or soon to send a message to earth (NOTHING IS OFF THE TABLE! YAY! ARGH!) it's possible the origins of this are merely biological.
Have any epidemiologists written about this show? Were any in the writer's room?
posted by artlung at 9:23 AM
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We know that the pluribus is quite careful with language, struggles with pragmatics, and (as a result) can't lie. Because of this, it's quite easy to misinterpret their words.
I think their stance on eating plants is a good example of this. It's not that there's some arbitrary rule that goes "don't harm plants" or "we won't pick fruit". The logic of that falls down pretty quickly.
I suspect that it's both deeper and simpler than this.
To pick an apple is an act of free will. It says that out of many, one will be chosen. To the exclusion of all others.
To pick an apple is a selfish act; one person desires this thing, and only this thing, and nobody else can have it. In a collective, this is an unequal distribution. How can it be justified?
Additionally, to pick an apple is to remove it from the tree it came from. Why take from this tree and not another? What is the impact of that on all trees? On the entire system? Including those in it.
Lastly, to pick an apple is to rebel against the creator. Whatever that may be.
It's not that they don't or won't pick apples, or kill, or speak out of turn. They literally can't.
posted by iamkimiam at 10:21 AM
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I was impressed by diabantés poker win, and eyepatch's so-close loss; either they both stacked the deck and coordinated their play in advance, or something else.
(And welcome back to Kim, you can post here any time by pressing 1 on your browser)
posted by davemee at 10:22 AM
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I needed some space. And had a change of heart.
posted by iamkimiam at 10:37 AM
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its a testament to this show that it inspires such long, and deep, discussions, here on MF. this thread is really a highlight of what I love about Metafilter.
Ursula Vernon (T. Kingfisher) is on bluesky and just started watching this show. she writes romantasy (among other genres) and lives in Albuquerque, and is very amused by this show so far. she did mention that she would never be so disparaging of her fans, but loves them and truly appreciates their loyalty.
this show is touching a lot of people, and provoking thought about so many aspects of human existence and our society(ies). can't wait for more!
posted by supermedusa at 10:47 AM
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I told my wife they seemed like eusocial ultra-orthodox Buddhist members of an Oneida commune.
posted by Stanczyk at 11:19 AM
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I think it would be possible to create food from raw materials without anything strictly biological (though almost certainly deeply impractical except under the most extreme situations).
There is a small literature on "how could you feed people during a nuclear winter" and it turns out the Nazis worked out how to synthesize margarine directly from coal. Another weird thing about margarine is that it was often made from whale oil into the 20th century.
(Other options include "massive hot houses at the equator", "seaweed harvesting", and "extracting nutrients from inedible leaves")
posted by BungaDunga at 11:23 AM
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I like how each viewpoint character is living in their own film genre. Carol is in the 70s remake of Body Snatchers. The guy in South America is in a zombie movie. Diabanté is in a Bond pastiche, at least for now. I'd love to see the genre of the others.
posted by Eddie Mars at 11:42 AM
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Any hams out there have any idea what the mystery signal on 8.613 mhz could be?
posted by 2N2222 at 12:12 PM
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that said, that paper says getting production up and running would probably take a while though:
Using 24/7 construction of facilities, 16–100% of global fat requirements could be fulfilled at the end of the first year, potentially taking up to 2 years to fully meet the requirements.
So I guess there is a sustainable future for Pluribus, if it can get through a year.
posted by BungaDunga at 12:28 PM
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It is interesting to me that so many people here and on other parts of the internet are more upset about Carol choosing a police car than about Diabaté using other people as his personal holodeck. I think there is clearly a part of him that is very considerate and caring, and maybe he thinks he's doing the Others a favor by engaging them in play-acting as parts of their union are apparently starving to death. I just don't see how people can consent when they are obligated by biology to make other people happy; if that's the case, they have no choice, and if they have no choice they cannot consent. Obviously this is true of every action between humans and the Others, in which case: is it better to limit your selfish interactions to as few as possible, or exactly the opposite?
posted by oneirodynia at 12:34 PM
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simonw I have been assuming that the next step for the hive is to start building an enormous transmitting device the size of Africa
Yeah, there seems to be kind of a consensus that that Pluribus would be working on re-transmission. Is that canon, though? Maybe I missed it. I didn't think we had any sense yet of what the overall goal of Pluribus is (the earth-based Pluribus, that is). Except for figuring out how to convert the Unjoined. And as of this episode we know they are working to stave off mass starvation.
We don't even know whether the alien force that sent the transmission were "joined" themselves, do we? To the question of whether they were acting offensively or defensively, I'm not sure it makes a difference when the end result was that the civilization they infected is now unable to sustain itself. Prior to this episode, we viewers saw the existential threat to human individuality. But now we understand there's an existential threat to human life itself.
We also don't know if the Pluribus-transmitting-civilization became extinct itself, for some reason or other - this could have happened centuries prior to the start of the show. I guess my point is, I don't think their motivation is significant to the show, and I doubt that re-transmission is going to be a plot point either.
posted by torticat at 12:35 PM
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Obviously this is true of every action between humans and the Others, in which case: is it better to limit your selfish interactions to as few as possible, or exactly the opposite?
Meant to add to this: and is selfishness immaterial when you're dealing with a gaslighting entity that has couched cannibalism in banal wellness terms so effectively that the humans whose friends and family they've converted into fuel are actively looking for ways to help it out?
posted by oneirodynia at 12:44 PM
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It is interesting to me that so many people here and on other parts of the internet are more upset about Carol choosing a police car than about Diabaté using other people as his personal holodeck
I haven't seen a single comment here or elsewhere about the housekeeping woman who was invited into the hot tub, took off her clothes, and then realized that the invitation hadn't been sincere. Horrifying! The Joined take at face value any request from the unjoined, but we haven't seen anything to suggest that they don't feel hurt when they are rejected.
I'm not giving Diabaté credit for being a nice guy in any way at this point. For all of his faulting Carol for her anger at the Joined, he treats them like enslaved people. Does he ever say to any of them, "Are you tired, why don't you take a break"? "I'm sorry I spoke carelessly"? Or anything other than "Get me a drink/Join me in bed/Stay in character"?
posted by torticat at 12:53 PM
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straight mentioned The Good Place. Great show to bring into this as it weighs how and why humans take and do not take action and the moral consequences for those actions and the state of mind involved.
Do the Joined have moral culpability for their actions?
Spending the resources to staff that Holodeck in the face of global famine and incipient extinction is morally monstrous. So is keeping on the power in Albuquerque and Vegas just for those two. If James Bond asked for the London Symphony Orchestra to wrangle the instruments and staff up and play the James Bond theme in the hotel theater there is no mechanism in place to prevent that as long as Diabaté asks nicely and insistently.
If there is no will, there is no accountability, and no human being to be held responsible.
So, biggest genocide ever, and there's no Hitler or Pol Pot or Stalin or polity to bring to The Hague.
I guess the Joined do kind of... apologize. But ultimately their actions do all the talking.
Not really related but I really want to shoutout iamkimiam: Lastly, to pick an apple is to rebel against the creator. Whatever that may be.
Wow: humanity returned to Pre-Fall The Garden and now we're going to starve to death! That plucked apple biblical allusion hits hard!
posted by artlung at 12:56 PM
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Do the Joined have moral culpability for their actions?
And if they don't, do the Unjoined have it instead? After all, Carol asked for the lights turned back on. So is it her fault if this dooms a bunch of the Joined?
More to the point, can the Joined really consent to anything? On the one hand, they are the entire global population. They have the power of life and death over the Unjoined. On the other hand they seem to be unable to refuse requests, even ones that would harm them. So is what Diabaté's up to just rape, even if nobody involved sees it that way?
posted by BungaDunga at 1:13 PM
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I haven't seen a single comment here or elsewhere about the housekeeping woman who was invited into the hot tub, took off her clothes, and then realized that the invitation hadn't been sincere.
I think she stopped taking off her clothes because she got the signal that everyone had to leave because Carol was coming.
posted by snofoam at 1:13 PM
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So is what Diabaté's up to just rape, even if nobody involved sees it that way?
Yes.
posted by torticat at 1:19 PM
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I really like Samba Schutte's performance, but it just makes me sick at the loss of bodily autonomy for everyone Diabaté brings into his hedonistic behaviors; particularly the women he's presumably engaging in sexual acts with.
A big part of this show is about autonomy (or lack of it), which is showcased in various ways: the Joined can't refuse to give Carol a grenade; they can't refuse to have sex with Diabate; they can't refuse any of the selfish requests of the 12 that result in wasted resources and thus more of the Joined dying of starvation. But the Joined also don't respect the autonomy of the Unjoined. The researcher who transmits the virus by forcibly kissing the other researcher and the doctor who forcibly kisses Carol—they're both trying to get the other person to join the hive mind, and they didn't ask permission first. I'm not saying this so it's like well, tit for tat, they deserve to have their own autonomy violated. But the writers are continually showing us how consent is being violated in obvious and less-obvious ways, by both the Joined and Unjoined.
I'm sure the Joined will use Carol's and Diabate's eggs & sperm (Chekhov's eggs & sperm?) to make embryos to get the stem cells needed to make Carol and Diabate join the hive mind. Both Carol and Diabate have made it clear to the Joined that they do not consent to joining, and I am sure that will not matter to the Joined.
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 1:29 PM
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I haven't seen a single comment here or elsewhere about the housekeeping woman who was invited into the hot tub, took off her clothes, and then realized that the invitation hadn't been sincere. Horrifying! The Joined take at face value any request from the unjoined, but we haven't seen anything to suggest that they don't feel hurt when they are rejected.
He doesn't reject her. He invites her in, and she starts to remove her clothes. As she gets naked, he proposes a cheers to health. As her uniform drops, all the Joined freeze including her as he lights a cigar. He notices what is going on and then they apologize for having to leave, as the woman gets redressed, because Carol is coming. She then leaves along with the other women. He doesn't reject her at all.
I don't actually think that makes things much better as we still have no idea if the Joined can truly consent (even if they appear to) and even if the Joined can consent, that doesn't mean the individual whose body they currently inhabit does as well.
posted by miss-lapin at 1:45 PM
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The Joined seem to have access to all the experiences of the members, including forgotten memories and, perhaps, even subconscious desires. They also appear not to worry too much about the death of individuals, because their memories still exist within the collective mind. They simultaneously exist as a whole "We" while also being able to identify with each individual ("We are John Cena.") Any one body can "be" any other person in a sense, and experience the memories and feelings of another person. What if when Diabate says "I would like to have sex with several women" or whatever, Pluribus simply calls up some of the 8 billion minds that would be into doing it and brings them forward in the relevant bodies, and the collective as a whole experiences the pleasure vicariously, because they share the same desires. Just a thought. A related possibility is that just as they all now love the works of Carol Sturka as mucb as those of William Shakespeare, they all now enjoy all the sexual proclivities of all members, even if they don't have the same drive to pursue sexual activity.
Also, while Diabate is definitely engaging in billionaire like conspicuous consumption, I am not sure that it would have all that great an impact. The other 8 billion people on the planet have ceased probably 95% of human activities that negatively affect the environment: minimal travelling by road or plane, no more strip mining or clearcutting of forests, no more construction, no dumping toxic waste, etc. That would probably more than offset even the most resource heavy requests of the Normalos.
posted by Saxon Kane at 1:55 PM
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I feel sorry for the two bodyguards who raised their hands when Diabate asked if anyone else wanted to join. Hopefully they get a chance to hang with him in the hot tub next time.
My guess for the 8.613MHz is that's the frequency They use to communicate with each other and stay in sync. How They would cause humans to generate an RF signal it isn't clear, but maybe its all handwavy. Along with the amount of bandwidth required for seven billion nodes to be on the same network; the signal sounded more like a low baud PSK than a wideband encoding.
I bet Carol will try to rig a jammer on that frequency once she learns about it since she always reaches for the biggest hammer.
posted by autopilot at 1:58 PM
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What if when Diabate says "I would like to have sex with several women" or whatever, Pluribus simply calls up some of the 8 billion minds that would be into doing it and brings them forward in the relevant bodies, and the collective as a whole experiences the pleasure vicariously, because they share the same desires
Except that's not what we see with Diabate when he wants Zosia to join him. She initially says during that conversation in s2 for the Joined, "all affection is welcome", but she later says she can not choose who to be with "because it would hurt one of you." Given that the Joined can't hurt, even emotionally, the Unjoined, they can't choose to reject an Unjoined. Without the ability to choose, there can be no consent.
posted by miss-lapin at 2:53 PM
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I was impressed by diabantés poker win, and eyepatch's so-close loss; either they both stacked the deck and coordinated their play in advance, or something else.
I'm fairly confident Pluribus has the group knowledge on how to stack decks in order to fulfill Diabates' fantasy. "We just want you to be happy" afterall.
I was struck by how deep into the idle-rich party cosplay Pluribus was willing to go just to make one person happy.
posted by Thorzdad at 2:58 PM
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> It is interesting to me that so many people here and on other parts of the internet are more upset about Carol choosing a police car than about Diabaté using other people as his personal holodeck.
I brought up the cop car, but you shouldn't read so much into it; I was talking about Carol, not listing things I was upset about in order of unpleasantness.
posted by The corpse in the library at 3:54 PM
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He doesn't reject her. He invites her in, and she starts to remove her clothes.
Yeah, I think you're right, and I think also that the scene was set up in a deliberately ambiguous way. She takes off her clothes and Diabate and his women exchange looks. A second later, you realize that the women had actually just all received the notification that Carol was on her way.
I followed that as it happened and then forgot about it as I was remembering the horror of how the scene initially seemed to be playing out! Still, all of that was intentional on the part of the show creators. I'm not sure what it means. If Diabate's open-minded about having middle-aged ladies participate in his baccanalia, why not just have one already in the pool? If it was meant to be like "Mean girls! no, psych! they're not mean, remember, the Joined are never mean!" then I find it still kind of a gross use of that actor's body for the sake of a sight gag.
In any case, none of that gets Diabate off the hook for violating consent. A person who is drunk may act like they are consenting (and maybe in the moment they even think they are), but it's on the sober person not to prey on a partner who is not fully clear on "yes" vs "no." Much less someone incapable of saying "no," which the Joined very very clearly are.
posted by torticat at 4:02 PM
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Yes, that scene has left me puzzled, too. It felt like a mean joke at the older woman in her housekeeping uniform, but maybe it wasn't supposed to be? It was ambiguous enough for me that I'm not sure if the writers thought it was funny to see her in her beige undies, or not.
posted by The corpse in the library at 4:05 PM
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> She chooses to drive a cop car!
Like others who've commented on seeing multiple and various forms of this objection, I'm kinda mystified. I guess it's an objection on ideological grounds? Like, using anything associated with police is morally tainted, including vehicles? Would it be less objectionable for Carol to use a car—a V8 sedan with beefy suspension and frame and a high capacity gas tank and a shotgun rack and driver-side spotlight—if it didn't have police badging?
I mean, I personally think the Ford Crown Victoria was ugly as hell, but I knew more than a few boys in high school whose first car purchase was a Bond-O-patched cruiser from a county auction, because they were cheap, sturdy, and if not as reliable as a Honda or Toyota, they were at least cheaper and easier to fix.
Are we expecting Carol to take a performative ACAB stance, and if so, who is the in-show audience for her performative stance? Have we really reached the point of condemning cultural artifacts that do not fully depict all the values we wish to publicly perform?
posted by Deminime at 4:10 PM
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Also, while Diabate is definitely engaging in billionaire like conspicuous consumption, I am not sure that it would have all that great an impact.
Agreed. The services being offered to the unjoined are comparatively trivial. It's not like whatever "windfall" is being served to them in the present would otherwise be preserved for use 10 years down the road, or that even if it would be, it could achieve anything other than prolonging a few people's lives for a couple weeks. Conservation can't save the Joined; they need either some kind of scientific breakthrough (?) or an overhaul of their ethical convictions.
posted by torticat at 4:13 PM
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This signal seems like a perfect weapon for preparing planets for colonization. Only a civilization with the technology to receive, decode, and genetically sequence this interstellar signal (and presumably has base-4 genetic material) will be affected by it. The end result is a planet where all the sentient beings have starved to death, while conveniently tidying up their dead and doing their best to leave every natural resource untouched, all without the infrastructure and environmental destruction that a more traditional invasion would incur. Presumably they will set up the means to rebroadcast this signal, along with any improvements to its 99.9...% effectiveness they have derived from studying the immune folks, who are generally not that motivated to hinder the efforts of the Joined. If whoever sent this signal out initially sees a new planet rebroadcasting it, they know it's ripe for the taking. If Carol stops this process she could be saving not just this world but countless others.
That or it's the universe's immune system which targets civilizations on the verge of spacefaring who might do something like actually make genetic material from any old interstellar signal. It's as if the Great Filter were a test akin to not plugging a USB drive you find on the sidewalk into your laptop.
Really enjoying seeing all the discussion and speculation this show is generating.
posted by subocoyne at 4:56 PM
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I think there are a lot of interesting ways consent is coming up in the show. I personally don't think that having sex with a joined is clearly rape at this point. I think we don't know enough about the joined and how much they are still human. Like, if someone grew a human body with no mind and used a computer to operate the body and had sex with it, it would be a really weird thing, but I don't think it would be rape. I also think that sex with a joined might be rape. Or sex with the unjoined may be rape, if the joined have essentially infinite knowledge and skill to use in manipulating the unjoined.
posted by snofoam at 5:44 PM
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> Or sex with the unjoined may be rape, if the joined have essentially infinite knowledge and skill to use in manipulating the unjoined.
Now there's a fascinating question that foregrounds, for me, the show's deeply Pynchonian themes. If everybody around you knows more than you do, what's the line between persuasion and coercion?
posted by Deminime at 6:15 PM
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snofoam: I think we don't know enough about the joined and how much they are still human
I think that was an interesting question, wrt consent, right up until a couple episodes ago, when we found out the joining could be reversed. But as soon as Koumba got that little bit of knowledge he should have been "o hell no" to any further sexual encounters.
I thought from the beginning that his use of the Joined women was disgusting. But I mean sure, I guess if they were no longer individual humans with individual wants, and never would be again, then maybe he could try to make a case? Since it apparently made them happy to please him?
But once he finds out that they might someday be unjoined and feel differently about having been his sex toys-- nope, nope, nope. All plausible deniability gone. What are the chances that any of the women will be okay with what he did to them, let alone all of them?
posted by torticat at 8:31 PM
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The justification Diabaté gave when he first met Carol shared a similar head-in-the-sand quality with the other unjoined who were happy to keep living with their loved ones (except for Manousos, who knew that wasn't his mother and makes me think Carol might be every bit as cantankerous if Helen had Joined rather than died).
"These are all clearly human beings who have decided to be nice to me." It reminds me of how Nike doesn't use slave labor because all the workers in their factories have freely chosen to work there for the agreed-upon salary of $2/day.
On the other hand I'd have.a hard time arguing with the unjoined mom if she said, "Of course this is my son! I don't care what kind of mental condition this virus has given him, he's still my son!"
posted by straight at 1:50 AM
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I feel like anything having to do with sci-fi/alien invasion tropes (like undoing the Joined or how the Unjoined might be converted) is a McGuffin to the show's investigation of the human psyche by the advent of a different kind of individual. I like to think this show isn't about defeating an alien invasion, but rather about the condition of alienation between individuals (whether Joined or Unjoined) and with our own selves.
(Though of course it may also be a case of "¿Por qué no los dos?")
posted by Insert Clever Name Here at 6:12 AM
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all the workers in their factories have freely chosen to work there for the agreed-upon salary of $2/day
Pluribus as multinational corporation fits pretty well. From communicating with Carol mostly via advertisements (some of which leaked out into real world smart fridges), to carefully curated spokesbeings, to the same kind of forced chipper interactions you can have with a walmart greeter or starbucks barista.
posted by joeyh at 6:24 AM
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It amuses me currently to think that what Manousos said was on the level: That he knows that isn't his mother because his mother was unpleasant to him and the Pluribus-inhabiting-his-mother's-body is being nice to him.
Carol's response were Helen to still be alive but part of the collective wouldn't be the same, because Helen was nice to her anyway.
Also, of course, Helen is still alive, as much as anyone is, as she joined the collective before her body died.
I've not got the gist of the collective's aversion to fruit and vegetable farming (I don't see the moral difference between a plucked apple and a windfall), but I expect Gilligan etc do know, as one thing that's certain about that team is they think things through.
posted by Grangousier at 6:31 AM
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And as I posted that, I thought "Are we confusing a practical limitation for a moral code?" The existence of HDP shows that Pluribus is all about practicality, as it has no imagination whatsoever (and a moral code requires the ability to construct stories to measure behaviour against).
posted by Grangousier at 6:35 AM
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Oh, wow, the way you put it about Helen being alive blew my mind, because the other way to think about it is that everyone is dead now. None of the people who became the Joined is making new memories or having new opinions as themselves. Functionally they are equivalent to Helen. Their bodies are alive but they are only as alive as she is. And she's provably dead.
posted by rikschell at 7:08 AM
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If the Joined can be unjoined, then I don't think they are functionally dead. If their individual consciousness can be returned, then they still exist somewhere, but it's unclear if those consciousnesses are somewhere like the sunken place (able to observe one's body like a passenger) or in stasis. If they are in the sunken place then they could be making new memories and having new opinions, but are simply unable to express them.
posted by miss-lapin at 7:22 AM
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Pluribus as multinational corporation fits pretty well
Carol calling in to say that she doesn't consent to them using her stem cells had the vibe of when people cut and paste some Facebook post saying they don't consent to XYZ as if that's a legally binding agreement.
If the Joined can be unjoined, then I don't think they are functionally dead.
To me, some of the issues around consent or existence really depend on things we still don't know yet. Maybe people can be unjoined, maybe they would remember stuff, maybe they would remember stuff that happened to everyone, maybe their memories would be traumatic, maybe blissful, etc. Our obvious point of reference is human consciousness, but that's not a given in the world of the show.
posted by snofoam at 7:31 AM
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If people can be unjoined, I don't think it necessarily follows that they would be the same person they were before.
If the radio signal is meant to be what is binding the joined together then Manousos and Carol need to get started on building a faraday cage ASAP.
I predict that if anyone becomes unjoined from the hive mind that they will want to go back (or if there are more than one, at least one of them will).
posted by thedward at 8:01 AM
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In some ways, Helen was nicer to Carol than the Joined because she was able to tell lies.
posted by straight at 8:03 AM
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Unless further revelations change a lot of how we understand things (whoch seems likely) the joining is basically magic. Ig Helen's brain is gone, where are her memories? Are we to suppose that every human brain has the capacity to store several brains worth of memories? There's gotta be a limit to that. (And let's not even try to talk about latency or bandwidth.)
Remember that "saved to the cloud" just means "on somebody else's computer."
posted by straight at 8:08 AM
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OMG what if the Joined is actually just trained on humanity's memories like an LLM? So they were just telling Carol what they think Helen probably thought about her books?
I kind of doubt the writers understood LLMs that clearly two years(?) ago when this was written?
posted by straight at 8:20 AM
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It looks like the story may go with "this can be undone" with regard to what happened to Zosia, though that's not been my initial impression. I got the feeling that pluribus simply doesn't want anyone's faculties fucked with. Which makes me wonder what it does with people who have, shall we say, a skewed view of reality. The brain damaged, the mentally ill, so on. Does it have a way of weighing and evaluating the knowledge and experiences of the joined? Is it a matter of garbage in-garbage out? Under the current rules as they've been set up, it seems pluribus is limited to the summit of current knowledge, any may not exhibit much more of the insight and creativity that has been the driver of innovation in humans. The level of development needed to detect and activate pluribus would probably be at roughly the same level needed to spread pluribus to other parts of the universe. But maybe not - it's still something of a crapshoot.
It might be amusing if pluribus is ultimately foiled by weighing the current authority as superior, thinking the idiocracy is the most competent by virtue of being in power.
I'm still not finding the behavior of the unjoined, aside from Carol and Manousos, to be very convincing. At all, really. Diabaté is an interesting thought experiment, but seriously, how long could someone go like that, playing fixed games and living out a story whose plot and outcome you know in advance every time. The rest would have to, at the very least, be rather distressed at the personality changes with their loved ones, not to mention the cannibalism angle, which they seem to be aware of. Sure, waste not, want not is an admirable proverb in general, but normal humans are good at rejecting consistency in the extreme.
I'm still curious about the radio signal. My initial thought was that pluribus is working on re transmitting the genetic code. It was a fairly specific frequency, so maybe there's meaning in that? The idea of a control/sync shortwave signal for pluribus gets too hand wavy for me, as autopilot suggests. Plus the idea of an alien intelligence self propagating in such a hands-off, passive way, I find far more compelling than any kind of setup-for-invasion scenario.
posted by 2N2222 at 9:32 AM
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> Like others who've commented on seeing multiple and various forms of this objection, I'm kinda mystified. I guess it's an objection on ideological grounds? Like, using anything associated with police is morally tainted, including vehicles? Would it be less objectionable for Carol to use a car—a V8 sedan with beefy suspension and frame and a high capacity gas tank and a shotgun rack and driver-side spotlight—if it didn't have police badging?
It's not that I'm objecting to it, but it is definitely a choice she (or the director) made. If you could have any car in the world -- or in Albuquerque -- would you go with a cop car? Me, I'd go with a minivan. We see someone else choose sports cars. Electric cars would make sense, so you don't have to go to gas stations. A cop car isn't a neutral, practical car; we are supposed to read into it.
posted by The corpse in the library at 10:00 AM
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From Carol's point of view, the cop car was there and less smelly than the other option. From the writers' point of view they probably just wanted an excuse for the car to have a two-way radio.
posted by thedward at 10:06 AM
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but seriously, how long could someone go like that, playing fixed games and living out a story whose plot and outcome you know in advance every time. My view may be poisoned by the last decade, but I suspect more than a few people would not only be fine with this, but absolutely delighted.
posted by miss-lapin at 10:47 AM
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> She represents the worst qualities of wealthy white America! She's destructive, she expects everyone to see things her way, she presumes she knows more than anyone else, she ignored everyone who didn't speak English, she sees the rest of the world as there to serve her. She chooses to drive a cop car!
C'mon; please don't pretend you didn't mean to object to what you see as the aesthetics of her consumer choices as an indictment of her character. She picks up the cruiser as a convenience when the car she was driving outside the hospital is basically totaled by comparison. It's not a neutral car, but it's very practical—she uses the V8 and beefy suspension to haul ~4,200 pounds of landscaping slabs, which is more than a 4-cylinder minivan would be able to do. Perhaps the personally held ACAB beliefs don't entirely mesh with those of the show's writer, who did once upon a time write for a show that featured FBI cops as its protagonists.
The cop car objection strikes me as the sort of new narcissism that's so pervaded FanFare recently: Oh, this show features people who don't perform my values! *clutches pearls* Maybe we could do a derail tie-in with the recent MetaTalk thread and call for the death of all cops, in addition to launching people who talk about AI into the sun?
posted by Deminime at 11:09 AM
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What's been playing at the back of my mind is Alan Watts talking about Brahman, or at least the way I remember him talking about it - a single universal consiciousness that adopts every individual person (and thing?) as a role, occasionally spending aeons forgetting it's a single unified consciousness, pretending its component parts actually are individual entities.
Pluribus as Brahman, anyway.
posted by Grangousier at 11:25 AM
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Rhea Seehorn proving once again that she understands the assignment.
posted by CynicalKnight at 12:38 PM
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Diabete and the other unjoined are communicating more directly with the Joined, and he at least seems to have learned a great deal more about their nature than Carol has with her solo investigations. I really hope we get to spend some time with him or the other unjoined showing what their experiences were like from the event to when we meet them.
During Diabete's Bondian role play, as he departs he asks if anyone else wants to join him, and a couple of the ladies do. His opponent's henchmen also raise their hands, but he tells them "next time". An initial read would be that he doesn't swing that way and is letting them down gently, but why don't they all raise (or not raise) their hands? Unless he set up some prior instruction, they seem to be exhibiting some individual preferences.
At any rate, I think the writers do intend us to think about what consent means in this far out scenario, and what it says about consent with individuals and collectives in the real world.
posted by subocoyne at 12:40 PM
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2N2222 I'm still not finding the behavior of the unjoined, aside from Carol and Manousos, to be very convincing. At all, really.
Yeah, that part requires serious suspension of disbelief. Laxmi is livid that Carol made her son cry, but she doesn't have any interest in getting her son properly back? It makes total sense to me that a mom wouldn't reject her child even if he'd apparently become a pod person. It doesn't make sense that she would be content for her child to stay a pod person.
...I find far more compelling than any kind of setup-for-invasion scenario.
Piggybacking off this to ask a question about this theory... if the transmission received on Earth at the beginning of the show originated 600 years in the past, how does that work as a setup for invasion? How do the potential invaders know if/when the earthlings have been subdued? Are the Joined, in this scenario, sending a message to report back to the originators, assuming they are still out there, 600 lightyears away? And then 12 (earth) centuries after they begin their preplanning, the aliens initiate an actual attack? And how long is that going to take?!
posted by torticat at 12:51 PM
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My view is probably (I'm thinking about it still) that the bodies of the joined aren't human anymore. They're digits of the joined consciousness and aren't any more capable of consent or objection than the fingers of a human are. To me they're basically zombies with a better public affairs office.
The specifics of pluribus's cognition is unclear to me (and I suspect also to the writers), it feels very much like we just have to accept the various conceits that are presented. It's clear that it's deeply alien, what with the seemingly illogical constraints on diet and the effects on population that brings. But I assume Pluribus doesn't have any special concern for any specific digit of its body, and maybe it thinks its current number of hosts is just too many anyway, so trimming the fat so to speak might just be rational. Maybe it only takes so many pluribi to assemble the radio?
posted by boogieboy at 12:58 PM
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It doesn't make sense that she would be content for her child to stay a pod person.
We don't know what kind of parent she was before the transformation. As someone with an abusive parent, I can do a bit more than imagine that there are parents who would be fine with their kid becoming a pod person especially if it meant the kid in question suddenly became all about making them happy instead of having their own needs/feelings/perspectives. Abusers can also be fiercely protective of their victims seeing them as their property or proxy so that doesn't require a lot of suspension of disbelief for me at all even though I can see how it might seem not to fit together.
posted by miss-lapin at 2:34 PM
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> C'mon; please don't pretend you didn't mean to object to what you see as the aesthetics of her consumer choices as an indictment of her character.
You've lost me in the negatives, but it sounds like you're reading a lot into my joke that ACAB includes Carol. I do think her choice to drive a cop car is based on more than how it's practical for hauling landscaping material. Surely we can agree that the writers chose a cop car deliberately as a cop car, however we feel about policing in America, and not because it was the most practical car for a person to drive?
> The cop car objection strikes me as the sort of new narcissism that's so pervaded FanFare recently: Oh, this show features people who don't perform my values! *clutches pearls*
OK.
posted by The corpse in the library at 2:44 PM
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what if it's an alien mining operation - send out the signal, any planet that can create the virus will also have lots of good technology and resources. Turn the population into the ultimate pacifist that just wants to share, then when the aliens arrive there's already a workforce available to help them take whatever they want.
posted by 5_13_23_42_69_666 at 4:25 PM
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2N2222: At all, really. Diabaté is an interesting thought experiment, but seriously, how long could someone go like that, playing fixed games and living out a story whose plot and outcome you know in advance every time.
Which is why he imitated Carol's sandwich technique; I thought it was an indication of the value of human individuality. Probably the first time since the event that he was eating something that he didn't already know.
posted by dhruva at 4:38 PM
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I thought her picking the cop car was about how it doesn't really belong to another person which might feel creepy. Plus, her taxes helped pay for it, it exists to serve the community. More than any other car, it's hers.
posted by fleacircus at 5:39 PM
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There's also Officer Checkhov's shotgun and radio. We've seen Carol access both.
Manousos is a ham radio operator, and the police radio is the way that the show can give Carol and Manousos a way to communicate that doesn't depend on the Joined. The shotgun is, well, a gun.
posted by kandinski at 5:53 PM
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As far as "would I prefer the horrifying intractable reality to the fantasy where anything I wish can be provided" I think of Cypher from The Matrix:You know, I know this steak doesn't exist. I know that when I put it in my mouth, the Matrix is telling my brain that it is juicy and delicious. After nine years, you know what I realize?
[Takes a bite of steak]
Ignorance is bliss.
I think I'd object to that, and I definitely find Diabate's way objectionable, but I understand the impulse.
posted by artlung at 6:13 PM
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It doesn't make sense that she would be content for her child to stay a pod person.
It would certainly be difficult not to go completely insane if you actually found yourself in this situation, I'm not surprised that some people might react with some level of denial
I thought her picking the cop car was about how it doesn't really belong to another person which might feel creepy. Plus, her taxes helped pay for it, it exists to serve the community. More than any other car, it's hers.
I kind of read it as an expression of her- completely understandable- defensiveness. Like, there are probably practical reasons too, but if you are in a situation where you feel powerless, maybe a cop car is what you prefer to have between you and the world, if you can't build a Mad Max car for your apocalypse
posted by BungaDunga at 10:24 PM
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(Which was also a cop car. Max Rockatansky's car, I mean.)
posted by Grangousier at 11:20 PM
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Carol's interceptor is relatively poorly suited to apocalypse life, really. It's basically just a Ford Taurus, probably with the 307hp V6, AWD, and some beefed up suspension components borrowed from the SHO. 305hp is a fair bit of shove, but it needs those tougher than stock shocks 'cause it adds up to being more than 4000lbs of car and dumb cop shit to move around before adding a driver, and it's simply not the infamously reliable curb swallowing, RWD, body-on-frame throwback to the Triassic era that the Crown Vic was, as shown by how severely its modern IRS was bottoming out on the way back from the landscaping place.
I assumed she'd hung onto it because - in a world where packs of wild dogs are now a thing America's Last Suburbanite will need to incorporate into her threat envelope - having handy access to something that makes all kinds of loud noises and has built in storage for a shotgun probably isn't the worst idea. Once you know how to work the release latch, that is.
posted by MarchHare at 12:40 AM
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"It [doesn't] got cop tires, cop suspension, cop shocks. ..."
posted by nathan_teske at 7:56 AM
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I like the idea that Carol would pursue the cruiser because it doesn't belong to a specific person. For the same way we have not seen her rummaging through other people's homes, she still feels bound by societal expectations of property and privacy. The police vehicle belongs to no one personally, and to all, communally. It makes sense outside of the features like a shotgun and radio. When she drove to Vegas, I immediately thought, "Why didn't she borrow something with a much nicer ride?!" Perhaps because she would see it as stealing.
2N2222: "At all, really. Diabaté is an interesting thought experiment, but seriously, how long could someone go like that, playing fixed games and living out a story whose plot and outcome you know in advance every time."
One perspective to Diabaté's behavior, as well as the rest of the unjoined, is that this is their trauma response. The world has ended, so those with the similes of their loved ones, cling to them, and those without, like Diabaté, cling to fantasy to avoid dealing with the horror that almost 1/8th of humanity was wiped out in a global event that rendered virtually everyone as just a drone in a hivemind.
posted by Atreides at 8:58 AM
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Non-sequitur comment here but before the show even came out there was speculation that Pluribus is based on or highly related to the novel All Better Now by Neal Shusterman. I haven't read the book but if nothing else it might be interesting as an exploration of similar themes.
posted by Nelson at 9:19 AM
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Y'all, the joined can evoke the abusive suitor who offers Carol anything she wants (except for the things she explicitly says she wants) and the yes-men who billionaires surround themselves with and the countless unseen workers who barely get enough to eat so that a few people can have avocado toast whenever they want.
In the same way, the cop car can be read as Carol being practical and Carol refusing to steal cars from people she hopes will still want them when she rescues them from the Joined and grabbing for something that feels safe/normal and asserting that she's the good guy taking it upon herself to restore law and order and Karen Carol the white lady bringing the cops to fix things the way she thinks they're supposed to be, whether people want her to or not.
posted by straight at 10:00 AM
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straight is correct in this of course - as a famous politician once observed, "it can be two things." We are considering the episodes facet by facet in the small amounts of spare time we each have, but the show and the ideas it's exploring were crafted over the course of months by a host of writers, each with their own perspectives, all supporting the show runner.
Pluribus - just like the joined claim of themselves - is large, it contains multitudes.
posted by MarchHare at 1:10 PM
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Yes! I also thought of Carol/Karen when she was driving the cop car.
Also as a storytelling device there was the message she was sending to the Joined, which was a middle finger or "I'm the boss of me." Her car was literally framed side-by-side with Koumba's messaging choice, which was "money/prestige." And both choices are ironic, since the power of both police and wealth are pretty much mooted in the world of the Joined.
That this was a motif was made extra clear by Manousos's interaction with Joined + his vehicle of choice at the end of the episode.
posted by torticat at 2:01 PM
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straight: Non-sequitur comment here but before the show even came out there was speculation that Pluribus is based on or highly related to the novel All Better Now by Neal Shusterman.
Gilligan said he came up with the idea for Pluribus ten years ago, and filming started in 2024. All Better Now was published in 2025, so probably not.
posted by tzikeh at 5:33 PM
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> I like the idea that Carol would pursue the cruiser because it doesn't belong to a specific person. For the same way we have not seen her rummaging through other people's homes, she still feels bound by societal expectations of property and privacy. The police vehicle belongs to no one personally, and to all, communally. It makes sense outside of the features like a shotgun and radio. When she drove to Vegas, I immediately thought, "Why didn't she borrow something with a much nicer ride?!" Perhaps because she would see it as stealing.
I like this idea too as a character motivation. My suggestion of Chekhov's radio and gun was more of a narrative convenience for the writing room.
Your motivation for Carol echoes Manousos's note to the self-storage clients: "I had to access your stuff and borrow some items, I will return them". They both see humans as individuals, and attempt to interact with them as such as far as they can.
posted by kandinski at 6:00 PM
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Why does Manousos have a VCR and a CRT television? Paraguay is not rich but they have computers and flat-screen tvs like everybody else.
posted by signal at 6:25 PM
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I got an old-school, retro D.I.Y. feel from Manousos. The ham radio, the MG car, there was also a scene where he had (from memory) pliers, wire cutters, screwdrivers and electrical tape on top of a table or dresser. So keeping old tech like a VCR or CRT TV going would be consistent with that.
posted by Larry David Syndrome at 6:49 PM
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> Why does Manousos have a VCR and a CRT television? Paraguay is not rich but they have computers and flat-screen tvs like everybody else.
Same reason he's a ham radio amateur, drives an older car, has some gas and money and a gun and paper maps stashed in his apartment. He doesn't seem to trust newer technologies like computers and the Internet, and he is some version of a prepper. Owning a VCR and a CRT television fit the larger profile.
posted by kandinski at 7:19 PM
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Paraguay's per capita GDP is about $16,000, roughly comparable to Iran or Mongolia. As someone who's spent some time in low-income countries, I'll gently suggest that not "everyone else" has computers and flatscreens, and that wealth and income discrepancies do a pretty good job of creating class isolation and invisibility. Even in wealthy nations like the US, there are places in the wilds out here past the suburbs like where Manousos works—small warehouses, auto repair garages, mom and pop motels, barber shops and beauty salons—that don't use a computer in the front office.
I think we tend to not hear or think about people who aren't digitally connected for reasons that are unfortunately kinda obvious.
posted by Deminime at 7:54 PM
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Shoot - that quote came from Nelson, not straight. Sorry for the mix-up.
posted by tzikeh at 8:05 PM
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During Diabete's Bondian role play, as he departs he asks if anyone else wants to join him, and a couple of the ladies do. His opponent's henchmen also raise their hands, but he tells them "next time". An initial read would be that he doesn't swing that way and is letting them down gently, but why don't they all raise (or not raise) their hands?
It's just part of the role-playing play that it does with Diabaté. At some point it realized, or more likely Diabaté told it, that it was weird for it to raise everyone's hands when he asked that question.
I felt like Diabaté's imitation of Carol's breakfast sandwich is a tell that at some point he will help Carol bring back individuality because he's grown tired of everyone he engages with not being original.
I lean toward this view too. It will play the games he tells It to, and It can recite facts and answer questions, but asking It "what are some other ways I can arrange these foods?" or "arrange these foods the way John Cena would arrange them" is not remotely the same as having a person just naturally share stuff by doing their thing, quietly, while you hang out with them.
posted by oneirodynia at 10:25 PM
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On the podcast Samba Schutte said (I think) that Gilligan's direction to him re the character was that he should be geeky - We've seen him Diabaté performing Diabaté, but not the person he was before the Event. Given the scenarios he's projecting himself into, I suspect he's naturally not that great at people.
posted by Grangousier at 12:19 AM
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The casino scene was a good homage to Twiligt Zone "A nice place to visit" (1959) – we rewatched it yesterday, and it still holds up.
posted by monocultured at 12:47 AM
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I'm very curious about Diabaté. It's interesting that he doesn't seem to be interacting with any family or friends or loved ones. I think a typical "party guy" about to take the trip of a lifetime to Vegas would be relishing the chance to bring his buddies along. I feel like there must be some kind of tragedy or problem in his past.
It seems unclear how well the Joined are at appearing normal with their former loved ones. They have all the memories so on that account they can do a realistic job. But on the other hand the urge to please can make them unrealistic, as with Manousos' mother. They also seem to not understand the Unjoined sometimes, as with the hand grenade.
I thought at the start of this series it was going to be a genuine dilemma about whether the world is better off this way, but with the cannibalism and starvation it seems like a more traditional narrative about how to bring things back to normal.
posted by TheophileEscargot at 2:13 AM
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the world would be better of this way - just, humanity wouldn't.
it'd be an effective method for an alien race to clear out a destructive infection for their following arrival and repopulation.
posted by lapolla at 4:58 AM
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No one has mentioned the very brief scene (either right before Carol arrives or some time during her visit. I can't recall) where Koumba is on the phone with...someone...talking about how she (assumedly Carol) is simply lonely, almost as if he was providing a diagnosis of some sort.
It really stuck-out to me. Who the heck is he speaking with? I can't imagine he's called one of the other unjoined just to talk about Carol. The scene was shot very close-up, and he was speaking in a hushed, confidential tone quite different than the manor in which he normally addresses the world. It put the question out there as to whether Koumba isn't cooperating with Pluribus to some degree. Do we know what he was before the joining?
Also, is anyone else somewhat curious how/if Carol being lesbian plays into any of this? Writing her as queer is a pretty specific character point for what is notionally a sci-fi series. Much like Checkov's hand-grenade, it strikes me as something that is destined to be used at some point (beyond simply admitting to herself that Zosia is fuckable.) See also: Koumba's "diagnosis" that Carol's lonely.
Also also: Sometimes a cop car is just a cop car.
posted by Thorzdad at 4:58 AM
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I have the impression of poverty in his background, because of how over-the-top flashy he is now. Of course it could be that he's so flashy now because that's how he's always been.
posted by The corpse in the library at 4:59 AM
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The question for me remains: are the individual humans still "in there" in some way so that if the virus is removed they can return to normal, or did the alien virus destroy them after harvesting their memories and they are all effectively empty shells for the virus to inhabit.
If it's the latter, then what Diabaté is doing is desecration of a corpse. We generally believe that the living have a right to decide how their bodies should be treated after death. If your body were hollowed out an taken over by some other intelligence, would you approve of it being used for the sexual gratification of others? We believe that organs should only be donated after death if consent was given in life. This is the same situation to me.
However, if the individuals are still in there, and the controlling agent can be removed and restore individual agency and separate consciousness of the original individual, then what Diabaté is doing is rape.
There is no way in which what he is doing is ok.
Now, on the face of it it seems like we got the answer about reversal when Pluribus refused to answer the question of whether the process can be reversed -- no answer meant it can. But perhaps they refused to answer because saying it can't be reversed would leave the unjoined entirely without hope. If non-reversibility lead to the unjoined to assume that humanity was effectively "dead" and they're next, they would have no reason to hold back on attacking and subverting Pluribus.
Given how Pluribus doesn't seem to actually understand the unjoined very well (the hand grenade situation among others) I'm leaning towards the idea that it just harvested memories LLM-style and is hallucinating it's way through interactions with the unjoined.
And as for transmitting the signal -- if a virus is the model that would be what it does. I started to write "that would be its goal", but viruses don't have goals. They do what they do because their behaviors are evolved to result in successful propagation, so the behaviors propagated. There is no intelligence necessary.
No idea if that's the model the writers are working with, but it's a possibility, and if it's the case, and it's also the case that the virus kills the hosts and replaces them with non-sentient gaslighting LLM chatbots-in-the-flesh, then it's imperative that the unjoined subvert any attempt to propagate the signal.
posted by antinomia at 5:26 AM
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Aaccording to Gilligan the kernel of the show was an unlikable and not particularly nice person to whom everyone was all of a sudden very nice. Alien virus is what he came up with as the mechanism to set that dynamic up. So I would be surprised if the main reveal and arc were more about the alien impetus for the virus (invasion, propagation, etc.), and expect it will be more about how Carol manages her new circumstances. Not that those aspects wouldn't be well thought through even if not the main point.
So far she's lost her lover, managed to alienate the nice aliens who all leave town to get away from her, and even the 12 unjoined are keeping her out of their chatrooms. I suspect her connecting with Manousos - who if anything is even harder to get along with - will be a big part of her character's progression.
posted by jetsetsc at 5:48 AM
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jetsetsc: "So far she's lost her lover, managed to alienate the nice aliens who all leave town to get away from her, and even the 12 unjoined are keeping her out of their chatrooms. I suspect her connecting with Manousos - who if anything is even harder to get along with - will be a big part of her character's progression."
I'm kinda excited to see how they get along, an angry odd couple type situation, with Carol being impulsive at times, and Manousos being very deliberate.
posted by Atreides at 6:59 AM
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I've been thinking since the start about the sitcom version of this whole show. Pluribus is the quirky neighbor (and neighbor, and neighbor...). It's probably called "Everybody loves Carol" or "Carol vs. The World," depending on how they get along.
(It was nice to see Diabete call them "the world" this episode. Literally the whole world (minus just one person, opinion pending!) feels uneasy about Carol these days! I really don't like how/when she's so rude to the helperbot-that-is-everybody-now, but then I remind myself that they did kind of kill the only person she truly loved in this world -- and a mere 12 days ago, at that -- and I cut her some slack.)
(I also find I keep forgetting we're still only 12 days in, even with the timers popping up to remind us.)
posted by nobody at 11:52 AM
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Rewatched this last night and wondered if Carol's frozen eggs are going to be used for some sort of repopulative device instead of a stem cell source. Maybe they need "clean eggs"? I have zero idea whether or not a Joined who gives birth automatically infects the baby. Maybe just wild speculation.
We (the audience) are still so much in the dark that it leads to tons of wild speculation. Usually I like the slow burn, but this is on another level of slow.
The cop car to me is a combination of things, a standout vehicle with useful accessories, a car that's been fleet maintained, the ability to push stuff/other vehicles out of the way, and what seems to me to be an unconscious desire for safety and comfort.
posted by Sphinx at 12:09 PM
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Who the heck is he speaking with? I can't imagine he's called one of the other unjoined just to talk about Carol. [...] and he was speaking in a hushed, confidential tone quite different than the manor in which he normally addresses the world.
I don't think this was meant to come off as mysterious. His dialogue was (subtitles translated from French) "But she's so lonely. Yes, I know. Okay. ( chuckles ) I miss you too, my loves [plural]. See you soon."
So it's nearly certain he's talking to the Collective (whom I suspect he's been telling himself he's genuinely in love with? though of course it could be a more casual/rhetorical "mes amours"), with his "Yes, I know" coming in response to an (off-mic) reiteration of why they won't talk to Carol directly these days.
And grasping that shades a couple later scenes:
It helps us understand that when he becomes visibly uncomfortable at the idea of Carol holing up in another suite and sticking around for a while, it's probably not because he can't stand spending another hour with her, per se, but because her sticking around means Pluribus (his true love?) will continue to stay away. (But it's unclear, I think, whether Carol grasps that distinction, which makes it extra sad.)
And then it's this phone call he's presumably referring to when he tells Carol, right as she's set to drive off, "They want to come back, Carol. They're just looking for a change of heart." (...though I guess it's not really important at all to know that came from this phone call; it wouldn't have landed any differently had the phone call been cut.)
(Oh, and he's speaking so uncharacteristically quietly because Carol is asleep in the next room! ...though we don't know about that until we get to the next scene.)
posted by nobody at 12:19 PM
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monocultured, I randomly watched that very Twilight Zone episode last night! In fact, I was watching it at the precise moment you posted your comment. The Twilight Zone theme is echoing in my ears now...
Yes, Diabete's casino fantasy has some striking similarities to "A Nice Place to Visit," right down to the straight flush vs royal flush moment (admittedly, kind of a cliche). That episode is also mentionable for guest starring Sebastian Cabot (aka Mr. French).
posted by abraxasaxarba at 4:31 PM
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Deminime: "As someone who's spent some time in low-income countries, I'll gently suggest that not "everyone else" has computers and flatscreens, and that wealth and income discrepancies do a pretty good job of creating class isolation and invisibility."
As someone who was born, raised and lives in a low-income country in Latin America and has traveled extensively through the continent, thank you for taking the time to explain this to me. /s
It's still ridiculous that he had a VCR and a CRT.
posted by signal at 4:47 PM
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yeah, my read on the CRT and VCR, alongside the shortwave radio, was just that this is a guy who Doesn't Trust Modern Technologies
posted by DoctorFedora at 5:46 PM
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Sorry about your class blindness, then, signal; projecting your wealthy experience of "everybody has this stuff" seems particularly egregious given your lived experience. Are you really denying there are people who don't have modern tech? Or, more properly, are you really saying the existence of people who don't own flatscreens is a credibility problem for you? Because that says more about your limited experience and perspective than it says about the world, and it comes across as "I can't believe there are poor people on TV who don't own my modern conveniences." Just sayin.
posted by Deminime at 9:30 PM
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I also figured the CRT was meant to make him a technophobe. Manousos has an apartment and a job! Flatscreen tvs are cheap enough these days that I'd figure most people working in a city somewhere like Paraguay probably could have a cheap one if they wanted, like they aren't more expensive than phones and nearly the entire world has a cheap Android phone these days (and he doesn't have one of those either I think)
posted by BungaDunga at 10:00 PM
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At this point in history, having a CRT is a lot more specific than "not having modern conveniences". I believe it has been some time since anyone has manufactured them for the general market. The weight and size of CRTs has generally meant that few people keep them around if they're not still actively using them, which has limited their survival on the second-hand market, although that may vary by location. Possessing a CRT today generally means that either you specifically sought one out, or that you hang on to these sorts of things dramatically longer than the average person.
I didn't get the impression that him having a CRT and VCR had anything to do money.
posted by vibratory manner of working at 11:01 PM
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