#pluribus analysis

And now Carol has *no one* except for someone who will not only let her drink, but let her pour them one, join her without fail, tell her all about the particular vodka they’re sharing that night, point out the unique alkaline taste of this one. someone who will bring her a literal fucking hand grenade if she asks for one, will sit and watch her pull the pin on both of them, take it from her hand with a smile, then her bring a another the second she asks for it.

affection delivered via yes and yes and yes and yes and yes and yes and yes and yes and yes into mutually assured destruction. absolutely peak horror imo. there are no boundaries. why would there be? there aren’t any between individuals now, so ‘no’ is no longer a concept beyond the We’s biological imperative a decided yes.

The third hater to join this duo.

It is time our anger issue grieving mother cursing in wrong Indian language accents woman, Laxmi to join them and save the world.

A grieving heartbroken widowed lesbian, an angry man with an agenda to save the world even if it costs a few million human lives and an angry lost in denial mother who is experiencing her own custom-made version of a cult classic Demon Possessing a Child horror indie movie, need to work together.

Right now, the only way of any genuine human connection for Laxmi is to call Carol and yell at her whenever the hive suffers through seizures. The inability to protect her child must be so frustrating, and all she can do is call Carol. She does it because she knows Carol can bear her grunt and anger, but her changeling child cannot!

Now, I know what you're thinking. They're not zombies, obviously. They're not the shambling undead, moaning and dead-eyed and decayed with bits falling off. This is not a Zombie apocalypse show. Alien invasion, maybe. Zombie apocalypse? Absolutely not.

BUT that is exactly what they WANT you to think.

Hear me out.

What are zombies, exactly? Aside from dead people who still move around. Remove that part, and you have a few core tenants of zombiedom:

The Zombie horde (a hivemind that allows zombies to swarm and attack their pre)

Propagation through infection (the Zombie bite, scratch or other transfer of fluids to turn others)

Consumption of human flesh (braaaiiinnnsss)

And in Pluribus? We have... yeah, all three. They make a pretty big deal out of that last one, got John Cena to show up and everything.

Not to mention, one of the chief functions of the Zombie genre is to turn a mirror back to humanity and examine what makes us human through showing what we are not. The Zombie is humanity with something fundamental missing. Life, a soul, the spark that makes us intelligent, lets us talk and form connections and reason.

As zombies, we are nothing but bodies and mouths looking for food, infecting others and eating until there is nothing else left.

The Hivemind in Pluribus goes the other way. Instead of a mindless horde, they are all mind. What they lack, instead of reason, logic and intelligence, is individuality. Personality, opinion and free will.

In many ways, it makes them so much more terrifying than the shambling zombie horde could ever be.

Think about the classic scene in so many zombie movies. The characters loved one has just been bitten, is turning and it is up to them to kill them. They know that isnt the person they love anymore, is just a monster wearing their body, but this is an impossible choice all the same.

In Pluribus, the characters look at Carol like she's insane for even suggesting their family members step out of the room. Try shooting your family member in the head when theyre politely asking you not to do that, and calmly explaing their reasons for world domination. They have a point, I guess? I mean, it seems chill so lets just... I dont know, accept it?

Are they eating people? Yes. But, yknow, sometimes it be like that. Sure it's a shocking reveal when you stumble into their warehouse of body parts but when you watch the marketing video they put together it starts to make sense.

If only the zombies had access to such good PR.

Pluribus is a Zombie apocalypse for the modern age. Instead of blood thirsty monsters ripping your face off, the end of humanity is coming at the hands of smiling, attractive people who really just want whats best for you. They would never hurt anyone!

Sure, individual cultures and traditions are disappearing around the world and humanity will slowly starve to death within the next decade while they dedicate all their time and resources into figuring out how to turn the last handful of individuals without their consent.

And yes, they will let that happen despite having the capacity to prevent the death of humanity, eventually they will run out of corpses to eat and animals and fruit that have just conveniently dropped in front of them. So that will be it for humanity and the world I guess. Not because of a monster with blood in its mouth or exploding bombs going off around the world, but because of polite, smiling people who sat around and all decided to do nothing while the world died together.

I've been hit hard by Carol's portrayal in Pluribus and this post has been sitting in my drafts for a minute, for reasons that should quickly become clear.

I'll open with a memory from high school, a conversation I had with my coach. I had apparently made a few comments to her about a few different people and how I didn't like them, so she said to me "you really don't like a lot of people, do you?" I thought about it and I responded with something to the effect of, "I don't know if that's really true, but assume that nobody likes me, so it's easier if I just don't like them first."

I think this is something that has defined so much of my life, a preemptive strike at the world in the form of feigned indifference, for fear of the pain that would come from rejection. The shame of being one's self and of showing one's genuine interests. It is hardly a revolutionary concept, but the way that Carol exemplifies this really resonates with me.

The big moment for me was the sodium thiopental trial scene. Watching Carol say that she can see her book as a movie, doing a reading with a silly voice, wearing that hat from her fan. With her lowered inhibition she is interacting with her writing freely and she's enjoying it, even admitting she thinks about the future of it. It made me think of my first impression of her. I remember being so happy to see her doing that passage reading and the meet and greet with her fans. I loved seeing the way she loved her story and cared about the other people that loved it too, even if they were sometimes a bit much. Then the door closes and she tells us that is all an act, a lie for money. I felt disappointed, but I understood. She continues looking down on the books as unserious and silly for the rest of the show, she insults her fans and acts like it's all beneath her. She is ashamed of her work.

Until she is under the effects of a "truth serum".

Throughout the show, Carol herself is not that great of an actor. We as the audience can always see through her, especially when she tries to act happy. To me this further shows how genuine that first scene of her is. It's the disgust in her "real life", born of her shame, that is the real lie and it is what is making her miserable.

I feel that Helen also saw this. That this was in part what that scene with the hive meant, when they told Carol what Helen really thought of her books. Helen had no issue with the books, she enjoyed them even though she didn't see them as "serious". To her making "even one person happy" was something, but she knew that Carol could not recognize the nuance to it, so she let Carol have all her barriers.

I am a queer woman, the same as Carol, and I think having that sense of "wrongness" put on you (from the intersectionality of woman and queer) by your community from a young age really just seeps into everything you do. Carol hid her queerness from the world, we see very specific and direct examples of her trauma there, but she also hid herself by putting on a show of hating her "unserious" books. Books in a genre that is percieved as silly fluff for women. She may have left that conversion camp still queer, but they succeeded in teaching her she was better off hiding anything inside her that was not seen as "normal" or "useful" by the world at large (a systemically sexist, racist, and homophobic world). The way that the "truth serum" is what brings Carol to emotionally and explicitly state her grief over Helen's loss, really solidifies for me the way that all the shame goes hand in hand.

I think that's also part of why she can't trust the hive while the other survivors can*. She's too familiar with the rejection of society, so any world where everyone on the planet loves and accepts her is wrong.

but I do think it is worth considering that one of the reasons carol is one of the only immunes who is truly resistant to the new world created by the hive is because she doesn't trust happiness, especially not the promise of rapturous happiness forever. pretty much anyone on earth would need a significant mental paradigm shift to accept that as a possibility, but to carol it's not just improbable, it's suspicious—in no small part because the people who were meant to love her didn't love her properly, and the life that was meant to make her happy never could have. and even after shaking off at least enough of those formative influences to have a wife, to go to an indigo girls concert, etc...she can't stop performing something else, she can't be truly satisfied, she can't give up on her own self-destruction. and yes much of this stems from her own choices, but it still leaves the feeling of: I guess this really is as good as it can ever get. and it still kind of sucks.