Hey, do you ever think about the end of the world? You have to, right? Given the times? Me, I’d like my post-apocalypse to be like Carol’s in this week’s Pluribus episode. Sure, she’s lonely and scared. But she does get to sleep in her own bed and eat the food she likes. Also—and I can not stress this enough—she gets to watch TV.
Specifically, Carol watches The Golden Girls. Even more specifically, she watches a DVD set of The Golden Girls. And the medium matters. As soon as I heard the familiar voice of Betty White’s sweetly dim Rose Nylund coming out of Carol’s television set, I wondered if the Joined were still operating TV stations and cable channels. By the end of this episode, it seems clear they probably aren’t, for reasons that are quite ominous, actually.
So let’s raise a glass of good vodka—distilled from both potato and corn!—to Carol Sturka, keeping hope alive for all of us who’d like to ride out the end-times by vegging out to ’80 sitcoms. How human can you get?
The title of this episode is “Grenade,” which refers to an unserious request by Carol that’s taken by her alien-infected overlords at face value. Feeling smothered by the Joined’s constant efforts to make her happy, Carol jokes, “There’s nothing wrong with me that a fucking hand grenade wouldn’t fix.” Later that night, the individual known as Zosia shows up at Carol’s house with a hand grenade. “We thought you were probably being sarcastic,” Zosia says. “But we didn’t want to take the chance.”
The grenade, in a way, symbolizes the incredible level of cooperation and competence exhibited by the hive mind, as experienced through Carol’s cynical eyes. Although the Joined are, presumably, very busy, they still make time to cater to Carol whenever she has a request or a complaint. It’s scary how efficient and effective they can be. It also makes for some funny sight gags, as these ordinary-looking people go to extraordinary lengths for her, smiling all the while.
On the whole, “Grenade” features less grand spectacle than we saw last week, which might make some viewers feel a little impatient. There’s still so much we don’t know about what just happened to humanity or why. Because Carol doesn’t trust the collective to give her honest information, she refuses to ask them important things, like: Why did the aliens send the eternal happiness formula to Earth in the first place? That can be frustrating, for sure.
Instead, Carol mostly pouts and stews. On the plane home from Spain, she asks Zosia (whom she apparently retrieved from Air Force One after the previous episode’s dramatic ending) if there are any non-English-speaking, non-Joined humans who might be more aligned with her bitter take of The State Of Things. The Joined try to connect her by phone with a Paraguayan self-storage facility manager, but across multiple calls he proves to be as standoffish with Carol as he has been with the alien-aligned folks. (Conjuring up what she can recall of her traveler’s Spanish, Carol rings this dude up one last time to shout, “Chinga tu madre, cabrón!”)
So Carol returns to Albuquerque and isolation—to vodka and The Golden Girls. On the whole, this choice makes for less exciting television than the events of Pluribus episodes one and two. But I do think what happens this week is necessary, to show both the potential and the limitations of Carol’s new life as one of Earth’s few non-blissed-out humans.
On the plus side: As already noted, the whole planetary population is at Carol’s disposal. When she tries to go shopping and finds her local Sprouts has been picked clean, all she has to do is call and the Joined quickly fill the shelves back up. The scene of the trucks arriving in unison—with a small army of minions streaming in to unload them—is one of this episode’s few big-scale “wow” moments. It’s a moment of pure fantasy: the woman who can have everything.
And yes, the collective would give her another hand grenade if she were to ask. They’d give her a bazooka, too. Or an atom bomb. They hope that she won’t ask for any of these things—especially after she pulls the pin on what she assumes is a fake grenade and nearly kills Zosia. But they’ll try to accommodate her demands, no matter how potentially destructive. That’s how much her happiness means to them. Isn’t that…nice?
On the minus side: The enthralled masses are apparently busily working on something outside of Carol’s view. I’m not suggesting that they’re deviously hiding anything. Given that Carol is so obstinately incurious, I can’t blame the Joined for not telling her how they spend their days. Still, it seems inauspicious when all of Albuquerque—aside from Carol’s block—blacks out at night in the name of conservation. Apparently, since there’s no crime to prevent and no one works at night, who needs power? (“You donated twice to the Sierra Club,” Zosia says apologetically to Carol. “We thought you’d understand.”)
Also, the collective still intends to convert Carol, as soon as they can figure out how. Zosia describes this first as “a biological imperative,” although when that description is unpersuasive, the hive shifts to a more provocative analogy. Zosia asks, “If you saw somebody drowning, would you throw them a life preserver?”—suggesting that Carol’s in need of rescue.
And maybe she is! The other visually spectacular scene in “Grenade” is in the cold open—the very cold open—set at a Norwegian ice hotel, seven years before the alien takeover. There, a very cranky Carol resisted her partner Helen’s efforts to get her to appreciate the wonders around her. In this place where the Aurora Borealis was visible through a window, and where every piece of decor had been lovingly sculpted by accomplished artists, all Carol could think about is how it was three degrees below zero in their suite and how she expected her latest book to be higher up the bestseller list in its debut week. The patient and understanding Helen needled her, saying this vacation was perfect because “You love feeling bad.”
Later in the episode, after Carol asks Zosia to have a drink with her, she tries to imagine what it must be like to be Joined, wondering if it’s “like every Rick Steves special ever”—using an analogy she also used with Helen to describe the ice hotel. This is what mindless happiness looks like to Carol: being able to appreciate the awesomeness of nature without complaining.
But I’m not so sure. I find the idea of the Joined all switching off their lights at night to be chilling. Do they not take evening walks? Do they not gather around tables to play board games? Do they not watch TV?! I can’t imagine a happy life without those small pleasures, so satisfying to one’s individual tastes, including the tastes of those who like to grumble and moan. Without tiny joys, who are we?
Stray observations
- • I’d like to thank Joyce Carol Oates for getting into a public feud with Elon Musk centered on the main subject of this review. If people don’t take any obvious, open, and personal pleasure in anything, how “successful” are they, really?
- • I’ve been wrestling in these reviews with what to call the alien-infected masses. (I can’t call them “aliens,” because the C-SPAN chyron in the series premiere said not to.) A lot of the press material I’ve seen calls them “The Others,” but that term hasn’t been said on the show, near as I can recall—and also, in my opinion, that moniker’s taken. I don’t think “The Joined” or “The Joining” has been mentioned on the show either, but I’ve seen that in press materials and I like it.
- • Something to file away: In the ice-hotel flashback, Carol gripes that their suite is cold enough to freeze her eggs (“yolks and all”); and she references paying a lot of money to a fertility center. I don’t think Vince Gilligan & co. would do anything as hacky as suggest that Carol is miserable because she has struggled to become a mother. But! Could one of her future requests involve trying to get pregnant? (I’m not watching ahead so this isn’t a spoiler. Just speculation.)
- • My favorite moment in the Sprouts sequence is when a cheery fellow carrying supplies back into the store says, “Carol! May we sneak past you here?” Runner-up: A solo Carol shopping for groceries while Sade’s “The Sweetest Taboo” plays over the PA.
- • A tip of the cap to this episode’s credited writer-director Gordon Smith and the Pluribus creative team for the cool shot of The Golden Girls’s Rose, seen in the reflection of a DVD.
- • Lastly, kudos to whomever was responsible for picking the Golden Girls scene in which Rose describes an old acquaintance who lacked smiling muscles and who would stand on her head to express happiness… literally turning her frown upside-down. Hey, whatever it takes to look friendly, right?
