Imagine being Carol Sturka. You make it through a crummy childhood, raised by parents who sent you to a conversion therapy camp—the aptly named “Freedom Falls”—when they realized you were gay. As an adult, you’ve poured as much of yourself as you felt you safely and profitably could into your popular romantic fantasy novels, which have found an appreciative audience. Meanwhile, in one of the great miracles of human existence—familiar to many, yet special every time—you have settled down with a companion who loves, nurtures, and understands you.
So when an alien-controlled hive mind with seemingly limitless resources and capabilities asks what it can do to make you happy, what can you say, exactly? Nearly everything that made your life satisfying has just been wrenched away by the Joining. And the Joined? Honestly, their incessant cheeriness and solicitousness feels a lot like the counselors at “Camp fuckin’ Freedom Falls.” The whole situation is impossible, bordering on hopeless.
This week’s Pluribus is called “Please, Carol” (a title that will acquire a mortifying resonance by the end); and it’s an episode that really chews into the meat of what this series is about, at least when it comes to Carol’s all-too-human tenacity. There are two moments in particular I want to spotlight, because while they’re brief, they both speak to the larger question of What Carol Wants And Why It Matters.
In one of those moments, Carol pulls out a whiteboard in her home office, containing notes for her next Wycaro novel. She almost wipes the board, but can’t quite bring herself to do it. In the second moment, later in the episode, after injecting herself with sodium thiopental (colloquially known as “truth serum”), Carol reads aloud from one of her books and remarks that it would make a good movie.
In the world that Carol now finds herself in, there will likely never be another Wycaro novel. Wycaro will likely never be adapted into a major motion picture or TV series. From what we’ve seen, the Joined do not consume popular culture. And sure, this isn’t the most important crisis Carol is currently facing. But it has to be devastating to realize that your vocation no longer has any purpose. Whatever animated Carol’s life and gave it meaning and structure…the Joined aren’t really capable of recreating that.
There’s a fantastic scene—both poignant and puckish—in which Carol reckons with her new reality. She asks for help from a Joined individual named Lawrence J. Cless (Larry to his friends). (Larry’s played by Jeff Hiller, the Emmy-winning comic character actor, who has a kookily sunny energy.) Carol asks Larry what he—or, more accurately, the collective—thinks about her books. His answer is unsatisfactorily bland at first, and at times preposterous. When asked how the Wycaro series compares to William Shakespeare, Larry chirps, “Equally!” But he touches a nerve when he reminds Carol about Moira, one of her most devoted fans, and says, “You gave her something to live for.”
Carol then pivots and asks the Joined to do something they’d promised never to do again. They access Helen’s memories and share what she really thought about Carol’s books. In short: She thought they were “harmless.” As for Carol’s unpublished passion project, Bitter Chrysalis? It’s “meh.” Helen actually never finished reading it. She just encouraged Carol to publish the novel because she knew it would make her happy.
“Please, Carol” is credited to screenwriter Alison Tatlock and director Zetna Fuentes. They and the rest of the Pluribus team do a remarkable job of building this episode’s story through a combination of seemingly digressive dialogue scenes, like the one between Larry and Carol, and long dialogue-free sequences in which we get to watch our hero think through a situation. This was a hallmark of Vince Gilligan’s Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, too: seeing Walt, Mike, Jimmy, or Carol piece together a plan, using ideas we often saw occurring to them in real time.
Here, Carol’s curiosity about everyone’s opinion of the Wycaro franchise serves two purposes. First, as I noted up top, it socks Carol in the gut. But also: While pushing Larry to admit what the Joined know about Helen’s tastes, Carol realizes they can’t lie to her. This is useful information, which she adds to a list she calls “What I Know About Them.”
The second half of this episode turns into a fun, intense caper thriller, as Carol plots how to exploit the Joined’s radical honesty. First, she goes to see Zosia in the hospital and asks outright if there’s a way to reverse the formula that linked nearly all of humanity as one happy mass. The answer? Apparently so. But no, Zosia can’t tell Carol how to do it. There is a hard limit to how truthful the Joined will be.
On to Plan B: Carol raids the hospital’s pharmacy, swiping sodium thiopental and disguising her theft by brazenly asking a concerned doctor if the collective can get her some heroin and a hypodermic. With that misdirection out of the way, back home Carol flushes the heroin and tests out the truth serum, shooting a video of herself under its influence.
I’m writing all of this as though it’s obvious at the moment what Carol is up to; but what makes these sequences so enjoyable is that the viewer is expected to piece together what’s actually happening. The self-dosing scene in particular initially seems bizarre and comical, as Carol gets stoned out of her head, hilariously slurs her words, weeps over Helen, and then admits she’s horny for Zosia. But we soon realize the Zosia lust is crucial, because it proves the drug can make a person say something out loud that she wouldn’t otherwise admit.
This triggers phase two of Carol’s sodium thiopental plan, which involves injecting the serum into Zosia’s IV drip at the hospital, then trying once again to get her to cough up the anti-Joining formula. But even though Carol wheels Zosia to a remote part of the hospital grounds, it doesn’t take long before swarms of people find them and intervene. Carol gets nothing out of Zosia, who goes into cardiac arrest as the assembled masses repeat “Please, Carol” over and over. It’s the most unnerving moment in the series since the mass infection scene in the premiere. It’s also a reminder that while all these interconnected people on Earth seem friendly, they are alien.
Before dosing Zosia, Carol has a conversation with her in which Zosia defends the Joined’s plan to convert Carol as soon as possible, saying, “You want to change us, too, don’t you?” and adding, “We know what it feels like to be you, but you’ve never been us.” Zosia strikes a compassionate note, but her meaning’s plain: This is not a “live and let live” type deal.
This is why I’ve become less bothered by Carol never asking The joined about their long-range goals. Carol is clearly on the clock here. The first order of business is to hit the reset button on the Joining before they figure out how to change her. This threat is existential—not just for Carol in the here and now but for everything she’s ever created.
Stray observations
- • Speaking of visual storytelling and demanding that the audience think along with the characters, this episode opens with a classic Gilligan-esque sequence, featuring the cranky Paraguayan self-storage manager, whom Carol spoke to on the phone last week, in the minutes leading up to those calls. We don’t know right away who he is or where (or when) he is, but gradually we get a snapshot of what his life is like, as he avoids the food the Joined prepare for him and lives off what he can scrounge from his facility’s lockers, all while taking notes about the invaders. I suspect we haven’t seen the last of him.
- • There are too many funny moments of the Joined being overly friendly for me to cite them all, so I’ll just mention my two favorites: first, when Carol steals a police car and the Joined reach out to her over the radio, saying if she feels like responding she can radio them back “just like Adam-12!”; and second, when she asks for the heroin and they suggest several alternative ways of blissing out before giving in and advising her just to snort the stuff. (She insists on a hypodermic, saying she’s “gonna Sid Vicious this shit like it’s the Chelsea fuckin’ Hotel.” When Carol next returns to the hospital later, Zosia peppily asks, “How was the heroin?”)
- • I haven’t really talked yet about Gilligan possibly using The Joined as an analogy for artificial intelligence, but I’m going to have to get into it soon, because when Larry’s giving glowing assessments of Carol’s work, he sounds exactly like those TV commercials for AI assistants, offering friendly advice to office workers punching up emails.
- • When Joined Larry is noting that Human Larry had many friends, do you think he’s proud of that? I wonder if it’s possible to undo the Joining by appealing to the individual members of the collective as individuals—to get them thinking about the ways in which they’re unique.
