For those of you who become impatient whenever Pluribus episodes feature little to no dialogue, this week’s “Charm Offensive” should be more your speed. It has words aplenty, spilling out of both Carol and Zosia, who spend a few days together, chatting away like people on a first date. Which they kind of are…if you consider Zosia a person.
The big question of who Zosia really is—like, really is—gets explored in some depth in this episode, in ways both troubling and touching. It’s a question Carol is struggling to answer in a way she finds satisfying. Despite having acknowledged that she needs the Joined in her life to help stave off crushing loneliness, Carol won’t let go of her deeply held belief that the Joining itself was a crime against humanity.
So at the end of their three-day hang session, Carol finally snaps at Zosia (gently…so as not to cause a worldwide hive-mind seizure). She says the collective’s way of life is unsustainable and it’s “psychosis” to behave otherwise. She says she’s not given up on her mission of restoring the world to the way it was “even if it means you all leave me again.”
Then the ladies smooch, before inevitably falling into bed together. It’s complicated.
But I’m more interested in the journey than the destination (although it’s a very interesting destination), because the giddy “getting to know you” phase of Carol and Zosia’s budding romance reveals a lot about both characters. Or at least it reveals a lot about Carol. It maybe reveals a lot about Zosia…provided that we can trust what the Joined say while they’re using Zosia’s body and voice.
When it comes to Carol, it’s intriguing to see her wrestle with her reactions throughout these three days, unsure of whether she should just roll with what she’s feeling or fight it hard. She’s relatably awkward in the early going. She gives Zosia permission to criticize her lemonade-making skills and mumbles ashamedly that she only brought the Georgia O’Keefe painting home because she was afraid a wild animal might eat it. (There are a lot of wolves and buffalo around, after all.) The conversation is clumsy.
Carol finds a better groove eventually, when they try playing a game. Zosia smartly suggests spit, which Carol played with her cousins. All the while, Carol has to remind herself of who she’s dealing with: strange creatures who know what card games she used to love.
Even after she falls asleep cuddling Zosia on night one—on a mat on the floor of the Rio Rancho Events Center, where many of the Joined bed down together at night to conserve electricity—Carol does remember when she gets home to pull out her “What I Know” whiteboard list and underline “They. Eat. People.” At the end of their second day together, after Zosia tells Carol about the planet from whence the alien transmission came (Kepler-22b, an oceanic world with a radius twice that of Earth), she scrambles home to add a bunch of new information to the list, including the potentially ominous news that the Joined are building a giant antenna to spread the alien formula.
But it’s the third day that breaks Carol. After a spirited round of croquet at a nearby football field, Zosia springs a special treat: a visit to the old diner where Carol originally sketched out the world of Wycaro on stolen legal pads from her temp job. Carol looks back fondly on those days, when she drank bottomless cups of coffee poured by a waitress who didn’t hassle her to leave. Then she freezes as she realizes two things: 1.) This diner burned down years ago, which means the collective rebuilt it just for her in a gesture more “love bomb”-y than flattering; and 2.) The waitress serving her coffee now is the same one from her temp days, even though that woman moved to Miami.
Before Carol and Zosia kiss, Carol’s genuinely upset about all of this, accusing the Joined of trying to distract her. This episode is called “Charm Offensive” for a reason. Carol worries that Zosia is being so attentive—and seductive—to manipulate her into dropping all efforts to reverse the Joining. She asks Zosia to admit that the collective knows she won’t give up, and Zosia, resignedly, says, “We know. We wish you would.”
Which brings us to the enigma that is Zosia. Is she an individual, deep down? Carol keeps pressing her to stop saying “we” and start saying “I,” which is a struggle. (“All the brains in the world and you can’t navigate a fuckin’ pronoun,” Carol gripes.) Nevertheless, throughout this episode Zosia shows flashes of what can only be called a “personality.”
For example, when the ladies get a couples massage, Zosia lets out some very real moans of pleasure. She also playfully trash talks during the spit and croquet games and even goes so far during the latter to have the football stadium scoreboard light up with the words, “You suck, Carol!” Zosia displays a genuine interest in Carol’s uniqueness, too. She seems excited on behalf of the hive mind when she thinks Carol’s planning a new Wycaro novel. There’s been no new art to consume since the Joining, so this would be big news. (In fact, just hearing that the book would be welcome inspires Carol to start writing it.)
Yet even as Zosia’s trying to woo Carol, she remains honest about the nature of her existence. When Carol talks about how much she loves the sound of trains, Zosia flexes her powers, using the collective’s connections to have a passing train blow its lonely whistle. While playing spit, she rattles Carol a bit when she taps into the hive-mind to quote something Carol’s cousins used to say: “Loser has to sort.”
Through all these moments, I kept thinking about the way AI has been marketed to us over the past couple of years. Our future AI assistants are pitched as miracle-working super-pals, who non-judgmentally know our complete history (from family anecdotes to sexual kinks) and can use that knowledge to organize our lives in ways we couldn’t imagine…all while speaking in a flip, friendly voice, like the one Zosia uses on Carol.
My point is: Even Zosia’s good-natured put-downs may not be “hers,” per se. When she beats Carol at croquet, Zosia notes she has “the combined knowledge of every living croquet champion.” Her little zingers could be similarly crowd-sourced.
That’s why it’s so significant when this episode jumps ahead to Day 60 of the alien occupation—about a week-and-a-half after these two have coupled-up—and Zosia tells Carol about her favorite food. Because the Joined have to be honest, Carol specifically asks to hear about the preferences of Zosia-Zosia, not the post-Joining version. The collective accesses the original Zosia’s memories, and she tells a lovely story about eating mango ice cream as a poor kid living in a Gdańsk seaport neighborhood. For a moment, Zosia seems a lot less Joined.
Alas, we don’t get to spend a lot of time with this Zosia, as her reverie’s snapped by a hive-mind red alert: Manousos is crossing the U.S. border and is headed to Albuquerque. When he arrives, do we think that this stubborn alien-defying zealot is going to understand that Carol—the rebel he traveled an impossible distance to support—is now shacking up with one of them? They’re damn sure going to have a lot to talk about.
Stray observations
- • I always like it when things that happen in TV shows carry over to future episodes without comment, so I appreciated seeing the grenade-explosion scars on Zosia’s back during the couple’s massage and the hapless drone still wrapped around the lamppost in Carol’s cul-de-sac.
- • The Joined’s simulacrum of the diner includes having cars roll by outside occasionally, blasting music with a bass-line loud enough to rattle the windows. “This place was my escape,” Carol says about this restaurant. Her hosts mean to rekindle that feeling within her to put her in a writing mood again.
- • It’s sweet to see Zosia channeling the memory of every Wycaro fanatic and geeking out about Carol’s plan to make her pirate rogue Raban a woman (as she was always meant to be). The two ladies brainstorm about how to use existing pieces of the novels’ lore to make this change canonical. Adorable.
- • Encouraging signs, part one: Many dogs still want to be with their alien-possessed owners, so the Joined look after those very good boys and girls. Encouraging signs, part two: As Carol spoons Zosia at Rio Rancho, we see some of the Joined spooning each other too. Perhaps muscle-memory—or some deeper need—prompts these expressions of affection.
- • Speaking of which, do we think the Joined are having sex with each other? We know they’re willing to sleep with the un-Joined and that they enjoy it. When Carol sarcastically asks if the scene of masses sleeping at Rio Rancho is “going to turn into that orgy scene at the end of The Matrix,” Zosia shrugs. “Not unless you want it to.” In other words: These entities are willing. But also…when Zosia talks about the death count (1,674) and birth count (965) on a particular 10-minute stretch of the day, it raises the question of what these post-Joining babies will be like and whether the collective will try to make more.
- • We get a good long look at Carol’s whiteboards in this episode—enough to know that she too has pondered whether or not the Joined have sex. My favorite note of hers though is this observation about the others: “Don’t play faves, love all jerks same.”
Noel Murray is a contributor to The A.V. Club.
