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Episode 7 of Pluribus really gave me what I wanted from this series for a while now and that is watching Carol deal with her loneliness when the hive mind decides to leave her alone completely, this whole episode was slower than what we got used to but damn it worked so well because watching Carol have fun at first playing golf with these huge animals just walking around the course or hitting balls from the top of buildings felt like exactly what anyone would do if they had the world to themselves, but then seeing her go from having that kind of freedom and fun to being so bored and miserable that she literally points a firework at herself, that was heavy and felt very depressing to me, I think Vince Gilligan really nailed it with this episode showing us how fast things can go from exciting to feeling like prison without anyone around because there is only so much you can do alone before you start loosing it. The Manuso stuff was interesting too watching him travel all the way from Paraguay trying to learn English and hiking through the wilderness just to get to Carol but Im not going to say it felt rush it was too much to fit in that short time and production did what they could, even though he ends up getting hurt and needing the hive to save him anyway witch is kind of ironic, I thought they were going to end the episode with him finally reaching Carol but instead we got Zosa coming back, I was so focused on Manuso the whole time hhmmm. I am glad Zosa is back though because her and Carol have great chemistry and these last few episodes without her really felt empty but this smells fishy already, so now I am very curious to see where this goes with Carol realizing she cannot be alone and Manuso still trying to avoid the hive at all costs, this episode made me think a lot about what I would do in that situation and I probably would not last much longer than Carol did either.
- IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt22202452/
- Platform: AppleTV+
The episode opens up with Carol driving around in her cop car humming Its the End of the World as We Know It and right away you can tell something has changed in her, she pulls into a gas station and calls the helpline to get pump one turned on and the whole vibe is different from before because she seems relaxed, she even does a scratch off while waiting and wins but when her Gatorade shows up it aint ice cold like she asked and she actually complains about it to the hive telling them to do better next time, it like she is accepting to live inside a bubble. This is Carol at the start of her accepting the situation and trying to enjoy the perks of being the only person left who the hive has to serve, she loads up her car with fireworks from the gas station and heads home singing and you can see she is in this weird honeymoon phase with her isolation, but we all know that shit aint gonna last long because humans are not meant to be alone for extended periods no matter how much freedom you think you got. The way the episode shows her progression through these 48 days is pretty damn good, at first she is living it up changing her cop car for a Rolls Royce that still has just married written on the back window, going to hot springs and singing Nelly while taking her cloths off, playing golf on empty courses with bison walking around, even going to Georgia OKeefe museum and taking an original painting home with her because why the hell not. She sets up this fancy dinner at the restaurant where her and Helen celebrated there anniversary and has the hive make all these dishes based on memorys from her relationship, its like does feel too good to be true even if you are all alone with all this people as servants, best part is you might not feel guilty because they are not humans anymore??, she even plays music on the self playing piano and for a moment it seems like Carol has figured out how to make peace with this new reality, but you can already feel the cracks starting to show because even with all this luxury and freedom she is completely alone and no amount of expensive cars or gourmet food can fix that emptiness.
The big turning point comes around a few days latter, Carol still doing her routine but everything feels flat now, she is hitting golf balls into buildings from a parking garage instead of on a actual course and she is falling into this Anarchy tipe of behavior and there is a limit how far and strange things she can do until there is nothing more, she is sitting down while lighting fireworks instead of standing up and howling at wolves like she did earlier, you can see that the fun is gone and all thats left is this crushing loneliness that she cant escape no matter what she does. Then comes the moment that really got many of us Im sure, when one of the fireworks tips over and points directly at her face and she just sits there, she dosent move or try to get out of the way, she just turns her chair towards it and closes her eyes like she is ready to let it end her right there, the firework goes off just inches from her and sets her neihbors garage on fire but Carol survives and has to put it out like its just another boring chore. That scene was hilarious and hard because it shows how far she has fallen in just a few weeks, from enjoying her freedom to literally being suicidal because she cant handle being alone anymore, the isolation has completely broken her down and she finaly realizes that she needs the hive back in her life even if it means accepting Zosa and all the complicated feelings that come with that. The next morning Carol goes to a home improvement store and gets white paint, she comes home and paints come back in huge letters on her roundabout so the drones can see it from above, its her white flag moment where she admits defeat and asks them to return because she cant do this alone anymore.
Mean while on the other side of the world we got Manuso making his way from Paraguay all the way to New Mexico to meet Carol and this dudes journey is absolutely insane, he is learning English by repeating phrases over and over while driving through these beautiful landscapes, he siphons gas from abandoned cars and leaves money on the windshields because he beleives things will go back to normal eventually and people will come back to claim there stuff. Every time the hive offers him help whether its a ride or water or a place to rest he refuses because he hates them so fkn much its like a rage, you can see it in his face whenever he interacts with them that he thinks they are thiefs who stole everything and dont belong on this planet at all, when he gets to the Darien Gap witch is this roadles expanse between Colombia and Panama where he burns his own car rather than let the hive take it and walks into the jungle alone even after they warn him about all the dangers. The hive tells him about extreme weather, lack of clean water, deadly plants and animals but Manuso treats every warning like a lie and pushes forward anyway, after all he is a real hard head, he is crossing rivers and climbing mountains while repeating "my name is Manuso I am not one of them I wish to save the world" like to keep him going or something. The whole sequence feels like a mini survival movie and the cinematografy is really good showing off all these landscapes but if you know some of the places then you know there is a good part of it is CGI specially the Darien felt like cheap CGI, but then things go bad when he almost steps on a Chunga palm witch is a black palm tree with needle like bacteria coated spines, he slips and falls backwards onto the tree and lets out this agonizing scream as the spines pierce his back, just to remmeber the image feels terrible. He pulls himself free and the pain just keeps getting worse, by night he has to cauterize the wound with a heated machete witch is one of the most brutal scenes this season, by morning the infection has spread to his face and he collapses whispering Carols name before passing out, a helicopter shows up and the hive rescues him even though he never asked for there help and probably would have rather died than be saved by them.
The contrast between Carol and Manuso could not be more clear, Carol spent 48 days trying to enjoy her isolation but ultimately cracked and needed human conection even if it comes from the hive, Manuso spent his entire journey refusing any help from the hive and trying to do everything himself even when it almost killed him, they both want to save the world but there approaches are completely different and I think thats gonna cause problems when they finaly meet. When Zosa shows up at Carols house at the end Carol just waddles down the driveway and hugs her so tight while crying and gasping for air, you can feel how desperate she is for any kind of human contact even if Zosa is just part of the hive mind and not really a individual person anymore, Carol has accepted the hive back into her life because the alternative is dying alone witch is somehow worse than living with them, its almost like the hive finally fool Carol at least for the moment. The episode title The Gap makes sense because there is this gap between Carol and Manusos approaches to dealing with the hive and the gap between loneliness and connection that Carol try to get over but she couldnt be alone for ever, the whole episode is about how humans are not built for solitude no matter how much freedom and luxury you have because without other people to share it with everything becomes meaningless. I love how this episode made me think about loneliness and isolation, watching Carol slowly break down and watching Manuso push himself to the absolute limit just to avoid the hive was intense, this show keeps finding new ways to surprise me and I am very excited to see what happens when these two finally meet because there personalities and methods are so different that I cant see them working together easily, overall this was a fantastic episode that slowed things down to focus on character development and it paid off big time.
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