Full spoilers follow for Pluribus Episode 3, “Grenade,” which is available now on Apple TV.
Last week in my season premiere review of Pluribus, I wondered if we’d get some flashbacks to the before times as the show progressed, and what do you know? This week’s episode starts off with that very thing!
It’s about seven years ago and Rhea Seehorn’s Carol and Miriam Shor’s Helen are vacationing in a Norwegian ice hotel. The place looks sick, but as we’ve learned about Carol already, she has a hard time just enjoying herself and living in the moment. And so while Helen (so good to have her back, and alive!) is basking in the freezing temperatures and beautiful weirdness of the “Koi Suite,” Carol is… not. As Helen tells her, “You love feeling bad.”
It’s a tough job, feeling bad, but somebody’s got to do it.
Back in the present, where Carol is really feeling bad, we see that Zosia (Karolina Wydra), the “Pirate Lady,” is back in Carol’s company for the ride home from Spain (after narrowly avoiding jetting off with Samba Schutte’s Koumba). Also, the Joined are starting to figure out how to act around Carol, like by having actual pilots fly her jet instead of the “gal from TGI Fridays.” And yet it’s still all too weird for Carol, who as that opening flashback reminds us, was never too comfortable in her own skin even when the world hadn’t been taken over by an ever-cheerful hive mind bonded by “psychic glue.”
I was surprised that in Episode 2 we had already been introduced to almost half of the Others who haven’t been infected, thinking the show might drag that out over the course of the season(s). And now in “Grenade” we get a description of the rest, and what a group: a candy vendor who loves cats, a contortionist and dancer, a retired fisherman, an eight-year-old who “hasn’t decided on a profession,” a muezzin who also loves cats (I mean, who doesn’t?), an udon noodle maker, and a self-storage facility manager from Paraguay named Manousos Oviedo, who Carol winds up having an exchange with on the phone that results in them both shouting at each other in Spanish before Carol hangs up on him. It’s fun!
Of course, you can be sure that Manousos is going to become an ally to Carol eventually, because he’s clearly one of the only Others, like her, who is unmoved by the charms of the Joined. He seemingly wants nothing to do with them, and really, can you blame him?
I mean, what are the Joined really up to anyway? They haven’t hidden the fact that they’re working on a way to get Carol and the rest of the uninfected all Joined up, if you will. And sure, they’re willing to give the Others anything and everything they want – even an atomic bomb, as we learn this week in a hilarious/terrifying scene – but how much is that just a balm, a numbing agent to tide over the 13 Others until they can psychic-glue them all to hell?
There are already a lot of theories floating around out there about what Pluribus is really about. Do the Joined represent the coming threat of AI? Is the show’s virus an analogy for COVID? Or is the hive mind meant to be a commentary on the politics of America in the year 2025, where folks on both sides of the aisle simply can’t fathom how the other side can all be thinking the same thing and not see how clearly wrong they are. #Carol2028
Well, I dunno what the show’s really about, not yet anyway. Probably it’s about all of the above and more, even if creator Vince Gilligan didn’t intend it to be. That’s just how these things work sometimes. But however you want to read into the thematics of Pluribus, it’s just compelling and fascinating TV. I’m very interested in the drips and drabs of world-building info that we’re given each episode, like the sequence in “Grenade” where we learn that Carol’s favorite supermarket (Sprouts!) is now a hollowed-out shell of its former self because the Joined are, and I quote, “consolidating resources to centralize useful items for distribution.” (And by the way, that includes items from what we’re told used to be private homes. Because there is no such thing as privacy anymore, so why should there be private homes?)
Then there’s the fact that the power is being cut at night for now on for conservation reasons, which hey, is pretty great for the planet! And why not, since there’s, as Zosia points out, no crime to prevent anymore and most people don’t work at night. I guess they also don’t watch TV anymore, or go online, or check their Instagrams, or, I don’t know, read? Maybe not so great, actually.
We eventually come back around to the topic of the ice hotel after an increasingly isolated Carol invites Zosia in for a drink. It’s a weird back and forth that they have, but sometimes that’s better than nothing when you’re lonely. The thing is, the Joined can’t help but keep shoving all their knowledge about Carol and Helen’s relationship in Carol’s face, and when Zosia references sleeping under the furs of the ice hotel seven years ago, Carol has finally had it. And so she pulls the pin on a hand grenade, which she thought was fake, and Zosia almost dies as a result.
See, Carol asked for a hand grenade in a sarcastic aside, and they gave her one. A real one. This later leads to the funny/scary conversation (with a guy in a DHL uniform) about how if she really wants one, the Joined will give Carol the previously mentioned atomic bomb too. So who really has the upper hand here…?
Meanwhile, the fact that Zosia is still smiling as she lays on the ground bleeding is creepy as heck, and we know that the Joined can’t be trusted in the long run – they won’t just let Carol be Carol once they figure out a way to infect her. But there’s no denying that Zosia did save Carol’s life, so in the spirit of The Golden Girls marathon that Carol has been indulging in recently, she kinda has to thank Zosia for being a friend.
Questions and Notes From Kepler-22b
- I guess the Indigo Girls are part of the Joined now too, eh?
- The Joined have a great emergency response system. When Zosia takes a hit from the hand grenade, everyone on the planet instantly knows she needs help.
- Did you notice the phone’s caller ID reads “It’s us, Carol”?
- I like how after all her bellyaching about not being able to shop, Carol is seen eating a microwave dinner.
- The Golden Girls stuff here is great, and you have to wonder if while writing the script, episode writer-director Gordon Smith remembered Betty White’s lines off the top of his head about the woman who always frowned and was “born without any smiling muscles.” It just fits Carol too well!
