Read More The members of this hive mind, whom Carol eventually takes to calling “the Others,” are uniformly sanguine about their transformation. They’re uniform about everything, because while their memories and emotions are still accessible—they can, for example, call up the consciousness of an assembly-line worker to reassure Carol that the specific bottle of water she’s about to drink left the plant without incident—they can’t be separated from the whole, any more than you can retrieve a specific drop of water from the ocean. The people they once were are gone. “Nobody’s in charge or everybody’s in charge,” one emissary explains to her. “Really, there’s no such thing anymore.” Advertisement Advertisement For the unlucky individuals who remain, it’s as if humanity has died—not just the people, but the concept itself. The Others are eager to put Carol at ease, almost pathologically obsessed with meeting whatever needs or desires she has. (That dessert you loved on vacation 12 years ago? The collective knowledge and skill of every chef on earth is on it.) Her negative emotions cause the collective to short-circuit, like someone yelling into a stethoscope. But Carol’s discontent seems to bother them in other ways too. In a world where everyone agrees, she is a lone dissenter, an I severed from the us. And because she is set apart, Carol feels something that the Others can longer comprehend: grief. Helen, we gradually learn, wasn’t just Carol’s agent; she was her partner, the inspiration for the dashing corsair the heroine of Carol’s novels swoons for—at least until Carol got cold feet and turned the character into a man. And now that person is gone. The hive has all of Helen’s thoughts. It knows, one emissary assures Carol, just how much Helen loved her. But it can’t know how much Carol loved her back, or what it feels like to be so suddenly and thoroughly alone. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Over the course of Pluribus’ first season, Seehorn gets to express a far wider range of emotions than she did as Better Call Saul’s buttoned-up Kim Wexler. As a self-loathing artist with a history of addiction issues, Carol is all over the map. (In addition to freeing her from Kim’s habitual ponytail, the show also liberates Seehorn from the strictures of basic cable, which means she gets to drop f-bombs aplenty—reason enough to watch, honestly.) But one of the season’s saddest moments is also one of the quietest. As Carol and Helen stand outside a bar, scrolling through social media reactions to the new novel, Helen suggests they answer a few of Carol’s readers’ questions. Who, for example, was the model for the books’ dark and mysterious hero? Helen wryly suggests that Carol tell the truth—if she’s so sick of success, what better way to free herself from her fandom than by abruptly coming out of the closet? But Carol tells Helen to simply answer “George Clooney,” because “it’s safer.” Advertisement Source: https://slate.com/culture/2025/11/pluribus-apple-tv-show-breaking-bad-x-files.html