‘Pluribus’ Episode 4 Recap: Policy of Truth

Can you trust a collective? According to Carol Stuka, the answer would be a big yes. Throughout this week’s episode of Pluribus — a marked turnaround from last week’s lackadaisically plotted dip in quality — Carol works overtime to test just how trustworthy her newfound omnipresent companions really are. But is she asking the wrong questions?

Carol first plumbs the depths of the collective’s trustworthiness after coming up with a list of five things she feels she knows for sure about them: they are eager to please her, they can’t kill a fly, they like good people and jerks equally, they want to change her into one of them, and they’re weirdly honest. She doesn’t know just how honest, however, until she pulls aside a gawky, toothy cyclist (Jeff Hiller) who used to be called Larry to his friends (“of which he had many!”) and gets him to admit that her late wife and manager Helen didn’t particularly care for any of her work, even including her unpublished “personal” novel. She can tell from his reluctance to hurt her feelings that if he could have lied about this, he would have. 

She next turns to Zosia, her injured companion, in the hospital recuperating from her hand-grenade wounds. (What a show, huh?) Carol notes that the night the changeover occurred, the collective told her they didn’t understand much about “the Joining” — well, what about now? Zosia says yes, they understand it quite a bit better now; presumably this is via access to all of the world’s top surviving scientific minds. 

Carol’s interest in this question lies solely in whether or not they’ve discovered a way to reverse the process; Zosia can’t lie and say “no” if it’s not true, so her reluctance to answer is itself the answer. Carol is thrilled: “This is me happy!” she explains when Zosia apologizes for upsetting her.

Quickly, Carol comes up with a way to overcome that reluctance: a sodium pentothal injection, which she tries on herself in an experiment she films for later observation. She laughs, she cries, she misses her wife, she’s horny for Zosia — in other words, she’s painfully honest. The ol’ truth serum really works!

But when she injects Zosia with it, handcuffing herself to prevent the rapidly assembling other members of the collective from interfering, Zosia still cannot answer the question of how to undo the Joining. Like, literally: She has a heart attack rather than spill it out. All the while, the other pod people chant “PLEASE, CAROL. PLEASE, CAROL. PLEASE, CAROL” in unison, tears streaming down their faces from the pain of disappointing her by not telling her what she wants to know.

Well, Carol has her questions, and I have mine. For starters, why do the Joined keep handing Carol the means with which she can easily kill herself? Granted, they’re allowing her to drive a car, to visit buildings with multiple stories, et cetera, so they can never fully suicide-proof her. But there’s that, and there’s giving her hand grenades and heroin (which she receives from them this episode as a cover for the sodium pentothal experiment). 

Meanwhile, down in Paraguay, the other survivor who’s not getting with the program (Carlos-Manuel Vesga) is busy doing two things: checking every single band on his shortwave radio for transmissions from (I assume) other survivors, and starving to death. He won’t accept any food from the Others, you see, and the storage facility he manages is down to its last few cans of ancient dog food for him to eat. But hey, he has agency, so the collective is just letting this happen. 

Which brings me to the question I think Carol should be asking. It’s not if the hivemind is trustworthy — that much has been established. It’s if the hivemind is stupid.

Consider Carol’s question about whether they’ve learned more about what it is that they are, and how it is that they worked. The agreed-upon fact, then, which she races past, is that they emerged into the world fundamentally ignorant. Sure, they had the combined knowledge of every human being on the planet (minus a dozen or so), but that didn’t mean they knew anything about why or how what had happened just happened.

It stands to reason. The Joining took place when an extraterrestrial transmission was decoded and a nucleotide was created from the, I dunno, recipe that transmission spelled out. The creation then spread to the mind of every person on the planet, with a minuscule number of immunes. It propagated like a virus, not something known for sentience.

Now consider the hivemind’s words and actions since then. Its willingness to hand Carol weapons of both self-destruction and mass destruction, despite its unwillingness to harm either her or anyone else, confounds logic. During Carol’s grilling of “Larry,” we learn that the collective values her romantasy novels, which she herself thinks are dogshit, as much as it values Shakespeare. “It’s an expression of you,” Larry enthuses, overusing the adjective “wonderful” so much Carol has to ask him to stop.

To be blunt, this nursery-school talk, the kind of thing you stay to children — rightfully! — to encourage confidence, creativity, and self-expression. Those things are intrinsically valuable. But discernment, taste, even just plain personal preference — this is how adults determine what they value in art, and by extension in life. All kinds of art has its place and its purpose, but you kind of have to decide whether you prefer Hamlet or Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest to be a functioning person.

But the members of the hivemind aren’t functioning people at all, not anymore. They’re some weird mishmash of everyone — geniuses and idiots, visionaries and dullards, saints and monsters. Carol’s beloved Helen is in there; so are the abusive counselors at the conversion camp to which Carol was sent as a teenager, and the estranged mother who sent her there. 

But again, Carol kind of races past the implications here. She’s blowing off Larry’s apology on the collective’s behalf without asking how it is that a melting pot of all human thought and emotion produced such a placid, chilled-out new breed of person, instead of devolving into a cacophony of competing and incompatible ideas and desires. It’s nice to believe that if we all suddenly had access to one another’s minds we’d all hold hands, but it’s not self-evident that it would.

So let’s review. The Others are all permanently blissed-out people pleasers. They cannot kill other living things. They want to convert the last few holdouts, and won’t harm them directly, but won’t hesitate to hand them ways to harm themselves. They have no meaningfully personal concept of personal expression. Their big changeover has cost the lives of hundreds of millions of human beings. Assuming the show is leaving these plot holes open on purpose and I’ll grant you I’m shooting it a lot of bail here, my final question is this. If you were the senders of the transmission responsible for the Joining, and you were trying to turn a fractious planet full of nuclear armaments into a smooth, flat runway for an invasion and a pasture of docile livestock for the slaughter — if, in other words, you were making a weapon — would you have designed that transmission any differently? 

This, however, raises another question. I’m interested, in a sort of academic way, about the nature of the joining, its origin, its ultimate purpose. Let’s say I’m right and we’ve got a science-fiction story about an alien weapon that turns everyone into pod people. Hey, great! I figured it out, I solved the puzzle. Well, then what? The story itself has to offer something more than the thrill of solving a riddle. There’s a reason it’s not called “theorytelling.”

Sean T. Collins (@seantcollins.com on Bluesky and theseantcollins on Patreon) has written about television for The New York Times, Vulture, Rolling Stone, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pain Don’t Hurt: Meditations on Road House. He lives with his family on Long Island.