It's Christmas, Carol! But that doesn't mean it's all cheer and goodwill as far as Pluribus is concerned.
Santa giveth and Santa taketh too with this season 1 finale, which marks the end of a chapter, but also gives us one of the most unique, special ends to a season we've seen in quite some time.
The episode, titled 'La Chica o El Mundo', is essentially a three-hander between Carol Sturka (Rhea Seehorn), Manousos Oviedo (Carlos-Manuel Vesga), and Zosia (Karolina Wydra) — even if the latter technically represents pretty much every other person on the planet.
And with this close proximity comes a few disturbing twists that we spoke to stars Rhea Seehorn and Karolina Wydra in greater detail about.
But the final chapter begins before these three characters meet, revealing what happens when one of the few remaining survivors gets her wish in Peru.
Pluribus season 1 ending explained: What happened to Carol?
Interviews by Alex Hewitt.
With the clock ticking 71 days in, the season one finale of Pluribus starts with Kusimayu watching as a plane arrives in her small Peruvian village. A relative (in the group mind) asks if she's 'excited or nervous about what's to come.'
Against gorgeous scenic backdrops, we watch as a special crate is delivered to Kusimayu. "Will it hurt?" she asks. "Not one bit," replies the group mind. And with that, Peruvian chanting begins as Kusimayu breathes in vapour that emanates from the delivery.
As soon as she falls to the ground, mid-seizure, the religious-like chanting immediately stops. The Joined have what they wanted now. Kusimayu has joined them too, and she did so willingly, so there's no need to keep up any semblance of normalcy.
Everyone in the entire village suddenly leaves at once, letting the farm animals free as they go. Where they go next, we don't know, because then the action returns to Carol and Zosia watching Manousos on his way to Albuquerque.
Zosia suggests that they/she should not be here when he arrives in case her presence upsets him. Carol wonders if Manousos might be dangerous, as if she's not casually sleeping with a cannibal in her own home.
Manousos arrives with a machete in hand, which doesn't exactly scream diplomacy. Carol is wary, even if he's only carrying it in fear of The Joined and what they might do to him. He's wary too, unwilling to talk inside her home.
Together, they speak through a translation app outside, but Manousos is worried about Carol's phone so he tries to take it and they end up dropping it inside the grate.
"I'm finito," says Carol, as she storms back into her house and closes the front door on him. How will she keep up her Candy Crush streak now?
Realising that he's messed up, Manousos tries to retrieve the phone using his machete for leverage. A multi-purpose tool if I've ever seen one.
He then convinces Carol to talk with him again, first outside with an umbrella to shield them from satellites, and then finally, inside her house.
"These weirdos are evil," says Manousos. "They have stolen everyone’s soul. If we can't fix them, they are better off dead."
"They are still human beings," replies Carol. "They are not evil. They wouldn’t even kill an ant."
Manousos is surprised that this Carol is so different to the one he saw in the video she sent. What he doesn't know is that Zosia is attractive and therefore has won Carol over.
Inside the house, Manousos is checking for bugs and wire taps that The Joined might be using to listen in. Carol thinks he's absurd for suggesting it until he suddenly finds something very suspicious hidden away in the back of her liquor cabinet.
Carol immediately calls Zosia, who tries to tactfully reveal that it was Helen who put what turns out to be a motion sensor in there so she'd know if Carol was drinking when she shouldn't be. It's a devastating reveal, another twist of the knife that doesn't just reopen old scars but creates new ones too, just when Carol had been trying her best to suppress that grief.
Manousos reluctantly moves into one of the neighbour's houses while Carol drinks herself to sleep with The Golden Girls playing again in the background. Sounds like my idea of a good time, if it wasn't for the soul-tearing grief and post-apocalyptic vibes of it all.
The next day, Carol finds Manousos talking to Zosia, and she's instantly horrified at what she must have revealed to him.
As she pulls Zosia away to find out if she disclosed the physical nature of their relationship, Manousos calls the group mind and asks to speak with another representative.
Zosia didn't lie to him, because she can't lie, and she loves him the same as well.
Another betrayal, another stab in the gut for Carol. But it's not so much a betrayal of love as it is a reminder that this romantic fantasy Carol has begun to indulge in is all a lie.
"No, you can’t love him the same," she cries. "He’s a stranger and we… You’re my… You were my…You’re my chaperone. Mine."
Seehorn broke down this "very upsetting" exchange with us exclusively, saying: "Carol’s very careful to not poke holes in this water balloon that’s barely holding water. There's a willingness to hang onto what she would like to believe in this moment, because not only was she very, very broken from how long she was left in isolation, it was an existential threat of loneliness."
"She might just be sitting in her house watching Golden Girls until the day she dies," continues Seehorn, "unless she chooses to have a relationship with one of these people, be it a close friendship or a romantic relationship or anything. She was looking at a life alone for the rest of her life."
Manousos has become a threat to that, so Carol asks Zosia to stay away from him, mentioning all the bad things he's said about The Joined. In response, Zosia suddenly lies down, telling Carol not to be alarmed regarding what's about to happen.
It turns out Manousos got angry with another member of The Joined, deliberately so, in order to test theories around their connection and extreme collective response to heightened emotions.
"Rick, I know you are there," he says, checking the signals emanating from the radio he's placed in his hand. "Come back. I know you are there. I am there."
It looks like Manousos is trying to find a way to sever Rick's connection to the alien group mind, which explains all the scientific research he was doing alone back in Paraguay. And crucially, it looks like he might be onto something.
But before Manousos has the chance to test his research out completely, a shotgun blast suddenly takes a chunk out of the wall behind him. Carol is back and she is livid.
When Zosia wakes up, she reveals that all The Joined must leave again, like they did last time.
"For what it’s worth, [Manousos] did warn us first before he did what he did. Please tell him we’re sorry it came to this."
Manousos doesn't care though. He's just happy that his research was fruitful: "It was worth it completely. Now I know much more. You were right. I think there’s a way to put things back in their place. Come on, now the work begins…"
Carol doesn't seem too interested though.
"Do you want to save the world or get the girl?" asks Manousos.
Our answer comes in the form of stunning holiday vignettes from around the world. Swimming in a gorgeous pool, drinking tea in a luxurious apartment, visiting a snowy ski resort and what appears to be Halong Bay in Vietnam… But is it enough?
"You seem pretty quiet," says Zosia.
Carol's been wondering about Zosia's past, the unjoined Zosia, and whether she had a special someone in her life. Yes, it turns out, but they must have died before or during The Joining because they're not present in the group mind now.
"I don’t think I’m good at just feeling good," says Carol. "What makes us happy in our bodies?"
They talk about chemical reactions before Zosia suggests things will "only get better" once Carol joins them, just like Kusimayu did at the beginning of the episode.
Carol checks that they need her stem cells and her consent for the joining to occur, but something's off and Carol senses it: "My eggs. The ones I froze with Helen. You have them, don’t you. And you can make those into stem cells… You’re working on it."
"We are," replies Zosia. "You have to understand how beautiful it is. You have to see how we see it… Remember the young Peruvian girl? She just joined us. She’s happier than she's ever been."
"How long do I have?" asks Carol, broken by this news.
"A month. Hopefully no more than two or three."
"If you loved me you wouldn’t do this," pleads Carol.
"Carol, please understand we have to do this because we love you. Because I love you."
The Joined can access every memory, every skill of each person in their group mind all at once, so it looks like they've learned plenty about gaslighting and manipulation to get what they want out of Carol.
It's devastating to watch, not just for us but Seehorn too. "In episodes 8 and 9, Carol is living in a delusion somewhat voluntarily," the actor says. "She is choosing to not see obvious signs of certain things. I don’t think she saw the egg thing coming, I really don’t."
Wydra had no idea that this was coming until she received the script for episode 9: "We didn’t get all the scripts at once, so with each episode, there was a new discovery of the story as it was unfolding..."
"It was great to read that and to see how to Them, their biological imperative is everything, at all costs. They really need [Carol] to experience this thing that they’re experiencing. Same with Manousos, same with all the rest of the ‘old-schoolers’."
As Seehorn points out, this betrayal "starts the whole plot ticking again, of being ‘turned’. They can now do this without my consent."
It's with this information that Carol arms herself as the final scenes of season one pull into focus. Now 74 days into the countdown, we see Manousos doing research using science books from the library (sometimes translated using his English dictionary).
A helicopter suddenly arrives with a huge crate just as Carol pulls up in a car.
"You win," she tells Manousos. "We save the world."
"What is this?"
"An atom bomb," replies Carol.
And then the camera zooms out from above into the credits.
Yep, angry Carol is back, fresh off the horrors of that betrayal, and she's ready to stop The Joined using whatever means necessary. But how this will actually look remains to be seen. Could Pluribus really go there and actually set off an atomic bomb?
"The good news for me is that I don’t have to keep secrets," Seehorn tells us, "because I don’t know anything! I literally don’t know what she’s doing with the atom bomb."
"I have gone through a lot of thoughts in my head," she adds. "I know that they are in the writer’s room right now writing season 2, and I have chosen not to specifically ask that."
"But as excited as I am about the chemistry and the relationship and the bizarre rollercoaster that I have with Karoline Wydra playing Zosia so brilliantly, and wondering where that’s going, the dynamic between [Koumba] Diabaté (Samba Schutte) and Carol is also slightly different now. We see that he does have some compassion and admitted that he wouldn’t want to be turned either, so would he help me?"
"And then, the dynamic I have with the brilliant Carlos-Manuel Vesga playing Manousos, so fun. I’m looking forward to their combative energies, because they both so dramatically are hanging onto their own intentions and secrets that they are both immovable objects when they come up against each other, which is just often comedic, no matter how you go at it! That was a lot of fun, and he’s a tremendous actor."
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