They don't want to take the chance on hearing it or visually taking in what it is that Carol's trying to express.

And now the poor operator on the other end, the Howard Hamlin, is the sacrifice.

Basically, what if they isolated Howard Hamlin from the collective just for the sake of the rest of the hive?

If there was somebody that Howard Hamlin should have distanced himself from, I think Kim Wexler would be the answer.

Kim Wexler does it again, folks.

Ruined Howard Hamlin's life by ending it.

We are Walking Dead, a podcast pulverizing programs beyond The Walking Dead universe.

Sometimes we give you news, sometimes we make you laugh, most times we go deep.

This individual was represented by the former form of David Cabio.

This individual is formerly known as Cosmo Mom, 09.

This individual was known as Blasi Gardner.

And we're here to discuss with you the 5th episode of Pluribus because we just recorded the last one and I have it ready for upload and it's about to publish.

All I just have to do is fill in the details.

And it's been a minute since you've been here with us, David.

I know.

Truly.

You're especially confused.

I have truly missed your input Dave on this show.

I have missed giving it I bet.

You have.

I bet you have.

I really appreciate you.

Every single episode you guys are just saying where is David?

Also, I hate that you're in the chat.

David, if you're going to be here, just be here.

Tell you you're wrong to your face, David, Although that's a good point.

Now that you're in the chat, it's great to be back.

But yes, we're here to discuss the 5th episode of Pleurus's inaugural season, titled Got Milk.

Got milk?

No, technically, technically known.

That kind of made me a little thirsty.

This is something we should ask before we get started because I know some people don't like the taste of milk without like a chocolate or something like that, or at all.

But are you guys one of those people?

I used to drink milk a lot, but I'm one of those weirdos that puts ice in my milk.

I like freezing cold milk, so.

I'm with you.

I do like milk.

On that, but I'm putting ice in.

It just kind of grosses me out.

Don't ask me why it's just water, but it does so.

If I'm going to drink milk, it needs to be ice cold.

Yeah, why?

Doesn't like tasting the warmth for the meat.

Do you see you don't like warm milk or hot milk of?

Any kind, unless it's in Cocoa.

What's your steak with?

Chocolate in it is fine.

No, just just hot milk.

It's like on a saucepan, right?

What's the old trope?

Like you drink warm milk to go to sleep and I'm like, no thank you, I'll just stay up.

I'm not drinking more milk.

That's disgusting.

It works.

Though.

Because you throw up until you're exhausted and then you go to sleep.

That's disgusting.

I just thought it was the lactase, but all right, you should.

Just throw throw.

You get exhausted.

You get like an AB workout tomorrow.

It's gross.

Now that we've gotten the got milk question out of the way, which is actually please no, mostly unless it's modified to the degree to which I can actually drink it.

Well, we're here.

I'm here with you and I haven't been here for a while.

I explained most of this on social media and in a real on on YouTube.

So we're not going to get into that too much at all.

But well, there's a lot of crazy things going on in the world that is outside of the normal crazy things that go on around the world.

I'm going to give you an example of this.

When you have 1 country hacking the bus company of another and yelling out or singing out propaganda on the bus speakers, that's nuts.

This is the kind of things that we have to deal with in the realm of computers and security and technology.

I love my little bubble of ignorance over here that I live in.

That being said, not milk.

How does the title relate to this?

This is charity.

Like everything else, the milk is a illusion.

The milk is a lie.

Rachel has to do the obvious one.

I can't take that away.

Dick or dreams?

The more I watch, the more I think the hive is an illusion.

Their happiness is an illusion.

Which, I mean, we've suspected all along.

Is it though?

Well, the hive has feelings.

As well, can you have happiness if you don't have emotions in general, We.

Definitely saw emotion though.

I did listen to the end of the last podcast where you guys went through they, they only have a grasp on basic emotions and all that stuff.

I think for the most part I was with you guys.

However, this episode this is more color I think.

I agree.

Got milk?

Obviously.

As Sharon D pointed out in our last coverage, we've seen the theme of milk pretty much all throughout the series so far.

Almost every episode, yeah.

There has been a mention, so they're they're throwing these things right in our face if we know where to look.

I pointed it out in the first episode.

When we covered it, I was like, that was a milk truck in a yogurt truck.

Yeah, Levant Dairy.

Why?

But yes, they are showing us the answers if we know where to look.

Sometimes we don't know that that's the answer until we have episodes like this where it's much more obvious, where Carol kind of discovers it on her own.

Why the milk cartoons of all of the containers that they could be using?

Because everywhere, every cafeteria, every school, every lunch room, hospital, government building, anything like that is going to have those little things of milk.

They're innocuous because they're connected to children.

Nobody's going to think anything about a milk carton.

Not that it matters, since none of them think anything anyway.

That must be for the benefit of whoever's left.

So it's easy to transport that way.

If this were any other container, we could be making the same argument minus the fact that the milk cartoons are more solid.

Any other container I would agree is see through some degree, right?

If we're talking like soda bottles, if we're talking glass bottles, glass bottles, things, things like that, we can see right through them.

So the milk cartoons do provide obscurity I guess for what's inside the the container.

But think that through.

Why?

Who cares?

Right, it doesn't matter except for the viewer.

So then what else?

What's left after?

That could it be size measurements since they're usually half pint cartoons and maybe that's like an exact measurement?

Maybe it's a pre made dose?

Maybe it's the requisite size for optimum nutrition, which is kind of what I was thinking.

I was thinking the same thing when I started thinking about what is this substance?

It's obviously the tailor made nutrients that a human would need for survival.

Is it obvious though?

I'm taking a leap and I'm probably with you on this one anyway, but I do want to go a little bit backwards before we go a little bit forwards into what it is.

Think mimicry.

One of the first substances that most babies have when they're born, and this is a new Organism technically is mother's milk.

In your head as an image, the baby is born, what's the first thing they have mother's milk.

And So what is this Organism nursing but what was known as mother's milk?

And if they're kind of mimic the human population, or at least what they've grown to be accustomed to as the collective intelligence of the time, what better use or imagery of being a newborn.

But suckling on the image of what is mother's milk going on?

What you guys were saying before, of the liquids that we produce in the world, milk is the most universally accepted or as far as the United States goes, the government does subsidized a lot of dairy farms, milk for school programs and stuff like that, like you were touching on Sharon D, But it's so heavily prevalent in American Society at the very least.

And so milk distribution would be everywhere or the capacity to distribute that particular liquid in an easy manner to many people all at once, everywhere.

It just makes sense.

They've shown that they will go out of their way to make Carol comfortable, right?

Like the sirens and turning the Muzak on and stuff like that.

This is just another layer that she sees them drinking milk, even though, like Carol said, they're not always in cartoons.

Sometimes they're in cans or even in bottles.

Bags.

Nor bags.

Or bags.

Bags of milk.

That just sounds gross.

A bag of milk.

We used to call a kid that, by the way, because it came from somewhere else.

Obviously the bag, he had that Philadelphia accent, so he called it a bag.

A bag of milk, like how some people call it like you Baggles.

I knew that was coming.

Hey, we're 5.

Whatever, leave me alone.

Stop bullying me.

Bullying you anyway.

I mean, now that we beat that one to the ground, so what's in it?

I mean, I know what it, I know what it looks like.

I went one one place first and then by the end of the episode I was.

In a different.

Place.

Wow.

OK, I want your journey.

Let's go.

Where did it hit you first that it could be one thing?

My first thought was it was something they were adding to the milk.

We find out later that there is no milk, that it's just.

This milk is a lie.

The.

Milk is a lie that it's just this amberish substance.

So I'm like, oh, OK.

Then she finds the powdery substance, which to me look like sugar.

And if they're mixing it with water, they're creating sugar water.

Even if they kind of boil it down, it would sort of turn that amber color.

If you cook sugar on the stove top and mix it with water, it would it would turn that color and, and she said it had no smell.

There would be sweetness.

So I, I don't know.

Anyway, to me it looked like it looked like sugar water, which then took me to Men in black.

Oh, the bug.

Creatures.

Yeah, when the bug landed and he took over Edgar's body and he did sugar, sugar water.

Carol keeps referring to like, this weird alien virus.

And I'm like, oh, yeah, the bug was an alien and he wanted sugar water.

And now here, the hive mind wants sugar water.

It made sense in my head.

It's a collective.

Edgar.

What do you think?

Sharon D.

My first thought was Soylent Green, Soylent Green is people, but I was like, that's just so obvious, it can't be that.

You're meant to think that.

That's where I was at the end of the episode.

I went back and I thought, OK, they won't kill things to eat it, but they will eat it if it's already dead because the others were eating meat at the table with their families.

To whose benefit, though, was that?

Yes, only in the presence of.

Right, Zosia says they prefer to be vegetarian, but they can be flexible.

They're very anti waste so all those dead people would just be wasted if they didn't turn them into food.

And.

Just a little thing, but they were loading dead bodies into a milk truck when we met Zosha.

Good point.

Right in the Levant, Dairy truck in.

So I feel like maybe this is where it's going, but there's two on the nose for Vince Gilligan.

So I feel like there's going to be some kind of twist to it.

It's not just going to be like it's straight Soylent Green.

Something else is going on.

Because I think what you're saying leads me to the same Ave.

But let me say I'm with Rachel at least on what is in it is just basal all-encompassing nutrients in a prepackaged format that just needs water, which is everywhere.

And that's fine.

But then what is in it to make the nutrients fine?

And could it be connected to what she discovers at the end of the episode?

I was on the same path or thought process as you, Sharon D.

Because they could be preserving a lot of things, waste not, want not, and they could be doing it for a variety of benefits.

And I guess it it may not have even occurred to them to distinguish between fruits, vegetables, all these other different products in a factory of what some sort.

And again, we have to consider that the factory itself, the Agri jet factory where the dog food is processed, technically that's where they are getting the salts from, or at least that's where it's being packaged fine.

But it would be just like this series to, in a very unemotional way, say, hey, how do you think replicators on Star Trek work?

It takes everything that is wasted, everything that we have raw materials and like just breaks it down to its carbon and protein formats and then reconfigures them to make the thing that you want.

I don't know if you're familiar with Star Trek at all, but they have replicators.

We can make anything you want in your brain become material, right?

But Star Trek does this awesome thing down the years of saying, well, how do you think that happens?

Literally all the raw material that you have on board that is put into waste.

And that doesn't exclude things like, OK, not saying dead bodies, but I am saying waste.

I am also saying human waste.

We'll go into replicating usually clothing, let's say, right, because there are materials in your waste that can be used to make certain things, right?

I guess when broken down to its infinite particles, let's say, and reassembled, right?

Because then I point you to the color of the liquid.

I wonder if part of the process isn't making use of the things that we normally waste to reconfigure them into some sort of salt or powder of some kind or crystal that can be dissolved into water.

Part of that is frozen feces maybe, which that would be the gasp.

Just consider the fact that this is how the scene went down.

You're seeing all the watermelons and whatnot and fruits and vegetables frozen in the aisles and stuff like that, which is OK, that makes sense.

You look at the dog food package in the front, you're like, Oh yeah, the loose dog food has fruits and a whole lot of meat and bone, right?

Whatever.

But then you go to 1 stall, you pick up the plastic and you look underneath and she doesn't have a reaction right away because if it was a a dead animal, she'd be like a minute.

This is what is why?

Why is this?

She's like.

Takes her a minute to figure out what she's looking at.

Why am I looking at feces?

One of these things is not like the other at all.

Actually.

It's not animal or mineral or vegetable.

It's feces.

It's just a funny thought that I had in my head.

The horror is them having to explain why it is that they do this.

Also, the fruits and vegetables and stuff are in there because that is what they took from consolidating everything and they're keeping it.

Right, so we have that answer.

We feed Otto in in peachy chicken breast, but we have to supplement that because there aren't enough nutrients.

There aren't enough other variety of things that they need in that chicken breast.

So they could be using the bodies to make the gel, but they could also be putting.

Fruits and vegetables.

And such in there too as as supplements, because you can't rely on human alone.

So it's highly engineered human food.

It could also be something they use to maintain their connection.

Maybe the hive mind doesn't stay hive mind on its own.

Maybe it has to have some kind of sugar water to keep it going.

Well it is still a virus and so if the virus needs to feed off of something that's in the human body, you may be right.

But I did go to the basic science of what she was saying about the pH scale.

Obviously Aph of 7 is basically water right distilled.

Water, the basic scale.

Good one, Dave.

It is 7.1 so it is more basic than it is acidic, but that's not saying much if the range within liquids we can drink is 6 point O to 8.5.

But I will say there are naturally occurring liquids that are also in the pH scale and they are human blood.

It's a very tightly regulated pH range of 7.35 to 7.45, which is slightly basic but considered a near neutral range.

And human saliva which varies from 6.6 to 7.3 gross OK, but still valid.

Unsweetened almond milk also falls within that range.

Out of all these things that I'm looking up, that's the most strange to me.

Non natural liquids that we can partake of technically neutral phosphate buffered saline.

These are laboratory created solutions used for biological research and medical applications.

There is designed to maintain a

stable pH of around 7:00 and are isotonic, meaning they have a salt concentration similar to that of human blood.

So kind of cool specific formulations once verified for purity composition could theoretically be consumed, though they are not marketed as beverages.

And there's one other thing, it's solutions of neutral salts.

A solution of a neutral salt, such as sodium chloride table salt in pure water is also chemically neutral with aph of exactly 7.

The concentration must be appropriate for consumption like very mild saline.

So other than almond where?

Does does Gatorade fall on that scale?

I.

Think it's more alkaline, so it's all it's more acidic, but it's still consumable.

It's probably on the six point O side of the scale.

What if this is like a alien Gatorade or something like?

Maybe, but it is 7.1 so it's very close to perfect balanced pH and.

There's no chlorine in it.

There's no chlorine.

Which I thought was actually backhandedly interesting because a it's funny that she used a pool tester.

That shows some ingenuity that's covering your bases.

You want to know if the people that we're interacting with are still human?

And if you break them out, are they the same kind of person?

Can they continue to digest human food?

What not?

Is this their new diet?

Because they can't.

Testing it for chlorine made me a little bit pause because if it is a salt derived nutrient, let's say, well then if there's no chlorine in it, is that a problem or is the chlorine chemically neutral so it doesn't count in terms of the like the pH balance and stuff?

I have no idea.

I'm confident we'll find out.

Another thought occurred to me throughout all of this.

First of all, she's re recording because she realizes she sounds like a girlfriend who's trying to reform, right?

She's abused her ex-boyfriend and now she realizes, OK, I have to send this message again to get on his good side or her good side, whatever.

It doesn't go that much better the second time around, creating survivors.

Don't you think just based on their first meeting alone, that Lakshmi and Kumba, they probably already know what's in these things?

It's that she's the last one to know.

Did you not get that feeling?

Because they've been so upfront with everybody else about what's going on here, what this collective is all about and how accepting everybody else is.

I don't know if they know what's in it.

I think they just don't care.

Yeah, I think the only person who's going to care at all is going to be.

Our friend in Paris.

Menus.

Menus.

I think he's going to be the only one who cares about what she's sending out.

Yeah.

Well, it even still, to what end?

Do you think it's possible that there are other people out there that they don't know about?

Like Menusa I think.

It's possible.

There are lots of people who are very solitary that wouldn't necessarily have connections to know about them.

Granted, it's not going to be an army, but.

I would dial that back a little bit because of what we said in the first episode, which was it is extremely, extremely difficult in this day and age to go at it alone, especially in the areas that aren't say quote UN quote, civilized or modernized or whatnot.

Even then, those people are not alone.

They're in tribes, let's say.

So if one of those tribes was infected, then the rest of them on the numbers, just based on statistics are probably of the high of mind.

So I wouldn't be surprised.

However, it's extremely unlikely.

That's how I'll put it.

I'm not thinking there would be a lot, but there are people that do live out in the woods that don't have any connection to anybody anymore.

So maybe those people wouldn't be affected.

But then again, there's also the the fact that like they dropped it with chemtrails.

So like who did it not affect?

Even if that's true, they'll still be out there all alone and will be irrelevant to the story if you think about it.

I mean, if the hive mind wants to use them as whatever, they're a drone or whatever, so they would probably call them out of the woods to whatever closest town.

Where did everybody go when they left Albuquerque?

Santa Fe?

Why wouldn't they?

It's Albuquerque after all.

I've been there quite a few times.

The last time I was there probably was the worst.

You've been to Santa Fe?

Both Albuquerque and Santa Fe.

Yeah, Albuquerque.

It's got its highlights and it's low lights, quite a few low lights.

Geez.

Sorry, rude, you have to go there to to know what I mean.

It's a place where people live.

Yeah, it's all right.

It's okay.

Nothing write home about it.

It's got color.

Color.

Anyway, let's move on.

Already trashed Albuquerque.

Enough.

I was.

Going to pivot and take us in another direction and just say how nice it was to see Carol finally be able to grieve Helen in.

Whatever little way she can.

Yes, this seems to me like the first time, well, besides her, her breakdown under the truth serum spell, but this is the first time she's actually been able to sort of slow down and really acknowledge that fact.

Well, in what manner did she did that take?

It forced her when she saw the wolves digging up Helen's makeshift grave.

And Carol's like, don't do that, right?

Because that's, it's her.

That's where she's at.

I mean, she knows that she's not there anymore.

But this, I think for her, sort of brought it into reality.

Before then, she could be like, Helen's just at the store.

Helen is visiting her mom.

This really kind of brought her back to reality.

No, Helen is gone and these wolves are about to dig up her body.

And all this drama with the hive mind has.

Been very distracting, yeah.

That's exactly the word I was going to use, but then I wanted to add more words.

But yeah, it's taking away from what would normally be a stop everything, grieve, do your thing sort of process.

I've noticed that when Carol slows down and does something for herself, she gets rewarded.

Instead of relying on them to come get her trash.

She takes the trash and takes care of it herself.

And she finds out about the milk cartoons.

She slows down and builds Helen's thing by herself.

She doesn't get any help her.

Burial mounder they.

Called it a dance floor on the official podcast.

I would not.

They said it's the size of a dance floor.

It's a Greek dance floor, She.

Builds Helen's ancient Greek monument and she finds out about the bag.

The bag.

The the barcode on the bag.

Dog food right nutrient bag.

She slows down enough and takes a breath and she notices that she only has to push a button to open the gun lock on the car, which was hilarious and.

Solves her coyote problem herself like you said.

So it's every time she does something on her own, she gets rewarded for it in some way.

It's more apparent in this episode that that's the case, at least because they purposely drew that out.

Well, and then so that goes to something that was just visually.

It occurred to me when the drone took away the second message, not the first message necessarily, because you didn't kind of see it that way.

But OK, the drone is flying over the backyard, let's say, of this desert because it's a cul-de-sac in the middle of the desert and it's zooming away.

And of course, the all the all the coyotes in the world come in to Carol's backyard.

Wolves.

Was it wolves?

Yeah, they were quite.

OK, fine, let's call them wolves.

I don't care.

Some canine.

It was a.

Theme for this episode?

Yeah, Wolves.

Again, all the canines.

So as the drone is zooming past the backyard, it occurred to me, wait, you know what?

They could just do The hive mind, if they were the nefarious kind of hive mind that we're all assuming because we can't not assume, but we should probably not assume that they are.

They could just go click and then the message would never get delivered just because the way it was filmed.

I thought we were going to see him drop it off and there was the other one was going to be there too.

They was going to drop it out in the middle next to it.

Yeah, like a Vince Gilligan kind of way.

Like I dropped it exactly where the other one was because I'm robot people.

They were wolf dogs, according to the official podcast.

And.

Because everybody is going to want to know their names.

Their names were Kaya, RIP, Ricky, Koda and Cora.

That sounds right.

That's freaking.

Are they cute?

All American names slash all Native American names.

They said that while they were filming, you know, they wouldn't let anybody approach them and, and talk to them or anything.

But after the filming was done, they're like, OK, you guys can all go pet the dog, the wolf dogs now.

And everybody was over there loving on them.

That makes sense.

That's cute.

They're.

Pretty cool.

It occurred to me that they could dump the message.

But they wouldn't.

Why was I riffing off of that though?

Oh, because she figured that out on her own.

Blah blah blah.

Well, she relied on them to send that message, right?

But yeah, it occurred to me that they could just as easily dump the message.

And it's interesting.

Do it yourself.

You want an Internet, build it yourself.

Which is actually what I was thinking, because they don't need an interconnected Internet world.

This hive mine.

So the calling up at the hospital course, she has the wherewithal to pick up the phone because.

No one else is calling except.

For her, no one else needs that phone call except for her or her survivor friends who aren't really friends with her.

Basically same thing with the relying on them to send the message.

We've knocked out everything because why?

We don't need it.

We can just go hey, hive mind note over here.

It's the little things that we take for granted that this world is so hyper connected.

And when you are a hive mind, you don't need any of it because you're seeing the world through everybody's eyes and you can touch each other's consciousness through this weird psychic glue.

So the screens that we're looking at, irrelevant.

The cameras don't need it.

Cell phones don't need it at all.

It's just interesting how quiet the world would be if we were all part of this hive mind, and how noisy it would be in your head, probably, but still.

You don't know what it's like in their minds, though.

Can they tune it in and out?

Can they sort of pinpoint what they need?

Is it like a walkie-talkie where we're on, they're on different frequencies and they can tap into this person or that person or Because we've seen when Zocia is trying to communicate specifically with an individual and it does take her a second.

I think we've seen it in other characters too, where they like focus for a minute and then they're like, oh, OK.

I figured that out.

The reason why it takes long is because of human communication.

What they're attempting to do is that time it takes to get that information isn't really the time it takes to gather in their brain, it's the time it takes to actually say it to a human.

They're all at once trying to say to their human companions, hey, so and so wants to speak to you.

Except she did the same thing in the elevator when she asked her to turn on the muzak, she like closed her eyes and focused and then the muzak came on.

And that did not require human.

That was how long it took for that other human to walk into the thing and then turn a button and then come.

No, but what I'm saying is Zosha had to close her eyes and focus on messaging the person who would be in charge of doing the muzak.

Dramatic.

It's like she was searching for that specific individual out of all of them.

I think we could also consider the fact that she was damaged and so maybe it took a little effort to or more effort than normal.

Maybe it's different if, like the other person pipes up because like when she was telling Carol about the water, this guy bottled the water on the plant this day.

Like she didn't have to search for him.

That just popped into her head.

But it could be that he was listening to the conversation was like, hey, I was there that day and I bottled it.

Yeah, I just feel like anything that takes a little time is either the shuffling of feet or having to confirm it from a human person at the other end that needs that time it takes to say the things and to receive the words to confirm it.

But.

Yeah.

It's fascinating nonetheless to think about, I gotta admit.

When you were here, Dave, one of the main things I was like is I want to know how the hive mind works.

I want to know how this operates and what it actually is.

So that's like the most interesting thing it's.

All about the details, which I have to commend Vince Gilligan ET al.

For really tackling, is that there's high potential to pick this thing apart.

The more you keep it nebulous, the better your position is going to be.

Vince great, but so far so good.

I feel very good about it.

I was.

Listening to someone cover episode 3 and they were talking about the science that they put into this.

They are as close to actual real science as you can possibly get with what they're saying in this.

They didn't cut corners and just make a bunch of stuff up.

They actually got into the science.

Now, is it really stuff that could happen?

Yeah, but they they made the fantasy is based in reality, right?

It's it's firmly based in reality.

It's.

Just the way you said that, it was really funny.

Yeah.

I mean.

What specific science are you referring to though?

The four things The Gwani.

And.

They're like, so anybody who wasn't well versed in science could have easily substituted thiamine for the uracil, which would have made it DNA based, not RNA based.

The board that they're looking at and the sign when they're in the very beginning, when they show the big white board with all the equations and stuff on it, that's real science.

This how on the board is how you would create this thing that they sent us, which I think is really cool.

Right.

The rest is like a big leap, right?

You have all the pieces in place, just that there's The X Factor that makes this the show that it is basically, well, how do you get from RNA to a virus that keeps people psychic linked?

Well, stay tuned folks.

I don't know.

I don't know well.

We may never find that out.

It's interesting though.

But they.

Based it in real enough real science that it's believable.

And it's not even for the nerds.

It's for the folks that are like there's a consistent Reddit folks basically R slash pluribus, which is poppin.

I will say that I've been.

There a little bit and most of what I've seen is mostly positive you're always going to have your Ying Ying Ying Ying people but.

Oh yeah, yeah, for sure.

For sure.

A lot of the cream tends to rise to the top too.

It's just that when you're in it and getting all the notifications, which I'm not, but it's fine.

What I really wanted to talk about with this episode is the almost current or ex-girlfriend mood that the Collective 5 Mine stance is taking towards.

Carol.

We just need our space, Carol.

I love it, I love it, but I also hate that for I hate it.

I felt bad for them.

Let me paint this picture because your head immediately goes to when you hear the premise of the series.

You're earth domination.

Aliens are invading.

Oh my God.

And like I said in the in the first episode, it's like the Borg.

It's like pod people.

It's but it's the reverse.

So instead of trying to dominate Carol, they're escaping.

They're aliens that are escaping, not dominating.

They're fleeing.

I just love that little.

If you think this is aliens coming down and destroying or dominating or creating, creating chaos and havoc and killing all the humans.

And so it's the exact reverse.

They're subservient to the remaining humans.

They're fleeing when they get hurt.

Precious Angel baby alien consciousness.

It's just when you think about it, it's like it's exactly what I love about the series is that Carol is the worst.

She is the perfect, you said anti hero.

I say more like antagonizing protagonists.

They are literally the tension.

They're causing the tension in the series and really the collective because she's saying I'm just trying to save humanity.

And from their perspective, they're like.

We already did that.

Right, right.

But now we need space.

We tried to throw a life preserver but you're like, let's see, she's drowning and her arms are flailing and she's swearing at them.

She's like, OK, you need a time out?

Call us when you need a life raft, you crazy lady.

It's funny ass though.

I love that they took the common trope and turned it on its side.

Sometimes when you watch media today, it feels like everything has been done right.

What can you possibly surprise me with that hasn't already been done?

It's like kind of like what From could have been.

From is convoluted and people like that about it.

Some people.

But if you boiled everything down, added humor to it and just made the answer simple, like goad you into thinking this is an alien invasion, but really only giving you the opposite of what it is.

Pod people, alien invasion, Borg, whatever.

But just every answer points to Carol is the worst.

And the hive mind actually isn't that bad at all.

There's no nefariousness about it whatsoever.

But if you keep goading the audience into believing, showing them signs of alien invasion, but it's never going to give be that it's it's what from could have been imagine what from was actually.

Oh, so it's a nice place.

You're just ruining it.

You're just resisting it.

That's why the tension's happening.

I mean, I think the.

Nighttime monsters pretty much make it they're.

Just trying to give you a friendly hug.

Sure.

You should just let them, everything would have been fine.

Yeah.

Like in The Sixth Sense when he finally stopped being afraid of the ghost and started talking to him and he found that they just had problems that they needed him to solve for them, right?

So just needed a kid to solve their problems, which is odd actually when you think about it.

I liked seeing them mad at Carol.

I did.

It was funny.

It was funny.

Everybody's reaction all the way from her talking to Lakshmi on the phone.

She hangs up and she's like, hey, tell that Lady if she wants my number again.

And the guy looks at her and just.

Is she going to be OK?

She's going to be fine by.

The many shades of shade.

Even the recording on the phone, they won't even talk to her anymore.

Rachel, you know who that was?

Hello Carol.

This is a recording at the Tone.

You can leave a message to request anything you might need.

We'll do our best to provide it.

Our feelings for you haven't changed, Carol, but after everything that's happened, we just need a little space.

Yeah, we both know who that was.

David, do you know who the voice that is of?

Course I do.

Did you know or did you have to look it up?

Oh, no, no, I knew.

I knew.

I knew.

The second I heard, I'm like, yeah.

Is that Patrick Fabian?

Is that Hamlin?

Yes, it is.

They did not tell Ray that that was who was going to be on the other side of the phone.

They wanted to make her break the scene.

She didn't.

She was a pro.

Oh.

One day she.

Finished the scene and then she was like, it's that Patrick, why didn't you tell me?

Spice of life, lady.

That's hilarious, but.

Yes, I think it's very appropriate that it should be Howard Hamlin of all people doing the gentle breakup.

He has a perfect VO voice too.

He really does.

Who better to be the operator, right?

I want him to be my operator.

Every time I call the bank and there's an automated message, I want it to be Howard Hamlin.

We even had an opening in the sky.

It was Hamlin to go blue as we opened up the episode.

Did you lift that?

No, I'm just.

OK.

But I think that might have been they're trying to think about.

OK, wait.

It's a perfect blue sky.

No clouds.

Yeah, it's hambling to go blue.

It's so funny how I love hearing his voice throughout the episode, but every single time she calls, it's almost as though she gets increasingly more frustrated.

Wouldn't you?

The one I played for you was the one before she told him to turn on all the lights and she's banging on the club on the table which I muted because it's really loud compared to the recording.

I'm like dying laughing pleasantly loving every.

Time it plays, it gets funnier because it's just more irritating.

Like, I know you don't have to keep telling me this.

It is long, to be fair, but it's a little triggering, though.

It's really confusing because you want to feel bad for the collective because I think each of us identifies with just needing a little space and how mean Carol is.

We wouldn't want to get used to being and it's like it's mean.

There's still.

People she double S down and threatens them.

I can't be responsible for how biblically angry I'm going to be if you don't do.

One sentence like.

Biblically, I will find myself in.

I loved it.

She's emotionally manipulative.

That wouldn't make me happy.

Blackmailing if you don't, threatening biblically ishy mood, and finally abusive.

God knows knows you need your space in one sentence one.

Sentence.

She did all the isms.

She really is the worst.

I got triggered massively.

And you know, you know, the first time she's sitting out there waiting for somebody to show up and then it's a drone and she is like.

Oh, she can't.

They can't even handle coming to my place.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

Oh, my God.

Look, I got the ick.

I got the ick.

They're so mad they won't even send someone out to collect the broken drone with the bag of trash.

Conversely, she's so upset when she calls about the trash and they call back, you can tell that she was seriously hoping it would be a a real voice and not a recording, and then when it wasn't she was invisibly disappointed.

So she is realizing as much as she said just leave me alone, she doesn't really want them to leave her completely alone.

She can't.

It's like she's incapable.

She is constantly asked, calling and asking them for things, which is the complete opposite.

As our friend in Paraguay, yeah, I'm not even going to try, but I know he's from Paraguay.

He is the exact opposite of Carol.

He is truly, truly independent, not asking them for anything, going out of his way to avoid them.

Right.

There's the what we say we are versus what we actually are.

Yeah, Carol thinks she is independent and and, you know, leave me alone and I don't.

Need this and that.

But she is very heavily relying on them for lots of things.

More than she cares to admit.

Oh.

Absolutely.

Of Helen.

She has to do it herself.

She can't rely on anybody else.

I think they're technically the same person really.

Menusos and Carol, like you said, he actually does the thing, but he's also realizing that he goes through all the storage lockers, like you said, and all he's able to come up with Tic Tacs and gel and dog food haggis, which by the way, it's not that bad.

I think he's more of a realist, See, and that's the other thing too, is that we got an eye full of him at the beginning of the first episode and he makes the key art, but we don't see him at all in this episode, which makes me wonder, you had said we'd see him again just based on the teaser footage.

Maybe the messages are going to be the entry point for him to be more seen in the next episode, right?

Because I imagine they're going to drone drop because he wants to be left alone too.

Drone drop the footage.

At any point he could talk to one of them that showed up in his at his door is like put me in touch with this lady and they would do it.

But I feel like if the character wise they're going to drop ACD in the middle of his of his compound.

Or like a self playing play or something with the parachute.

We didn't want to bother you.

We're not.

This isn't food.

We swear this lady wants you to watch her DVD.

Yeah, it's Carol Asturka.

We were spying on you when you wrote that down.

Technically we did.

We got to see that.

Did they?

Who knows?

It's the it's big government, big Paraguay government.

So let's give Carol some credit.

When Lakshmi calls and says you don't make my son cry ever, because it's on the heels of the last episode, Please, Carol, right?

Can you imagine?

All around the world this collective is saying please, Carol, so they know who did it right.

Can't really.

If I had watch him is furious.

I'm just imagining the first encounter.

But then to give Carol some credit, Lakshmi says you don't make my son cry ever again.

And then I go, that's not your son.

Who do you think is crying?

And zosh is fine by the way.

Thanks for asking.

Casey wanted to know.

Thanks for asking.

My person that I love, probably who's affable.

Who's affable?

Forget all that, I figure out how to fix this.

They've already made it clear they're not interested in fixing it.

So you are not appealing to her in any way at all.

Carol can be as tone deaf as the hive mind.

Oh, Carol, she's upset about her son and you're going to be like, yeah, but I can fix this.

That's not getting her in any way.

But.

There's a difference, I think, because the hive mind wants to be understood.

Carol doesn't care.

She wants to be understood.

Or she thinks she's understood by the rest of the survivors.

And at each turn, she's completely really not.

And actually, I have an answer to this, which is so cool.

If you really think about Vince Gilligan's material, it's uniquely American, both the negative and the positive.

There's the rugged individualism, but there's also like the penchant for egotism or egotistic narcissism.

Like we are the center of the universe.

And but then there's these beautiful moments of thoughtfulness and heartfulness, things that make even the most the worst people sympathetic, like Walter White.

I say that because like the rugged individualist, I think, I think he purposely sets apart Carol from the rest of the world, or at least the rest of the surviving humanity, individuals other than collective people, because we're a different animal.

We're born of the kind of pioneering spirit of discovery, whereas the rest of the world is kind of over it.

We still kind of have that in our propositions, right in our Constitution.

The seek out, No, I'm sorry, that's the Star Trek seek out new life and new civilizations.

The whole pursuit of happiness, the pursuing part, which I just love that part of that proposition.

I think that sets people apart than traditionalism a certain way that is done over and over again.

I think Americans try to reinvent themselves and possibly I'll fatedly, you may think that what you're doing is original, but it isn't.

It's been done and you think you keep in reinventing the wheel.

It's still a wheel.

For all its shine, there is always a double edged sword to Vince Gilligan's material.

Just like Americans, I feel like this material reflects what Vince Gilligan has been really trying to say about his work all along, is that we're kind of great except when we're not.

And Carol reflects that soup to nuts.

You want to cheer her on.

You want her to succeed.

You want her to do the thing even though the thing that she's doing is hurting a lot of people.

We keep watching the episodes.

We keep wanting her to do the thing you asked for it.

She's going to break a couple eggs along the way.

So for good or for I'll, we're along for the ride with all the mistakes she's going to be making along the way.

I'm just thinking about the stuff he's done that I'm familiar with.

Yes, he had.

There are stubborn, headstrong characters that we follow.

But I don't think that's a uniquely American trait.

No, no, I think we.

Glorify it more than other cultures do.

But I don't necessarily think it's strictly an American thing.

We.

Place that value above other values.

Let's say that's that's kind of what I mean.

I mean, people are technically kind of the same all over.

Is also kind of like the message of the show is that we're all humans.

We all eat, drink, fart, poop, but some humans place certain values of over other or culturally speaking, we we place some values of other others.

And we're going to find out that the collective places, you know, the feces is normal, right?

It's just the bodily function.

You know, if we break down the particles from feces, we can eat them.

Basically make feces salts.

There are a lot of cultures out there that are more community centered than American culture.

Right.

Less individualistic, but they're still.

Individuals.

Of course, but it's what values you place above others in terms of the hierarchy of needs coming to this country.

My parents had always wanted to live next to their grandparents and their cousins and their uncles and et cetera.

We wanted all live near each other because that's kind of how we grew up.

So to hear their son say, when I turn 18, I'm going to move out and far away, It was very hurtful to them to kind of imagine a world in which I, too, would not be in the general vicinity of where they live.

And so it kind of makes sense that if somebody watching the show, people are aware of Americans, they just can't really tag us in terms of the kind of people that we are.

I think we prioritize different values over others, let's say, that make us uniquely American people, generally speaking, can't really pin us down.

I think Vince Gilligan has a way with actually being able to do that.

It's like, oh, this is what it means to be American, for good or for ill.

Cultures that tend to be more community minded tend to be smaller areas of living.

Japan's very, at least they again, it used to be very familial connected.

Japan is not a very big place, so relatively small country.

Whereas in the United States there's a lot of room for people to spread out.

We kind of grew up here with the explorer mentality, the frontiersman spirit.

Yeah, even if we can't do it on our own, we feel like we can.

Right.

Well, Americans scream individual.

I'm an individual, I can do it all.

And then they go buy their Starbucks coffee and they're computer pioneer.

Did you go kill that soybean and beef nose?

Did you kill that soybean Patty yourself?

Why did it bring this up?

Only because it was really off the heels of the Lakshmi conversation.

The difference is in attitude.

Leave well enough alone versus no, it's it's not good enough.

It's not good enough.

That's not your kid.

I completely sympathize with Lakshmi going.

Let's not make things worse than it already is.

Let's say perhaps like this is my new normal.

This is my new reality.

The world is broken.

Acknowledge that it's broken.

Maybe you can fix it, but maybe be careful.

I would like to see some more interaction between the survivors and their family members.

Sharon and I had a conversation about whether or not any individual in the hive mind would be able to basically summon forth the person they are inhabiting.

So on a day-to-day basis, is Lakshmi's son acting like a nine year old?

I'm making a guess here.

He looked about 9.

Is he doing things a nine year old would do, or is he doing trigonometry and solving?

I don't know.

Wheeling medical equipment around the hospital like the other 12 year old kid that they had Wheeling stuff around in there.

Right, that's meant for us.

Yeah.

I wonder how the interactions go and if what we speculated is possible when you're inhabiting a person.

Can you bring forth that person or do these people not exist anymore?

What if the thing that makes you you is still in there?

It's just overwhelmed by this other thing.

Right.

That's why I wonder if if that personality is able to come forward.

Yeah, at the risk of making certain leaps and assumptions, I think it's perfectly reasonable to say that the collective is making the closest approximation to Ravi is humanly possible, quote UN quote, meaning he's still there.

You can distill the parts of him in memory or in action even, or behavior, and then place it in the body.

But you also still have to admit that if they are doing that, they're doing that just to keep Lakshmi happy.

Same thing with her husband.

But that's the only reason why they're doing that.

It's not really them technically because there is no them.

Them is just the collective.

I wanted to say this in a previous episode, but I obviously haven't been since the first episode or no, No, it wasn't even grenade.

We did the first two in the first step in our first discussion that haven't been on since.

But Dragon Ball has been a long running for 30 or 40 years I think at this point.

Oh my gosh, Curatorium start.

It's a manga anime.

They introduced this concept somewhere along the line called Fusion.

In fusion, what it really is, you have two characters and they either do the fusion dance or wear Potara earrings.

Getting technical now.

And what that does is they fuse together and instead of it's being two people, one voice, it's a new being right That is composed of varying wibbly wobbly personality types from the both characters, let's say.

But they do this to increase their power to defeat the enemy.

Whatever.

You know what I'm.

Saying.

But it is a new being and this is something that's been expressed over and over again.

It's like I'm not either or the OR the other.

I'm a new person.

And so if you want to visualize what the collective is, it's not any one person, it's a new person.

So it doesn't do the audience more favors when you think of it this way, because literally this person, which is what we can refer to as is hurt.

But if it can be reversed, then what happens to those when people, well, you're?

Killing.

Does Ravi come back with his own memories or does he still have everybody else's memories too?

Does he only have part of his memories and some dude over here has the other part and Ravi's got like fragmented memories from everybody else?

And what about Ravi himself?

Does he come back or is it Ravi?

Used to be Ravi and now it's somebody completely different.

So I have 2:00-ish answers for that question.

This is a great question, right?

The way I imagine this whole psychic glue thing works is, look it obviously uses messenger RNA.

So meaning your DNA interacts with other people's DNA and relies on the messenger DNA, the RNA, to communicate with one another in a sort of distributed node system.

The way cloud computing works, distributed node system means you're relying on multiple nodes to act as a single processor.

So you're relying on the entire hive to process multiple thoughts at the same time.

Because you're multi node system, you can rely on three nodes to process some things, whereas one node a person would take all their concentration.

But you now you have multiple nodes to have a single thought, which is why they're able to do so many things at once.

You're using the entire capacity of 1's brain distributed right spread out across humanity.

So simple tasks are like you have multiple arms.

Now to do a simple task that would with one person would be impossible.

But then again, like I said, it's a single being.

It's a new being.

It's one person that has the distributed functional thought of billions of people.

I'm trying to give you a visual representation of what this actually is.

So the second ish part of that question is let's say you are able to bring Ravi out Lakshmi's child of this thing.

My worry is not necessarily the remnants of thoughts from all the other people is that are you there for creating another being technically?

Because when you pull somebody out of that collective or a fingernail, right, this is really an appendage of 1 collective being.

Does the, like you said, does the memories and the things live in Ravi now or have they been distributed or is it static in that one node and it's we're just sending messenger signals across a web?

Or is he gone and his consciousness and his memories are distributed across the collective consciousness?

It doesn't live in Ravi anymore.

That's the worry for me is that he can't come back, which is my worry at the end of the last episode is you can't do that.

That's why I'm going to go into cardiac arrest because there's no going back.

The world is broken.

We broke the thing.

You can't go back.

I'm not saying yes or no.

I'm just saying that.

What does that look like?

And that may not look like what we think it looks like.

We were led to believe that this process can be reversed, though we.

Were led to believe a lot of things alien invasion and we're kind of wrong.

I know, but Zosh's reaction or non answer to the question that Carol posed quite matter of factly.

There was no interpretation necessary.

She asked a very direct question and social's reaction to it.

Carol's like, OK, so it can be reversed.

Yeah, reverse is pretty specific though, isn't it?

Can people go back to the way they were back to before when this thing happened?

But then you're asking the person to kill themselves, though That's that's kind of what I was thinking.

How do you ask a being a being one?

Although it is collective, it's still one thing.

How do you ask somebody to destroy themselves?

That's what they're asking.

Of Carol, the human race in the 1st.

Place in regards to what you were saying about them saying that they could reverse it, they're very good at half truths.

Yes, it can be reversed, but that's just the action that doesn't tell you what that the outcome.

Right.

What that could mean is simply severing the hive mind.

So now everyone on Earth isn't linked to each other, But what does that mean for the humans now?

Are they just empty brainless shells?

Well, and here's what we forgot.

What was the process of getting them linked up?

Seizures right for an extended period of time?

What would it look like breaking them out?

They just passed out.

They didn't really have seizures.

Well, it was the seizing.

Well, seizing also means to stop.

I don't think that the actual joining is what killed anybody.

I think it was what?

They were doing.

At the times coming out of it, as long as you're not driving a car or flying an airplane, which being the hive mind, they can all say, hey, let's not do this physically, they'll come out of it.

OK.

Here's the most important thing, Carol, may be I don't want you to say anything about Helen.

I don't want you to think about Helen.

That could also be grief talking.

She hasn't had time to think about what it means to have Helen's consciousness available to her.

They could find someone who resembles Helen and stick Helen's thoughts in her, which is kind of what they attempted with Pirate Lady.

I'm not saying it would work, but I'm saying that overtime Carol would get used to it.

That's just how we are.

Something weird happens after it's done enough, you get used to it.

You may know it's not real, but you can still say Oh well, you know, this is as close as I can get to reality.

And which is better?

I don't see that working out because it's not Helen.

I'm just saying it's something that they could do.

Might be something they would try to do, but it would be an imposter.

And I agree with you, but humans overtime tend to accept things well.

They adapt, right?

It just becomes part of your everyday.

You're excited when you get a new car, but after a few weeks you're like, yeah, it's just my car.

She could be like, oh, this is not Helen.

I hate her.

I don't want her near.

But the more this person acts like Helen and is Helen ish around her, she would get used to it.

I'm not saying she would ever really fully accept it, but it would be something better than what she has.

Now I think you may be on to something only because I think it might be every single episode.

Take a concerted effort to tell us how much time has passed.

When you do that, you temper the audience's expectations.

It's only been a little over a week since she lost Helen and the world fell.

Ish.

Which, you know, how long does it take for somebody to figure out that the world fell?

And it's quite possible that it'll never go back to where the way it was.

How long does it take for somebody to accept that?

Somebody like Carol, even.

Which is why I look at you, Rachel.

I'm like, yeah, she won't accept it for a while.

She kind of is already, because she's like, hey, come get my garbage.

Hey, turn on the lights.

And it's also like, well, what else can you do for me?

Well, maybe just like the collector, you're testing the limits of what is doable under this new reality.

You almost want to push them.

Become normalized for her to call them for what she needs.

She doesn't even think twice about it.

You start a new job and you go in the first day and you don't know what the heck you're doing, but by the 3rd or 4th day you feel like you've been there.

I know where this is.

I know where that is.

You adapt, and you.

Or you kind of fake it till you make it sort of situation like you're, you're just like, oh, I assume that everybody does what I'm.

Saying is it's normal to you to go there now.

It's not something new, it's not something different and then you don't think about.

The perfect analogy, it's kind of like when you, when you start out school for the first time you ever, do you remember doing that kindergarten or something like that where you kind of start to come online, you start to kind of follow the hive, the other kids, what they're doing.

Oh, obviously this is normal.

That person's doing it.

That seems normal.

You don't know what you're doing, but and yet the adults expect you to know what you're supposed to do.

You know, you just follow what you're told because you don't know what's picking up a lunch tray like I've never eaten at a tray at home.

OK, I guess we'll do that.

You just kind of follow the crowd.

You kind of figure, oh, this seems normal.

Everybody else is doing it, that sort of situation.

So I think that's what she's doing.

This is the new normal.

Let's test this out.

Let's see how far we can take this.

Take my garbage.

Shouldn't expect a drone I don't think but.

That was funny too.

Hilarious.

Yes, it was.

It was very funny.

Also kind of infuriating.

So they said on the on the official podcast that that was a real drone that they really crashed into the pole and that was a real bag of garbage that they opened up and tried.

To pick up.

Onto the ground.

None of it was CGI, which I thought was really funny.

That's perfect.

When I saw that scene, my mouth was open in horror.

I just was like closing it.

I was, I was watching this whole thing unfold.

I'm like, OK, you know?

She did not weigh that bag at all.

You know this sounds about right.

Like jerk off motion I.

Don't know if you could notice, but you could see like it was really windy out there.

The grasses and stuff were blowing around it so that's why I was having trouble picking it up.

It was funny though.

Is that why it was very funny?

Oh, man.

But I was also in horror because I know that drone is super expensive.

Oh, yeah.

You're like, this costs a lot of money, Carol.

Don't care.

I'm like Carol.

Well, what does money mean anymore?

There's a million drones laying around.

Production wise though.

Yeah, production wise, yeah.

But Carol?

And now you know why they built their own cul-de-sac and did not film in a real neighborhood.

Grenades.

Crashing drones.

Cars with sirens.

Not the part where she ran through the fence, but the next morning with.

I know we already talked about, but when she found the button on the gun, I laughed.

That's so funny.

And every single line thereafter.

Son of a bitch, son of a bitch, son of a bitch.

Here's the other thing.

When she was doing herself up and setting the place up really nice for the first message.

The funniest part about that is it's not the doing herself up in any of that stuff.

She's trying to make herself presentable because she realizes she did not make a great impression on the folks the first time around, or at least some of the folks she's messaging.

And yet, when she's giving her whole speech, her arms are waving around.

What did she forget?

Why does she have a broken handcuff?

On one hand, she put the bottles of alcohol.

Away.

Imagine you're on the other side.

OK, this is crazy lady talking again.

Fine.

All right, let's let crazy, crazy.

There's only so many people in the world.

Where are you going to get your telenovelas from?

All right, crazy talk, crazy lady.

It's fine.

And she's saying the things just like, oh, another crazy theory.

Why?

What?

What's that?

What is?

And then she's waving it around and at one point she has it by her face.

She's like holding her head or something to that effect.

And you could see it.

It's dangling.

It's like the chain part is right out front.

And you, you must be thinking if you're locked to me.

Oh, crazy ladies, somebody must have handcuffed.

She might be probably hung handcuffed herself, that crazy idiot.

It's just not going well, whatever is happening here.

So when she finds the handcuffed thing, I'm like, OK, good for you.

Found the.

It just struck.

Me finally.

How awful all these other people are, even when when Carol came the first time to meet all of them, everybody was nice and everything, but it's like, cut her some slack.

She just lost her wife.

Everybody was like, oh, Carol, she's crazy.

And Lakshmi's like, oh, she killed my grandfather.

I lost my grandfather, I lost my wife.

And I'm all alone and you people have people and I don't.

So just kind of struck me how uncaring the other people were about it.

They know everything about her.

I'm sure they knew that her wife died.

Why would they know?

Think yeah because I was unsure if she mentioned that part or if they mentioned it to her.

The hive mind could have told them.

Everybody around those people knows that Carol lost her wife.

Well, the hive mind people would, but the survivors?

What I'm saying, Ravi could easily have told his mother that Carol's wife had just died.

They all know.

Well, yeah, the being, the collective being knows.

That would imply they have some sort of empathy to share that information.

They have told the other survivors they knew that Carol killed 11 million people.

I don't think they did.

So they didn't know that her wife died.

I'd say this much, it seems to me that the remaining survivors, all they really kind of, sort of care about is their own situation.

Yeah, which is, I mean, that's not a bad thing.

That's just kind of how we, most of us work.

I think especially if you're the only 13 people left in the world, there's not much you can do about the rest as.

Well right understand where Carol's coming from when she's there and why she's so upset.

She just lost her wife.

She's all alone.

You all people still have people she doesn't.

I think they.

Do.

It's just that.

I'll put it to you this way.

I don't know if you've ever dealt with anybody who is going through a rough grieving process.

One person in my life, when her mother died, she would go into fits of screaming.

And I'm not talking about crying, yelling, it's just yelling.

You kind of just learn to, well, as humans do adapt to that scenario, try to handle it in different ways.

And with some people when it comes to grieving, in some ways, you don't want to feed into the crying thing, like introduce stimuli that may make it worse because it could come back on you.

And there are many, many different forms of people grieving in a way that you may not be able to handle, let's say, or you may not be able to handle appropriately.

And so I feel like in some ways, when you encounter somebody that, by the way, by all accounts, looks stupid, volatile, you're in a table with Carol and she's like ranting and raving.

From your perspective, she kind of looks a little unhinged, rightfully so.

But two things can be true.

You can have the empathy but also be like, I don't want to set off this deranged lady even more.

She's obviously grieving.

I guess I'm projecting from me because I feel like I would be the kind of person that was like, I understand her wife just died.

She's really upset.

But you don't want that stank on you, right?

We don't know that they don't feel that way either.

We haven't seen any of these people since they had their sit down dinner.

The only time we hear from Lakshmi is because Carol made her son cry.

She's she's reacting to the direct effect Carol had on one of her loved ones.

They may be just sort of in their own little corner, Like, I'm going to let this lady grieve, you know, do her thing.

In a way, they're treated Lakshmi, let's say, as an example.

They're treating Carol the way Carol treats the hive mind because obviously the hive mind is like it's a new being.

It's kind of like a kid in a way.

It knows what it is, but it also doesn't know how to handle Carol.

In a way, it's kind of developmentally disabled.

It's like, I don't know what I mean.

I don't have the language or utility to be able to handle a Carol Sturka, but also Lakshmi doesn't know what to handle Carol either.

How do you handle this crazy raving lunatic lady from her perspective, right?

Not from our perspective.

We get it.

On the one hand, you don't want to set her off anymore.

But on the other hand, you made my quote UN quote kid cry.

So I'm going to yell at the thing I'm currently upset at, even though that probably is not going to help matters more, because if you set off a Carol, you may set off the chain of reaction that could make the kid cry.

Lakshmi knows that if she yells at of the hive mind, she's going to do the same thing Carol did, and then she can't blame Carol for it because she did it too.

I.

Was my first thought when she was on the phone with Carol, like aren't you crazy?

You calm down Lakshmi, because now you're doing the thing that Carol did and I want you to set Ravi off, which sets up the whole thing.

She's.

Directing it at Carol.

True, true.

I'm just like, listen, I don't want to be the match she's directing.

It at Carol rather than at.

At the Hive.

Mind, she was actually the technically reason, but anyway.

Good point.

Maybe.

So maybe this is something we ought to take away, is that when it's directed specifically at a node in the hive mind, that's when things kind of they glitch out, let's say.

But I did write that in my notes.

OK, that's interesting because of the comment Carol makes about her biblically.

Is she mood?

If she doesn't get what she wants but nobody's around, She could get as mad and screaming and ranting as much as she wants and it's really not going to affect anybody anymore because no one's around.

Out of Albuquerque she would have to like get in her car and drive to another town and find five mind person and yell at him.

Can you imagine how fast they would run away?

My gosh, they would have to bring in helicopter air support.

My gosh, get him out of here.

I don't want her to like do that but I but I do.

Yeah, I don't know.

The scene I have in my head will never compare to what they possibly show us.

Yeah.

I'm seeing like the one guy in the street, he's like dodging left to right.

And then they start running down the street and Carol's like gets into the cop car and starts and then they get air support and they lift him out.

Got him.

It's OK, It's all right.

Hi my.

Drone come picks him up.

There's no short of dramatic music in the show by.

Somebody still has to be in Albuquerque.

To turn the lights on right.

Have a drone nearby.

I don't know if you could fly a drone from another city in the city.

There has to be somebody still there, just not where Carol can see them or find them or yell at them.

Unless there is a way to do it remotely, David, can you tap into a system from?

Just plug into a computer remotely and then.

Do the thing could have a drone watching her like they did before we got a drone watching you and then they made it fly away so they could be flying a drone around and be like oh she's in her house you guys can do whatever you need to do in the city everything's fine oh she's standing outside, but far away so you can send the drone in we can see where she's going it's.

Interesting that you mentioned that, because remember when she said to turn on all the lights everywhere?

She wasn't very specific by the way, which made me worried.

I.

Was like, yeah, the lights are coming.

Conservationist right?

Exactly.

And then locks me would call up.

She was like, why are the lights on everywhere?

I'm trying to go to sleep, Robbie.

Robbie is trying to go to.

Sleep.

Trying to sleep.

Robbie doesn't need sleep.

Yes, he does.

Maybe I don't.

I don't.

He still.

They're still humid.

They are still.

What if the juice makes them work at 1 eighth to speed and so they don't need sleep but they.

But they do still need sleep.

The difference is they're going to figure out the exact optimum time of sleep and that's it.

That's they're not going to sleep anymore or any less.

That's not true.

That's not true.

Sleeping in the.

Yeah, but she had to be medically induced coma, so not true.

We don't know she.

Was napping, She was napping.

No, I truly believe they still they do.

They do still have to sleep because they are still humans.

Whatever they are mentally, they are physically, anatomically, biologically humans.

They still need to do everything a human needs to do to survive.

Absolutely.

The only joke that it would make about Ravi is that the kid probably doesn't need as much sleep as he used to, and if he does sleep at all, it's all to make luck to me feel comfortable.

Still forming, so he would physiologically still need very true, the same amount of food and nutrients that he would get normally.

And the amount of sleep.

Which brings up another question about the hive mind.

What do they do about children whose brains have not formed yet?

I wonder if babies and talk since they have all the thoughts together.

Man, that's a tough one to bring.

Their vocal cords and in their brain fully formed enough to do that.

Because even if you have the hive mind, all babies are born with the ability to speak.

They can make they.

Have to develop and their brain has to develop to a certain point before it can do that.

So I imagine that still remains the same.

Maybe with babies they have like a filter or something so babies aren't hit with like the everybody's thoughts right in their in their little brains.

Physiologically wise, they would still have to develop to a certain point before they could do things.

But.

You know what?

They don't have to be potty trained.

The little baby gets to a certain point where his brain is formed at two years old.

You don't have to potty train it because it's not to do.

Yeah, Until the brain develops to that point, it's still going to be.

Yeah, right.

It's still a biological Organism.

And learning how to walk right.

You need to form the muscles in your body to be able to hold your body weight.

It's not just about learning to take those steps, it's forming the muscles that are strong enough to carry your body around.

I imagine they have like a big daycare where they just have all the unformed brain babies stuck in there and they just have like hive mind people corralling them.

They have bodies in.

The daycare bodies, yeah.

But I mean, if we're talking about an entirely new species, they have to have the next generation of that.

Species reading the babies that stuff.

Or do they have like baby food?

I mean, it's probably so.

They can probably.

I mean, but don't babies need different nutrients than grown people?

I think they need it in different concentrations.

I think growing babies probably need more at different intervals, let's say.

Yeah, it's all about what the human body can take.

I mean, if we're talking about like Jarred baby food, it's just mushed up food.

Mostly sugar.

No, unless you're referring to like naturally occurring.

Yes, the good stuff.

I just had this vision of McDonald's and baby food with like crowned up cheeseburgers.

Sure, in a jar.

Sure.

Well, that's what I want right now.

Yeah, yeah.

But yeah, I mean as far as nutrients go, babies get the same nutrients.

Yeah, I mean, you need to package that in a way that is easily digestible for everybody.

Then who cares?

Yeah.

But I wanted to mention one little wrinkle is that yeah, we're still biological organisms and that they're only going to be able to link them up or process information in and out to the best of that biological organisms capacity, right.

You don't want to flood them with too much information at once.

They're not able to handle it.

Too much stimuli.

A baby being born screams because a they're basically blind.

The the brightness of the everything is too much for them at first.

They don't have the cognitive capacity to filter things out.

They can only handle so much at once.

Everything is in stages and so I'm, I imagine that the hive mind connectivity of their thing is extremely limited at 1st and then gradually as the Organism like a plant grows, it's able to actually handle more information in the hive.

It's able to connect to other people.

It's like having a billion mothers, let's say, or multiple billions of mothers or multiple billions of fathers being able to rear this thing, be able to tell what to do, etcetera.

So many things are involuntary at that stage.

So it's kind of cool to even think that that all of that wouldn't would not be external now, it would be internal.

All the rearing, all the guiding is internal.

It's a feeling.

They're moving the hand, they're doing the things.

Or instinct than anything else.

In a manner of speaking, yeah.

If you want to boil it down, it would be instinctual over You're not guiding the baby from the outside.

David, you haven't been with us for the past few recordings.

I'm curious to get your opinion on something specific.

When Carol's looking for the heroin, I'm using Bunny ears.

Air quotes, yeah.

Air bunnies, Air bunnies, The doctor comes in or whoever he is comes in and he refers to the bodies who are currently undergoing recovery basically.

So like drug addicts basically.

What do you think's happening to these people?

Are their brains currently in the hive or are they shut off in some capacity?

Or is it just like gobbledygook?

What do you think's happening to these bodies that are I?

Think this is severity because you'd asked the question I think a couple episodes ago, which was if you introduce physical stimuli, does everybody feel it?

I surely brought.

Up, you know, Alzheimer's and other factors that might compromise your mental ability.

Yeah, your input output.

That's the way I'm putting it.

Like in computer terms.

Can they look into your memories and differentiate between dreams or memories, dreams or a manifestation of your subconscious?

I've had these really freaky dreams that they pick up on those.

Is that something that that I that they remember that I remember?

I'm sure because in a sense we're all humans and we all draw upon a common shared experience in life, be it individuals that have different experiences and take away things from different experience.

But when you share those experiences with one another under a single consciousness, I'd imagine all that would remain is what is shared over what is different.

And even the things that are different are kind of uniquely human is it makes sense because your way of understanding the differences is a product of who you are as a human.

I'm trying to make sense of something that's very complex, but let's answer the question first because I think you can handle some of those recoveries in multiple ways.

In terms of how bad the withdrawal is, let's say you could probably put some some of those people in a medically induced coma.

I do think that the physical stimuli is not shared.

So if you get one of them high, I don't think it's something that they share.

I think it's really the emotional impact that's really the thing that is.

Does Carol ask Social when she was drinking?

Does the six year old slur his words?

Right.

She doesn't.

Doesn't work that way, correct?

I think they're just trying to heal the body.

The body is them, right?

But what a single being.

For the mind right now, where is that individual's mind currently?

It's just a node in the.

So that's the problem is that it's just a node in the collective.

Let me put it to you this way.

Think of the collective as a flat screen TV.

When you look at your TV, what do you see?

Glass and just plays images that are coming at you, right?

And you call it my TV, but you don't.

See the things that make it all?

Up.

Yeah, you don't see the pixels.

OK.

Right.

OK.

I'm with.

I'm with you.

Think of somebody who is suffering drug addiction and he could be anything, right?

Withdrawal, whatever it is, Alzheimer's, right, development disorders, whatnot.

Think of that as a pixel that is, I think, a little funky.

You may not even see it, by the way, billions of pixels.

In that sense, it's isn't that sort of like a tapestry.

You look at it from afar.

You don't get to see the forest for the trees.

You don't get to see the individual threads that make it up, that make it beautiful, that make it a single thing.

But you know, occasionally some go dark, a thread is pulled, but you don't really notice.

It doesn't change the way you feel or see or experience that beauty, that portrait.

But you know, for now it just needs to, we have to replace the thread.

We have to just weave that one thread in.

OK, if you want to put it that way in terms of, say, pixels, you may not notice one, but when there's a whole lot of them that's out, you're going to notice.

Thanks, Carol.

Which I thought occurred to me because you don't really think about this.

You're thinking it's like the milk, right?

You see, see a milk carton, You're like, oh, that makes sense.

They're in a hospital.

They drank milk.

It's in their tray.

But right.

But then you notice, wait, there's a lot of them in that hospital.

And then you remember it's only been a week.

And Carol, when she shook up that consciousness twice because we only heard about the first one, which is the billion total, including the 11 million, 160.

6,000,400 and something thousand and then 11,000,000 after that.

So it was almost a billion and then a million, and then they didn't give us a total on the second one.

Right, exactly.

And so yeah, that one hospital, do the math and distill it down to Albuquerque to see okay of that, how many of them were in Albuquerque that got hurt while they were doing all the drony things?

And so the guy hanging.

From the crane, which probably still one of my favorite moments, but even then you see the lady on the ground who had fallen on her face and she's might be one of the 11,000,000.

In the in the she might be in the freezer.

Actually, I they are very nonchalant matter for they mourn the loss and they moved on right the collective.

I'm just saying it's just an awful lot of people They had to move out of there from, probably from before, maybe during the whole thing, maybe because of Carol.

The hospital is actually a Community College that they turned into a hospital for the show.

It felt like a Community College.

It's a big Community College too, though.

Notice last week when Carol was getting ready to go into the hospital, right before she pulled the crap on Zosha, there was a guy unloading a truck that was a Duke City milk truck.

Yeah, he was.

He was unloading milk and taking it into the hospital.

You mean quote UN quote milk?

Yeah, the milk.

It doesn't have my good.

Which Zosha was drinking strawberry milk that episode too.

Carol even gave her a straw, non transparent straw so when she sucked up the brown liquid it didn't look like brown liquid.

There's also we didn't mention this.

I'm surprised we didn't.

OK so when Carol is looking across this like before the 1st coyote wolf, whatever attack, I don't know which one was which, she looks across the night stand, she sees Carol's mask and later on I think right before the 2nd wolf attack, I think she finally uses it underneath the mask the.

Sleeping.

Then they were None.

Agatha Christies And Then There Were None.

Let me just explain the premise of the book and then if you guys have ever read it, you can expound upon it.

But it's about 10 strangers, each harboring a dark secret of from their past, who are lured to a secluded island by an unknown host, which is like a common trope on TV shows with the whodunit.

Stranger invited me to an island.

Let me hop on a boat and go.

Once they're there, they're accused of past crimes through a recording and a nursery rhyme displayed in the house 1 by 1.

The guests are mysteriously murdered in a manner that echoes the nursery rhyme, and as the number of survivors dwindles, they realize the killer must be one of them.

The killer is Carol, and it's obvious it's not a mystery.

Again, reverse.

It's we're reversing the trope.

But keep going with that.

The 10 strangers accept an invitation to an isolated state on the island off the coast, only to find their host Mr.

and Misses Owen.

An anagram for unknown is absent the accusation.

A gramophone record plays accusing each of the guests of getting away with murder, and a copy of the nursery rhyme 10 Little Indians is found in every room.

The Murders.

The guests are killed off 1 by 1, with each death corresponding to a verse in the nursery rhyme and a small soldier figurine disappearing from the dining room table after each death.

The central mystery with the island cut off from the mainland, Right.

All the survivors are kind of cut off from one another.

Survivors realize the murderer is among them Carol, and they must unmask the killer before no one is left.

So there's a point to all this.

Part of it is OK.

I'm actually wondering.

I don't really think this, mind you, I don't think this, but I'm wondering if you guys might because you're more paranoid than I am about the collective.

Do you think for a hot 2nd that maybe the collective sicked the wolves on?

Carol No, I brought this up in the second episode when we were covering it with all of the people and all the lights off and people not hunting anymore, things like that.

The wildlife population is going to explode.

I was just thinking though, it'd be a good cover story.

Combination of people gone and lights off and meat underneath the ground and her trash because her trash is what drew them originally.

And she is like out on the outskirts right?

Like she's not in the city.

I'd never even considered that.

I was like, Nope, they're just wolves coming because they smell food.

But like, maybe, maybe the drones were like dangling a piece of meat towards Carol's house and dropped it somewhere.

No, I say this because it is a good cover story if that were the case.

If she were to get attacked, there's no one there to save her.

Well, that was my first thought.

I just want to be clear they.

Couldn't save her from the wolves anyway because they can't kill something even to save.

Right, right.

Not even harm it.

Which they brought up with the lion attacks or the tiger attacks or whatever early on.

Right, whatever it was gabbing about.

Well, the giraffe in my window shoe.

Giraffe shoe shoe may say.

You're leaving out the end of the book.

The murderer was actually one of the people that were there, but that person was dead too.

So he set up the whole thing because he wanted to create a mystery that could never be solved because all of the people were dead.

Even the murderer was considered to be dead.

And the whole point is that everybody's awful in the scenario, essentially for the most part.

Because like one of them had like hit a kid with their car or something and another one was embezzling or something, I don't know.

But they all did terrible crimes.

I'm wondering what you think about that in relations to to Pluribus though, Like is, do you, do you feel differently than me about Carol being the secret killer or not so secret killer if.

The reversal has a bad outcome like we said earlier, and she managed just to do the reversal.

Then she will have been the bad guy, right?

Yeah, that's actually what I'm saying.

I was thinking a little bit more opposite when I read and Then There were none.

I was thinking and then There were none.

Survivors.

Eventually the hive mind will take over these 13 people who are left and that's.

What my first thought was.

Or.

Carol's going to be responsible for the deaths of all of the survivors.

Well, that was my second thought.

I don't know why it's so funny.

I shouldn't be laughing.

I mean, it's fictional.

Let's just be real.

It's kind of like how we saw COVID.

It's the zombie Panglins.

No, it's not.

It's ridiculous.

Why is there an ITP?

Stuff like that.

How?

Many people got to sit in their house and watch Netflix.

If this is how it's going to go down, let's go down laughing.

A lot of what's happening is more funny than it is dramatic.

Like the wolf stuff, obviously.

I actually was pretty tense about that.

Because you take it for granted with this hive mind about like, like you said, Rachel, from the beginning of distracting you that if this is one single entity or Organism, that's one person and that's all that's protecting you from the rest of the living things, natural disasters and stuff like that.

So if you don't have a good relationship with that, it's not looking too good for you.

You're on the homestead now.

You're a pioneer in pioneer times all by yourself, Carol.

I was afraid that when she found the dumpster, she wasn't going to be able to get back out again and she was going to be stuck in there.

It's just funnier than that.

Until like, so because she didn't have her phone or anything, but she didn't have a phone, then they don't work anymore.

Was she going to call her I'm?

Afraid she was going to be in the dumpster then just like be stuck in there and that was going to.

So we had to come rescuer for sure.

That dumpster scene was a little shout out to the dumpster scene in Better Call Saul when Jimmy was looking for the shredded papers and he climbed into the dumpster behind the old people home and it was full of like diapers and coffee grounds and stuff.

Only far more colorful primary colors too.

Did you notice that a lot of blue, yellow, yellows and Reds pink?

It looked that way when they drove out of Albuquerque too.

All the cars were like those very bright primary colors, even though it was kind of dusky so you couldn't super see them, they still were very brightly primary colored.

That shot was stitched together.

They filmed it 2 separate ways and they filmed Carol.

She's not actually on the roof.

They filmed that on a soundstage and photoshopped her onto.

The roof.

Yeah, because they were like, it wouldn't be safe to put her up on a roof.

And I was like, OK.

And the abusive X goes good riddance, is it?

Nothing but the tail light.

Oh man, man, again, it's like you want to have sympathy for her because you guys been saying it every episode.

I hate when she did this.

I hate it.

She's the worst.

That's kind of all I said.

What I said about Vince Gilligan and uniquely American and warts and all, but also it's what makes us great is that anytime you have any sort of bad feelings towards Carol, you're really having bad feelings towards yourself because you're essentially judging the human experience.

Judge this woman after you've gone through what she's gone through, all the various things that happened in succession, losing your wife, the world as you know it, coming to an end, being basically alone and completely disconnected from the rest of this actual other survivors.

And the only person that you have left in the world is a collective consciousness.

That's one person.

I've been pretty supportive and defensive of Carol until the last episode and that just made me angry because of what a terrible, crappy thing she did.

And and when I said what made me the most upset was aren't I making you sad?

Isn't that making you sad that you're not doing what I want?

That manipulation was what made me angry.

Like I I even understood why she was doing it.

Right.

Because the grievers, like I said before, really there are people who grieve like that.

They just don't care who they're hurting because they're not in that place where they're thinking of others.

So I get that.

Like it's just you don't want to be around people like that.

Sometimes you just have to.

I'm sorry for your loss and then get to go.

Home.

I would dislike Carol in real life.

I wouldn't though.

I get it.

I get what you said before.

You're not in the right place.

Seven days, seven days, it's not enough time to kind of come down even.

Before Carol, Before in the real world, I would not like Flight Carol.

Yeah, she's kind of a miserable person.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

We all know somebody.

In her misery now.

Like, I'm totally empathetic with that.

I'm talking about the before, Carol.

I do sometimes think about that too, the kind of person she was before and you guys had a really great conversation about the things she's been through and also the kind of validation or understanding she needs from Helen, who was a good match for her, who was unconditional love or showing her this is what you're missing out on, that you don't know that you're missing out on.

But I'm showing you this thing.

It was a great conversation.

I just want to commend you on that too, because I, I love listening to that.

But yeah, now she's alone.

But she's not alone, because all the scenes with Zoja, the handcuffing, when she's causing all this pain, I kept thinking to myself, because it's hard for me to extricate that Helen is in there too.

Meaning everything that was Helen is in this distributed other conscious.

It's not Helen, and this is the trap, isn't it?

But it could be in the same respect that Ravi is for Lakshmi and her husband too, which is a trap.

The difference is Kellen, they have her memories, but she's not making any more memories.

She's not there thinking about Carol or whatever because she's dead.

All they have is what she thought then or felt then.

They don't have anything about what Helen would say.

And now?

Well, like anybody alive or dead.

The AI approximation I was talking about earlier, like in the first episode.

Based on past experiences, this is what she would say they.

Still have a little bit of themselves in there that they have to use when dealing with Carol and the others.

What I'm saying is Helen isn't there anymore to build on the memories that she has for them to deal with Carol.

All they have is her past memories.

There's no new Helen in there saying, look, this is what you should say to Carol.

I know I lived with her all these years.

This is what you should say to her to handle her.

All they have is what Helen would have said before to deal with Carol.

But this is not the same Carol that she was when Helen was alive.

Yeah.

I think, David, how I'm picturing it is no one is really making or forming new memories because I like the way you describe the fusion, David, and it makes the most sense to me.

Where once everybody became this hive mind, they are a completely different being now.

Yes, they do have all the the memories of everybody else.

So to me, because I have to make sense of things and I am like, oh, it's like this.

So it's as if the entire world, all of these humans, became the Internet.

Right, it births a new human.

Right, which is now sort of the Internet.

So if we were to go to Google and say, what would Helen think of this?

It could generate a response, but it wouldn't be that person.

What would Ravi have for breakfast?

It could generate a response, but it's not actually Ravi saying here's what I want for breakfast.

It's like they became the Internet.

What this episode tells us though, you wouldn't be faulted for thinking that this thing is unfeeling or does not have a personality until this episode where they decided they needed space from Carol.

That means it actually cares or is self preserving.

It cares about protecting its feelings, but also it's bodily integrity, right?

Because in a sense, Carol betrayed their trust.

That's where they're like, please Carol, please Carol, you're hurting us in a different way than you did before when you were yelling at us.

You're betraying us.

We gave you everything.

All we want to do is make you happy and you're hurting us.

And it's not even the physical hurt.

I just want to reiterate that when we're talking about the addiction, the physical addiction, physical addition, drinking, whatever doesn't bother them, Impairment doesn't bother them.

It's the idea of betrayal.

You're getting me to do something that I can't, I'm not supposed to be able to do.

You're betraying me.

And they made that very clear as well.

You're forcing me to do something I don't want to do or I can't.

I'm not supposed to do like is literally making me destroy myself.

So that's what hurts them or that's why they're crying.

They can't stop because they can't stop that one node from spilling the beans.

It's a dangerous thing being able to tap into a node that has the collection of knowledge that you have access.

Like let's say you hacked the she literally hacked the Internet being an extracted data from it and it hurt.

I understand that completely after the week I've had, I feel betrayed.

I felt what Zocia felt and had to clean it up and everything put tubes in my face.

I love that this thing is this being this person, this this thing has a personality and it not that it's fighting back, but it's protecting, it's running away from the thing that caused it, the pain, like any Organism would do, ex-girlfriend would do.

Because again, I I still see the collective as a sort of Helen 2 point O in a sense, like her chance of actually having a the new.

It's like a fusion of Helen with everybody else.

Because I don't agree that you can distill Helen into another Zosha, let's say like because it's easy to kind of because your brain, right, you look at Zosha like, oh, that's isn't that Helen?

Because she from her memory drew out that image of ribbon and put it like, this is as close as it's going to get.

Everybody thinks that Ribbon was based on Helen, but they never explicitly said that.

What if Ribbon is based on what Carol wants for herself?

That's literally what I said in the first episode.

Which is why she's doing all this, because she thinks she's being a hero when she's saving people.

Haughty and proud, right?

I also thought it was Carol.

That was the first thing I said.

And you guys said it was wrong.

And we're like, OK, fine, then we'll talk about it over.

It's the idealized self, though, isn't it?

Right.

It's who you imagine yourself to be versus who you actually are.

And isn't that how she's seeing herself right now?

Haughty and proud?

And at the same time, it's like, yeah, but you don't realize the other dark side of those attributes.

And that's destructive and unfeeling and abusive and manipulative, right?

Right.

Because that being is still a being.

It still has feelings and catastrophic.

She is as a writer because she's abusing and manipulating her readers and they're eating it up.

They're not taking it that way.

But when you create characters and then you leave people hanging as to what happens to them or you kill them off, you're manipulating and hurting your readers.

Yeah, that's how I sometimes refer to Chuck Poland X writing author of Fight Club.

Basically, he does that to his audience too.

Just makes us feel things that we don't want to feel.

Isn't that what all artists try to do, is try to get you to feel a certain way about certain things?

It's a little meta, what the series is doing to us.

We're trying to recognize the damage that we're doing as artists or even us as podcasters.

I don't know if there is an intended feeling that an artist wants you to feel.

They just want you to feel something and it's open to interpretation.

They want to gently guide they.

Want you to take away whatever feeling it is that you need to feel in that moment.

Because an artist is going to feel a certain way while they're creating it.

And yeah, a lot of people probably are going to feel the same way, but a good majority aren't.

They're going to feel a completely different way, but the goal is still the same.

They made you feel something.

Right.

See, the what I had written down also was that Carol was kind of like the Internet too in a sense where a lot of people in Internet, the way it's democratized currently, I don't think people understand the degree to which they have influence to the point where I think most people don't think they have influence.

But when they start yelling on the Internet and they reach certain people, I think it has a severe impact, more impact than they're able to feel in that current moment.

And so when Carol flies off the handle, she doesn't understand or she hasn't grasped yet.

And I think she's starting to the kinds of destructive power her mere words have against a whole being.

And I think that's how we are on the Internet.

Sometimes the words we use on the Internet could have a severe effect on one person or many people.

It can make many people feel bad, many people empowered.

We just don't understand the degree to which, because I had this thought about free speech, how it's a privilege, it's also a right, but it's also like once you say a thing, once you bring that idea or meme into reality, the people within earshot can't unhear or Unsee it.

An extreme amount of power that you don't really think about on a day-to-day basis.

That's why they've all disappeared.

That's why they've all run away.

They don't want to take the chance on hearing it or visually taking in what it is that Carol's trying to express.

And now the poor operator on the other end, the Howard Hamlin, is the sacrifice.

Basically.

What if they isolated Howard Hamlin from the collective just for the sake of the rest of the hive?

There was somebody that Howard Hamlin should have distanced himself from.

I think Kim Wexler would be the answer.

Right.

Kim Wexler does it again, folks.

Ruin Howard Hamlin's life by ending.

It Duke City, which is the name of the dairy company, is a nickname for Albuquerque because Albuquerque was named after the Spanish noble, the Duke of Albuquerque.

Albuquerque.

I mean, it's also called the ABQ, but there was a shot that they use, as they called it the Well of Soul Shot.

And it's this backlit sunset.

When Carol's done with the dance floor standing with the sunset behind her.

They talked about getting that shot in the podcast, but they were calling it the Well of Soul Shot because it resembled the one where Indy was directing the Diggers.

Raiders are Lost Ark when they were digging for the Ark and there's a shot of Indy with the sunset behind.

Him and he's all silhouetted basically.

So when you see Carol silhouetted, you can see all the bugs flying around her.

The Nats, which?

Kind of made me think of the hive mind people all.

Buzzing about Carol.

However, how they got that shot was the camera was really far away and because of the way the lens they were using, all of the bugs that were in between the camera and Racy horn were caught in that shot.

So that's why it looks like there's a gajillion bugs around her face.

It really wasn't like that, but I thought that was.

Kind of work.

But right, I did think so too.

I'd look like the hive mind people going around in her.

The little hive.

The Gnat hive.

Beautiful shot.

Also, another shot that was really interesting was right after she chased the wolves off, they showed a shot of looking down from the top of the car into the driver's side.

No cut tracking shots at the beginning, you kind of take it for granted.

You start off with that sky scene through the mesh window and then pulls back, sees the guy drinking the milk and you keep pulling back and you see this person come across.

It's all a single shot.

Again, really well done, really well thought out shots to kind of convey multiple ideas at once, or multiple Chekhov's guns, Chekhov's milk carton at once.

Soylent Green is people.

David, we already know what you think.

Charity What?

What did she see under that tarp?

I hate to go with the trope, but I think it's body parts.

Something freeze dried.

Maybe it took her a minute to recognize what it was because being freeze dried is going to look a little weird.

I feel like I'm wrong because I just feel like that's way too obvious an answer.

I'm trying to think of anything else that would give her the reaction we saw though.

I mean, I also thought body parts.

Maybe it's dogs or something, who knows.

Everybody hates that.

That would freak me out.

I'd rather say people.

I just really feel like people is too obvious an answer, but I feel like that's the one I have to go with.

You know what?

That's why we're not writing the show.

Yeah.

That's why I went so far afield with my answer.

Maybe it's her DVDs.

Maybe it's her Golden Girls collection.

They went in my house and stole it.

It's the camera card she flushed down the toilet they found, too.

And the other two, she said.

Well, maybe that could be it.

All right.

And they make me eat it.

They came out and dug Helen up when she wasn't there and moved Helen's body and now she just covered up a.

That is a Dave answer 5 ever heard.

Moreover, of empty grave.

Cruelty, thy name is Sharon.

Don't touch that dial.

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Let's leave it there.

We have a lot on the plates.

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And with that, everybody, I hope you enjoyed this discussion on Pluribus, the 5th episode if it's the inaugural season titled Got Milk.

And now you have a lot to think about, everybody.

This individual was David Cameo.

This individual, formerly known as Cosmo mom the.

Artist formerly known as Cosmo Momo 9.

This individual is Lazy Gardner.

And we are squawking dead.

I have mine meat pop board.

We'll see you next time anyway.

Bye bye meat, back pork.

We're done.

I don't need a mute.

For you, however, I should go with this one.

Thanks so much for making it to the end of yet another episode of Squawking Dead.

This one, our discussion on Pluribus's fifth episode of its inaugural season, titled Got Milk.

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Thank you so much again.

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It's been a little rough trying to cover 2 episodes a week doing our best over here in light of all the things that have been happening behind the scenes in my own personal life that has prevented me from attending a couple of or handful of episodes.

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