you Hello fellow humans and welcome to e pluribus unum where we do a deep dive into the hive mind I am Eric and I'm Josh and welcome to episode 3 where we cover pluribus grenade an Ominous title for this episode.

What do you think?

Yeah, I think it's a little ominous and it ties very well into the ending and I think it means more than it shows on the surface I think as well So you don't think it's too on the nose, so to speak?

I don't think so, no.

All right, all right.

Well, just as an overview, I appreciated this episode, I think maybe more than 50 other percent of the audience out there.

I feel like what I read sounded as though this episode might've been a little divisive.

What do you think about that?

I could see why when I was...

Initially thinking about this episode, I felt that it was definitely more about exploring the themes as opposed to moving the plot forward.

So I could see why folks who are really intrigued by the mystery and really want answers weren't as happy with this episode, but I quite liked it at the end of the day.

But before we sort of jump in, I think we need to have a bit of an important.

correction from episode one and two for us.

Okay.

We have been pronouncing the lead actress as Rhea.

And it turns out that her name is actually pronounced Ray.

Ray Sehorn is the name of Carol in real life.

So you're saying it's Ray Sehorn.

Ray Sehorn, yeah.

Right.

I guess that makes sense, R -H.

Okay.

I can invest in that and I feel like a complete idiot.

So, you know, there's also that.

I feel like we're an old school newspaper and we have to print an apology or something saying that we misquoted in a previous issue.

So maybe that's it.

It also just proves that guess what, we're human and we're not part of the hive mind.

And maybe that is a way we can test ourselves to ensure that we're not part of that hive mind.

The hive mind would have known how to pronounce that correctly.

Yeah, but they probably wouldn't have known about some pretty obvious other things, you know, and I think that those ideas and thoughts are explored in this episode, as you mentioned before.

You know, I'll say this, you mentioned episodes one and two being a character study.

I think the quote unquote slowdown of this episode is that it is a character study.

It is literally us learning more about Carol and almost nothing else.

I thought it fit well enough in the structure of the show and it didn't do what maybe somebody might have expected, which is to continue to ramp up the action, so to speak, in the show or the mystery or anything like that.

But I think it's smart to do it.

I think it also shows us that it's still not the show that we might have expected it to be.

I agree, yeah.

And I think if you're familiar with Vince Gilligan's work, you know that there are going to be episodes like this where he'll not necessarily hit the pause button, but he'll take his time and allow a character to have a little bit of breathing room and explore their background and explore exactly how they're feeling within this moment.

Because the characters themselves are explorations of the theme of not only the episode, but the series as well.

We've been talking about how much we love his cold opens and he literally gives us a cold open.

Yeah, I like that quite a bit and He does a good job in this opening scene showing that Carol is very much the same character post -joining as she was pre -joining Her wife brings her to this ice palace hotel.

That seems very cool.

Honestly, it'd be an amazing trip And it seems like the reason that they're at this sort of getaway is because Carol's book numbers are coming in and they want to sort of get away.

Yeah, the fray.

Exactly.

Exactly.

She's as anxious about how successful she can be with her writing as she is angry at the world.

One side of it is this anxiety of, is this good enough?

Do enough people like it?

Is it high enough on the list?

That sort of thing.

And then on the other side, it's like, why am I in this?

with a bed literally made of ice and the view through the window of the Aurora Borealis looks like a screen saver.

And you know, a lot of what she's saying here is repeated later in the episode, post -June.

Absolutely.

She doesn't seem like she wants change or anything new.

She wants what she is comfortable with.

She's very much likes what she likes and she wants what she wants.

And quite honestly, she can be a little annoying when she doesn't get exactly what she wants and have things exactly how she likes, which I think speaks to the relationship with her wife slash manager because her, her wife is essentially rankling her throughout so much of their relationship that we've seen.

It's in their own personal lives even.

Exactly.

Yeah.

Yeah.

She's, uh, wrangling the talent even when they're off the clock.

Well, I think the key takeaways from this opening sequence where we see Carol and Helen having a vacation in Norway is to show us that Carol was a curmudgeon before and is now still a curmudgeon as we know her in the context of the joining.

The second thing I thought was It's put up as a sort of a throwaway line is to say I froze my eggs including the yolks so she mentions having had her eggs frozen and This is colder than that or something along those lines But she has the thought to have her eggs frozen and that she has the thought that she might want a child Apparently is the thought that I have in this and I find that really interesting because I don't think her character exudes that and I'm wondering if that's going to play into this later in some strange way.

I can only assume it for me in my perspective of this thing in a maybe terrifying or not great way.

That leads us to the next scene where.

She's sitting in the back of the plane again.

And instead of having the TGI Fridays lady flying the plane, we have two very professional, very seasoned pilots in the front seat.

And she and Zosia are apparently headed back to Albuquerque.

And she finds out that there is another immune, as you've been calling them, doesn't speak English and has been avoiding the joined as they try to reach out to him.

And Carol says, well, let me give him a call.

Even though he only speaks Spanish, let me give it a try.

And this scene is, again, funny and unnerving at the same time.

And I think this highlights a big theme in this episode, which is loneliness, especially for Carol.

Even at this point, she seems to have alienated the first five immune that she's met.

And it's almost as if she sees a kindred spirit in this 13th immune.

that wants nothing to do with the joint.

It's the only other one that she's found that seems to think like she does.

And these multiple calls out to them while they're on the plane here.

And it's multiple calls because he keeps hanging up on her.

And so she'll hand the phone back over to Zosia and dial him again.

And it happens more than half a dozen times, but it's like this bit almost that's happening as she's slowly peeling away the layers of this Paraguay onion.

Exactly.

Well, the scene ends with her not really even getting in touch with him.

He curses at her in the next last call.

She makes his OSHA call him again.

And when she returns the call, she just curses at him in Spanish and hangs up the phone.

Like, I got the last word on this situation.

So I found that to be really funny.

And it wouldn't surprise me if that doesn't endear him to her.

And he's more like, oh, you're obviously not a joined.

Now I want to talk to you.

more like I am.

And I thought that was again funny and quite brilliant.

At this point she gets back home and she sees that she's received a package and the package is from Helen and it is a massage gun that Carol had tried at the airport and Helen just bought it for her because she wanted to give her a surprise gift when they returned back from the book tour.

And of course this just ends up sparking Carol's grief again.

Once again she goes after Zosia and says, I told you to stop using Helen.

You can't use Helen.

Zosia has to explain this isn't us using Helen.

This is Helen.

This is the last thing she sent to you.

And they constantly have to re -describe the fact that they aren't using Helen's memories against her that.

any information they have they're using from other sources.

You talked about nodes in the last episode.

It's another node.

It's the maid who cleans the refrigerator.

She knew how much you had in the fridge and all that kind of stuff.

Yeah, and we even have a scene here that is a little heart -wrenching, I think.

She calls Zosia, and as she's looking out the window, she's looking at Helen's grave in the backyard, and she says, forget everything you know about Helen.

And essentially hangs up on Zosia because really all that Carol has now is her memory of Helen and feels like it's been stolen by the hive mind because they have her consciousness, if you want to call it that.

So she is almost desperate to carve that back from the hive mind.

And I think that's sort of impossible.

I don't think the hive mind has the ability to forget everything they know about Helen.

All she does have left is that memory and even that.

she feels has been taken away by the hive mind.

And we see her over the next day or so rotting away on the couch watching Golden Girls, which for a scene that is someone's laying down on a couch and watching a television show, it's immaculately shot.

Some of the scenes where.

We're looking at Carol and the television is reflecting in a disc that's laying down on the table and we get to see Betty White's face as she's delivering her lines in Golden Girls.

One of the episodes of the Golden Girls is called Dorothy's New Friend.

And this is the one where she's telling the story about the woman who couldn't smile and had to stand on her head in order for it to look like she was smiling.

The only smile we've seen on her face ever is a sarcastic smile.

At this point in the story, Carol can do anything.

She can go anywhere.

She can meet anyone that she wants.

She can have any meal that she would like.

And she chooses at that point to stay home and dive into her golden girls.

And as we see in a moment here, she chooses not to eat this wonderful breakfast that the joint has delivered to her.

She wants to go to her own grocery store and she wants to live as much as she can in that old world.

She even says on the call with his OSHA.

I'm a very independent person.

She does end up going to the sprouts grocery store to pick up her own meal so she can cook for herself because she, she truly believes that she's this independent person.

It goes to show you how.

much of an illusion independence really is and in modern life and and how Carol isn't as independent as she really wished that she could be because there's nothing in this grocery store.

She doesn't grow her own meals and she doesn't slaughter her own animals for for her bacon in the morning.

That independence is kind of shoved in her face has a bit of an illusion where you always needed the help of others.

You always needed a stocked grocery store and you always needed Helen to prop you up because you were constantly sort of floundering a little bit.

And without that rudder that was Helen and without that ecosystem of things like a grocery store, are you really as independent as you really wanted to believe?

Yeah, I think you bring up a great point.

I would say it's one I didn't necessarily catch and I agree wholeheartedly with you.

So essentially she's at home and they know how much food she does or doesn't have and they deliver this classic Looney Tunes cartoon of the silver platter with the silver dome over the top.

Again played to a great fair with seeing her reflection in the dome as she goes to lift and you see this gorgeous plate of food and she's like, I don't want your food.

I just want to be able to go to my own grocery store and go get my own groceries.

And they're like, yeah, go ahead.

without saying anything more really.

She hauls her butt into town and she's ready to go into Sprouts, which is a real store.

And when you see this overhead shot of the store, the entire store is empty.

All of the produce, all of the groceries are all completely gone.

It looks like a brand new store.

And she walks in just in shock.

And what does she do?

She goes to the nearest phone.

picks it up and presses zero and hops on there and goes, hi Carol, how can we help you?

And she says, I want my store back.

And she says over the phone, we're on our way.

And this is where I have a question.

Either they knew she was coming to the grocery store specifically and they had these trucks.

close by, fully stocked with the entire store, waiting for her to make this decision so that they can come and show her, I would say, their power or their efficiency, let's say, be more direct with what the themes are in the show.

And we get this beautiful sequence, once again, of a ballet of vehicles, this ballet of trucks rolls in in this very eloquent way.

These people bounce out of these trucks.

in a very timed and accurate way, and they go to refill the entire store within a matter of moments.

As a matter of fact, I was hoping, because there's a time stamp at the beginning and a time stamp at the end, I was praying it was 78 minutes, because the original signal from episode one was 78 seconds apart.

And so since that was 78 seconds apart, I was hoping this was going to be 78 minutes later, and that there would be this neat little efficiency there.

But it wasn't.

It was 68 minutes.

You know, take that for what it is.

But 68 minutes later, she has her sprouts back.

To reflect on my question too, and it's more a production question than it is an inside the television show question.

Did the hive mind predict that she was going to be at that sprouts and knew that they had to show up in order to restock the store in 68 minutes or?

Are we to believe that the world is so efficient that if she were to think this without them knowing it that within 68 minutes, they could have everything back on the shelves.

The only way this works is if you knew she was going to do it.

There's no other way.

So it just, it made me question the structure of how these things happen.

I think it plays into a question that we had back in episode two, which is can the hive mind be deceptive and.

To what extent can they be deceptive?

Because social responds to her on the phone at the grocery store that, oh, we've, we've taken all of the supplies so that we can have them in a central distribution center and we can use them to peak efficiency.

But if that was the case, could they stock an entire grocery store in 68 minutes?

It seems almost impossible.

So I think - It is impossible because she literally says, when do you think you're going to be here?

Or when should I come back here in the next few days?

And she says, we're already mobilized.

And it's as though she turns around and looks out the door and there's the first truck.

And so it makes me think of magic.

And in magic, you know a handful of card tricks.

It's called a push.

As a magician, you already know what they're going to choose.

making that choice for them.

So I'm wondering if they are so efficient that they already know, and this goes back to the free will question again, they already know the decisions she's going to be making from this point into.

a certain point into the future, they're that efficient that they already know that she's gonna wake up hungry, that she's probably not gonna take this meal that we just served her, that she's probably gonna want her comfort of going back to the grocery store just as much as she wants the comfort of the Golden Girls.

And so we're ready.

But I wanted to bring that up because as a person that looks at the details, they were there immediately.

And that seems impossible to me.

One thing I want to mention at this point as well is to talk a little bit about the visual language of not only this episode, but the series as a whole.

So often when we see Carol, something is obscuring our vision of Carol.

When she opens the refrigerator, we have all of the ingredients and food that's in the refrigerator obscuring our vision of Carol.

And she's almost confined to a small box in the middle, maybe just 25 % of the frame.

Or when she's laying on the couch, all of the things that are on the coffee table are obscuring her body as she's in goblin mode on the couch and watching her show.

And even in the grocery store itself, when she initially walks in, it's a very zoomed out.

shot and we see the entire grocery store and we just see a little bit of Carol over here on the side really showing how expansive and empty this grocery store is.

So I think he's trying to say things with the blocking and the cinematography of how lonely Carol is and how confined she is.

So it plays into the loneliness and plays into the almost prisoner like aspect of how Carol's feeling at the moment.

It reminds me of the observations we saw in episode one and two where the greater action is happening in the background.

Even though it's a little blurred out, I'm paying attention to the family that's standing in the background, not Carol talking to the other four that aren't assimilated into the joint.

I think he's showing us a few things here.

It brings a lot of clever intent to each of these shots.

make her way through sprouts, and she does her shopping, and she makes her way out.

I found it fascinating that rather than go home and cook herself a well -deserved meal, what does she eat?

She eats a microwave meal.

And what's more lonely, especially in television or film, than eating a microwaved meal?

It was almost the antithesis of what she had gone out there for in the first place, other than to flex.

To flex what she believed was her independence in her individuality and her life as her own.

I thought it was funny and probably honestly, not much different than what I would have done.

I would have fully gone grocery shopping and I would have grabbed my Tuesday night microwave meal and eaten that rather than made chicken gumbo or something like that.

I thought that played well into us learning even more about her.

Once she's had her dinner and she lies down on the couch, her house completely loses power.

And she's like, oh my God, what's next or what's going on?

Very quickly she regains power, but she looks out the window and sees that the rest of the city is losing power.

And she jumps on the horn and she says, what is going on?

And what we discover is it's just another efficiency measure.

And she says, there's no crime.

There's no reason to have lights on at night.

We're not out there working except for the essentials.

It is very efficient for us to turn all of the electricity off.

So she's put off by this.

I get the efficiency, but this is also still terrifying.

It's that subtle terror.

They have that much power that they can just shut an entire city down within seconds.

She says, Carol, if you'd like, we could turn the city back on for you.

Like they would forego the efficiency in order to keep Carol happy if she felt like she needed a city full of lights.

And this starts the...

next kind of tense conversation that she has with Zosia.

So this is literally Carol's worst week ever, right?

And Zosia and the joint are just wanting to please her.

And they said, is there anything that we can do to make you happy?

She says, there's nothing wrong with me that a fucking hand grenade wouldn't fix.

And that is a line.

It's also, again, any worthy delivery here.

I think this goes back to your thoughts on the first and second episode, because they are joined, they are a hive mind, do we lose certain things about humanity?

And this is illustrative of, do we potentially lose our sarcasm when we become joined?

They clearly don't understand the sarcasm.

So yeah, something is still lost becoming one of the joined.

And one of the things is, sarcasm and being able to understand the very human aspect of what sarcasm really is, saying exactly what you don't mean to exemplify what you actually mean here.

They say they're not alien.

They say that they are still human.

It's just, we have this rewrite.

But if you rewrite that, doesn't that rewrite humanity and define humanity in a different way?

Because if you lose things like sarcasm or critical thinking.

It takes away your individuality.

It seems to take away what you believe is a freedom of choice.

But here we have her saying, nothing a hand grenade wouldn't fix.

And within moments, Zosia shows up on the front step with a live hand grenade.

And she said, we thought you were probably being sarcastic, but we didn't want to take the chance.

They're saying that they would rather hand you a live hand grenade than to upset you.

Now, it's terrifying in a different way.

If everybody has all the same skill set, you could turn everybody into a military expert and we can go after these 13 people and it's over.

In this instance, it's flipped on its head.

Now that we have this assimilation and the assimilation has homogenized humanity, in a way that washes away sarcasm and critical thinking.

Now they're really freaking dangerous.

So now we have a different terror factor that's added to it.

And I find that the real twist and that is where the real divide comes from me in this episode.

It's not that it's a character study and it's sort of tonally different than the first two episodes.

Now they're just dangerous because it's almost like they're children and they even know the consequences.

So that becomes almost even more terrifying.

I can't imagine that we could really last all of that long under those circumstances, in my opinion.

This leads us into the next scene, which was my favorite scene of the episode.

These next couple scenes are really spectacular in my mind, but we see Carol try to reach out of her loneliness and she invites Zosia in for a drink after Zosia has delivered this hand grenade to her.

And I believe Carol even brings it up, you know, if Zosia has a drink, does the hive mind get drunk?

Zosia replies, that's not how it works.

And this brings me back to what I was talking about in episode one and two, and that's language.

As they're having this conversation, we see that Zosia really doesn't even have the ability to have a normal human conversation with the hive mind.

They're so used to.

not even speaking, they communicate throughout this psychic glue or what have you.

And conversation is foreign to them essentially.

I like where you're going with this.

Exactly, and Zosia, really all she can do is spout information to Carol.

Almost like you're talking to chat GBT, going back to what you had mentioned last episode of it being almost computer -like, the hive mind, because - It's 110 % that, you're absolutely right.

All she can really say is, well, the, this alcohol tastes this way because it's derived from these two separate ingredients and it has nothing to do with what Carol's trying to talk about.

It's just, that is all that Zosia can supply in this moment.

And you can even see how that might have the opposite effect of alleviating some of Carol's loneliness.

It is more unnerving.

I agree with you, yeah.

And it goes back to the other Immunes as well where they are very much with conversating with their loved ones as if they were a chat GPT or what have you and even highlighting some of the things that are happening in the real world now where people are so lonely that they reach out to a chat GPT and enter into a relationship with an AI large language model.

That's very much how The hive mind speaks very similar to a large language model when we cut back to Carol What we see obstructing Carol in our view is the hand grenade sitting on the table That's in the foreground and Carol is in the background sipping her drink You bring up a great point to and this is off show, but the marketing of the show includes conversations with Vince about his opinions on AI And he's like a lot of directors and creators.

He's adamantly against AI in all forms.

And people have asked, is part of this story your thoughts and analysis on AI?

And in the way that you're describing it, you could very easily say yes.

I'm waiting for the moment when Carol asks anyone that is joined how they feel about something, how they think about something, what they believe.

about something, because as you pointed out, they're all about the facts.

But we hear nothing of this new version of humanity that has anything to talk about feelings, emotions, thoughts.

And it is exemplified in this conversation she has with Zosia in the living room where Zosia only adds these frankly trivial and boring facts.

to the conversations.

But inside of this, Carol does ask the questions we would ask as viewers.

You know, you say you're working on this formula to bring me into the fold here.

How much longer?

Days?

Weeks?

Months?

And Zosia can't answer that question.

And then she asks, when it comes time that you think that you can bring me into the fold or the other unjoined, do we have a choice?

And once again, Zosia brings up the old biological imperative.

And she says, if you were to see someone drowning, wouldn't you throw them a life preserver?

You wouldn't even think about it.

You would just do it as though that's the reasoning or thought behind the hive mind trying to quote unquote save Carol and the other 12.

I think we almost have to have a moment in every episode where she gets upset, right?

And then it brings the tension up quite a bit.

And what does she do?

She grabs this grenade.

And I don't know if you were thinking the same thing I was.

Were they just trying to show up to appease her sort of as Zosia had said when she arrived or are they frankly foolish enough to actually give Carol a live grenade?

Carol's holding the grenade and she pulls the pin and then she lets the clip go.

And Zosia goes, if you don't mind.

And then grabs the grenade, tackles her.

throws the grenade out the window, but turns her back to the grenade to protect Carol.

And a great small detail that I found in this particular scene as she's finally connecting with Zosia and worried about her safety is you hear sirens in the background and you realize that there's no need for the hive mind to have sirens.

The sirens are there purely to let Carol know that the hive mind is on the way and that they're coming to help the sirens are there specifically to Calm Carol and to communicate with Carol and let her know that that they're on their way and that they're coming to Hopefully save Zosia Now I think that that's absolutely brilliant.

I did not catch that so that that would be performative For her is is absolutely amazing and had a lot of forethought Zosia's back is what's damaged by the grenade and And she's calling to the air again, like, anybody here?

Can anybody hear me?

And Zosia just has this creepy smile and says, oh, don't worry, Carol, they're on their way.

As she's bleeding out a little bit here, instead of having a TGI Fridays pilot, we now have a DHL representative, a package delivery guy giving her the breakdown of what Zosia's physical condition is after the grenade.

It's almost as if he's delivering the good news that Zosia is alive and well.

At this point, she's talking to the DHL guy and they're very chummy, all these creatures I'll call them.

More chummy than anybody I've ever known that was even happy in their lives.

So it's cartoonish in an odd way.

And she's having an in -depth conversation with the DHL guy.

And she says, let's get back to the fact that you guys gave me a live grenade.

Can we talk about that?

And he simply says, we would move the heavens and the earth to make you happy, Carol.

If I wanted a bazooka, he says, yes.

If I wanted a tank, he says, yes.

It becomes more and more reluctant as he answers.

And when she gets to the end and she says, if I wanted an atom bomb, he says, well, we would think very deeply about why you might want an atom bomb.

And she goes, but if I asked for one, would you give it to me?

And he goes, yes.

And now for me, the terror has shifted more from them being manipulative to actually not only have we lost our sarcasm, we've also lost our critical thinking and that as a hive mind, we can't go, obviously we shouldn't give a carol.

a live hand grenade or a nuclear weapon, but they do it anyway.

And then you have this look on Carol's face as they close out the shot.

She goes from sort of disbelief and wonder to calculation and realizing, how can I exploit this?

How can I get this to work to my favor?

And then I would take it a step further to ask, can she compel the joined to actually pursue the opposite and ask them to reverse this?

I think that that facial expression at the end says a lot.

It makes you wonder what is the realization that that Carol came to?

Can Carol force them in some way to begin to make decisions for themselves or can she force them in some way?

If what she wants is for the joining not to happen, can she force them to revert the joining?

You also bring up sort of the consent without understanding, right?

They can't comprehend why she wants something.

They literally lack the emotional context.

They don't go, oh, she's being sarcastic because she's extremely angry.

And that's important to this show.

It's gonna play out in a very interesting way, I'm sure.

Do you have any final thoughts on the episode before we talk about episode four?

All I can say is I believe that I am as excited as I was by the end of episode one at this point.

So you weren't put off by the third episode being a character study and not necessarily moving the story forward.

I wasn't, no.

I was satisfied in steeping myself in the themes of the story.

Well, I think this will play out wonderfully.

We want to thank everybody for listening to E Pluribus Uno, your favorite podcast on the show.

pluribus.

We will definitely be taking a hard look at episode four, seeing how this thing lines up with the previous episodes and trying to come up with theories on exactly which direction everybody's going.

Once again, I'm Eric and I'm Josh and thanks again for listening and we'll catch you guys next week.