you Hello, Carol.

Welcome to ePluribus Unum, your favorite podcast on your favorite show, Pluribus.

Today, we are covering episode seven, The Gap.

Something tells me that that title has some importance to this particular episode.

We also have a unique episode going on today because we have a special guest joining us, but we also have Josh.

Josh, how are you doing?

I'm doing well, a bit under the weather here, but I'm always here for Carol and everything that she needs.

Even though we need our space, we still have the same feelings about you, Carol, and I am here to assist in any way I can.

I think that's marvelous.

We appreciate you being here, and we also appreciate Mr.

Joe Price.

He is the world famous vocalist for the band Helephant and founding member of the band CAN, Q -A -N.

Be sure to check them out.

Joe, how are you doing, my friend?

Oh, I'm just happy to be here.

Thanks for inviting me.

Absolutely.

We are beyond pleased that you're here with us as we come to just a few episodes left in this season.

And I think this is a rather important episode for us to cover, episode seven, The Gap.

Before we do dive all the way in, another thing we would like to say is we have...

kicked up our Discord, so check that out if you would like to have conversations with us or if you would like to talk about theories.

We even have a stupid theory section there.

It's probably my favorite section and I'm sure one of them is bound to be right.

Josh, you have a pretty good one in there.

I think I've got one or two good stupid theories in there, mainly about Carol being Bob Newhart and that she'll end up waking up next to Saul Goodman at the end of the series and realized that it was all a dream at the end of the day.

I honestly pray that that's the answer to this whole thing because if it were, I could totally forgo the Soylent Green.

That's all I'm saying about that.

That would solve a lot of my concerns too.

I think that's really the only way you can really properly end any show ever, frankly.

That's our Discord.

Secondly, we would also like to recommend that you take a look at our other podcast.

It's called Dad, You're Wrong, where we have a Gen X dad and millennial son duke it out over everything between horror, sci -fi, and fantasy, and a few other things.

Apparently, I'm wrong a lot.

So, that happened.

That's the rumor, that's the rumor at least.

Yeah, I don't know why they named the show that is my question, but those are the housekeeping items that we have for the top of our show here for episode seven, The Gap, E Pluribus Unum.

Mr.

Price, once again, thank you for joining us.

I would like to know.

What are your overall thoughts for the show itself?

We're into episode seven here.

We're pretty deep.

What are your overall thoughts?

It's such a good show.

Besides being shocking and startling and with these great characters and the depth, it becomes this real thought experiment to me and that becomes the part that's perhaps most interesting in listening to your podcast.

I found that you know, you tend to really kind of take the carol perspective and I mean I think about what's different for this show to me is that I've seen a lot of Movies like I am legend or night of the living dead yet You're walking dead and there's just a few of us left and we're fighting to survive It's the horde and so in this one, it's uh, it's just a lot much more seductive The evil isn't out to kill you apparently Probably not at all, quite the opposite.

So you have a real different of genre and what really becomes interesting to me is the more the show allows me to think about whether Carol is actually wrong or whether she's right.

When you think about the joining of the collective, like I guess our first gut instinct is that you're just sucked into a vacuum and it operates using your body.

But my question is whether You become a part of a community and you're able to transfer between bodies.

Go where you want to go as a consciousness.

Can you explore the Alps in a body that's currently in the Alps?

If you want to be in Kumbha's hot tub with them, you can decide to be there or not.

Maybe somebody like you were mentioning about Kumbha last time.

Maybe he was a dishwasher in his former life.

Maybe today a dishwasher can be a surgeon, a world famous surgeon and feel that thrill.

You know, it's that question.

Are they subsumed and consumed or are they transcending by joining?

And that tension, it seems to me, is something that Vince Gilligan is, you know, creating on purpose.

It's kind of the point of the show.

In some of his interviews, it sounds like it to me anyway.

And I think that as the show goes on, for me, like, my Soylent Green Ick moment will be if the joined become the horde.

Because, you know, when you have the horde, like in The Walking Dead, You succumb by breaking down because you no longer can fight.

You're tired of the fight.

And when you succumb, you don't end up in an orgy in a hot tub.

You just end up devoured.

So it's a different kind of question to me and that's what I really like about the show.

It's certainly no hot tub time machine.

I would agree with that.

My question in this philosophy is, do you also have the opportunity to opt out or are you still forced to experience what every other joint experiences on the planet, whether it's Kumba's hot tub or being a scientist?

So I find that interesting, but I don't know that it's alluring.

It doesn't seem alluring to me.

There is, I agree with Joe, a tantalizing aspect of joining the hive mind.

I do see that transcendent sort of mindset and they do make it alluring to you to join a community.

You know as a very solitary person myself I see the allure and not only joining a community but working together as a greater whole and possibly more than the sum of our parts.

So I totally agree and I see where you're coming from Joe, absolutely.

It's not that I I don't necessarily think of myself as a joiner in general either It's the fact that they managed in the writing to make me wonder I think if the joining had no allure then kind of a one of the main tensions in the show would disappear Well, I don't know about this whole transcendence thing But I think we might find some answers along these lines or maybe it'll just become more confusing Today we're covering episode 7 the gap This one was directed by Adam Bernstein, who had also worked on Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, written by Jen Carroll from a story by Ariel Levine.

We start off the episode and scene one with Carroll driving back from Las Vegas.

Yes, we have Carroll singing the R .E .M.

song, It's the End of the World.

Carol has decided to make the best of her time in solitude after being shunned by the joint and I think being affected by her visit with Kumba who also rejected her.

She has decided to come back and play around a little bit in her hometown and she's perhaps actually enjoying herself or perhaps pretending to enjoy herself just to shut out the reality around her.

We find her as she is picking up at a gas station on the way home and Not only does she go into the gas station and make that call.

Once again, we get a repetition of the answering machine from the hive mind or the joint.

And she calls them to tell them to turn on pump one, which they do very quickly.

And she decides to make a second call right after that.

And she orders an ice cold bottle of Gatorade and the red one.

in particular, I believe it's the fruit punch flavor.

Well, and it's got to be ice cold, right?

It can't be anything else.

And what I love is she's now grown to ignore the message.

And it's almost like she's half become immune to it.

But she'll put the phone down when the message starts to kick up and she'll go run some other air and like grab a scratch off ticket or something while she's waiting for the message to play.

And just the way that she goes about that, it's her not doing it in the way that Kumba is doing it where he seemingly is nice to them and asking them politely, would you do this for me perhaps?

How much can I push this?

How many of these buttons can I push before this breaks?

I think we see that in these sequences at the very beginning here.

I see it as her having.

a positive reaction of there is no traffic, there are no people, I can ask for anything that I want and basically get it almost immediately.

I'm going to do all the things that I would like to do from here.

And she, you know, embraces that, I think.

Not only does she get her gatorade, she calls them back to give them a hard time for why it wasn't cold enough.

It was tepid, it was lukewarm.

Do better next time.

You know, I would say that she's taking her own advice.

In the last episode, she told Kumba to tell them to just pick a fucking apple off a tree.

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

She literally plucked a red fruit drink from the sky.

She's just decided to pick the apple from the tree and enjoy it.

My question to you guys, though, is when she scratches off that $10 ,000 scratch off and wins, like I get that it's meaningless and she just goes and moves on.

But I guess I wonder if there's any kind of deeper significance to that that I'm not picking up on.

I felt like she felt the kick of winning that and living in a world that she couldn't cash it in, whether she needed it or not.

I mean, who wouldn't want to win a $10 ,000 scratch off?

But I think she also took it as just another thing that she's endured.

It's insult to injury almost, right?

And why not just peel out of there then and then go live your Kumba -style fantasy, whatever that may be.

Another thing I do want to bring in at the gas station, doesn't she find fireworks there?

And at the tail end, before she takes off out of the gas station, she did take some fireworks with her.

A trunk load.

That's the way to do it right there.

And those aren't cheap either.

Fireworks are expensive.

Let me tell you.

I could blow that whole $10 ,000 from the scratch off.

We have a really great scene that I want to bring up and that's Carol back at home.

utilizing those fireworks for the first time in the episode.

And what does she hear as she's setting these fireworks off, but the howling of the wolves that we've seen in a previous episode.

And I like this quite a bit.

It's sort of a call back to one of my theories that I believe that this pack of wolves is a bit of a metaphor for the joined.

Wolves tend to work as a group, as a pack together.

And as she hears them howling in the distance, and it seems to be surrounding her at this point, the wildlife seems to be leaking back into Albuquerque as the population has left, she howls back at the wolves.

And not only that, but it ends in a really great little scene where she essentially has the last howl.

She lets out a...

a final howl that is louder than all the others, and what do they do?

But they cease their howling at that point as if they're recognizing the alpha wolf that has come among them.

Basically howling the quiet emptiness of the world through singing pop songs.

It's all kind of a piece.

She's the one that provides us with the soundtrack through her entire half of the episode.

Why?

Well, you don't have radio anymore unless you call them and ask them to play the local radio station and whatever they might play.

I couldn't imagine what a joined DJ would sound like.

Frankly, that could be good or absolutely horrifying.

So she just makes her own soundtrack as she makes her way through.

It's the end of the world or the Caddyshack song or anything else.

The reason I bring up the golf course scene and I think the reason that they used it in the spot is.

something that Joe had brought up offline and I would like Joe to talk about it now about sort of your theory about the animals.

Well, why are the joined unwilling to kill animals or to kill plants and to what degree are all life on earth joined?

Are the animals somehow actually joined too and can they just see her through the eyes of that buffalo that's on the on the golf course there or is the rabbit really just a you know, a security camera that's keeping track of her.

We don't know.

The show doesn't ever actually suggest that.

It's just one of those things that's kind of fun to think about, but who knows?

At first I wanted to sort of ignore any of the animal or plant joining ideas, but when you bring it up in that way, I think it becomes very interesting.

So I would love to throw that into the theory pile there.

I just like the idea that it was sort of, here's the result of letting all the animals out of the zoo or consolidating humanity in a certain way that allows the animals to re -encroach on what used to be civilization.

When we get back into our state police car to get out of there, it seems the battery is dead.

And I think this concept comes up more than once in the last episode.

Manny's car had a little bit of a battery issue there.

And here we have Carol having a battery issue with her car.

And she's also faced with the same or a similar set of choices here as Kumba.

She goes outside of the country club and she has the lion's choice of vehicle.

She could have a Porsche, she could have a Lamborghini, but she lands on a Rolls Royce.

And it's not just any Rolls -Royce really.

It looks like one that's been dressed for a wedding.

It says just married on the window.

And there are balloons coming from the doors just hanging over the car that say love.

They all say love.

And I assume there's probably some sort of not so subtle messaging here.

But she cracks open the trunk.

She throws in her golf clubs.

And she throws in her shotgun and decides to take the Rolls -Royce.

This whole sequence as she is going about these activities, to me it's really exemplifying her loneliness.

And I think that is also shown in how she reacts to the message that is left by the joined on the telephone and how she has come to ignore that message.

It all seems to me the mask for that loneliness and she's trying to run away from that loneliness.

And her choice of the Rolls Royce of choosing specifically the only vehicle that signifies the antithesis of loneliness, which is marriage and having someone with you is just another way that she is coping with the loneliness that is forced upon her.

And it's very much that they are utilizing her loneliness as a weapon to hopefully get her to give her consent to become one of the joined.

I still don't see it necessarily as her masking her whatever she's going through, whether it's loneliness or depression or whatever.

I see it as her opening her eyes and going, you know what?

Fuck it.

I'm going to take advantage of it.

It's sitting here.

Kuma's doing it.

I'm going to do my own version of this.

I'm going to go play golf.

I'm going to go to Hymes Springs and I'm going to...

lay in there completely naked and sing an Ellie song and I'm going to absolutely love every minute of it.

I think it wears itself out and I think it will for Kumba as well.

But I think she's sincere in her elation and the experience that she has.

I don't feel it as she's covering something up or trying to mask it.

So I like that those two ideas kind of wrestle with each other in a great way.

Yeah.

Yeah, I agree to a point as well.

You know, I think after her last interaction with Kumba and finding out that Kumba knows that the hive mind is indeed using dead bodies as sustenance, she feels that there is no other path now.

She sort of lost her way.

And this sequence of her finally getting out of the house and stop watching golden girls and taking advantage of things as her coming around to a bit of Kumba's style of thinking.

you shall not besmirch the name of the Golden Girls.

That's all I'm saying about that.

As she exits the hot springs and whether she's experiencing a moment of pure freedom or she's trying to drown out her emptiness here, she heads over to the Georgia O 'Keeffe Museum.

Of course, she returns to a certain image and takes it off the wall.

A little bit later, When she gets back home, she pulls the print off the wall in order to replace it with the actual painting itself.

And this doesn't seem like a moment of her masking a depression or emptiness.

This is a moment of, hey, since I can, I'm going to have the original right here in my house.

Well, for someone who's been through the level of trauma she's been, including the horrific death of her partner and the whole world changing as it has, to now feel slightly empowered in this moment and to have the presence to go ahead and just take that thing that she wants in her place.

That says something about her character too, and I think it's kind of what you were getting at with the way she's singing and kind of skipping through the apocalypse.

The painting is called Belladonna, painted by Georgia O 'Keeffe, who is a native of New Mexico.

That belladonna plant specifically is a form of nightshade.

So that is a poison as well.

And it's almost a bit of a call back to the plant that Walter White uses in Breaking Bad to make his ricin.

Well, I assume that they had selected this painting for a particular reason.

It is great.

And I think it works in a ton of ways.

She goes home, she gets the idea standing in her kitchen to give them a call and demand a meal.

that is based on the past anniversaries that she had with Helen at a specific restaurant.

And when she gets to the restaurant, we have several plates that are covered in the chrome dome that we had seen before that for whatever reason always reminds me of Looney Tunes cartoons.

And she is dressed to the nines.

That dress is absolutely amazing.

That chain around her neck is impossible.

And she starts lifting up the lids to these dishes, naming them off essentially and saying with some of them what date or year it was.

And she has very clear memories of these moments and these meals with Helen.

It's like she gets to the apex of enjoying her environment here.

Even being willing to have them recreate these meals from her past using their understanding of Helen, which she's so offended by.

And then when she's sitting there, trying to enjoy it in this beautiful dress and this amazing scenery, slowly those wolves start coming back in again.

There's a couple of great things in this portion as well.

When she requests this dinner, there's seemingly some hive mind hidden away somewhere, since they're able to get into Albuquerque and get into the specific restaurant and cook this meal for her.

There is an aspect of that performative nature of how the hive mind is still there, but purposefully hidden away from her and that they are still very much in Albuquerque despite what we've been led to believe.

And I loved, I'm sure there's quite a few different songs on this player piano that she has.

The first one that popped up in my head as I was looking at it is Dancing on My Own by Robin, who is a great pop star.

I thought the song choice adds to the potential loneliness that Carol's feeling at this moment.

Yeah, I definitely want to troll through the selections that she thumbs through because something tells me that every single one of those songs has a point that she could have selected and it would have still landed.

But what she ends up landing on with the player piano is the song I Will Survive.

Again, pretty strongly on the nose there, but very defiant to the wolves that are howling.

I wonder if, as you said, is this the apex of her enjoyment of being alone?

Is this the last thing that will satiate either her loneliness or satiate her being able to be alone and do anything that she wants?

Again, I don't know if it's a production thing.

I don't think it is, or if it is a thing within the writing of the show.

They are too quick to answer.

without having known what she wanted already.

There's no way that they could have made all of these meals so specific to these places with these ingredients this quickly, in my opinion, without having already known it in some way.

And I'm gonna refer back to the grocery store stocking before, or even the Gatorade that she gets in five minutes that is tepid, but I'm sure it was ice cold when they left.

I just find it...

impossible to stock the grocery store to have the Gatorade, to have these fanciful meals on the go without having some sense of already knowing.

Well, it does sound incredible.

Amazon knows because you look at something a few times and they kind of know your patterns.

If you're likely to buy it, the AI will move it to a facility closer to you so that when you do order it, it shows up the next day.

But then, you know, if you think about it, Helen is not just Carol's partner, she's her manager.

And she manages everything about Carol from trying to manage her moods to her schedule.

She understands Carol better than herself, apparently, in a lot of ways.

So the idea that everybody that Carol knows, including the person who knows Carol better than herself, maybe there's something to that.

Well, I believe this is probably Josh's favorite part.

Our next match cut is your favorite character, Manny.

Yeah, it cuts in a wonderful way right to Manny from the sound of the music to almost dead silence.

We only get the sound of the plastic hose as it's slapping against the metal gas tank.

But we see Manny with a yellow scarf.

And as he's walking to retrieve gas from another stalled vehicle, he is practicing his English.

So we see that he's on this journey, not only to go find Carol, but he also sees the need to communicate with Carol once he gets there.

The first thing I believe we hear him utter is yellow.

the dog is yellow.

But that's not the only yellow thing that we see Menousos with in this scene.

Of course, he has his wonderful little convertible that is a very stark yellow, but even the cassette tapes that he's utilizing to learn English are very distinct yellow as we see that yellow is indeed the color of individuality and he has another great.

a line here, especially about the yellow dog.

He says, the yellow dog chases the gray cat, almost as if these individuals, himself and Carol are the predators to what could be the gray cat in the hive.

Well, and then is the girl who freed the mouse from the mole strap, is that Carol?

Then she's the girl freeing the mouse.

Yeah.

I feel like there has to be some significance to that, especially since that is such a unique line and Why would you choose to have that as something to teach someone conversational English?

It's almost like you're teaching someone English through reading a children's book.

Normally it would be, you know, where's the bathroom, right?

Or can I ask for the check please?

Or something like that.

But it's not that at all.

I also want to point out when he's walking, in the middle of this road, a guy rolls up to him and is the extremely friendly joined person that is there to be like, hey, Manousos, how are you doing?

Hey, we would like for you to hydrate more.

And if you need a ride, I'd be happy to give you a ride.

We can fly you there.

You could be there within the end of the day.

And he wants absolutely nothing to do with them.

The importance of this conversation, though, is that they're using the exact same language on Manousos that they used on Carol.

at the very beginning as well, being overly helpful, overly considerate, overly everything.

And he reads it in the exact same way she does, that there's something wrong here.

Nobody does this or is like this.

You're obviously not who you were before.

You can move on.

I've got this.

And it also illustrates throughout this last half of this episode how resourceful Menousos is.

And I believe that he must have some sort of training or education or something.

that has provided him with the knowledge that he uses in this episode to make his way to the gap.

He doesn't have training in siphoning gas without drinking it, which led me to this pair of thoughts.

When do tropes become so a part of culture that if Manny didn't drink the gas, people would be taken out of it because that's such a trope in movies, but also that Manny strikes me as the kind of guy who Just isn't happy without the taste of gas in his mouth.

You got to feel the grit.

Exactly.

And every time he siphons gas, which we see a couple of times throughout the sequence, he leaves a crisp hundred dollar bill under the windshield wipers.

And to me, what this signifies from a new source is that not only is he an honorable man, but that he sees a future.

for the earth and that things can go back to normal.

And he's very much a man of faith.

He believes that things can be better past this point.

I see him very much as a man of faith and that he believes that he is on the righteous path in that regard.

And he still believes in doing right.

Honorable is a wonderful word for this man, without a doubt.

I think it goes beyond that even.

I think it's that he also believes in paying his dues, so to speak.

But he's saying that the only way that you can take part in something is if you pay your dues for it or you pay what is owed.

And again, you do such a good job of putting it into the religious realm for him.

This is what a very faithful man would do.

This is what a very godly person would do, do unto others in this really taking care of other people kind of way.

And you really get to see our two characters who are clearly not enamored of the joint, but then they're contrasted here.

Carol's way of handling things is not at all putting hundred dollar bills under windshield wipers, you know?

It's interesting that they're both different, but at the end they seem to lead to basically the same place, the arms of the joint.

Our friend is driving his mustard yellow MG Midget and he gets to...

a spot here that has clothes scattered all over the place.

And I don't know about you fellows, but when I saw this, it became very unnerving, especially the angle.

I think we were almost at ground level with the car.

And he finally gets to a part to where he can no longer drive the MG.

It was almost out of a horror movie, right?

When you encounter those clothes and we see the joint as they almost...

dissolve out of the jungle.

It was incredibly creepy.

And at this point, they're essentially pleading him not to go into the gap.

And they seem so much more emphatic than they normally are.

When you have Zosia give Carol a bottle of water that she refuses, it's very much here, take it.

We highly recommend you take it.

All the doctors on the planet recommend you take it.

But if you don't, that's fine.

But when we have these Native peoples, like you said, fade in and standing before Manusos, they have a laundry list of all the reasons you should not go into the gap.

Most people that do go in there die.

We don't want you to go in there.

We can take you exactly where you need to go.

You can be there by the end of the day.

Please don't do this.

And all the while, his gaze never leaves them.

He's always watching this group of the joins standing sort of in front of what looks to be a creek or a small river that would lead into the gap here.

Well, and Manousos is just perfectly designed to hate the nanny state, which is what they kind of seem like to me.

He sets his own car on fire.

It's just the most brilliant moment.

Seconds before it actually happens, I knew it was going to happen.

It's one of the things I love about the writing in this show.

It can surprise me, but sometimes it doesn't surprise me in a way that makes me want to cheer.

And this is one of those moments.

I was rising out of my seat for this.

It was fantastic.

This was a cheering moment.

Yeah, I think this was very much my favorite scene of the episode where he lays his hand on top of the MG as if to say goodbye to a good friend.

And at that point he goes to the trunk of the MG, pops it open, pulls out the gas canister.

and proceeds to, while staring at the hive mind, pour the gas canister over the MG and light it on fire.

And he says, nothing on this planet is yours.

You cannot give me anything because all that you have is stolen.

You do not belong here.

It was just such a brilliant sequence and just solidifies Menousos as by far my favorite character in this series.

Joe, what are your thoughts on the line he delivers here?

How does that make you think about the joined sort of now and his perspective of it?

And does it change your sort of transcendent thought you had earlier on?

I mean, at the end of the day, whether he likes the change that they've gone under or not, they are still the people of the earth.

And Kumba says in the last episode to Carol, if he misses you, come back.

And that's where I started wondering about If they won't even pluck apples off a tree, does that mean that they share the consciousness with the tree?

And at the end of the day, Manny, being such a man of God and a man of faith, what do you do?

You reject earthly things.

You reject the earth.

So that's a real interesting tension to me and how his character works.

It brought to mind the thoughts of colonialism for me and America in general being essentially stolen land and that may add into your theory of potential invasion and the hive mind just being a tool for extraterrestrial invaders.

I actually want to bounce on something Joe had mentioned earlier and it's about the are the animals joined?

Are the plants?

joined and not for surveillance purposes.

Because now the line that Kuba said earlier, which is, it misses you.

He doesn't say, we miss you, they miss you.

He says, it misses you.

And if your sort of theory is true here that every living thing on the planet is actually joined except for these 13 human beings and maybe a few other creatures, I don't know.

That makes a lot of sense.

Now it's not necessarily a surveillance state or something like that.

It is now Earth has been joined and you're one of the few things that hasn't joined and it as a whole misses you.

I guess that makes her the flea on the Earth and the Earth is very forgiving of its fleas.

To a certain extent, but at some point the dog has to scratch.

Well, needless to say, we love Manny's monologue here.

It is the standout for me for this episode.

He absolutely ignores the joined and he grabs his go -bag along with his machete and forges on into the Darien Gap.

I feel the sequence begins far away and we see Manny rather small in this huge jungle that is encroaching on him.

As we make our way through this sequence, Manny has a mantra, and as he becomes more and more tired, and as he comes across more obstacles, we tend to get closer and closer on Manny as he's trying to make his way through the jungle.

And I really loved his mantra that he goes through here.

He says, I am a nusos oviedo.

I am not one of them.

I wish to save the world.

And I just love that as he's repeating it.

And we get a lot of repetition throughout this series, not only Manny's mantra or what he's repeating to learn English, but the repetition of the hive mind's message to Carol.

Most shows, once you've heard, let's say the voicemail message once or twice, we know what it is.

He's making us listen to every single word, every single time.

And that is purposeful to us as the audience.

He's ribbing us a little bit here and making it a little tough on us, but I think he's doing it in great fashion.

We do get a moment where he gets to make camp, he has a fire set up, and you can see that he's trying to use the mantra as a way to keep him on track and maybe keep his fears allayed, but he's definitely worried.

even he's starting to second -guess himself as to whether he should have done this or not, we notice that the rocks are slippery as he might cross a certain section, and he's tired, and he's obviously not getting much sleep in the jungle.

And he finally gets to a section where we find the trees that were mentioned earlier by the joint before he went into the gap, and these are the porcupine trees.

And I myself had never seen these before, and when you see them, These are terrifying trees.

They do have these three, four, five inch spikes on them all the way around the trunk.

And you can see that they're dripping with something, whether it's bacteria or poison.

And not only that, when he gets to the porcupine tree forest, they're pretty close knit.

He's having to kind of skim by them and try not to get too close to the porcupine trees.

As you said, you start to see him stumbling and I was thinking, you know, Oh, he's going to break his ankle or something and be stuck out there.

And then what, but, you know, if you give me Chekhov's diseased pork and pine trees, somebody better get impaled on it.

And, and they sure do.

I think we all let out a shout as we were watching that at that point.

Definitely.

But when he was impaled on that tree, yes, I was shocked.

because of his, and you bring up a great word, Josh, because of his righteous nature, my first thought, or I would say my second thought was how's he gonna get out of this?

You know, this is our guy and he is righteous.

In what way will he potentially get out of this?

And he certainly tries.

Yeah, this is where he decides to cauterize his wounds with a red hot machete.

They talk about grit in your teeth and being ready just to see that.

It's interesting to me because when I was watching this, I had to think about what it was really saying to me and it felt like the most poignant scene in the episode, which is, it seemed like self -flagellation to me.

They specifically mentioned the bacteria -laced spines.

And I feel like I should mention, I'm not sure if these are actually called porcupine trees.

I think I just made a joke of that and now we're all calling them that, but I don't know if there's actually a name for these things.

That's the cool thing about the show.

We call everything what we want to call it.

We call them the joined.

Everybody else calls them the others.

I'm not going to call them the others ever.

They will always be the joined.

So these are porcupine trees, my friend.

I like the joined and I like the porcupine trees.

And I do think it's interesting that here we have Manny in the cathedral of heaven, the jungle.

surrounded by the earth, defying everything and his own hubris perhaps has led him to this spot and he's burning it out with a leather strap clenched between his teeth.

It just says so much about his character.

Yeah, if we see Manny as this man of faith, this righteous man, it very much brought to mind the self -flagellation and the paying of penance.

it was quite honestly a horrifying scene to watch.

And it just shows how much will Manny has and what he's willing to do to reach his goal specifically to shun the joined at the same time.

Cause we know they mentioned prior that he can just wave to them in the air and they'll come, but he does not do that.

And we see the next scene.

as he's stumbling through the jungle still saying his mantra and ends up collapsing.

And indeed the joined was watching him the entire time and they come to his rescue in a helicopter.

Well, what another contrast between Menousos and Carol.

Menousos is literally burning himself to stay alive and Carol is considering sitting still to let herself be burned to death.

I didn't catch that.

That was a good one.

I also want to point out, Joe, you mentioned earlier about how these are two people that are going through their own gauntlet, though similar and different, and they end in the same way, in the arms of the joined.

And I think this brings us into the third act as we catch up with Carol.

We see something that we haven't seen yet and that is a fairly large time jump as we move from, I believe it's 12 days to 48 days.

It's about 36 days of a time jump.

as we catch up with Carol.

When we do the jump from the jungle back over to Carol, she has her booyah jams from 1998, which apparently are quite important.

She has her own mixtape going here.

And it's Judas Priest, you got another thing coming.

So again, you have another strong defiant song from our Carol here, as she's hitting golf balls into the office building across the street.

At this point, Carol has lost her path.

She's lost her way forward.

After hearing from Kumba that even the other immune don't agree with her on her stance of ingesting humans, being wrong, as I think all of us really feel about that, she doesn't see a way to overcome the joint anymore.

And we have this segment here in the cult of SAC.

And she's sitting in a circle of fireworks.

as they're erupting sort of sequentially all around her.

And the final firework tips over, and it's facing right towards her head.

And there's almost a strange, nihilistic acceptance that comes across Carol in this moment as she is facing down this firework and accepting her fate, much as Menousos in the prior scene was denying his fate.

She does have that nihilistic look.

And I got a little bit worried there, but I think she has endured enough of this solitude in order to, as Kumba had said in the previous episode, have a change of heart.

It's a very passive -aggressive way to get someone to do that, in my opinion, but here we are nonetheless.

And as she faces down this firework, it does fire off.

And it seemed like it didn't even phase her.

as it whizzed not even inches past her face, landing in the roof of her neighbor's house.

I love the way the camera just slowly closes in and you see her face and she doesn't move a muscle, but you know what's going on in there.

I guess that's the question.

Is it her final submission?

Is she giving in?

Is she broken?

I don't know.

I'm not sure if she's given in or if she's just gotten more resolve.

I guess we'll find out.

I very much see it as At this point, Carol has lost her path.

She's lost her way forward.

She is now officially fully alone and she's accepted the fate of if this firecracker goes off in my face, then I'm okay with this being the end.

But we see this blue firework go off and it lights the roof of her neighbor's house on fire.

And what does she utilize to put out that fire but a yellow garden hose?

But as she puts out the fire, it brings us to the next scene in which she heads to Salmon's hardware store to pick up a five -gallon bucket of paint.

write something in the center of that cul -de -sac in large letters that point up.

And of course, we know that whether she likes it or not, they're watching her either from a satellite or from a drone or from something else.

And then she goes into the house, into her house, and sits in front of the painting, the Belladonna painting, and watches it.

And then we hear a car pull up, and we wonder, who is that?

Turns out it's Zosia.

And Carol comes out and hesitantly, slowly comes towards her and then embraces her completely.

She's shuddering.

She's gasping.

She's so relieved and so upset.

And it's like she's lost her grip to a point and can't even hold back the pain she's been feeling.

And of course, Zosia shows up in a bright blue car.

How about that?

And I think there's two different ways to interpret the scene as Carol falls into the arms of Zosia.

And Zosia not very emphatically embraces her back, but we have to think, was this a plan of Carol's to call back the joined, begin the next phase of her plan or a new phase of her plan?

Or is it truly that she's lost her path completely?

and the weaponizing of her loneliness by the joined have defeated her.

And she's now at the mercy of the joined almost just to have some sort of connection back in her life.

After these 36 or so some odd days, I'm of the mind that she has been defeated and that there is no ulterior motive for her to call back Zosia or call back the joined, but she has finally succumbed to that loneliness.

You know, Carol doesn't strike me as much of an actor.

When you watch her, the way she hugs Zosia, that doesn't seem fake.

And she doesn't seem like a person who doesn't say what she thinks.

In fact, she seems to very specifically always say what she thinks.

But then when I thought about her sitting there taking this painting and finding some agency with herself again in a new way, and sitting there looking at it while she waited for them and then you realize after the hug that she put the call out to ask them to come.

I wasn't sure what she was painting.

You know, she's faced down her own death.

She gave up on life.

And then when it missed her, it was like a coin toss and it set that house on fire.

And if she was really truly given over to nihilism, she could have just sat there and let it burn down and burn down the whole neighborhood and her too.

but she didn't.

I think she made a decision and she got up and she got grabbed that yellow hose and put out the fire and put her next plan into action.

And I think that the notion that somehow she is going to be the poison pill that walks into them is fascinating.

I'm on the side of her being calculating because we've seen so much of that in her anyway and so much of it before and also thinking ahead, she paints the cul -de -sac, she goes into the house, and she sits there in front of her painting and sort of meditates on it, right?

She even reacts to it, almost like she's having a conversation in her mind.

And then what does she do?

She calls back to them and brings them back.

It doesn't seem necessarily like, quote unquote, a change of heart.

It seems like she's using their own methods against them.

to get them to do what she wants them to do again.

And as far as the reaction, yes, it is a true and honest reaction.

She's been alone for 36 days.

The next human being, whether it's a robot or not, you're going to embrace it because that is human nature.

That doesn't mean that she has failed or given up or is willing to embrace the joint at all.

At the end of the episode, we have the closure of the two threads and the gauntlets have been traversed.

They've both gone through torment and torture and have ended up in the arms of the joined.

And I mean, what could be next?

Yeah, and we only have two more episodes left.

So prime yourself for hearing the word penultimate a lot for the next week.

Now that we've run through it and shared our thoughts on it, Josh, again, what are your overall thoughts on this particular episode?

I enjoyed this one quite a bit.

I think specifically because we've got much more of Menousos and his journey and those are always such a pleasure for me and the juxtaposition of their two journeys throughout this and how they deal with loneliness and how Carol has lost her path whereas Menousos has found his path I think was a really great.

two sides of the same coin.

And to me, it was very heartbreaking at the end to see how Carol, in my eyes at least, had lost her path and see her finally embracing the joint.

My final thoughts are, oh gosh, I can't believe there's only two episodes left.

They're not going to sew anything up, are they?

The journey they've taken us on, I can't even imagine what's coming next.

It's such a fascinating place to leave us.

The chess pieces are clear, understood and on the board.

And how is this going to play out and where is it going to leave us at the end of the season?

I hope with the level of writing we see here that we're going to get some reveals that have some sense of leaving us salivating for more.

And I, from what I understand, it's going to be a couple of years before we have more.

So I guess we should just really chew these well and enjoy them.

Yeah, and I think they're also certainly rewatchable, right?

We can go back and see if we can't find a few more pieces of information that will get us through the long stretch as we wait far beyond 45 days, 20 hours, 42 minutes, and 55 seconds.

I kid.

Bringing that up though, actually, we have two time stamps in this particular episode.

One's not so unique and the other one is, and I have to say both of these are non -prime numbers, so if we match that up with our previous prime number timestamp theory, what we're getting here are some dark reveals, and maybe the dark reveal for Carol is that she embraces the nihilistic view and the joined, and Menousos, of course, defies the joined and goes into the gap anyway and could potentially die.

two pretty dark storylines.

When we get to our second timestamp, this is a significant time jump and we have 48 days, 16 hours, 57 minutes, and 12 seconds.

Again, not another prime number, so we have some dark reveals in this episode for Carol as well.

Those are just the two timestamps that we had for this episode and I wanted to bring those up to align them with.

the current theory we have.

Whether it falls apart later or not, you know, there's always potential there, I'm sure.

Well, thank you once again, Carol, for joining us on E Pluribus Uno for the Pluribus episode seven, The Gap.

We want to thank Joe for joining us as well.

So many insights, Joe.

It's been a real pleasure having you on the show.

And honestly, I believe I can speak for Josh and say we would love to have you back sometime.

I appreciate that, man.

Anytime, I'd love to come back.

That's fantastic.

I always love getting another voice in here.

Josh, you have any parting words for us before we bounce?

Well, I just want to say, Carol, our feelings about you haven't changed, but we don't need our space over here.

We would love for you to come join our Discord and chat some great theories and chat some stupid theories with us as well.

But apart from that, if you guys would like to join us on our other podcast, Dad, You're Wrong, where a Gen X dad and a millennial son talk everything from horror, sci -fi, fantasy, and everything in between.

We'll be having our end of the year episode, our top tens coming out before the end of the year, hopefully around Christmas time.

And apart from that, we will be talking to you guys next week for episode eight of Pluribus.

Thanks, Carol.