Pluribus
Charm Offensive
Season 1
Episode 8
Editor’s Rating
Photo: Apple TV
When Carol beckoned Zosia’s return last week by painting “Come Back” in the cul de sac outside her home, it could be fairly interpreted as a moment of surrender, of a lonely woman needing the company that this beautiful representation of collective humanity provides. But as we see this week, it’s also a sly redoubling of her efforts, an opportunity to continue probing this alien-slash-infected being for information that might help Carol save the world. Maybe there’s some chance that she can catch the Others off guard, some more subtle means of extracting the truth than a vial of sodium thiopental.
But what we get from Carol in this revelatory episode is much more nuanced, a combination of affection and hostility toward Zosia and the Others that’s not so easily untangled. With Zosia, the Others have succeeded wildly in offering a companion who has the power to disarm Carol, a fantasy figure who is not always easy for her to reject. You can see in certain scenes that she’s forgotten — or has chosen to forget — that Zosia is like her “John Cena.” She’s a thoughtful, accommodating, and, of course, irresistibly attractive being who shows more patience and sympathy for Carol than the immune survivors, the vast majority of whom didn’t want her invited to the twice-weekly video conference call. Carol has missed Zosia’s company, even in those times when she’s agitated by her. You have a sense that Carol likes a sparring partner, too, and from what we’ve seen in flashbacks, Helen was a tolerant sounding board for her misanthropy.
One great thing about “Charm Offensive” is how well it emphasizes that Carol’s feelings for Zosia and the Others isn’t strictly on the latter end of a love-them-or-hate-them binary. As much as she has committed to her campaign of resistance, she’s not as rigorous about it as Manousos, which may be compromising in many respects but brings true complexity to her relationship with Zosia. There’s a sense here that Carol is, at a minimum, curious about how the Others are living by a certain set of principles. She remains freaked out by the whole “milk” situation — her updated whiteboard reads “They. Eat. People.” with multiple lines under that last word — but when Zosia shows her the hockey arena where people are huddled together in sleeping bags, the explanation is compellingly ecofriendly. (“It’s more efficient to heat and cool one big room than hundreds of small ones.”) The Others’ respect for the planet and the living things that occupy it is a stark reminder of humanity’s own reckless disinterest in sustainability and environmental justice. And they’re not cruel, either: A dog named Bear Jordan is allowed to live around the person who isn’t specifically his owner anymore but gives the animal a comforting anchor.
The intimacy that develops between Carol and Zosia in this episode is sincere yet conditional, because Carol is still pumping Zosia for information. When the two get a couples massage, Carol wants to know what Zosia feels and how, because the idea of a collective consciousness suggests that she’s giving and receiving the massage simultaneously. (“To feel everything all at once would be unbearable,” Zosia explains, “but we know it as it happens.”) When they look out over a train and Carol shares her love of a train horn’s lonely sound, Zosia cues it to go off, which again prompts a question and an answer over how the Others communicate via “natural electric charge.” All of this is prime whiteboard material, along with insight into the source of the “signal” on a planet 640 light-years away.
All of these scenes, including a particularly unnerving resurrection of the diner where she first started writing, are a prelude to a Rhea Seehorn speech that recalls the one in Better Call Saul, where her Kim Wexler confronts the terrifying Lalo in her and Jimmy McGill’s apartment. Seehorn has a flair for such cut-the-shit candor and her “cards on the table” confrontation with Zosia is bracing. When she prefaces the speech by telling Zosia, “There’s a lot of things I like about you,” she means it. She also means it when she calls what the Others are doing a “train wreck” and “unsustainable” and “mental illness,” and that she fully intends to set the world right, whatever the price she pays for her loneliness.
For Carol to follow that speech with a passionate kiss and lovemaking session with Zosia sounds like one of those clichéd rom-com moments where the two beautiful leads who have been yelling at each other for 90 minutes finally embrace. But in the spirit of this episode, the whole affair is slipperier than it seems. It is both exactly what it looks like on the surface — Carol finally slaking a thirst for Zosia — and another move on the board. Their final conversation, where Carol prompts Zosia to use “I” instead of “we” and evokes a specific memory about the actual Zosia from her childhood in Gdansk feels like Carol’s attempt to wedge a crowbar between the Others and their pre-joined human hosts. Maybe the taste of mango ice cream still lingers within her.
With the finale coming next week, we’re set up for a collision between Carol and Manousos, who is so grateful for the Others’ medical intervention to save him from dying in Darién Gap that he holds a scalpel to his doctor’s neck shortly after regaining consciousness. He wants a bill for his treatment and for the ambulance he’s about to borrow, too, so he won’t owe them anything. How well he gets along with a woman who gets groceries from a store stocked just for her remains to be seen.
“Will you be requiring an itemized receipt?” You have to appreciate how well the Others seem to understand the way Manousos thinks. Always so courteous and helpful!
• Carol’s doing an excellent job protecting that Georgia O’Keeffe painting from wild animals like wolves and buffaloes. (“And if they were to wander into the museums and start rubbing up against the paintings…”)
• Funny all the board games that are off limits when you’re playing against someone who knows everything. And because I can’t stop making comparisons to previous Vince Gilligan projects, I think it’s notable that Carol and Zosia settle on a card game, given the thousands that Walter White spends in Breaking Bad to have the vacuum-repair/criminal-witness-protection guy (Robert Forster) play a few rounds with him in remote New Hampshire. The motivation in both is the same: To stave off loneliness.
• Zosia and the Others prove good at a lot of things, like giving Carol the business. They can taunt her croquet play via Jumbotron.
• That train horn is lovely, but it’s also a reminder to Carol that trains are still needed for food distribution. Kinda spoils the mood.
• “Individuals feel, everyone knows” is a wonderfully succinct description of how the Others are connected. Perhaps the sex being privateish makes it more palatable to Carol.
• Carol snorting when Zosia asks about her best day writing: “No such thing. Come on, you have other writers in there. That’s like asking, ‘What’s the most fun you ever had getting your teeth drilled?’” Amen to that, Carol.
• If we think about the collective knowledge of the Others as analogous to an AI scrape, then it’s fitting for Zosia to seem genuinely wowed by Carol’s new work when she’s presented with it. AI is plagiarism, not expression. It can’t do what Carol does.
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