Vince Gilligan explains Pluribus episode 5’s big twist: ‘They’re just giving Carol a time out’
So you’ve seen the latest episode of Pluribus — and you have questions. Well, so did I. Luckily, I was able to take them straight to the source: series creator Vince Gilligan.
So pull up a chair and gather round as we unpack the newest installment of Apple’s mind-bending science fiction show.
[Ed. note: Spoilers follow for Pluribus episodes 1-5.]
Let’s recap. In episode 4, Carol gets serious about trying to undo the “joining” that turned all of humanity into a collective, blissful hivemind, minus a dozen or so immune survivors. After sitting down with a member of the hivemind and asking a series of increasingly pointed questions, she’s certain that the joining can be reversed. Carol’s logic is that the hivemind can’t lie to her, so the fact that they refuse to say whether humanity can be un-merged must mean it’s possible.
At the end of episode 4, she visits her hivemind chaperon Zosia (Karolina Wydra) in the hospital, where she’s still recovering from that grenade explosion, and attempts to drug her to finally get an answer. This backfires when Zosia has a heart attack, and the hivemind intervenes to save one of its own.
Image: Apple
That brings us to episode 5, which begins with a surprising twist: the hivemind abandons Carol. She wakes up, still at the hospital, to find that everyone there is leaving. And after heading up to the roof, she can see a mass exodus, as everyone in Albuquerque, her hometown, drives out of the city to get away from her.
“They love Carol, and nothing will shake that love,” Gilligan says. “Even when Carol blows up at them, they don’t leave. But when Carol will not leave it alone, when she says, ‘There is a way to reverse this, I could tell, because you can’t lie. I can tell by your silence that there’s a way, because if there was a way, you would tell me, and if there wasn’t a way, you would tell me,’ then everybody splits. I don’t think they split out of fear, and I don’t think there’s necessarily anything nefarious about it.”
Gilligan says that figuring out the dynamic between Carol and the hivemind was one of the most difficult parts of creating Pluribus. That relationship didn’t come into focus until he started working with Wydra to figure out her eerily un-human performance, which helped him understand why the hivemind reacts the way it does in episode 5.
“I realized it’s kind of like the most patient mom in the world instructing their little infant toddler,” Gilligan says. “They might say, ‘I hate you, mommy.’ But you don’t take it seriously. It doesn’t hurt your feelings. You know they’re just acting out. They’re a little kid. They kick you in the shins. It hurts a little, but at a certain point, for their own good, and for yours, maybe you give them a time out. So I think they’re just giving Carol a time out. They do it in an over-the-top way: Half a million people leave town. They can’t lay hands on her. They would never lock her up. They love her too much. They can’t do any of that, and they wouldn’t want to if they could. But they can leave, so they do.”
New episodes of Pluribus air on Apple TV on Fridays, though episode 5 premiered early due to the holiday weekend.
