I think that we saw a narrow slice of pre-joining Carol that had to be expanded by the rest of the season (and probably further seasons) -- in particular, her relationship with Helen and how important Helen was to her success as an author, but even more importantly, how Carol perceived those things and whether she's really processed how true her perception of them was (for example, the liquor cabinet monitor).

I’ll probably still watch season 2, but I don’t think of it as a “great show”. I think the first season was missing some sense of urgency and the finale adds that back in. I can’t see it maintaining enough interest for 4 seasons though. I’m honestly having trouble envisioning anything past 2.

I think this conversation with the creators and Rhea on what they think is quite insightful.

I definitely enjoyed it. And I get your concerns with Carol's character, my read: she hated her fans. She hated the cloying fawning happiness that they brought. But she was trapped with them. Now the *entire world* has turned into the thing she hates, and her anchor died in the process.

Loved it. It's about as good as sci-fi gets. It's subtle, thoughtful, full of social comment, walks a careful line of moral ambiguity, not afraid to paint the protagonist as imperfect and the 'baddies' as sympathetic. I love that it's not in a rush to reveal everything at once. It's just great.

It took me a good chunk of the season to warm up to Carol as a character, esp the main character. What made her "click" for me was the bit of her backstory about her experience at conversion camp. With that one piece of information, I could understand how she felt towards the Others, how she couldn't trust their relentless niceness.

It makes me wonder what her arc across the show is. If she and Manousos work towards resetting humanity and succeed, will she have progressed on any personal journey? As it is, with the end of the season, I think she's back where she started.

A slightly different, but related, question is: Why do so many people, in the aggregate, love Pluribus? I think the answer to that question is that with a strong artistic premise and slightly opaque, painterly execution, viewers can interpret the depths of the show as they may. For some, a criticism of the saccharine sycophancy of AI chatbots; for others, a painful meditation on loss and grief; for others still, a comment on the potential emptiness of Heaven or a utopia. While some have lamented a lack of reveals or twists in the show, that very lack has kept alive all of these simmering possibilities, and all of the concepts I've listed — and others I haven't — can be profoundly engaging, even if they are ultimately unanswerable.

I love the show and I'm excited to see where it goes, but the wait is going to be agonizing.

I don't see anything too unrealistic about Carol. A recovering alcoholic with a family that betrayed her, she's a mostly-unhappy writer who resents the fans that made her successful who only seems to find joy in her marriage. The hive mind not only killed the one person on the planet she loves, but they stole her memories too.

It's not surprising that someone like that would react with grief, stubbornness, and anger. She mostly just wants to be left alone, and then once the shock wears off, she wants to find a way to undo the damage before she's absorbed too. She's also not immune to the hive's manipulation, which feels real to me.

Manousos is even more stubborn and furious than Carol, refusing any help at all from the hive, even if it means starvation, infection, and near-certain death.

In some ways, it reminds me of Walter White in Breaking Bad, another smart-but-flawed protagonist who continually undermined his own success through irrational decision-making born of pride and arrogance.

I'm sure it would be a fun exercise to see a hyper-logical problem solver like Mark Watney from The Martian tackle this end-of-the-human-race scenario, but that would be an entirely different show.

The problem is they wait to see if the bank account will be refilled and then make a lessor product in a rush. This is repeated until they've killed whatever made the show good in the first place. Stranger Things is unwatchable now. And on and on.

Am I still loving it? Yes. And, for me, there really isn't hesitation. I think Carol as a character really opened up in the last 3 episodes. The addition of someone who thinks the same about The Others but is a few degrees more unhinged in Manousos was excellent. Looking forward to Season 2.

I really liked it. I have met plenty of stubborn and incurious people; pick any workplace at random - you'll find them. I found that pretty realistic, unfortunately.
I liked the slow pace, but I don't think they quite nailed the pacing and timing of the plot (sorry, I'm not a film person, don't know if this is the right way to say it).
I have found much of the discourse around this show, in particular, to be pretty dull and unimaginative. (I was glad to read the comments on this thread). I can't quite put my finger on why.

In the beginning, I gave Gilligan a huge latitude and just went for the ride. I loved the pace, fwiw. I did though find Carol really hard to follow in the finale; throwing herself completely into the arms of the joined when she still thought the entire human race was going to starve within 10 years. I have been viewing her through the lens of attachment theory (I know, I'm a walking instagram therapist), particularly the disorganized model. It's been interesting watching her be both desperate for connection and fearful/rejecting it. I mean, I guess this is at least my solace: most sci-fi fails to stick the landing, they build up an interesting world but never pay the story off well (this should just be branded the JJ Abrams problem), but if you can at least follow a set of characters and invest in them, maybe the end of the plot is less important. But is Carol worth watching? Manousos is. I think the writers know he is, like Mike from BB, but there's less tension in his core drive (he isn't conflicted). I'll keep watching is what I mean to say.

I love the slow pacing. It really reveals just how boring this new humanity is. It seems entirely plausible that an alcoholic with family trauma and self loathing would respond to grief by going on a multi-episode bender and binge watch Golden Girls.

Yesterday I happened to have caught the Star Trek TOS “I, Mudd” episode, which has remarkably similar themes. An overwhelming group of mind-think human-like androids seek to turn our small landing crew into pampered pets. Harry Mudd follows the sensual pursuits of Diabaté as Kirk is left as the human most able to resist the fantasy. But of course, one hour is just too short to explore this.

There’s little details in the slow episodes that really hit hard. I almost teared up when the hive Kusimayu released her pet goat and ignored its bleating as it chased after her. I’m intrigued by Manousos’s contention that “they” have stolen souls, which explains why he doesn’t accept any of them as rightful owners of anything. Maybe it’s just the old philosophy student in me but there’s a lot to process in all this.

I had the inverse journey as yours. I didn’t mind that it started out a bit slow because I was expecting the tension to gradually build. Instead it feels like the episodes got slower and slower. Still entertaining, and I still like the show, but it isn’t really drawing me in any more than what occurred during episode one. Finale was pretty good though… will stick around for season two.

I don't know if Carol is realistic or not, but today I had to go to an Apple Store to have my Pencil repaired by an employee, and I had the realistic feeling that I was Carol

I really liked it. I don't think it's one of the best shows ever, and I can definitely see it's not for everyone, but I loved the premise, the slow pace, the photography, and the creativity.
I also like the way different unconverted people react to the situation: Manousos is outright refusing it; Mr Diabaté is going all-in; the other 10 accept it because of family members; Carol's way to process it evolves during the season - the end of episode 7 was particularly touching.
I look forward to S2.

For a number of reasons, I'm enjoying Pluribus. It's different from what I've seen before. (Perhaps there's something else out there that's like it, but perhaps I haven't seen that thing.) Carol is an individual at odds with a powerful collective. However, that collective can't directly harm her. I like the way the rules of this game continue to unfold.

I'm enjoying watching how a particular individual deals with an extraordinary circumstance. The scenes are deliberately crafted. Clues and rules of the game are gradually revealed. Some of the information feels earned, some doesn't, but every piece of information provides more dimension to the situation.

It took until episode 8 for Carol to FINALLY start engaging with the hive mind. The game was afoot: Carol wanted to unbind the hive mind, and the hive mind wanted to get under her fences. Carol can be hypocritical: she judged Koumba in his hedonistic indulgences, but by Episode 9, she was content to indulge in her own game of pretend with Zosia.

I do bump on some things. It's hard to believe that the collective consciousness of humanity would choose nonviolence, would choose to allow itself to starve to death over time. Carol's refusal to engage with the hive mind in the early episodes was frustrating. When she comes around to engaging with them by episode 8, is it just more of her hypocritical personality at play, or bothersome, inconsistent storytelling? My biggest road bump, by far, is believing that the other people not affected by the virus seem to be so okay with the situation.

I expect season two to be about Carol and Manousos learning to work together. We don't know much about Manousos, but we do know he's extreme in his principles and is capable of engaging in disciplined methodical research. Carol is less disciplined, more ruled by her emotions, but insightful in ways that Manousos is not. How they find their way to a functional working relationship (or fail to) is something I'm interested in seeing.

I've enjoyed the commentary throughout this season on Autostraddle (a website for and by lesbian/queer, trans and enby folks). I can only come at this from my own experiences as a lesbian who endured religious conversion efforts, so YMMV, but I find Carol extremely relatable and appreciate that she is unlike most of the other protagonists (queer or otherwise) that I've encountered in film and television. And to be clear, Autostraddle does not give her a pass on her flawed behavior -- they dig into the brand of self-involved white feminism that a character like Carol represents.
https://www.autostraddle.com/tag/pluribus/

Just want to say that I really appreciated this thread. Thank you all for your thoughtful comments and insights. 🙏

I am enjoying it, but the structure and pacing are different than I expected (It reminds me a bit of Station 11). The mechanics of the antagonists activities have been mostly unseen after episode 1 so it has been interesting (and sometimes frustrating) to see it presented from only the protagonists POV. There certainly have been plenty of things I would want them to go into more deeply that to just have long quiet shots that seem designed to make you feel uncomfortable and lonely.

I have been enjoying in a lot - the slow burn and open direction of the story are both great features to me. I find Carol to be a much more relatable and comprehensible character than Walter White was - I think they are doing a nicely subtle job of explaining her motivations and thought process.

One thing I find interesting is the concept of the battle between Carol + Manousos vs the Hive. The Hive is competing to convert everybody, but must grant essentially every request for aid coming from those people as they work to defeat the Hive. That is a fascinating setup and I'm eager to see where Pluribus takes it in season 2.

The show clicked for me when I realized Gilligan tells stories driven by people, not events. This story is gonna be driven by Carol, not by the "virus" that came from the sky.

I don't like Carol, and I think at this point in the story she's a bad vessel to lead the story telling. I like the show and think Gilligan can turn things around (so many shows' first seasons only look good in retrospect), but at this point the show's best output is the thought experiment rather than the narrative.

To me all of S1 is set-up to the deep betrayal Carol experiences in the finale. Carol felt she finally had room to breathe, and tried a path different from the grief, rage, and loneliness that defined her in the first 8 eps.

She silently bargained for some kind of peace by no longer trying to fix the hive (no more probing questions, no more additions to her whiteboard), and she believed the hive couldn't force Carol to join them without consent.

When she found out that the hive would never accept her, no matter what Carol does (stopped trying to convert them, stopped yelling at them, stopped issuing hilariously petty demands), Carol realizes it will never be enough.
How gutting and isolating to have the focus of your affection - that you made so many compromises for - tell you that you still aren't enough.
Given Carol's painful history with conversion "therapy", this would have been a devastating betrayal, similarly perpetrated by someone who claims to love her so much.

Carol made every bargain she could, in the face of personal and global loss, calculating it would help her survive physically and emotionally. But instead the hive worked intentionally behind her back to violate her.

Feeling foolish, unloved, alone, under pressing mortal threat, and with possibly no real hope, an unexploded atom bomb seems almost restrained.

Also, did anyone else notice how Carol's rumspringa montage always featured her drinking a beverage? I don't know what yet, but it seemed important.

Beyond the story, giant kudos to camera work, set design, costume, and scoring.

My kid takes ADA public transportation to and from school. It requires me to call each week to schedule the next week's rides. The call begins with a multi-step menu, each part of which is prefaced by a lengthy recorded message giving me important updates from roughly 2023. I timed it once, it's about two minutes of messages—the same messages, every time‚—before I can make the choices that connect me to the dispatcher. Anyway, this is just to say that Pluribus made me feel very seen.