Summary
Pluribus slows things down in “Grenade”, which is no bad thing, and it does build to a literally explosive conclusion for good measure.
Well, I think it’s safe to say that the launch of Apple TV+’s Pluribus was quite the success. Its deeply mysterious two-episode premiere was met with overwhelmingly positive reviews and word of mouth, despite a degree of hype I rarely recall seeing in recent times. It was only right that Episode 3, fittingly titled “Grenade”, slowed things down, but it also can’t resist building to a literally explosive conclusion that raises compelling questions about whether Carol’s newfound God-like power to be gifted anything she wants might be a touch problematic.
This is a smart outgrowth of some of the questions raised in “Pirate Lady”. Those were specifically about consent, mostly in the context of Zosia becoming a part of Diabate’s harem against her will, but they’re elements of the same conundrum. Humanity is now a perfectly unified hivemind, and Carol’s inability to be assimilated into its shared network has positioned her as someone who must be courted. There’s a sinister contour to this, of course, since part of the aliens’ plan is to leverage her fondest memories and most significant relationships to try and charm her. But the most compelling aspect of Pluribus thus far, at least for me, is the idea that perhaps the aliens don’t know they’re being sinister; that their desire to promote a state of unbridled happiness for everyone on Earth is earnest, and therefore dangerous in a unique way. You can, after all, have too much of a good thing, be too accommodating, and miss the point of why complete contentment isn’t always a desirable baseline state of being.
With this in mind, the literal cold open of “Grenade” takes on an interesting shape. It shows Carol and Helen staying in an ice hotel in Norway that Carol is too preoccupied and cynical to enjoy, and the question becomes about perspective. Even 2617 days, 10 hours, 30 minutes, and 42 seconds before what we’re now dubbing “The Joining”, Helen was basically in that post-assimilation state of unbridled enthusiasm and jubilation. Carol, however, was not. The only thing that has meaningfully changed in the interim is that now everyone is like Helen and nobody is like Carol. Oh, and Helen’s dead, at least in part because of Carol’s inflexible attitude.
Carol doesn’t want to be alone in this, but it’s not going well so far. Her meeting with people like her who had a conversational grasp of the English language was disastrous, and here, even her efforts to reach out to the manager of a self-storage facility in Paraguay backfire. Sure, he naturally assumes that Carol is part of the hivemind, but it becomes a game of multilingual tit-for-tat soon enough. This show’s really good at depicting Carol’s disorientation and frustration over not just feeling so isolated but being unable to reconcile the aliens’ overtures being both deeply manipulative and oddly sincere and thoughtful. When she gets home, she’s greeted with all of her collected mail, which includes a personal massager gifted by Helen as a homecoming present.
Carol’s immediate reaction is to demand that the aliens stay out of Helen’s memories and never use them against her, which is fair enough, but she keeps conflating all of their knowledge with Helen-specific details. When she’s delivered breakfast on account of having a nearly-empty fridge, she assumes that intimate knowledge of her supplies came from Helen, but that turns out not to be the case. Carol’s adamant about maintaining her independence in a world where the only thing she’s using her independence for is binge-watching Golden Girls. She’s having to weigh up the cost of giving in versus the convenience of being able to have anything she wants or needs delivered to her. Is the consolidation of supermarket fruit and veg terrible totalitarianism, or is the hyper-efficiency of synchronized sprout restocking a utopian ideal?
Pluribus Episode 3 introduces problems into this equation. The efforts to preserve resources cause a power cut that kills all the lights across town until only the ones in Carol’s neighborhood flicker back on. Carol’s sarcasm about wanting a hand grenade is misunderstood, and later, Zosia arrives at the door carrying one. Zosia’s comprehensive shared intellect makes her a great conversationalist, but the elephant in the room can’t be avoided – the aliens are working around the clock to turn Carol into one of their unquestioning number, and it’s only a matter of time before they figure it out. Her independence is at odds with their biological imperative to assimilate her. The only potential future is a picture-postcard version of life like the one flash-frozen in that Norwegian hotel; that didn’t seem genuine to Carol even before it was mandatory to live in it. Oh, and the grenade turns out to be real.
In almost killing herself and Zosia with the ordnance, Carol exposes the biggest problem of all. If the aliens think a grenade will make her happy, they’ll give her one. It’s the same with a bazooka, a tank, or – this one after a bit of debate, granted – a nuclear weapon. The flaw in the aliens is that they can’t rationalise their desire to be helpful. Their idea of happiness is too simplistic. They are, as described, working off a biological imperative. And they’ve given Carol, indecisive and unsatisfied by nature, more power than she can possibly know what to do with.
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