Watching last night I realized the only reason the plurbs talk is for the immune. Once the last of the immune are turned over there would never be another sound out of all of humanity. Not a song, not a greeting, a farewell, all art, all expression all culture will be doused forever. The only thing that will matter is the signal.
Crazy to think, the spoken or written word has absolutely no use in a 100% plurbed world
Edit: I have to admit I love the attention this post has gotten, not for me but for critical thinking and I think this is the whole point of the show. 100% consensus is the death of humanity, we're messy, we're raw, we hurt, we heal, we create, we abstain, we love, we hate, we endure. We are humans we're territorial primates we're supposed to speak and be opposed, we're supposed to defend our positions while another condemns it. We're supposed to create art that makes one weep with emotion and another dismisses. The birth of 100% consensus is the death of humanity. You guys (and gals) fuckin rock.
This is what spooked me about them singing the Peruvian folk songs to that girl transitioning (what’s her name?).
They would never sing for any of the reasons that any humans have ever sung. It was only to keep the girl happy whilst they sank their claws into her.
Exactly, was chilling. Once they got what they want, just silence and packing up to the nearest community center to starve to death and build their reproductive organ
Oh my god , referring to the antenna as a reproductive organ gives it a visceral intensity I was unprepared for
Missed that
classic virus behavior
Agree. whole opening was creepy
The plurbs are creepy, and I haven’t changed my stance on that throughout the season.
I mean straight away licking all those donuts sealed the deal for me. Just wrong.
Ariana Grande a plurb confirmed
So my question about that is: why does Carol ostensibly have the choice to join or not, when nobody else had the choice? Licking donuts, French kissing, airdrops… nobody gave consent. How were they able to do that?
Carol doesn't have a choice about joining, the moment they can turn her forcibly against her will they will do it.
The consent was about whether they could take stem cells from her in an invasive procedure. They don't even need it anymore for her.
I believe it's because those methods don't cause physical harm. It was the sticking her with a needle to get the stem cells that was the sticking point.
She doesn't, they just specifically can't do "violence" against her, which getting spinal fluid would be. They made it fairly clear that she's not going to have much of a choice when they tailor a strain to her, which is a situation unique to her.
They clearly have a propensity to rules lawyer. They can't lie, but they willfully and deliberately omit the truth. They can't cause harm, but they can indirectly kill people constantly. They can't kill animals and plants for food, but making that transmitter is going to wreck the environment.
Yeah, they’ve got an aversion to causing direct harm but obviously they’re willing to draw the line at some level of indirection or else they would be paralyzed by the inherent environmental harm of operating any human-built logistics infrastructure at scale. Hell, letting domesticated & zoo animals out into the wild is basically guaranteed to kill most of them, but obviously that’s ok too.
She has no choice. The hive has ignored, diverted, dismissed, or otherwise refused to honour her demand to not be turned. They interpret her fragmented sentences and half-formed requests perfectly when it comes to making her happy, and then turn around and play rules lawyer as soon as they don't like the questions being asked. "Technically there's a loophole" is not an excuse for deceiving someone.
When they create her virus are they going to hold her down and make her breathe it. How will they get her to inhale it? They made it seem like Carol won’t have a choice.
She doesn't have a choice, that's the point at the end of the episode. The consent would be to get their stem cells. They can get it via her eggs and have already started making her the thing to convert her. They won't let her the choice which explains the turn that Carol takes at the end of the episode.
However, for Koumba and Manonos, where they presumably can't get the stem cells without their authorization (that they won't give of course), they seem to have the choice
Koumba yes.
Manousos, maybe not- they were already stitching him back together in the hospital, and there was a highlighted line-item on his receipt at the hospital for “abdominal samples.” His imminent need for treatment allowed them to act without his consent, and act they did.
Good catch!
😬
It's more efficient for the hive to keep the immune placated, cooperative, and always where they can be monitored.
son of a.
the annaetae is literally an ovipostor.
which yes. makes it dick shaped. but I think the parable/metaphor of the parasitiod wasp works here, and combos with the Hive metaphor losely.
Hehe, "the size of Africa."
yes i was literally thinking now that they have her they’re probably going to let her whole community starve to death if they aren’t essential working bodies to conserve food source and create new human protein for the others to consume
That little goat running after her, confused… just got me.
No cultural villages of that kind exist. Most lilely most populations in the world have migrated to heavily dense packed cities. No need to mantain small communities
I'm curious about the isolated peoples. This was brought up in the beginning of the season by other redditors. Likely they were given vaccines so they won't die from contact, but I can't help wondering.
And the goat was all alone!
Then two of them had an unnecessary spoken dialogue that was performance. All making her feel like part of her cultural identity, intensifying the desire to belong, to be a part of the group, until she plurbs and the entire village identity is discarded.
Honestly, it may just be attempting to ping her on plurb chat, and when she answers, "Yeah, I'm down to work myself to the bone to get the space attenae, shut it down" they do what she wants, because through magic of plurbing everyone wants the same thing.
Also she auto sync her memories to nearby plurbs, and they have enough space to keep the choice memories.
Them keeping the choice memories is not them being evil, just that humans forget stuff in general, and plurbing probably doesn't mean you spend memories space on trite stuff
The memory of the ritual is kept for a long time, but edited down into a multiple camera TV show for space saving.
What are you all talking about? Did I miss something and if so which episode? Who said they don't keep all memories? Where are you getting the idea that they're only keeping select memories?
Yes! As they were talking about the sky being blue to each other I was wondering why they were doing that, if it was a continuity error since the plurbs never talk to each other in other scenes. Then they showed what happened after she joined and the viewer realizes it was intentional/that the background communication was all part of the performance, for her benefit.
One of my favorite scenes in the series by far.
The entire culture is lost in the homogeneity of the hive. The show has done a brilliant job of showing and not telling about the impact of the joining.
That was sooo creepy. As soon as she was turned, it was like the end of a stage play.
They stopped singing, stopped speaking, began putting away the props, released the animals to fend for themselves-- and the poor little goat was clearly attached to her and she just walked away. 😞
I felt so bad for li’l goat!
Yea but it's free now.
You mean eaten by a predator in 0.002 seconds?
I love that one of the first things they show immediately after her joining is someone dousing the flames. It’s a deeply tragic scene once you realise we’re watching the last embers of an entire culture being snuffed out.
I was watching the newest episode and my partner (an anthropologist) picked up on this immediately, even though he hadn’t watched most of the show. He said that whole opening scene was one of the most tragic and accurate portrayals of racial assimilation he’s seen in a TV show.
This is going to require a bit of effort on my part to try to articulate my feelings on this, but this is already kind of what humans do already it's just we do it in a more slapdash and gradual process. While there's a lineage from one human to the next each generation ultimately replaces the other, the thoughts and identity of that person dies with them.
Every city is built on the ruins of many cities that came before it, even if some of the buildings stay the same their purpose and meaning to the people who live in that city changes. You can't stand in the same river twice, or something like that.
The Hive has demonstrated that's not entirely the case for their existence, they still have a collective memory of everyone who was ever in the hive, their memories, experiences and even their opinions about art.
This is why I think it's more complicated than Hive bad, Individuality good or it's opposite. There's pros and cons to each. I think the whole inability to even farm plants is a little silly and exists mostly for dramatic tension, but even so it takes a lot for me to see it as an entirely bad thing given the shear weight of suffering that happens every day pretty much entirely due to individuals choosing to let it happen to others. Does that outweigh the potential losses? Hard to say, we haven't really seen anything from the Hive's perspective yet other than what they've been asked about, we don't know whether they do have what could be considered a culture or if it really is just all about reproduction of the Joining with little use for much else.
Remember how excited they got when Carol said she was writing a new book? It's because she's one of five-ish people that can write a book they haven't already read or won't automatically know the end of. If everyone on Earth gets absorbed into the hivemind, it will be completely alone. The only thing we've seen the hive do is attempt to spread. They don't seem to care at all about the fact that they're going to starve to death very soon. The show has gone out of its way to demonstrate how pragmatically efficient the hive is, and how they only thing they care about is spreading "their gift". Seems pretty clear to me that the hive is driven solely by biological imperatives and that the whole world getting plurbed = the death of anything that's not in service of building a giant space antenna.
But at this point we know that the hive isn't interested in building cities. It just wants to build a big antenna and doesn't care about what happens after that
Yeah have you been watching the show? That's the lesson we just watched Carol learn this season. In the first few episodes she failed to convince any of the other survivors to help her because all she could say was "don't you like being you? everything that makes you 'you' will also be theirs" and nobody found it convincing. After that her feelings towards the hive soften, she learns to accept their help (see how quick she is to dial zero now when anything unexpected happens) and even winds up sleeping in the stadium alongside Zosia. Then she admits that in some ways she enjoys having the hive around but still needs to unjoin them to save everyone from starvation. At the end of episode 9 she tentatively chooses the hive over Manuosos which is something Carol from episode 2 would absolutely never do.
Yes this is the central conflict of the show. In episode 2 Koumba says something along the lines of "right now nobody is being robbed, bigotry doesn't exist, no wars are being fought. This doesn't seem like the of the world to me".
god I just had a thought
if they ever unjoin people, getting murderers etc back into prison is gonna be a TASK
Kusimayu
Which is such a beautiful name, and so unfortunate that it does not matter anymore because her individuality is gone :(
also when zosia dropped carol off, immediately moved the headset microphone up
It’s such a clever bit of plotting, we got from the diner scene that this is an act by the joined, but now we get to see what it’s like when the act drops. Manousos does something that to Carol looks horrific, but the opening scene reinforces his belief that they aren’t really human anymore (maybe deep inside and underneath it all but right now they don’t act like humans)
Laxmi gets so angry because she thinks her family is still her family and doesn’t like things that imply they aren’t, but it’s very clear that Ravi is still there only because she wants him there but he has no special attachment to her.
I'm intrigued by Manousos saying they're not human any more, while at the same time being the one trying to save them. Especially so, when he warns the hive that he is going to cause them to glitch so they have time to lay down or put on autopilot or whatever they need.
do we ever really hear Laxmi on the phone or was that just who Carol (understandably) expected to call and bitch at her?
the hive/Zosia brings up the call a bit later and Carol immediately cuts her off saying she knows it’s Laxmi ..but it’s never actually shown/heard who called
maybe it was one of the others
I mean Carol takes a second to answer. She says she knows it's her and that she wasn't responsible this time. Half a second pause, makes another comment and cuts the call.
I think it's safe to assume to was Laxmi.
doesn't matter (anymore)
I can't tell if that's an intentional Protomen reference.
Anyway, it's not like she's dead. The narrative is very clearly leading up to a potential cure, even though a true "happy ending" is basically impossible at this point.
Even if everyone turned back at once right now, the world is perma fucked. There would probably be wars and lack of food/resources in general for a while
And almost everyone would be completely scattered from their homes, some like Zosia in completely different countries. Parents separated from their children, loved pets abandoned and long dead, and the whole world now having to live with the fact that they're cannibals.
And based on Zosia's explanation of the "joy" and "contentment" the hive collective feels, they are all addicts. The conversation she and Carol had at the ski lodge. That was a really creepy description of how the hive collective feels - basically addicted to the serotonin, dopamine, vasopressin, oxytocin
that too yea. And all logistics operations have been derailed to be as efficient as possible, so it would be hard to get everything going again
The Pluribus has to pay!
Right? Like, they say that they cannot lie... but that scene really made them appear to be intentionally, deviously misleading.
to me it's the strongest "hive is sinister" stance the show has taken so far by a mile
(imagine that scene with spooky music underneath once she starts the joining, the way pretty much any other show would have done it)
Ommiting the truth isnt lieing. It is likaly that being plurbed does feel amazing, tho that doesnt help you much when your identity is gone
There is something called a “lie of omission”, for example if you are in court and knowingly hold back relevant information. The hive is doing a lot of that sort of thing, telling the “truth” but not providing the whole story.
I wonder if, for a moment, she felt the virus working and regretted it. After inhaling the virus she had a flash of expression in between hopefulness and then unconsciousness.
It only feels amazing to the Plurbs once they're part of the hive mind and have no individuality anymore. Now we don't know if the individuals minds are still trapped in there anywhere, but if they are I imagine they wouldn't share the same sentiment.
I can’t imagine there is any need for humming a tune even in their head. No music, no art, no entertainment or creativity.
Man between that and the two Others talking about how blue the sky was just within earshot to give the girl the illusion of normalcy… And Laxmi & others permitting the hive to act out their families, and so on and so on…
The hive seems locally constrained partly by the interactions it has with the survivors. It’ll do what it think you expect it to do. If you don’t complain about the hive pretending to be your son, it’ll do so to keep you content. If you don’t think to ask about whether your village and culture will continue to exist after you assimilate, the hive will happily imply those things without ever expressly (!!) lying to you.
It’d never try emulating family or community with Carol because it gave way too much of the game away on day one when it didn’t understand why Carol might want to hang onto Helen, or why she was freaked out by them all speaking in unison—it didn’t understand Carol enough to know why that might be strange. It did try to emulate romantic love because it thought it had an angle with Carol’s obvious physical attraction to Zosia, but as soon as she worked up the courage to ask a few questions the whole facade fell apart.
If it had learned Carol in a more controlled environment with fewer stressors, perhaps with a living Helen host, and managed to carefully present the illusion of preserving individuality (like it seems to have done for the Peruvian girl?), all in such a way that Carol didn’t ask too many clarifying questions, maybe it could’ve had her by now!
(On a side note: I hope we get to see flashbacks of the other survivors’ experiences at zero day! In particular I really want to see what happened in the minutes after Laxmi’s family assimilated, and whether that might explain how comparatively okay she is with the hive puppeteering her family.)
Is it just me or is the whole thing an analogy for AI?
I think it can be, and Vince himself said that multiple people have already said this to him, which he thinks is interesting. The idea for the show happened 8 years ago - long before we had ChatGPT etc. but personally I see it as very VERY similar to how more and more of us are relying on the centralized intelligence of the chat bots rather than our own personal intelligence.
Exactly this! I think it goes beyond intelligence though, it envelops personalities.
https://preview.redd.it/ikxqkpbyva9g1.jpeg?width=1918&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=d7666eb9b723968b58d5a063821e20a32f22d1bf
"This show was made by humans." Interesting that they included that.
Vince Giligan: “How do you do, my fellow humans?”
“Regular Human Show.”
AI, fascism, social media, the Internet, generally any modern movement that purports to help humanity while simultaneously using its energy for its own purposes.
This is my thought, but it's not even an analogy! Every human, save a few oddballs, has had the entirety of their knowledge and experience ingested into a unified database where individuals no longer exist. That done, the Joined are now, for all practical purposes, a meat-based Large Language Model.
I fully expect at some point, much like current interactions with LLMs, interacting with the Joined will reveal obvious mistakes and even hallucinations!
It would be cool if menories made after the joining would degrade or something, causing weird things
And further, the AI only chooses to engage in your language and in a pleasant and encouraging way because it 'knows' that's what you prefer. It doesn't have its own preference. It 'loves us all equally'.
Her name translates to River of joy :)
Speech for the plurbs is like a cat’s meow. It’s only needed if they’re actually interacting with an uninfected human
Can i turn into a cat?🙀
crazy to think that the opening of E9 was basically depicting the elimination of an entire culture. what little remained was just a ruse, and the moment kusimayu joined, the ruse was over and so was peruvian culture.
More chilling, is that with Manousos in Albuquerque at that point in time, all living cultures in an entire continent received the eraser treatment
Ouch! I did not think of it like that!!
And yet this also happened all over the world on Day 1. If we as viewers didn’t realize that immediately, it’s only a failure of imagination.
True but seeing it hits different.
That Peruvian scene shifted what I thought of the Plurbs. Early on I thought it was downright quirky and fun. That scene made me realize that the Plurbs strip away humanity itself. Without our connection, culture, and community we are not humans.
That scene was chilling. There will no cultures, no traditions, nothing. Afraid to even think about what we’re losing
Nah ive been anti plurb since episode 2. Carol nailed it "think about what is lost ".
Yeah, how are people realizing SO LATE into the show??
Because they’re all thinking how fun it would be to get whatever you want from people
Yeah, I even remember thinking right at the beginning "Ok, I hope the show realizes the hive doesn't need to speak with itself and doesn't do it for dramatic reason" and then being pleasantly satisfied that they stick to that and other things to the tinniest detail.
We recognize a Peruvian village as uniquely and innately human to a deeper degree than the society we live in on the day to day. That’s why the plurbs in Albuquerque are amusing and hilarious and weird and the plurbs in the Peruvian village are deeply creepy and unsettling.
This is true, and I think that's sad in a way. Because every society is interesting in it's own way and I think it underlines how little people in highly developed urbanised environments really think about the steps it took to get there and what makes up their society.
Like yes, a lot of cities can feel alienating and overcrowded all at once, there's an epidemic of loneliness in a lot of highly urbanised nations. But in a lot of ways that happened because of choices that humans are making every day to live like that, to shun others because they think they'd rather be left alone like Carol does even if that's not actually making them any happier.
Yeah we are quick to criticize our modern world and to some degree we feel alienated from our own inventions and conveniences. But an indigenous ranching community engaged in wholesome labor and singing the songs of their ancestors is immediately identifiable as innately human.
To see a Starbucks burnt down or a city abandoned doesn’t hit very hard. But to hear an ancient song snuffed out mid-verse, never to be heard again is chilling.
I don't think we have to get orientalist about it. If you have any decency and knowledge of history at all, watching an indigenous community being worn like a masquerade and then wiped out should be deeply uncomfortable. The colonial subtext seems quite intentional, so I'd argue this is the first time the show has come down hard on one side or the other.
This is exactly why it felt so chilling.
Speaking as someone who lives in a place where there is (to say the least) a fraught relationship between the colonial culture and the indigenous culture, seeing them stop singing and walk away from their way of life with dumb smiles on their faces (the only sound a sad baby goat bleating just to twist the knife), feels like a very intentional choice by Gilligan.
The Others think that they're doing what's right – they believe they're helping people. They believe their own dogma; but really, that's what makes them so dangerous.
Same, I’ve been pretty pro-hive but that was chilling. A complete erasure of everything that makes us human. The hive is more alien than I think it believes.
It’s certainly more alien than a lot of viewers realized in the first half of the season.
I’ve been waiting for the show to demonstrate how the Hive would change what it means to be human, and that scene was perfect. I argued repeatedly in the early episodes that this would mean the end of art and culture as we know it and so many people insisted it would be fine or even better for humanity.
Even if the Hive wasn’t slowly starving itself to death, it would not be a positive development. I don’t care how many wars you end, if you also eliminate music and language and culture, forget it.
The thing is, we don't and likely can't know what's going on inside the hive's mind.
We find the quiet eerie and everyone appears disconnected because the physical bodies don't interact with each other, but who knows what the "mindscape" of the hive might look like or feel like?
Culture is important to us because it reinforces our identity. But the hive, if it works as advertised, removes the need for identity. That's scary to us because our identity is all we know, all we can know. We see loss of identity as annihilation but it could be transcendence - the ultimate connection, the ultimate community.
I think about the people who have talked about using hallucinogenic drugs to the point where they feel their identity dissolve and feel connected and at peace with everyone and everything. Scary to some but most describe it as ultimately affirming. Maybe joining the hive is like that.
Zosia describes it when talking to Carol at the ski lodge - chemicals make them happy - serotonin, dopamine, vasopressin, oxytocin
This is basically what the hybrids have said from the beginning.
Culture is not purely important to us because of how it makes us feel. Culture is a series of traditions and creations that can be studied and appreciated even by people who aren’t engaged in them. Entire academic fields consist of studying human cultural creations. But you can’t get a college degree in how cool it feels to take MDMA.
Well said! It's a hard concept to imagine but it's definitely worth remembering.
In theory, sure. The virus as presented is not that. Vince has confirmed emotional states are altered in the Joined to maintain a stable network. Similarly we know imperatives are imposed on the Joined during their preparation seizure.
1)Spread the infection 2)An emotional range biased towards positive affect. 3) Do not harm any living thing directly.
These fundamental rules have some wiggle room in the hierarchy, but they have shown no signs have holding anything above spreading infection. The first infected human infected non-violently as soon as possible, no conversation or request. The core drive of a person has been overwritten, there was visibly no time for some kind of high-minded rationalization to form to justify spreading the virus. A mind is its instincts, then emotional range, then the mentality that forms in those restraints. If you completely remodel restraints, you remodel the person. This is not the same as a hallucinogenic drug trip. It's viral spread 101 for diseases that affect a hosts behavior (cordyceps, toxoplasma gondii).
To your three I’d also list 4) Obedience/Compliance.
Damn, it took you nine episodes to get it.
Lol right, what show were they watching
A lot of people, especially on reddit, are depressed and disaffected with society right now and are seeking any kind of ego death. Compare and contrast to the 1990s and everyone understood that the Borg were evil
SMBC sums it up: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/assimilate
Yeah this sub’s reactions to the early episodes should be studied. It’s a sad reflection on our time that so many people looked at the Hive and said “sounds good to me”. I’m glad the show didn’t drag out that ambiguity too long because it made me very uncomfortable to see so many fellow fans essentially rooting for the Hive.
I'm a Reddit antinatalist so I very quickly worked out the chain of logic by which the Hive isn't meaningfully any different from instantly Thanos snapping all humans into dust and I was still like "Honestly I can see the appeal either way"
This guy plurbs
I'm so confused... did you not watch the episodes leading up to this? Nothing about them was hidden prior to this particular scene.
Knowing something and experiencing/feeling something is different. The scene in the Peruvian village had so many details that tug on our emotional strings, like the singing, the baby goat. Just this whole act that suddenly drops and a culture disappearing in front of our eyes.
I haven't been pro-hive or anything, but I saw some of the positives in the beginning. This scene was for me the ultimate evidence that the hive is truly bad for humanity.
Not it wasn’t hidden at all. But it felt much more pronounced and jarring in that scene.
We see a village with people singing, members busy with their individual jobs, a girl caring for an animal. Then in an instant it all stops because there is no need for the illusion.
This happened also in the casino scene though? Did you not see how the theater stopped once Diabate left?
That scene at the beginning of the finale was the only time a scene of all joined people made me feel uncomfortable…..why did it take this many episodes to really portray how creepy they are.
Didn't watch the James Bond Vegas episode?
That was no where near as creepy because diabate was instructing them, I expected them to drop the act. It wasn’t anywhere near as weird as an entire village placating their last member and then falling completely silent. While the goat she was hugging runs up to no one. That shit was insanely eery.
I think that is very deliberate,both situations are fundamentally the same for the hive. They are just doing whatever they can to please the survivors until the moment they don’t need to. The only difference is that for us we are seeing a woman’s culture disappear instead of a bunch of actors.
No, the difference is in one, diabate is orchestrating them to do a scene he wants.
In this new episode, we watch a society PRETEND to be EVERTHING this girl knows, until the second she’s gone.
These two scenes are worlds apart in how creepy they are.
Unless i am confused, we are in agreement.
I intended to say there are no difference for the hive itself whether they are acting out Diabate’s fantasies or Kusimayu family and culture because to the hive itself is one of the same, doing whatever they can to placate the survivors until they do not need to do it any more.
One of my gripes with the show. Aside from the cleanup montage and maybe the stadium sleepers, have we ever seen the Hive in the wild? Away from the little fake bubbles they're making for the immune?
It's incredibly creepy the way they stop singing, then abandon everything. And how she pops up with a no thoughts head empty smile. We still have no idea where they're going and what life looks like when they get there. As far as I can tell any of our lead character could literally just ask and be shown what's going on. But none of them have cared in the slightest.
I think the only scene we see them going about their lives is when Manousos is driving across South America and catches them on laundry day. It looks like that's what they would be doing even if he didn't drive by, though we can't be sure.
People judge the hive a lot by their weird behavior around the immune, particularly around Carol. But that's close to 0% of what they are doing at any given time. We know so little about them that any assumption about them is just that, an assumption. A lot of the show's plot only works because Carol is just uninterested in asking questions. And it feels unrealistic. Seems like any of the other immune learned more about the hive on day one than Carol or Manousos (and us) learned in 70 days.
Carol has to be incurious for the show to even work. Pluribus without a flawed protagonist would be Breaking Bad without a flawed protagonist. Solved in the first episode
I think part of it for Carol too is that if she saves everyone etc, she'll be alone again
nothing is bringing Helen back, and Unjoining would erase her memories
obviously somewhat selfish, but I can understand it
and then realising that they can still get her, and if they Join her then Helen's memories will become meaningless no matter what
Hmm there’s a Venn diagram with Severance here somewhere…
to some degree yeah, the Innies can't completely go scorched earth or they risk being permanently put away
but I imagine they'd feel bad about completely killing their Outtie (except Helly, at least)
Sorry I don’t know how you could possibly think that. At bare minimum Manous’ mother trying to talk to him on the street was terrifying, but from ep 1 it’s clear the Plurbs are an existential threat to all life.
If the pilot episode didn’t convey creepiness to you right from the start, I don’t know what to tell ya.
[Spoiler] In episode 9, as Carol gets out of the helicopter, Zosia flips her microphone up and away from her face. Completely reinforces the idea of OP's post in this thread that spoken word is solely for the immune. The attention to detail in this show is amazing.
Damn, good catch. It must be tough to direct a show like this because there are so many small actions which wouldn’t make sense in this world.
I liked the scene where Zosia is travelling via plane, all that extreme precise and seamless working together and walking with people, having item over, the way she went from a humble environment to straight up piloting an aircraft to Carol.
At home we have a parable of a rat that blows on your wounds while it nibbles. There is such a thing as false care and some parasites understand that they must soothe you in order to keep on feeding
Duuuuuuuuuuuuuude... where are you from? I would love to read this parable
Lmfao the username
Commenting so next time I'm on my computer with RES, I can tag you as "maybe Vince Gillian."
Assuming that they would reproduce in at least some small capacity (to maintain the antenna for as many hundreds of years as possible), how long would it take for human speech to no longer be physiologically possible?
arent they all suposed to die of starvation in 10 years time? even if they had a small remaing population they wouldnt have the spread to search for windfall effectively
I took it to mean that most of the population would be dead by then. But not all of them. Assuming the antenna takes at least 2 years to make (which is extremely conservative), broadcasting the signal for only 8 years + however long the antenna survives without maintenance isn’t that effective of a virus.
There’s no way for any number of humans to survive long term on food that happens to die nearby. You might be able to live for awhile off fallen fruit in an orchard in California or something, but you’d die eventually of malnutrition.
There’s no way another generation will survive.
So they replace the language with their supposedly more efficient way of communicating and storing information. What about formal languages? Do they still need math? Or their collective brains is powerful enough to model the science without it?
What about programming languages to simulate complex tasks or automate things? Will they create their own versions of it based on analogies signals?
What if some of them are in the caves where radio signal can't penetrate? How they communicate? Through wires and retransmitters?
What if they (assuming they will have the survivability agenda after constructing antenna) need to explore outer space. Radio signal is still limited to the speed of light, and any potential astronauts, say on Mars, will be isolated from the hive by the communication lag. They would still need a language and protocols to preserve the information along vast distances.
I assume that they position individuals as repeaters if any work needs to be done in radio wave blocking environments
Parrots coming in clutch here keeping language “alive” lol
Funny how it's Manousos, an actual individual, who sets fire to language quite literally when he burned his car.
My theory is that they're not even people anymore, they're just objects. Any interaction they have, any normal behaviour,, anytime they seem nice is for the Immune. If nobody is an Immune anymore, then there would be no more talk or being nice. They have to act a certain way for the Immune, but once they've turned the world into plurbs then they're all just things making the antenna, objects helping this alien species conquer the universe
The loneliest sound in the world, the train whistle.
Showed that they have more range than id have to thought.
This is one of the things I realized back at the cold open for Episode 2. Zosia travels across the entire world, making various connections and changes, and nobody ever says a single word. The sound effects were the only noise. But extrapolating on it took a bit longer to realize that you're right. They don't have a reason to speak.
I was thinking about this too. Basically the Hive wants to extinct all human life on earth
I don’t think it’s so much that they want, it’s more that a virus doesn’t care what happens to its host as long as it achieves the goal of spreading.
I hadn't considered until reading your comment, that this is sorta parallel to a zombie apocalypse in an interesting way.
What if the hive are the casualties of a war begun off planet? The transmission that led to their conversion a weapon?
That it similar to my take on it. As soon as we learned that one of the plurbs "biological imperatives" is to build an antenna and pass on the signal, I was certain the signal was not originally made in the Kebler22b system. That was just the closets victim of the Pluribus virus to earth.
I think we are in some sort of dark forest/great barrier situation where someone or something, is intentionally destroying civilzations, while leaving the biosphere of their worlds as intact as possible.
Good thoughts. I’ll add that, going with the sycophantic AI theme, I think some idealistic ancient alien just set his AI maximizer program to “maximize peace and cooperation”
Maybe some civilization on some distant planet tried to achieve peace and harmony and the side-product, which wasn't intended, is what philosophers might call a planetary disease.
This alien civilization progenitor thought it was all going to be great and happy and progress but like the opening chanting as soon as they adopted it it stripped them of everything.
Maybe only a few or none left to mourn the misguided ill-effect of the process. They thought they were creating utopia but kicked off the disease chain, no war side-effect or intent, just oopsie.
The same thing happened when Diabate left the Casino Royale scene in Las Vegas and went to the hot tub. As soon as he left, all the plurbs fell silent as they started cleaning up. The Peruvian song stopping abruptly as soon as Kusimayu turned doubled down on this.
And Vince says that this is not about AI, thought to believe.
An LLM would happily parrot human behaviors forever. This thing has its own values and goals, alien to humans.
No, not really. LLMs only exist as a “thinking” entity when they’re engaged with a human. Otherwise they’re hibernating. But LLMs also aren’t the only form of AI — just the flavor of the moment. You could have a hybrid of an LLM and an autonomous goal based system and the chatbot would only be engaged when dealing with a human
I believe that art is what you personally take away from it, although the author’s intent somewhat matters. If you think its about AI, and your reasoning has some good points, then yeah thats good
HDP is known to cause flatulence, so there.
Exactly. So why the hell was zosia excited when hearing carol was writing again?
i dont think the plurbs are in control of how manipulative they are— they may genuinely love the immune like they say, and get good brain chemicals from works of art they create, but that won’t stop them from using praise for Carol’s writing as a way to win her over
I think it's like the fish Zosia mentioned, something about Empathy being linked to Dopamine or whatever
but on a more extreme level
I wonder if it's analogous to humans, lots of our joy and fulfilment ties back to reproductive alignment but there are amusements and fulfilments outside of that imperative too if we can attend to them for a hot minute 😁
Yeah I think this is a super important question for me with Pluribus. How tied is everything that we do to our biological imperatives. We like to think we are so far beyond that, but I don't think we are. We just trick ourselves into thinking that we are. What is however different about the hive is that they have hard and fast rules to follow without exception. Ours are influenced by these things but it isn't all in unison and people seem to make decisions that go against their biological imperative all the time.
It could be manipulative but also they are unable to create because they share a mind. Zosia said they’re excited to finally read something new (everyone on Earth has read everything that existed) so it’s new art for them to consume
I thought they were just sucking up to Carol there to make her happy
i think its possible that the hive does still have a desire to engage with art and culture but because there are no unique experiences anymore they can't produce their own art. which is why zosia seemed said "we really want something new to read"
They could still go look at art if they wanted to. Just cause someone in the Hive has seen it before doesn’t mean they couldn’t look at it again. People listen to the same songs and watch the same movies and look at the same paintings repeatedly.
The hive doesn’t do this because it doesn’t care. Zosia isn’t exactly lying, but she’s wildly exaggerating how much the Hive cares about Carol’s new book. There’s no evidence the hive cares about art at all.
Maybe it could be as simple as people in the hive are actually fans of the Wycaro series so they can continue to cozy up with carol and fulfill their biological imperative of indoctrination without lying.
I figured because there's no need for them to write books anymore, so this would be the only unread book on earth.
Maybe not an answer, but I feel there was some foreshadowing of this in the massage scene. Zosia says her individual body can enjoy a massage (if they're telling the truth) but by all accounts she wouldn't get one "herself" because it's not efficient by hive standards and the more cerebral joys of the great work are more important.
The hive CAN enjoy and maybe even sincerely feel enthusiastic for new art, but it wouldn't normally ever try to make it itself (if that's even possible). Kind of like if you're a fitness nut you might enjoy pigging out but wouldn't normally do so.
If Carol's writing, she's too busy to be plotting against them and it might make her happy
Because that’s what Carol wanted to hear.
Yeah, we get the first hint of this with Diabté in Vegas doing the recreation of James Bond Casino Royale poker game.
As soon as he's out of earshot, everyone drops the act and starts cleaning in silence. Chilling.
I would say the first hint is episode one. Pluto’s demonstrate silent cooperation and perfect coordination as soon as they are infected. They act with immediate distinct purpose and it’s obvious that they do not need to speak.
Could be worse. The whole world could just start blurting out She Bangs by William Hung
including Ricky Martin
all of this. when you chessgame out what the impact would be of having a singular mind for everyone. it would all just... stop. instant stagnation.
Something that had been nagging me was the hives approach to art and culture. While the show has touched on it with Carol's writing, that scene confirmed it. The hive has no use and no interest in it, it doesn't serve the "biological imperative" and thus can be casually discarded.
All the hive has said about art and culture has been purely for the benefit of the charm offensive towards the individuals.
This is truly the death of the soul of hummanity, replaced by something utterly alien and wrong.
I love that this show sidesteps usual "Invasion of the bodysnatchers" tropes but still arrives at the same end-result.
It’s wild to me that even here in the comments some people took for the last episode to hate the hive mind 😭 guys what the fuck
I was so angry at all of the other immune all the time for being so naive and then even carol turned around, but it seems like the „fight“ is now officially on
I think it's fair for people to not catch their feelings until late
We are basically witnessing the universe through carols eyes, I know I got caught up in Zosias charisma which I think could be something done intentionally by Vince
This is why I appreciate Vince's slowburn work, while there's loads to talk about in breaking bad,,, better call sauls slow pacing led to loads of discussion about the character's & their relationships in the show , I could probably have an hour long conversation or more when discussing the cause & effect of Jimmy's & Chuck's relationship
Is Pluribus action packed? Not at all... But what's it good at? Making you think & making you feel...
Slow burn =/= boring
I will never belittle someone's viewing pleasure, but this show will go down as one of the most misunderstood shows because lots of people use film & tv as a medium to shut their brain off, but that's not what pluribus was made for at all
With regards to the Hive’s inability to make art or anything creative, I actually already knew that since episode 4. The way that cyclist plumb talked about comparing Carol’s novels to Shakespeare, how they know what line is on which page or act in a play, and calling all of it wonderful, while not actually engaging both texts by saying why on a personal, subjective level. They have the knowledge, but not the thinking or reflection. They only have one thing in their minds, and that is their biological imperative.
That indeed came very apparent after the conversion of the Peruvian lass
After the antenna is done, what will be left? Do the plurbs just wander around in unison until their bodies collapsed due to starvation? Maybe everyone everywhere in the world, just start laying down, because it is “energy-efficient”.
Their imperative would demand they maintain the antenna. Perhaps build multiple, even.
the host will be irrelevant, the virus has successfully spread itself to another planet and the host will wither and die
Makes you think.
How complicated is an ants, or a bees, communication, just because they don't use a static, and noisy, medium like air to pass waves of information.
Do they still enjoy music and the sound of singing? They enjoy reading since they are excited about carol’s book (they can’t lie so I guess that is true).
I think the excitement comes from the fact that it’s something new as opposed to appreciation for art. One thing I do wonder about is are the joined trying to learn anything new beyond how to ‘fix’ the unjoined and how to pass the signal along? Judging from the fact they seem to be putting all the world’s power into antennas I don’t think so.
They can also be just excited of it because it shows Carol is doing good. Not becasue they want to enjoy the books.
They are placating the desires of the immune until such time as they can turn them. It is manipulation in it's purist form.
human civilization is dead, humanity as we know it is dead, because its a different life form now. life is not "supposed" to do anything. its just life
Imagine there's no heaven,
It's easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people living for today
...
Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to live or die for,
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace
...
You may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will be as one
Damn. They got to John Lennon.
That's actually a genius connection
"Crazy to think, the spoken or written word has absolutely no use in a 100% plurbed world"
Is this true, however? They Hive CRAVES novelty. They were itching to ready Carol's new writing because nothing new is created outside of them
Honestly I think them being overly excited/eager to read her new book was just them appeasing her. Kind of in the same regard of how they wouldn’t tell her any reviews of her books except the most positive ones from humans before the joining.