Pluribus 1x03 Reaction

I imagine the hive wasnt aware about Manousos because they’d think he just died. You are assuming that everyone is a case like Helen, where she joined the hive before death but that was just because the nature of her death allowed it. She hit her head and died slowly and just after joining. I imagine many people died immediately by crashes, falls and so on and the hive has no access to their brains.

I love that you guys enjoy how much of a miserable hater Carol is. So much of what i found enjoyable and funny about her was seen as annoying and something to hate by much of the audience.

Fun fact…the director of this episode, Gordon Smith is an og in the Vince Gilligan universe. He started as an assistant way back in the day in the early Breaking Bad seasons. He did the little “webisodes” of Breaking Bad which if anyone reading this hasn’t seen they should check out. It’s like 4 or 5 little 5 minute shorts of various things in the Breaking Bad universe including a Jesse Pinkman music video with the band referenced in the episode he fell in the porta potty as well as Hank and Marie’s wedding. Vince has so many people who started as assistants back in Breaking Bad and are now big wigs directing and writing episodes on the show with the most views in Apple TV history. That’s why he is so damn cool lol.

The mail we saw was just normal bills and advertisements and boring mundanities. Carol stopped and looked at that one envelope because it had Helen's name on it. It was a bill from FionaCom, a phone company (Behind the scenes fact: FionaCom was also a phone company in "Better Call Saul" and we saw signs and advertisements in the background of some episodes). Carol DID say that they were in Norway to freeze her eggs so you're right that they were working on having a child, but it wasn't connected to that mail. "DHL guy" (Robert Bailey Jr.) at the end was a surprisingly huge hit in the fandom after just this one scene. He seemed so awkward and earnest, but continuing to be so alien like all of the rest of the Hivemind. Such a huge impact from such a small role. This episode really emphasizes how SMOTHERING the Hivemind is. I wanted to scream and curse at them almost every time they said or did anything. Just being near them is infuriating.

Vince wrote Pluribus before the rise of LLMs. I think connecting the similarities has value, but this work wasn't made with AI critique in mind

The show criticizes AI, which is understandable. A lot of people use it pretty carelessly, rely on it way too much and just accept whatever it gives them without really understanding how it works. But as someone who uses AI a lot at work, I see it more as a tool than some magic solution. You need to know how and when to use it. It’s kind of like being handed a toolbox. If you know what each tool is for, you can build something useful. If you just randomly start putting together a cupboard without knowing what you are doing, it will probably collapse under its own weight. If someone asks AI something like "Solve the U.S. economy in seven days, don’t make any mistakes, and make me a billionaire" then yeah, I wouldn’t expect anything useful. But if I give it a clear software problem, the right project context, the code files, reproduction steps and clear expectations, it can actually be really helpful. In that kind of workflow, it saves me a lot of time, especially when I’m already working on another issue at the same time. I think many people are just inexperienced with AI as a tool, and then they are surprised when vague or careless prompts lead to nonsense.

I love Carol so much, I feel like her being a lesbian is such an important aspect of her character and the way she thinks as well

Manousos Oviedo mentioned 🥹

I really appreciate that the things that in the abstract make an ideal world (no war, no crime, sharing resources not fighting over them) make the world so alien and devoid of color. As humans we have different instincts and incentives (kindness, selfishness, violence, open-handedness, revenge, love) the choice is the very essence of our nature and as such, the risk of falling to our worse angels. As Carol chose to be negative in the hotel, she could choose to be positive, it doesn't make her first decision necessarily the right one, but it does make it human.

Milena is killing me with these thumbnails lmao

What could possibly be going on in Pluribus for Milena to make that face in the thumbnail 🤣🤣

It’s plurbin time

Give it to Vince Gilligan, to make you understand so much about a character in a scene and tie it up to the main plotline. This first scene makes the viewer understand Carol as a person that, like many of us unfortunately, cannot be happy, be in the moment, even when they have everything they want. Here she is with her lover in a beautiful room looking at the northern lights, her book being a bestseller (a book that she thinks is subpar and has compromised in) and she finds ways to complain about everything. That makes you think of why many of the other individuals were not keen to return to “normal”; their lives weren’t that good to begin with. Also worths mentioning, the irony of Carol saying she is an “independent person” and seeing how much works it needs just to get the food supplies she needs. That’s again not to say her points about the Joined are false, but that her (and ours) assumptions about the rugged individualism that drives us is a lie.

Making the thumbnail where y'all point and laugh at Carol's depressed face seems tragically comical.

Would you believe me if I told you I subscribed to apple tv just to watch this and by the time I logged in to watch episode 2 they told me my account was locked? Now I can't even cancel the membership 💀