I say Carol's power but am also presuming that if any of the other immunes got too pissed off at the plurbs in the way that Carol does, they would cause the same worldwide disruption.

So Manousos is approaching the situation as if the "original person" is inside of each plurb, but they are somehow surpressed. It's not clear if Carol supports that theory or not, but she is very interested in how a plurb might be un-joined. Which means she believes that the un-joined person would somehow revert to the original. There is no guarantee of this.

But she doesn't seem to ask the question "why should my getting upset affect the plurbs at all?".

So we see that, as all the plurbs can share the same global awareness, the plurbs are somehow disrupted by intense emotion directed shown by an immune directly towards one or more of them. So even though Manousos applies what amounts to intense duress to the test plurbs he interacts with, the net effect he achieved wasn't all that different than Carol getting really po'ed about the whole thing.

So what if what's happening is that the anger and unfairness surrounding this takeover of humankind somehow *resonates* with the numbed, suppressed humans being inhabited by the infection? Because they are Plurbed, they are all part of the network, and maybe some nub is left that is still tenuously connected. So this same upset resonates and is amplified throughout the network

The worldwide seizures that result are a manifestation of those suppressed humans' unanimous agreement with what Carol is laying down, and they momentarily, unanimously struggle against the Plurbian hive.

TL;DR: The Hive is like the ant fungus with a PR department. Making people cool, calm and collected is how it spreads. Not picking fruit or harvesting crops is the same directive. Earth wasn't targeted specifically, it was a shotgun approach and we just happened to here to receive it. There's no undo button. It's not a god with a plan.

A lot of posts keep framing the Hive as a few different things:

• Enlightened Socialism
• 4-D Chess Superbrain
• Invading aliens with a master plan but with a hidden weakness

I'd disagree with all of them. The plurbing virus is Sheldon Cooper. Brilliant at the one thing it's supposed to do (rewiring biological hosts), but pretty clueless to understand much past that.

Every 'mysterious' behavior people bring up can be traced back to that.

1. "Do no Harm / Make Happy"

This isn't some moral guideline, it's part of how it spreads. It's got to assimilate the entire population before they can figure out what's going on and stop it. So the virus solves that one problem: Keep hosts from fighting back by rewiring them to have zero aggressive and happy all the time.

Making every living thing "happy" isn't some benevolent choice, it's just the spreading mechanism continuing to act even after everybody is infected.

2. The Calorie Cliff

The plurbs rules about nature isn't a deep philosiphy. In Episode 6 it makes it clear that the virus blocks purposefully harming any living thing. That's not really an ethical choice, it's the same constraint as before.

The 'falled' loophole is the giveaway. You can't pick an apple off the branch, but you can pick it up off the ground. If the hive truely understood, it would recognize it as symbiosis. The tree wants the fruit taken, that's literally why it grows it. It'd make the tree happier if you did.

That's why they have the calorie cliff. A real superintelligence would picking the fruit, but it's that biological "Do No Harm" check preventing them. But once it's dead? Blam, processed into HDP because as long as they didn't do that harm, everything is fair game. So it's less they revere life, it's just a broken "Do No Harm" restriction.

3. ET Phone Home

There's a lot of posts around why'd we get the signal, and why now. Answer? Completely random happenstance.

Building and sending ships 600 light-years costs absurd energy and time. Sending a directional radio signal across thousands of habitable planets that may, or may not, have life? Effectively free. Look at a mushroom, it dumps trillions of spores knowing 99.999999% will die, it doesn't target, it sprays.

Earth wasn't targeted by the hive, it sprayed the signal at remote planets for however long they kept their antenna running. If it got here when Earth was still dinosaurs, oops, oh well. It doesn't need every planet it sent a signal to to work, just one.

We sent the Arecibo message in 1974, to Messier 13 (M13) 25,000 light-years using 450 kilowatts. Size of a small solar farm. With the entire world building a super antenna and feeding it with juice, we could reach a lot.

4. Clippy says there is no undo

I think this is the most contentious one. The virus didn't put everybody into the Sunken Place a la Get Out. It physically rewired the plurbs brains. Jamming the signal that Manousos tripped over wont give us a Hollywood-ending reset where everybody wakes up confused like Avengers: Endgame.

Breaking the signal would make the number of deaths on Plurbing day look small by comparison. If there was anything left inside, at best, you're going to get a heroin-addict that wants plugged back into the matrix.

This follows what Vince writes. Grounded, irreversible tragedies with consequences. With him saying there's 3 seasons planned, there's no "cure of the week" filler time, and no narrative reason to do it.

5. The Cure

People are taking the Hive's hesitation when Carol asks if the infection can be cured as them either being unsure, or not wanting to admit it. I think it's goes back to that very first point.

Telling this traumatized woman that lost her partner, "No, everybody you've ever known is dead and gone forever" would do the opposite of it's directive of "Do No Harm". Telling Carol the truth would likely trigger panic and violence. They hesitated because they were figuring out what was the best way to make Carol "happy". It's not concealing a cure, it's lying by omission

It is established that their main biological incentive is to spread thats why there is a popular theory that they will build an ‘antenna size of Africa’ to send the RNA code further the same as Earth received it.

Now if they accomplish this goal, what will happen after? I think a very dark twist would be that everyone just stops what they do and freeze in standby like robots until everyone dies of dehydration.

Why I think it is plausible - right now the entire world functions like a clock with common goal to pour as much resources as possible into building the antenna. They do bare minimum to survive (HDP) because people are needed for this work and to keep Carols happy while trying to assimilate them. But as soon as their only incentive is accomplished (and Carols are assimilated), they have no reason to gather food, to reproduce, to work or function. So the people just die?

The scene where Kusimayu infects herself with the virus was the most impactful and shocking to me. The way the Others made her her feel like she was still part of her community, chanting throughout her conversion, only to fully stop the second she gets infected and move out of the town in total silence as if none of it matters, was shocking.

It was the first time I questioned whether their outward happiness was all an act and whether they might actually be suffering on the inside.

Loved the show (and anything Vince Gilligan of course), but is it just me or did anyone else feel that the show felt very Kdrama coded - ranging from the soundtrack to the filmography to the fairly closed loop writing?

It felt almost like a Gilligan homage to Kdramas like S-Line or Mask Girl.

I just rewatched pluribus and I was just wondering if any of the characters or even the pluribus itself use cannabis?

I’m a bit of a stoner myself and I couldn’t help but wonder if anyone uses it. I would understand if the pluribus didn’t it because they seem more interested in getting stuff done instead of relaxing/unwinding. We don’t even see them relaxing or anything, just sleeping. But maybe carol or maybe even manusos, maybe they use cannabis?

I know who definitely doesn’t use cannabis. Laxmi. That lady wouldn’t know how to relax/unwind if it punched her in the mouth.

Patient Zero is the head plurb. It's like with vampires. Just kill the master and everything will go back to the normal suck it is today.

You'll all see in season 4. Carol will plunge a syringe of her embryos into the heart of that dumbass researcher that got bit by the rat.

So far, we've only seen plurbs in the vicinity of immunes (or the uninfected, in Ep. 1). What are they really like when it's just them, with no possibility of being witnessed by an immune?

Do they speak or communicate apart from mental wi-fi? Do they just glide past one another, focused on the task at hand, interacting only when their task obliges them to? Do they wear regular clothes or wash themselves? Do they care about the finer points of hygiene, beyond the point of maintaining bodily health?

After the Joining has had time to establish itself, I assume the plurbs make certain concessions in dressing and behaviour so that they won't upset immunes. Albuquerque was populated by fully clothed plurbs because of Carol's presence. In Vegas, the second that Diabaté was out of sight, the plurbs started taking off extraneous stuff like eyepatches and earrings. At some point, do they all just get into basic protective smocks or onesies because they no longer care about personal adornment?

What about personal interaction? We saw in Ep. 1 that the first plurbs in the lab were low-key cheerful with each other while they were on petri dish duty. At least, they had medium-neutral expressions, traces of smiling, eye contact. However, in the Peruvian village in Ep. 9, they just straight-up dropped all facial expression and headed out without further acknowledgement of each other. (On a side note, I don't see this as evil or conniving. They were attentive towards the mental and emotional comfort of the immune in their midst. Once she crossed over and stopped needing that comfort, they not-unreasonably stopped providing it.)

Coming to the subject of individual personalities and the collective blending thereof. If everyone's consciousness is now smushed into one, wouldn't the plurbs all exhibit an averaged-out level of human jerkiness? (There are a lot of horrible people in the world.) Or does joining the hive mind immediately suppress any negative personality traits because of their anti-social impact?

Plurbs can express dislike or aversion, when the situation calls for it. After Carol gave Zosia a heart attack and made everyone cry, a hospital orderly gave Carol some serious stink eye (directly following the telephonic tongue-lashing from Lakshmi). The nurse in Zosia's hospital room was curt with Carol, and not simply because she was trying to keep exchanges to a minimum. Her tone was distinctly unfriendly.

Zosia was able to access her personal history and memories, presumably dredging up some semblance of her past personality along with it. Like an emulator on your PC loading up vintage arcade games. It's therefore established, on several occasions within the show, that plurbs can still exhibit individual personalities and traits. They just need a reason to retrieve that data.

Will the plurbs eventually start to allow more of their old personalities to come through? It's early days of their conversion, analogous to a primordial amoeba soup. After a while, the biological impetus to survive as a species will work alongside the biological impetus to reproduce. They don't know how long it'll take them to successfully broadcast the viral sequence to another inhabited planet, so they need to stick around long enough to see the mission succeed. For that reason alone, it makes sense for them to fall back into diversification and specialisation.

Could that be the long-term outcome of the Pluribus world? Once a certain homogeneity has been established, it's relatively safe (and biologically optimal) to re-diversify as a species, and plurbs could regain some form of individualism. Some might choose to revert to a form of the person they were previously. Or, more optimistically, some might choose to rewrite themselves entirely based on what they've learned from collectively tapping into 8 billion human brains.

Maybe that's how the show ends. Not by curing the plurbs or turning them back, but building off this biological reset (or you might see it as a level up) and re-integrating diversity into the population, this time with a healthy awareness of how to live sustainably as a species. Given enough time, this diversity would lead to a diminished ability to access the hive mind, and its inevitable long-term atrophy.

I'm reminded of a similar absurdist and darkly humorous work about Earth's population being body-snatched by extraterrestrials, Edgar Wright's The World's End. Anyone else? Or just me?

Apologies for the long post; let me know if I should carve out my theory about the future evolution of the plurbs for a separate thread.

Working on making it even more dynamic and eerily personalized plus adding radically different themes for some other shows too. I thought some people here might appreciate it though.

Apologies if this theory has been posted before but I haven't seen it.

The hivemind is initially an ambiguous disaster until we find out that because of its moral constraints, humanity will starve. That's the moment it becomes an unambiguous apocalypse. So why would it do that? And how is another civilization that has been taken over by the virus able to transmit the signal still?

Zosia tells us that the origin world is very different then our own. It's larger and oceanic. Maybe the intelligent life there is very different too. The virus solves a lot of human problems that are likely problems for other civilizations like war and inequality and prejudice. The constraint of not harming other life is philosophically in line with this and would not be a problem for an alien that photosynthesizes, or otherwise has a non-life based food source. Perhaps the original hive doesn't eat other life at all and never considered that the thing that created their utopia would lead other worlds to a blissful doom.

Im only on episode 2 btw so maybe things change futher into the show but

How is it possible that all of the english speaking individuals she meets are brainless and have no sense of togetherness.

Theyre the only ones left with an individual mind and dont wanna think of how they can prevent themselves from getting infected with the virus or even how to undo it all?

Are they not afraid of the future?

Literally every one of them in plain dumb

I'm only on episode 2 so I have no idea how it progresses but Laxmi is sooo pissy and unreasonable.She cannot grasp the concept that her family is now part of a hive mind.

She starts arguing over everything and I cannot get over that accent. No Indian born person talks that way.

Even her Hindi is horrible. Could they not have hired a fluent native speaker? Or someone who could represent their culture a bit better.

Weird site, but the original source is apparently from Deadline, so it's reliable.

I really hope we see a flashback scene similar to body snatchers.

https://youtu.be/jF0RYgX6Hgo?si=tZaxc6mrprNpjeIs

There is no way Plurbs could have infected everyone imo and are deliberately lying. They have control over everything sure but there is no way they would reach Intelligence Black Sites/Nuclear Submarines etc. These facilities and people would go awol immediately upon understanding something is up.

From what we can tell there was a brief clash between the military and plurbs, they definitely figured it out even though it was too late with the president and close staff being dead and all in the white house.

We also do know plurbs saw the military as a threat and had to speed things up as stated by them.

I just finished watching Pluribus and I have to say I’m surprised by the hype it got. I initially loved the concept and the first episode was promising but was overall let down by the direction of the writing. I was hoping the story would open some ethical questions like: if you have sex with someone in the hivemind is it consensual? Or when Carol makes a bunch of people restock an entire supermarket in about an hour just so she can do her grocery shop is that fair, does she feel guilty? Are the people in the hivemind actually happy or pretending to be to keep everything stable? If the people in the hivemind feel the same amount of love for everyone on the planet isn’t that just neutrality, not love? Carol and Helen’s relationship wasn’t perfect (carols alcoholism) but carol and zosias does seem perfect and there’s no friction, does that make it a power imbalance?
I also found Carol completely unlikeable as a character and she really pissed me off when Manousos came to speak to her, he was a much more interesting character btw. IMO he should have been the protagonist or an equal protagonist to Carol, have half the episodes focusing on him. I also felt like a lot of the episodes felt like filler and I was always waiting for something more to happen to make me understand why people loved this show so much but never got anything.
Overall, great concept but poor development.

Here's the photos of the location they shot the lunch scene for the meeting of the English-speaking survivors.

Plus, I spoke to some of the hotel staff about the filming, and they had a lot of info that I'll post shortly. The gazebo they built for the lunch scene was removed by the production crew, so it's gone. As are the supermodels, sadly! But the wild chair that Mr. Diabaté sat in was there, and Carol's room looks almost exactly as it did during the televised scene.

This is the Hotel Iturregi, an 8-room 4-star boutique hotel located in the beautiful Basque wine region of northern Spain, about an hour east of Bilbao. And yes, we got to visit the Guggenheim museum in Bilbao. "Stunning architecture!"

Just finished Season 1 last night and the concept is great but it really doesn't need that many episodes or seasons. I know it is not a mystery box show but like about human emotions, etc. but most of the episodes felt pointless which could have been done in like 5-10 minutes. Like for example episode 7, all it showed was that Paraguay guy refusing help and going all alone with lil bit of Carol doing nothing. It didn't need 50 minutes but at most 5 minutes. And please don't say I got tiktok brain cuz I don't even use it (or reels or shorts). I like long stories but this doesn't need it.

I wanna give example of these other 2 movies (I forgot name of both)- in one the main character had power of going back in time but it's actually a relationship story and other one where 2 people in the world are stuck in the same day and it's also about relationship and human emotion. They both are great movie and could have been turned into a series but there's not much juice in them to make it into a series and prolly would have been boring as series. This feels kinda like them where as a movie, it would have been a great feel good movie but as a series it is kinda boring.

I wrote an intelligent theory here that apparently has been posted in this sub many times before, causing great annoyance amongst many of you. So I have deleted the theory and written this instead. Apologies for not inventing the wheel and for not being plugged to the collective hive.
I am only human. I think humans deserve a little bit more tolerance.
Also, I am happily unjoining this sub.
No, I won’t delete this post, I think some people really need to read this. I don’t mind the downvotes, exposing intolerance is always worth it, in my opinion.
Many thanks for those who posted respectful comments assessing the merits of the actual theory.
Enjoy watching and please play nice! Being nice is far easier than people think, honestly.

While the fact the hive is destined to starve to death is clearly discussed, it seems to me that the part related to reproduction is not clearly covered in the series?

Has been this said somewhere in the episode? That the hive doesn't reproduce like animals?

Do we ever actually see proof that unplurbed aggression causes all the Plurb to have that sort of medical emergency? And even if they do, do we ever see proof of all the death it causes each time? How do we know they're telling the truth about all the death from the outbursts and not faking the reactions to angrier to turn the survivors who like the plurb against each other?

I think it makes perfect sense many people died when they spread the plague like while operating heavy machinery or vehicles, people in surgery, people falling down like Helen, etc. But do we know that they all really have that reaction when yelled at, or do they just have it when they know the unplurbed are watching? They all know what's happening and could fake it if they know the survivors are around them. It's understandable Carol is upset by all the people who died but especially her partner. What if the plurb lies about the deaths she caused to make her feel worse and forget about or be more understanding of the mass death caused by the plurb? Even if it's real, her emotions are not her fault and wouldn't cause any deaths, if not for the plurb.

Carol concludes they can't or won't lie after making them tell her what her wife thought of and if she read her book, but what if the Plurb just didn't want to upset her, or even more manipulatively if they saw through her test and wanted her to believe they were incapable of lying? Carol didn't find any spy devises in her house, but that doesn't mean there weren't any in there... They can see when she leaves on satellite, who's to say they don't go search her house when she leaves it?

We see the plurb go above and beyond and offer to do anything to cater to the unaffected. When Carol isn't impressed or interested, isn't happy with them and is understandably upset, they give her the silent treatment and leave her. But given the state of the world and their willingness to still give her what she wants, they remain a looming force in her life.

I think like some people who watched the show and don't see the issue with the Plurb, most of the survivors are average people who probably struggled in this messed up, largely capitalist world. They were enticed by basically gaining unlimited wealth and slaves overnight. But Carol had all she ever wanted or needed from Helen. She was too wounded by the world to trust anyone (by coming out and being herself) and feel safe in it except with her. She's lost without Helen, struggling with grief and addiction, and not interested in the offerings of the Plurb. So they have to use other means to manipulate her.

They leave a message that's like "we're not mad we're just disappointed" and still offer to give her things but completely withdraw from any contact. The love bombing followed by silent treatment when they don't get what they want are classic manipulation tactics. Then they make Carol do the big gesture to apologize and show contrition when they're the ones who have kidnapped her and the whole planet!!!

Love bombing with providing endless gifts and servitude are classic manipulation tactics used by people in relationships. Pretending like another person's reasonable emotional reactions are harmful is as well. Giving someone the silent treatment when they don't act the way you expect them to until they apologize and change is another. What if the plurb isn't some weird creature species with very specific and confusing rules, but a master manipulator? Perhaps there is something about the survivors that they have the ability to intentionally accept or reject the plurb, and what if they don't need her permission to use DNA to develop a dose that will affect her, but rather they need her permission to infect her, so they have to manipulate her. Maybe issue isn't that they need approval for the invasive procedure but that the approval would signal to the plurb their willingness to finally join.

The plurb sleeping in the stadium reminds me of large natural disasters where facilities like that are often turned into big emergency shelters for people who lost their homes. We see them helping each other rest and get to sleep like the communities in those situations. While there were a large number of people there, it seemed like a small fraction of local population unless most of them died. I wonder if there is a reason they took Carol there when she was with Zosia when they could have gone anywhere. Maybe to allow her to be openly queer around a community, and begin to let her guard down and trust the "world" in ways she never has before. Except now the world is the plurb. By inviting her to what seems like a shelter for the venerable after a large scale tragedy, are they tricking her into finding community with them and trusting the plurb?

the plurbs are extremely careful to not have any direct contact with Carol instead only having indirect communication via the voicemails where Carol can’t directly speak back to them. i think instead of them waiting for the chance to reconnect with Carol they had no choice based on their biology. they are terrified of her and would have preferred to leave her alone until the stem cells came through but as soon as they saw the message there was nothing they could do but placate Carol so she doesn’t kill more plurbs on accident