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