‘Pluribus’ Finale: Episode Writers On Carol’s Last-Ditch Effort To “Give In,” The Hive Mind’s “Hideous Violation” & The “Fun” Of Meeting Manousos

Spoiler alert: The following article contains spoilers for the season finale of Pluribus.

After traversing approximately 8,000 kilometers — some of it tedious, some of it harrowing — Carlos-Manuel Vesga’s obstinate Manousos Oviedo arrives in Albuquerque, on Carol Sturka’s (Rhea Seehorn) turf, expecting to find the same steadfast leader he glimpsed in her call-to-action home video urging remaining survivors to join her in saving the world.

But as the Season 1 finale of Pluribus unfolds, it’s clear he’s caught her unawares — in a state of limbo where her burgeoning romance with Zosia (Karolina Wydra) has overshadowed much else. As episode co-writer and executive producer Alison Tatlock tells Deadline, it was inevitable that the duo’s first meeting “would have to start as a disaster.”

“Because the timing is terrible,” she explains. “If it had happened a couple episodes earlier, maybe we’d have a different story, but by the time he gets there, she’s in a completely different headspace. We, in the script even, had a moment where we, in a stage direction, referred to her kind of vaguely remembering that she made videos where she was calling everyone into action; it’s not where her head is at anymore. And that’s when he shows up, expecting the Carol Sturka that he saw on the video, and that person is a little bit dormant right now.”

Fellow co-writer, EP and director of the episode, Gordon Smith, adds, “All those things that give grist to the mill were really fun to sort of tease out, and fun to see them not quite be the people that they even think of themselves. Carol thinks, ‘No, I am a hero. Oh, wait, this guy just walked 8,000 miles [sic] to be here. Maybe I haven’t done as much as I thought,’ and vice versa, I think.”

Vesga, a prolific Colombian actor who was cast in the role after being up against 710 people, points out the differing stakes between his character and Carol.

“At least when it all starts, they see the enemy in the Joining. I am not sure if their reasons and their motivations are the same,” he says. “I think they come from very different worlds. You have Carol, who is a first-class citizen of the world, and you have Manousos, who’s probably a fifth-class citizen of the world, who is a migrant from Colombia to Paraguay, with all that comes with migrating and leaving your life behind and experiencing the trauma of just landing somewhere else new, losing your world. And then the small, little world that he’s managed to build in Paraguay is taken away from him, so his motivation is like, ‘Hell no, not this time, not again.’”

For Vesga, that means the two of them are approaching the problem of the Others in dichotomous ways.

“Here’s a guy who has nothing in the world: no food, almost no clothes and yet he has purpose. And we cut from that guy and we go to Carol, who has, quote unquote, everything that she wants and has no purpose,” he says. “Rhea’s an amazing actor, but that one [scene], when she’s sitting in front of that firework, and she knows that it might kill her, and yet she stays there — that is one of the best performances I’ve ever seen. And I was thinking, ‘There is someone who has everything and is without a purpose.’ They seem to be trying to [get] to the same place, but they are going [about it] in a different way for different reasons.” (Editor’s note: Seehorn vehemently disagrees with this characterization, which you can read about here.)

As Manousos and Carol struggle to communicate — because of their mutual unwillingness to cede ground, similar caustic personalities (and certainly a language barrier doesn’t help, though it does add to the scene earned levity) — the former crystallizes his concern: “Do you want to save the world, or save your girl?” The apt distillation of their conundrum (the episode is named “La Chica o El Mundo”) is drawn into focus after Carol fires off a warning shot at Manousos as he triggers a seizure in the Others, not unlike she did some episodes ago. After conducting quasi-scientific experiments on representatives of the Hive, he reaches the conclusion that the Joining can be reversed; but as the Others pack up to leave Manousos, Carol goes with them.

As Smith characterizes it, the ensuing idyllic montage is Carol’s last-ditch effort to “give in” to the collective.

“That’s really the essence of what we wanted to make it feel like, and that journey was the most beautiful, placid [thing],” he says. “Carol’s giving herself this one chance to give in to the real temptation of the Others, which is, ‘Hey, the world’s beautiful. Come see it with us.’ Essentially, ‘Give in,’ and it needed, I think, for the fall at the end, to hit as hard as it can. Everything else needed to feel like it was just the best vacation, or best series of vacations, that you could possibly hope to take. So we tried to craft that — all of the sequence I feel like I was trying to make the transitions feel like they were gentle, and make the shooting feel like it was gentle.”

Carol and Zosia stroll along sun-soaked beaches, take a bath in a luxurious Shanghai high-rise hotel and unwind with an après-ski evening in (all shot in Big Sky, Montana; as creator Vince Gilligan jokes, “They’re dressed for the beach, but they’re wearing galoshes to get through like a foot of snow and slush right outside the door.”) Just when this domestic serenity reaches its tipping point, Carol stumbles upon an alarming truth: The Others have located the eggs she had frozen with Helen years ago and are actively working on transforming them into stem cells, a process that can take as little as a month.

Tatlock says of the Others’ ethical justifications in the matter: “We talked about it a lot, like, ‘What do they do? What will they not do? What line will they cross? What line would they not cross?’ And we agreed that, while they would not force Carol physically to have a procedure that would extract her stem cells, if she had already voluntarily given up her eggs in a previous chapter of her life, which she did, that that would fall under the banner of, not consent, but that would be accessible to them, and that it would not break any ethical rule in their minds. Of course, to her, it feels like a hideous violation. So that’s where they part ways.”

Smith recalls there were “various pitches on the table” as the creative team discussed how the Others would inevitably acquire Carol’s stem cells, given the collective’s “specific” understanding of agency.

Gilligan notes of the dubious governing rules of the Others’ morality: “But, maybe, if the eggs had already been fertilized, they wouldn’t have been able to, right? Because they can’t [actively interfere]. Boy, that opens up [a whole can of worms]. We talked many, many, many hours about this stuff. It’s a quagmire.”

All episodes of Pluribus are streaming on Apple TV. Season 2 is in the works.