‘Pluribus’ Episode 2 Recap: “Pirate Lady”

What must it be like to be a billionaire? How must it feel to be head of a modern kleptocracy? Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Jeff Bezos, Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping: What thoughts go through the minds of men who’ve been able to build lives in which no one ever tells them “no”? 

What happens is you just make shit up about your products based on whatever pops into your brain. You decide you’ve identified the characteristics of the Antichrist, a thing you believe in. You state confidently millions of people will live in outer space within 20 years. You knock down half the seat of government to build a wedding reception hall. You talk to one another about how you’re going to live to be 150.

In other words, you go insane. Stark raving mad. Crazier than a shithouse rat. You’ve amassed more power than virtually any human beings in history, and you have a grasp on reality comparable to a Batman villain’s. 

It is my belief that a system that drives people crazier the richer and more powerful it makes them is bad.

In this episode of Pluribus, we see that humanity’s new collective consciousness has done exactly that. It/we/they/us/whatever have reprogrammed the entire planet to operate for the care and comfort of the 12 human beings who were not absorbed into the hivemind along with everyone else. In short order, the people that we meet:

• grow stupefied and complacent
• prove unable to focus on important matters in favor of trivia
• opt to assimilate with the new totalitarian consciousness rather than fight
• indulge their basest instincts and become sex creeps
• kill millions of people

Find a behavior in that list that does not reflect how the ultra-powerful and unaccountable actually run things. I’ll wait.

The episode launches with yet another homage to the mother of all apocalypse narratives, Stephen King’s The Stand: Frannie Goldsmith’s crazy-making burial of her father in her backyard, reflected here in romantasy author and Last(ish) Woman Alive Carol Sturko trying to inter her wife and manager, Helen. She rejects the help of one of the collective, a tall, beautiful woman we later learn is named Zosia (Karolina Wydra). The hivemind literally flew her from Lebanon to New Mexico because, of all the billions of people on the planet, she most closely resembles the pirate queen Carol originally invented as the love interest for the heroine of her book series, until she chickened out. Carol does not take this well. (At first.)

Eventually accepting some of the power that has been granted her by the joined, which seems to be the word to use to refer to the brain-linked humans, Carol demands a summit of the six English speakers among the still-individuated. Chief among them is Mr. Diabaté (Samba Schutte), a playboy who’s taking full advantage of his access to every amenity on the planet, from a harem of models to the use of Air Force One. Others include Kusimayu (Darinka Arones), the youngest survivor, who would just as soon join her family in the collective, and Laxmi (Menik Gooneratne), a woman in denial about her family’s mind-melding with everyone else on the planet — Carol goes to great pains to illustrate how her nine-year-old son is now also her gynecologist. 

Laxmi also blames Carol for the death of her joined grandfather in a car crash when the collective had another world-wide seizure thanks to a hostile outburst against Zosia by Carol. Oh yeah, did they not mention that? Lose your temper at one of the joined and their whole hivemind shorts out, leading to millions of deaths in an instant. The knowledge that she’s now a mass murderer on par with history’s greatest monsters has Carol vomiting, when she’s not drinking.

But her death toll after two anger-provoked seizure episode is still a drop in the bucket compared to the death toll of humanity’s global assimilation that horrible night. After trying their damnedest to keep the total to themselves, they are forced by Carol to reveal that the mind virus caused the deaths of 886 million people. But not even that knowledge seems to shake the resolve of the other survivors to just…keep on keepin’ on. The fact that the joined are working tirelessly to figure out how to assimilate them does not appear to bother them in the slightest. After all, there’s peace on earth now. How bad could that be?

Carol is prepared to wash her hands of the whole lot of them, up to and including Mr. Diabaté, who makes the gross request to induct Zosia into his harem. Zosia cannot choose to do this herself without potentially hurting Carol, nor can she opt to stay with Carol without hurting the cad in his coat of many colors in turn. It’s up to the humans, for lack of a more distinct term, to work it out amongst themselves.

And just when you think Carol couldn’t care less about her pirate lady, there she is, flinging herself bodily in front of the runway path of Air Force One to stop Zosia from taking off. Ah, romance!

Even as the power wielded by the dozen survivors of the assimilation event serves as a metaphor for unaccountable wealthy and dictatorial government — from killing millions on a whim to attempting to reproduce the yes-man factor that drove they themselves crazy at scale — Carol is a stand-in for the rest of us. Listen to how she describes the point she finds herself at, where with no particular knowledge of how to do so, she know she must fight back:

“I don’t know how we do this. I don’t know where to begin. But it’s up to us now. The future of humanity is in our hands now. As scary as that sounds, it is. It is up to us to put the world right.”

(“Why?” asks Mr. Diabaté while models serve them all champagne.)

Listen to how she reacts when everyone else proves unwilling to put up a fight:

“You are traitors! Traitors to the human race!”

(She then collapses, drunk, which I understand.)

Fighters and traitors seems about the size of things, yeah.

Sean T. Collins (@seantcollins.com on Bluesky and theseantcollins on Patreon) has written about television for The New York Times, Vulture, Rolling Stone, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pain Don’t Hurt: Meditations on Road House. He lives with his family on Long Island.