‘Pluribus’ Episode 3 Recap: “Grenade”

Pluribus has a perfectly good premise. A mind virus based on an extraterrestrial transmission and freed from a military lab has linked every living human in a gigantic group consciousness…with about a dozen exceptions. One of these is Carol Sturko, a bestselling author and depressive misanthrope. She hates the hivemind for taking away her wife, who like millions of other people died during the changeover. They’ve also vowed to take Carol’s own independence away from her just as soon as they figure out how, although until then they assure her her life is hers to lead and they’ll do whatever they can to help her. Their zombified single-mindedness about converting Carol combined with their smiling slavishness to her in every other respect is absolutely maddening. Now this (nearly) last woman on Earth must figure out how to move forward.

Yet this episode whacks away at this solid core concept like a piñata with every chance it gets. Written and directed by Gordon Smith, it seems determined to lean on every faultline in creator Vince Gilligan’s big sci-fi/horror idea until it cracks. 

Carol returns home from the abortive summit with the other English-speaking survivors of the mind-meld, disappointed that none of them could help her even if they wanted to (which they don’t.) She also has a brief, angry exchange with the one Spanish-speaking survivor (Carlos-Manuel Vesga) who evaded the collective’s detection for a day and a half, somehow. He yells at her and hangs up; she speaks just enough Spanish to tell him to go fuck his mother.

When she gets back home, Carol discovers that the pod people are starting to reorder society. They switch off all electricity at night for conservation purposes, since there is now neither crime nor night shifts. (Except for essential personnel, of course, Carol.) There’s no food in the grocery stores any more, or in private homes for that matter, since all resources are being centralized and reallocated equitably. 

To hell with all that, Carol says. She wants her damn fake Whole Foods back.

Here’s where the episode starts gilding the lily. The hivemind is happy to accommodate Carol’s request, which is only a rather minor hitch in their plan to remake the world in their calm, conflict-free image.

What strains credulity, however, is the speed with which they do it. Carol has barely hung up the phone with Zosia, her collective concierge, before a dozen 18-wheelers show up in the parking lot, miraculously carrying everything required to restock the store. 

What’s the idea here? Were they parked around the corner just in case? Because I don’t care if you know literally everything every other living human being knows — logistics are still a thing. Even if everyone on Earth instantly got the message, they couldn’t instantly get bananas. 

The point the show is making here is clear enough. One one hand, it’s about the conspicuous consumption of the rich, powerful, and unaccountable — the way they are able to marshal repulsively disproportionate resources to satiate their every whim. Whether she likes it or not, that’s Carol now. On the other hand, it’s a shot at the extravagance and decadence of the modern supermarket in general. A society that lets people starve but offers 50 different breakfast cereals is a malfunctioning society.

But the idea of restocking an entire upscale supermarket just so one woman can buy her own oat milk is so self-evidently gross that you don’t need the added detail of it happening almost instantaneously. The point could just as easily have been made if she returned the next day and found everything as it used to be, instead of having it happen in an improbable two hours. 

The boundaries of Carol’s newfound powers are tested once again when, in a fit of sarcastic pique, she jokingly requests a hand grenade. Zosia dutifully delivers one to her — a working hand grenade, which Carol is allowed to handle and arm. She accidentally triggers an explosion that nearly kills Zosia because, reasonably, she can’t believe the collective would be stupid enough to give her a live hand grenade.

But her follow-up questions to one of its avatars, a hilariously uncomfortable DHL guy (Robert Bailey Jr.) who works in a hospital now, are a bait and switch. Carol presses the hivemind about allowing her to have an increasingly lethal series of weapons — another hand grenade, a bazooka, a tank, an atom bomb. In every case, even the nuke, they admit that even if they were opposed to it personally, they’d give her what she wants. Carol rightfully tells him-them-everyone that this is completely insane.

Again, the point is clear. It’s about the obscenity of granting anyone — be they a random grumpy romantasy novelist or, I dunno, a dying racist pedophile with senile dementia — control over weapons that can kill millions instantly at best and extinguish life on earth at worst. But in doing so, you’ve drawn attention to two problems with the story.

First, why did the hivemind, which includes every nuclear expert and military mind on the planet, not eliminate such profane weapons the second they were able to? For that matter, why weren’t hand grenades, or bazookas, or tanks, or plain-old guns on the chopping block? I get that there’s no longer such a thing as conflict, so perhaps they didn’t feel the need. But surely a consciousness that travels through the void of space on radio transmissions knows there are things that can’t be predicted. An accident, a glitch in the neurological matrix, a flaw in the design of the nukes that no one happened to be aware of — you never know what can happen, even if “you” are “everyone.” Shut down the possibility!

Second, the issue isn’t really whether Carol should be allowed to nuke New York City or whatever. The danger of giving Carol weapons isn’t to others, it’s to herself. Right now, every life on Earth other than a dozen is dedicated to making those dozen happy until a way can be found to incorporate them into the hivemind. Meanwhile, the hivemind cannot hurt these people willingly, or so we’ve been told.

Yet nothing, apparently, is stopping them from handing them ways to commit suicide with the pull of a pin. It’s reminiscent of how they can’t hurt anyone…except the several hundred million people they knew would die when they took the mind-meld worldwide. The whole nuke business is a smokescreen designed to disguise from a flaw in the premise.

This narrative sleight-of-hand extends to the character work too. Witness the shell game going on with Carol and Helen, her late wife. Because the present-day material is centered on a grieving Carol, we’re used to seeing Helen as the love of Carol’s life, a woman whose memory is being violated at every turn by the collective. It’s presented even above her own eventual assimilation as the primary reason Carol hates them. 

But in the episode-opening flashback, Carol acts like the world’s biggest pill while vacationing with Helen in a Norwegian ice hotel. Even putting aside how goofy it is for her to show up and only then realize that the ice hotel is very cold — she’s not supposed to be stupid, after all — she’s raining on the parade of the woman she loves, who’s having the time of her life.

Indeed, all of Carol’s interactions with Helen have painted Carol as a drip at best, a dick at worst. Smith has a terrific eye as a director — that one closeup of Carol’s hands as she waits for news about Zosia at the hospital was like something out of Citizen Kane. But his script is at its clumsiest where it matters most: the flashback to Carol and Helen in the ice hotel. The dialogue is flat, the beats predictable, the dynamic forced, yet their relationship is the emotional heart of the show.

Perhaps the show is purposefully hinting that Carol and Helen were a less than happy couple. Perhaps it’s hoping we won’t notice. Given the way it’s fudging some key aspects of its high concept, I’m less inclined to give it the benefit of the doubt than I was at the start.

I have to admit, I didn’t expect to find myself suddenly bearish about a new Vince Gilligan show by episode three. It’s true that neither Better Call Saul nor Breaking Bad were anywhere near as smart, tight, bleak, and brilliant in episode three as they were by Season 5, and I’m certainly not writing off Pluribus, because I’m not stupid. But both BB and BCS, even the prequel series, felt like they were doing something new to TV. This post-apocalyptic dystopia simply does not. 

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.