‘Pluribus’ Finale Recap: Carol’s Horrifying Realization About the Others Sets Up an Even Darker Season 2
Editor’s note: The below recap contains spoilers for the Pluribus Season 1 finale. It’s safe to say that Vince Gilligan’s new Apple TV series Pluribus may not have been what some viewers were expecting — or maybe, it’s more accurate that Pluribus is driven less by the typical touchstones of the sci-fi genre and the kind of bombastic storytelling that has dominated streaming in favor of a more character-driven approach to its extraterrestrial premise. Whether that makes it a good or bad series is certainly subjective, but I, for one, have had a blast tuning in each week to watch Rhea Seehorn’s disillusioned romance author Carol Sturka fumble her way through co-existing with the Others while inwardly remaining determined to put the world right again. Some might have found her misanthropic personality off-putting, but every new episode peeled back some of her toughest layers to reveal the true vulnerability beneath. It’s this hidden longing that finally emerged as of last week’s “Charm Offensive,” which also saw Carol falling into bed with Zosia (Karolina Wydra) in a moment that proved both telling and impossible to untangle from its most glaring truth: whatever’s happening between these two women isn’t fully real so long as Zosia remains part of an all-encompassing hivemind that still wants to assimilate Carol into its ranks. This week’s episode, “La Chica o El Mundo,” co-written by Alison Tatlock and director Gordon Smith, explicitly spells it out — Carol can either get the girl or save the world, but she’ll never be able to have both, and as she comes to that devastating realization for herself, the finale sets up an even more explosive Season 2 (possibly literally).
Carol and Manousos Finally Come Face to Face in ‘Pluribus’ Episode 9
Rhea Seehorn and Carlos-Manuel Vesga in Pluribus Episode 9Image via Apple TV
Manousos (Carlos-Manuel Vesga) may be two hours away from Carol’s house by now, but she’s able to see him coming thanks to the access the Others’ drone-monitoring system is giving her. While she’s initially apprehensive about opening her door to the guy she yelled at over the phone — especially since he won’t tell the Others why he wants to meet her — Carol ultimately decides she owes it to Manousos, who’s come all the way from Paraguay, to hear him out. The Others, however, think it would be better if Zosia made herself scarce before he shows up, since he’s reacted unpredictably to their presence in the past. Manousos finally makes it to Carol’s cul-de-sac 60 days, 16 hours, 40 minutes, and 15 seconds after the Joining, as the episode reveals, but their meet-cute is definitely not lacking in tension. Granted, Manousos introduces himself with the speech he’s been practicing in English, while Carol awkwardly greets him with her own limited knowledge of Spanish, but when she invites him into her house to talk further, he refuses. There’s no telling whether the Others have planted any listening devices inside. When Carol decides to bust out her phone’s translation app to allow the two of them to understand each other better, Manousos snatches the device out of her hand and drops it into a storm drain, despite her protests that she’s turned it to airplane mode. Once Carol storms off, leaving Manousos outside, he realizes that he’s gone about this all wrong — well, he comes to that realization after trying to summon her back outside with a few honks of the ambulance’s horn. But he also uses his machete to retrieve the phone from the drain and agrees to a compromise; he won’t go inside just yet, but he will speak with her outside, underneath an umbrella, to avoid being spotted by the Others’ drone surveillance. The conversation that unfolds, with Carol’s translation app acting as a hilarious go-between, is incredibly telling for what it reveals about her current position. Manousos expects to meet the woman who made that impassioned video message about fixing the world, but Carol’s argument is more nuanced and complicated now. She’s seen the humanity that still exists within the Others, and she doesn’t want to destroy them; she wants to cure them. As far as Manousos is concerned, though, if they can’t cure the problem, everyone who’s been infected is better off dead. Carol also lies when Manousos asks her, point-blank, why the Others returned after freezing her out; she can’t bring herself to admit to a total stranger that she all but begged them to.
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Inside Carol’s house, Manousos searches for bugs, only stumbling upon what turns out to be a movement sensor in her liquor cabinet — and a quick call to Zosia explains its origins. When Carol and her late wife, Helen (Miriam Shor), were freezing her eggs in May 2011, Helen had apparently installed the sensor to monitor and record when the liquor cabinet was being opened. It’s one of the few times that Carol doesn’t have it in her to be upset about the Others being in possession of Helen’s memories, but she also doesn’t have it in her to continue plotting how to save the world with Manousos, either, so she sets him up in one of her neighbors’ abandoned houses and brushes him off with a weak promise that they’ll talk more tomorrow. Once alone, Manousos makes his own call to the Others and asks to speak with whomever Carol had been on the phone with. Some unknown number of hours and drinks later, Carol has passed out in front of her TV and wakes up to the Golden Girls theme song blaring over the DVD menu, but she snaps to attention when she notices Zosia’s car parked in front of Manousos’ house. She hustles across the cul-de-sac, not sure what she’ll discover when she barges inside — but it’s not the two of them cordially sitting on the couch. As for what Manousos has managed to get out of Zosia, much to Carol’s chagrin? “Everything.” Carol leads Zosia back to her house for her own interrogation. Despite the Others’ reminder that they can’t lie, what seems to bother Carol most of all is the insistence that they love Manousos the same as they love her — but even she can’t summon up a better description of her relationship with Zosia than “chaperone.” Before anything else happens, Zosia lies down on the floor and warns Carol that something’s about to happen before going into another seizure, one that looks all too familiar to Carol’s recollection. Sure enough, Manousos is responsible for this particular event, but he’s connecting the dots to that mysterious radio frequency he isolated before. Every time the Others go into a collective seizure, the signal coming through seems to be interrupted — and Manousos is trying to use the interference to bring another individual he’s summoned, a man named Rick, out of the hivemind. He doesn’t succeed, though, because Carol disappears and returns with a shotgun to prevent the experiment from going any further.
‘Pluribus’ Season 1 Ends With Carol and the Others at a Crossroads
After Manousos’ efforts are thwarted and the Others come out of their seizure, Carol fields an angry phonecall from Laxmi (Menik Gooneratne), who mistakenly blames her for this latest paroxysm after her previous outbursts. With what sounds an awful lot like resignation, Zosia admits that the Others have to leave again to put some distance between themselves and the man who was screaming in their faces (or disrupting that strange radio signal). As for Manousos, Carol’s been keeping him in the trunk of her borrowed Rolls-Royce, but once the Others dip, she lets him out so they can talk. He’s convinced he can put the world right if she’s willing to play it his way, but she doesn’t answer, instead giving him instructions on how to get anything he needs delivered to him by dialing zero and getting in her car.
“Carol Sturka, do you want to save the world or get the girl?” Manousos asks that night, and at first, Carol seems determined to have the latter. The next two weeks with Zosia are full of all the pursuits and traveling that she so often refused to let herself enjoy when she was with Helen — relaxing poolside at a villa, walking along orange sand beaches in Thailand, drinking tea in a shared bubble bath, skiing in the snowy mountains. But it’s in the otherwise empty ski lodge, in front of a cozy and crackling fireplace, where the unforgettable truth between them rears its ugly head. Carol’s admittedly happier than she’s ever been in this moment, with Zosia, but when the conversation turns to assimilation once again, Carol reasserts that the Others can’t tailor any virus to her stem cells because they don’t have permission to extract them — only it turns out the Others do have access to her stem cells, because they have access to the eggs that she froze, with Helen, back in May 2011. “As happy as you’ve been, that’s only the tip of the iceberg,” Zosia insists, with the admission that one of the other survivors, the Peruvian girl named Kusimayu (Darinka Arones), just agreed to become part of the hivemind. Apparently, she’s happier than she’s ever been, but is that really true when all of her individuality was completely stripped away in the finale’s chilling cold open (including arguably one of the most devastating moments of goat acting you’ll see this year)? What Carol only wants to know is how much longer she’ll have before the virus is forced on her against her will, and Zosia can only estimate somewhere between one and three months. Perhaps Carol has been in denial about the Others’ ultimate plan for her, but when she’s confronted with it, she tearfully makes one last appeal: “If you loved me, you wouldn’t do this.” As far as the Others are concerned, they have to do this because they love Carol — Zosia even uses the first-person here, but it only feels completely weaponized — and it becomes the biggest impasse preventing Carol from living any longer in this fantasy. 74 days, 18 hours, 30 minutes, and 21 seconds since the Joining, Manousos is still in the cul-de-sac flipping through various books about electromagnetic fields and looping antenna waves when he’s drawn outside by the sound of whirring helicopter blades. A large container is dropped on Carol’s driveway before she herself gets out, sharing a solemn look of unspoken emotion with Zosia before the two part ways. “You win,” she says, after spotting Manousos in the cul-de-sac. “We save the world.” As for what’s in that container… anyone still remember the atom bomb Carol previously asked for?
Release Date
November 6, 2025
Network
Apple TV
Directors
Adam Bernstein, Zetna Fuentes, Melissa Bernstein
Pros & Cons
The sequence with Carol, Manousos, and the translator app is a treat of comedic writing.
Carol and Zosia’s breakup hits hard thanks to an emotional scene between Rhea Seehorn and Karolina Wydra.
The cold open features one of the most devastating instances of goat acting I’ve ever seen.
The Season 1 finale starts to assemble some major pieces of the show’s biggest mystery.
已发布: 2025-12-24 08:00:00
来源: collider.com
