‘Pluribus’ Episode 3: Negative Nancy at the Ice Hotel

30:11And if the seconds and minutes and whatever are going down we know it's before and if they're going up it's after i still think if it were me i would color them differently or something like that but that's okay i'm not confused uh at all you know where and when we are i'm not confused i just i don't know um i i think it's so we're 2617 days uh and some hours and minutes and seconds before that's seven years ago and among other things what this tells us is like how long carol and helen were together yeah like seven years ago they were not only going on you know big vacations together uh carol was like freezing her eggs they were talking about starting a family together you know what i mean so like this is this is such a um has been such a huge part of carol's life for so long her relationship with helen a couple things on that front a listener a listener chris was asking like why it was count why that what that zero is the zero is like mass infection but i think also crucially for our pov character it's helen dying right like this is before helen's death and after helen's death is carol's sort of unique experience of this whole thing but on the helen and carol front we did get some listener listener emails that were like Like, Rob, buddy, can't believe you missed that they were together.

31:35And that's fine. Like, we don't want to dwell on that. But I did think this email from Lillian who was like, hey, Rob, what does this do to your understanding of who Carol is or the story when you realize who Helen was to her when she lost her? I mean, it intensifies so much of the first two episodes, which, yeah, like, I have zero idea how that went straight over my head to the degree that it did. and especially when you see episode three and it's like they're going to see the indigo girls and staying at a b &b it's like okay yeah province town the signs are here frankly the closet is glass yeah yeah yeah but also i love that we're getting not just like recontextualizing as idiots like me realize what's actually happening in the show but getting these flashbacks to spend more time with helen in particular who i was just worried she was going to be gone and it was all going to be retrospective is all going to be talking about memories or like little bits and shreds but to actually see them together and I think most crucially and maybe most heartbreakingly see that like Carol has been this way for a long time like there is a part of her that has been a negative Nancy at the ice hotel and is like complaining about all the things while Helen is wide-eyed and feeling alive in a totally different way and the way that those two people work off of each other and complete each other and form a pair is like clearly an instructive part of the show and something that makes everything that we're seeing with Carol in sort of the present day that much more devastating.

33:01Like that is a character who is five days removed from losing her partner for life and now has to pick up all the pieces. And so like, yeah, she's a little bit of a mess and she can be a little bit shitty in the same ways that she was, but also in new ways that represent everything that she's lost. I think also thinking about, I love that point. And I love watching Helen in this scene sort of like be the one person who could get her to enjoy something. Right. Sort of like jolly her out of her. She's like, you love being miserable. Not in like a you're ruining our vacation sort of way. Just sort of like, this is you.

33:33Come sit with me. Come put this fur on your lap. Look at the sky. You're going to like it. I mean, I got to say boohooing the ice window showing you the northern lights. Come on. Like this is a pretty cool hotel. It's a very cool hotel, Rob. You could not catch me dead staying at an ice hotel. No. I would stay at a different hotel and look at the northern lights in Norway, but I would not stay on a bed made of ice. I don't like being cold. It would not be for me. But if I had agreed to go with my partner, I wouldn't be shitty about it once I was there. Okay. But also, I would say for someone like Carol who hid something so fundamental about herself, like her queerness that she hid from her audience, the idea of everyone knowing everything about her might be so much scarier for someone like her who kept such a big part of herself so secret and so intimate she's been outed by like the fact that Helen has joined the collective consciousness before she dies means that everything about her is now on display to all of these people and the fact that like you know maybe it's healing that that the hive mind the collective is like and that's great and we love love and you know love wins and we're into it or whatever maybe that's healing but right now it's exposing and vulnerable uh to to someone like her and um and then i think also um thinking about like the ways in which zoja is act accessing helen inside of this episode um which you know we already talked about a little bit but like the the way in which uh that forces carol to understand that the last like minutes seconds that she shared with the love of her life was not really with the love of her life was with like a pod person essentially right and so it's just like that final memory she has of her is not is not even real because she was already like plugged into the ethernet and that's just like equally devastating to me so i mean not only does it make her feel like a pod person in those moments it makes helen again this person that she loved feel like fodder like like food for a larger machine like there is an element as far as this larger conversation of are these still people right like it is it's so dehumanizing in all the ways we've already talked about of like what makes a human a human um to just be like part of this thing that is facilitating memories for now a woman who has been like engineered to be attractive to you to spout back at you like it it's all really gross but also like there are moments like when um it is gross so gross when zoja is on the phone talking about the theragun like why helen bought the theragun for her um or so like the last gift she'll ever receive from helen right is is this thing um the way they put it on the official podcast is like also this is the last piece of mail she'll ever receive right Like that's that that experience of being a human is over the last bills she'll ever receive like all this sort of stuff like that.

36:33But I did think for a moment, Joe, that the pod people had ordered her the Theragun as like a spectacular bit of passion, like passive aggression. Relax. Please stop yelling at us. All I wrote in my notes like methadone Helen. Right. Like this is just sort of like she's like she's got like fumes of the person that she like loves so much. and it is painful, but also like, is there something about that that is also compelling? You have access to this person I don't have access to anymore. Yeah. And that, I don't know. There's something about that that is, yeah. And is there like a tipping point for that of where Carol, like, look, clearly the events of this episode, and I think specifically the guilt of Zoja getting injured because of the grenade are going to bond these characters.

37:22Like we're seeing them come closer and closer together in exactly the way the hive mind, frankly, seems to want. But will there be a tipping point where Carol wants to know, like that thing that I always wondered about Helen, like how does she really feel about this? She could know it if she wants to. In the same way that as our emailers have been entertaining the ideas of like wondering the secrets of the universe, you could also know what your friends thought about you, what your loved ones thought about you. What were their deepest, sometimes darkest feelings? I don't want to know. Something that, oh, absolutely not.

37:54But someone like Carol, given the vulnerable state that she's in, where she is like post-water chugging vodka, I could see her going into all kinds of dark tunnels. You don't chase your Xanax with vodka, Rob? That's not something? No. I mean, look, at least she didn't dry swallow that thing. So like there's levels to this, but that's not my preferred pill delivery method. No. I was really, I was struck by the, I could have saved that 100 grand and frozen my eggs here, yolks and all. So this idea that Carol had frozen her eggs with the idea that they would have kids someday, potentially. So what happened there?

38:29That was seven years ago. So what happened there? Was it the plan? We'll get to it someday. Did they try it? It didn't succeed. What was going on there? But that's a pain point for Carol for sure. And I saw a lot of people on the Reddit, as Reddit brains often do, and I love the Reddit brain, but were like, oh, well, if there's some of her DNA frozen somewhere, is that a hint to a future cure? Maybe. Like, who knows? Yeah, it could be. But I thought it was more, like, character-based of sort of, like, this is – tells us something about their relationship and also some of the pain in Carol's past that we have yet to unearth.

39:02And then on the look front, something I think that's really interesting that I didn't realize is that they color graded the show differently in episode two and in episode three. Basically, the before is more muted tones. And then the after, they're calling it Kodachrome, like these saturated colors. Hyper, yeah. Yeah. So like this idea that like, so that's something maybe to watch for like future flashbacks of like, what does the before look like? And the now is this like, you know, that bright yellow of the world. You know, I think that's true. And it kind of fits the canon too. Like if all the cars just stopped, wouldn't the air feel a little less smoggy?

39:41In this optimization engine, there's a lot that's appealing in terms of saving humanity from itself. It's not all good, but there are certain things that I think would look a little more hypersaturated. That's like the whole COVID. The animals are returning. Also, our listener, Andrew, I want to see this little Matrix thing here. Matrix is one of the comps that a lot of people brought up. But this, you know, line from Agent Smith about, did you know the first matrix was designed to be a perfect human world where none suffered, where everyone would be happy? It was a disaster. No one would accept the program.

40:17Entire crops were lost. Human beings define their reality through suffering and misery. We sure do, Joe. you know you were talking so perfectly last week about this idea of like are any of these benefits worth anything if you didn't have to like strive for them struggle for them etc so this i but this idea of like to be human is to suffer i don't know interesting i probably agree but i just think i don't know whether it is to suffer but it's certainly the way we make sense of things and so like whether it is true for us like on a biological level that we need to suffer who's to say, but culturally and psychologically, we are oriented to like organizing our lives based on the hardest moments and the hardest spots.

40:58But it's really one of the only things that like propels most people to actually grow is going through something incredibly painful. And so if you remove all of that pain, is there any kind of progress or is it just, as you said, in watching the like ant colony nature of filling out a grocery store, just a constant flow of stuff, right but it's all so flat right it's it's a it's an emotional stasis and this is why i think it's interesting that that we have these friction points with carol of emotional growth for the zojas and the dhl guys uh of the world okay carol on the plane last time we didn't get a chance to talk about carol's seat choice on the plane but do you want to talk about this rob and and and this scene in general i know she's like just trying to stay away from everybody so she's going to the back but simply why well she's making a point i will take the worst seat on the plane because fuck you and your seduction of convenience or or pleasure or whatever it is the point is just not worth the lack of leg room you know like you sit in first class and make zoja sit at the back of the plane that feels like there's other ways to keep your distance from the other people who are on here this reminds me of uh our severance pod and and the fact that you and i are tall people and it's a different it's different to fly when you're as tall as we are so it's extremely way true um i i thought the pilot co-pilot thing was really funny super funny really good and also the fact that um like when she waits for zoja to go all the way back to her seat before bringing the button also uh a pronunciation update i feel like last week we might have mispronounced or at least i did uh it's carolina vidra is the actress who plays zoja i think we said why drop because we're not Polish ourselves.

42:39Okay. Anything you want to say about the other, I don't know, originals, let's call them, the other people that we find out are seated around the world? Any of these stick out to you? I mean, we don't learn a lot. I mean, we do learn a lot about them biographically. We get their bio blast kind of information dump, and we learn that they are a mix of tenors and contortionists and literal children and a lot of cat lovers in the mix. A lot of cat lovers. Power to them. the cat lover shall inherit the earth it's it's a win it's a win for us Rob sorry you know what you can have this one thank you thanks um obviously there's the exception to that group being the one that Carol actually interacts with which is this guy uh Manusos who's this dude from Paraguay I don't know like he's gonna come back like that's too dangly of a thread for him not to be a presence in this show on some level I would be shocked if they do not meet in person now that Carol can just jet set wherever she wants but I do want to just put a very specific spotlight on the Ray Sehorne line delivery on Cabron, where she really, really put some spice on that thing in a way that I appreciated.

43:44This is where I want to offer an apology and say I fucked up a little bit last week on the pod. I had been talking to someone who had seen this episode, and I referenced this scene in last week's pod, and I do apologize if people were confused. They're like, I don't remember that happening. It's because it happens in episode three. I'm not watching ahead. This will not come up again, but that is something I did last week. I will say that the actor who's playing Manusos is the only other actor besides Ray and Carolina who is in the main cast of this show. So I have to imagine that he will be coming back.

44:15This was a moment for me, Joe, where I did see myself in Carol in one very specific way. I, like Carol, am a phone pacer. If I am on the phone, I am trotting around a room. I'm covering ground. I cannot sit still and be on a phone. Okay, that's good to know. I don't think we've ever spoken on the phone, but if we ever do I will I will keep that in mind. This is this is simply not true. Really? We text. I don't think we talk on the phone. We definitely have before talking through some planning things for this or that but it isn't frequent for us. You're absolutely right. Okay. Carol gets the mail.

44:47We already talked about this right. This is this is her last mail ever. There's a bill with Helen's name on it. That is upsetting that I will be coming back to for a later point. And then the Theragun. um well also something really crucial that you're glossing over which is the takeout menu for mr burger kebab thank you which you love to frequent mr burger kebab are you interested based on these prices i absolutely am uh 5.99 for kebab with fries or rice and shirazi salad which i love shirazi salad uh i simply can't beat that 5.99 i'd go there every day for lunch come on okay well um Mr. Kebab Burger, we also welcome.

45:27If Sprouts and Mr. Kebab Burger want to sponsor the pod. Be respectful. It's Mr. Burger Kebab. Oh, I'm so sorry. Some people on this podcast, Joe, are dedicated to getting the details right. You know, this is the important stuff. Anything else you want to say about this Theragun moment that we haven't already covered? I mean, coating it as Theragun specifically, which is an exorbitantly expensive percussion massager, I have to say, does make it a very sweet gesture. Like finding the thing your partner would not buy for themselves and indulging them with that thing. It makes it very sad and very sweet to open that kind of last gift from Helen.

46:02I think it's really funny. Someone, one of our listeners was like, Carol is a bestselling author. Isn't she swanning around in first class on her book tour? Like why is she sitting in the back? Wouldn't she be used to first class? I think you have a misunderstanding of how much money. If you're a lead child, maybe, you know. how much money best-selling authors make um you can afford a nice house in albuquerque but like you know which is great but like you're not she's not living in that house in a place where the real estate market is through the roof and she's not flying first class everywhere and she's not buying their guns left and right it's just simply not the life she's living um this all ends of course if you're looking at the orchid on helen's grave and it's very very sad um that shot too of like the in focus out of focus shift to the orchid really really elegant stuff really good stuff carol is watching the golden girls shut up physical media uh she's got the golden girls on dvd do you think this is the only thing she has on dvd or do you think it's her favorite thing is there another reason she would turn to the comfort of betty white and the golden girls well who among us would not frankly really agree i'm gonna guess that based on her treatment of the discs themselves that carol was not the physical media okay maybe this is a chance to get into our gilligan shot of the week of course it's a great nominee of course it is and of course it's the only reason a dvd would be weirdly upturned on its side on the table but they did talk about this on the official pod about like how he really wanted to get the shot and they're like we could just do it in post he's like no i want to do it uh the the director's episode was like i want to do it and they did it uh so yeah betty white reflected in the upturn dvd it's fucking good like it's like i'm here for it i'm here for doing it but the reality of that moment is a human has propped up a disc on their table in a way that no other human would disrespectful so thank you to whoever was buying the physical media in that house but i i don't think carol was the primary customer i'm gonna give you a couple of other uh nominees for the the gillian verse shot yeah extreme close-up of airplane instruments uh carol reflected in the gleaming silver cloche that is over the breakfast that is left at her front doorstep and the pouring water turning into vodka shot which i thought was was very gilligan coated um okay so we're binging the golden girls we're not showering and we're not really doing well i would say um and then a steaming hot breakfast from your favorite uh b &b in provincetown is dropped off at your front door rob are you eating the the sorghum flour pancakes and poached eggs and the micro greens yeah it's very tempting to me personally same but again when it's presented as like here's this intimate memory of this person who you are trying to keep private and this hive mind keeps insisting on like shoving down your throat that's what makes it feel gross and maybe you would lose your appetite um it looks like a beautiful breakfast it really does but this this is kind of the combination of I would say Carol is like starting to set her boundaries in this episode.

49:08She is trying to create a wall between her and the hive mind on two different fronts. One, like she doesn't want to be taken care of. And I want to dig into that more specifically because there's a lot to unpack with that. And then also Helen is just hard off limits. And the breakfast on the doorstep in the cloche is just like an embodiment of all of that stuff, like swaddled together. By a lot to unpack, do you mean several trucks full of food in the sprouts? let's talk about this okay so she goes to sprouts still driving the unicorn truck which is not long for this world and this is genuine okay i wrote peak white lady bullshit and again i say that as someone who can deeply relate to what carol is doing here but the insistence on being quote unquote independent i must take care of myself yep and in doing so forces all of these people not forces but it results in all of these people stalking the store so she can quote unquote quote, independently get food for herself versus the one person who showed up to put the breakfast on her doorstep.

50:08Yes. I think it is so funny. All those bulk bins had to be restocked. Now, the hive mind did it in an hour and eight minutes, which is... Incredible. Astounding work. But Carol, may we sneak past you here to get the entirety of the sprouts restocked so she can be a quote unquote independent person is genuinely, extremely funny to me. I really liked it. It's really great. And especially we've already established in this world, like there might be a very short, like there's not a lot of meat that's going to be out there or hunted or harvested in the foreseeable future. Did they restock the butcher counter?

50:45It kind of looked like they did. And so it's like, ma 'am, you need to freeze this meat if you want a hamburger in the next six months. Right. Burger Kebab is not going to do it for you. Simply. I mean, look, they're not open for business anymore. Although the hive mind has tapped into Mr. Burger Kebab himself and is like harnessing all that information, including his expert pricing strategies uh so maybe there's something to work with there but you're right like this is where i sit with the sprout stuff and ultimately this larger conversation about like being an independent person carol like clearly does not want to be treated like a guest in her own life or frankly like on her own fucking planet like you just got here and you're gonna take care of me how dare you um which that part i understand the ways in which she goes about it are incredibly wasteful and frankly ridiculous and she's she is turning her nose up at gestures gestures on principle that I understand, but in ways that are very human.

51:36And I think ultimately digging into this thing of like having the piping hot breakfast delivered to your door and this very specific kind of control that happens when you have all of your needs met and you don't have to provide for yourself, right? Like I think this is something where Carol is finding herself where if you give over all of the ways that you take care of yourself, you become reliant in a way where you are then subservient to the people who are providing your needs and so that is something that if you were in carol's position and it specifically if you're digging in your heels and the way that she is resisting and wanting to maintain who she is and like the hive mind is straight up saying like yeah we're trying to turn you into a pod person in the next two weeks to six months like that's an expressed interest of what they are trying to do absolutely i know and i like i support what she wants and if she had like walked out her backyard found a stream and like caught herself a fish out of a stream that's one thing to insist on restocking the sprouts just for her is a completely different thing and it's so good it's really good um what do you make we we had talked about this last week we talked about like what what are what are what is what is the hive mind doing when we don't see them are they just donald gleasoning themselves in a corner etc but we've got a couple things that we know right they are consolidating food resources medicine all this sort of stuff like that and they are consolidating they're turning off the power grid because people don't work at night and there's no crime and is this the future liberals want?

53:02That's my question for you, Rob. You know, all we want are 15-minute walkable cities. We want working public transit. I don't need to be part of a beehive, per se. No, okay, fair enough. But maybe this is the only way to achieve it. Maybe some of what the show is suggesting is that in order to reach this level of optimization, we do have to deny a lot of what makes us individuals, certainly, but even just fundamentally human. this is this is where i want to mention this email we got from our listener um elise uh who says in terms of no crime at night she wrote this previous episode but in terms of no crime at night she wrote what happened to all the sociopaths and deeply evil people who have committed atrocities if everyone knows how to do open-heart surgery does everyone know how to professionally torture someone to death were most of the people who died and then joining rejected because of what they were like most of the people in the upper levels of government were dead it's not as stretchably that most of them could have fallen into that category anger i love this part anger is a base human animal response if that's been scrubbed have any of the other difficult messy emotions made it being in love causes just as much difficulty as anger if not more so yeah are you human if you can't be angry messy and also uh the hive mind absorbed everything but not everything if sort of like evil is not here if ill will is not here if etc etc any thoughts on that rob mahoney i mean i think it goes back to what we're talking about about the difference between having information versus having the totality of a person like you can have you can have all their memories written down but that doesn't make you them yeah yeah and i like this show just begs all of these questions about what exactly is contained within the hive mind like we got another email from kevin who is wondering like what does it mean to share consciousness with a newborn baby like right right you are like you are a newborn baby you are a toddler you are an elderly person like you have this wealth of experience that like has no way of really reconciling to be honest with you like our capacity as humans for just like understanding each other's situations is fairly limited and if your brain if you just went full galaxy brain and like i have to relearn object permanence for the first time like no wonder they don't understand sarcasm you know like there's a lot that's going on also like the the children of the corn who lived next door are creepy enough right but like um you know in in in the show station 11 uh which i loved and i think in the book as well you have this idea of the of the post pans the kids who were born after the pandemic so what is it like to just have always been part of the hive mind versus assimilated into the hive mind do you know what i mean well and in order to be part of the hive mind post pan does the hive mind have to have sex with itself and if in doing so like does it care about its own half is that like a purely biological drive of like procreate or is there anything else involving there now that you have the sexual experience and information of the entire planet like i i can't even imagine the tantric shenanigans that could happen if it were interested in such things joe some of them more contortionists what are you gonna do like i think that like yeah i had to say i had this written down are we just breeding are we just fulfilling a biological imperative um so we're back you know we're back watching the golden girls uh we did get this uh great email from uh natanya one of our listeners who was talking about the way in which carol's experience uh is very much like depression which i thought was was really interesting i love that uh i thought it was a really really good email but like i think this idea that like um this the isolation the the sense that everyone around you is is happy and having a a frictionless like existence and you're the problem all this sort of stuff um i thought was really interesting anything you want to say on the on the golden girls specifically front or um anything else i mean first thank you for being a friend joe oh yeah travel down the road back again of course yeah i mean your heart is true you are a pal and a confidant uh knowing what carol's comfort show is is nice in and of itself like i just love this beat for this character but also i thought it was interesting in the scenes that we get specifically we like they're all like rose nyle and saint holof stories which are one of the great parts about golden girls to be honest the story that's like interrupted at the end it's like a scene break is her rose telling the story about there were some men who claimed to be druid priests who said they could stop a volcano from erupting if the the quote dumbest virgin in the town would basically do what they said um and it cuts off at this point before rose reveals it turns out they weren't druid priests at all they were just like a bunch of people looking for a good time i thought it was interesting that we left that part out you know like maybe that's a nothing thing maybe that's like uh i don't know a bunch of like supposing do-gooders just showed up on the planet saying they wanted to make humanity better maybe they're not do-gooders trying to make humanity better um on the official podcast they talked about the fact that they essentially had like some folks on staff like scrub through to find like what pieces they would want to put on and i don't know if they this is not contradicting what you're saying i was just saying imagine your job is to like as a pa it's your job to scrub through and find like the funniest rosen island stories to like just clip out for for a second or two on pluribus uh vince or any other showrunners if you're hiring for that specific job i will take it we volunteer i'm gonna return to this you donated twice the sierra club and i just want to say pluribus stop stop reading me to filth this instant i would really appreciate it um okay so it would be unsettling we should say if only your cul-de-sac was lit and everything else was pure darkness and like this is the other thing about the optimization and the sort of ant colony nature of it is there is something about watching it unfold that is appealing and and nice in a fluid and everything is working correctly kind of way.

58:56And it's also so unnerving to see. Absolutely. If you were in Carol's position, how would you not be constantly on edge by a chain of people coming saying one word at a time on their way out of the grocery store? It's horrifying. That was tough. And again, on this idea of we're learning as a collective, I would say if you if you want Carol not to freak out, put some pilot uniforms on your pilots and don't speak as one in that way that you did at the end of the Sprouts montage, I would say. OK, this is the direct quote from the official pod about this idea of emotional intelligence, right? Like Zoja shows up with a hand grenade because she doesn't understand that Carol's like dripping with sarcasm when she says this.

59:39Great emotional intelligence, but they're humans. So they'll get things wrong and they'll learn and they'll evolve. I thought that was really interesting. They're humans. And I was like, are they? You know, like that's the question we're asking. I mean, it's an intergalactic virus, but it is working with human hardware. Right. And so clearly like it's going to be limited by in some ways what the human brain can do. Although it's also tapping into abilities that the human brain could never dream of. So it's like, how human are they? I still don't understand even knowing all that. And this might sound like nitpicking.

1:00:12I don't mean it this way. I just think it's just philosophically interesting to explore. If Zoja can get drunk having vodka with Carol and the hive mind doesn't get drunk also, then she's having a unique experience. And so does that not make the Zoja-shaped person different from the hive mind because she had this experience of getting drunk? I was thinking about this like on a very basic level. I was thinking about you and I as tall people. Like if my experience is I can reach anything on any shelf I want and then there are some people who can't do that, then my experience is distinct from their experience.

1:00:51And so that's a very, very like minor sort of thing. But like extrapolate that out and out and out and out. Like the weather is different here than it is here. Like, you know, like there's just all these ways in which we are having different experiences in life and so how can we claim to be like one if we're having these little and so is that baked into the concept like are we going to see the collective you know my i'm weirdly bizarrely kind of rooting for zoja and carol i don't i don't know what to tell you they've got great chemistry and apparently this this scene the the vodka scene the aquavit sort of uh speech was uh carolina's chemistry read with ray like this is what they did in their audition to sort of like see if they connected um it's very endearing like it connects it was just etymology corner like i would subscribe yeah i enjoyed it a lot full of fun facts like the chemistry is undeniable right so i'm rooting for it yeah i don't know if i'm rooting for it i like watching it well here's here's the way in which i'm rooting for it i'm rooting for zoja to like wake up grow beyond well no because if she wakes up then And she's not Zoja anymore, right?

1:02:01That's very true. Because Zoja isn't real. Right. So what are we rooting for? Because to root for Zoja to have any kind of progress is to root for this construction, again, that has been engineered to be attractive to Carol. And even though Carol is trying to keep everything at arm's length, she clearly is susceptible to it. She stops the plane not to get on to join the harem and go party on Air Force One, but she wants the space pirate for herself. right like she's pulling zoja off the plane come with me she shows up with the hand grenade can like come in and have a drink with me like yeah she is trying her damnedest to not do this and you can feel her doing it because the chemistry is there and it is real it's undeniable and yet it is gross yeah um okay on the costume front i want to say really quickly i really love that like zoja had changed into this like flowy dress to join the harem yeah which she's still wearing at the beginning of this episode but she's back in like a smart blazer when she comes over with a grenade for carol um i love that we get some information about the biological imperative we get some information about like when carol says how long do i have left before you turn me into a worker bee and zoja does not contradict the the characterization of worker bee um tough i would say that's not how i would sell uh join us join us be a worker bee is not what i would say but i i I don't have Mr.

1:03:26Burger Kebab's level of marketing at my fingertips. So how do I know? Also, we had a lot of listeners ask a question about this idea that they can't, the they, the hive mind can't kill. What are you extrapolating from this? Like, what does this mean to you? It all feels like terribly convenient. And again, something that has been like focus grouped to be non-threatening, right? This idea like, oh, we couldn't possibly kill not just you, but any animal on earth. Like it is not in our nature. And so all of this talk about the biological imperative, on the one hand, like that's true of a virus, right?

1:04:02Like viruses operate in a way that is like they are trying to spread. They are trying to protect themselves. Like they are programmed to do very specific things and kind of can't go outside that programming. But it feels like the thing you would say. Like it gives you a lot of cover to say we have a biological imperative to not harm anybody and then have the cover to do basically whatever the hell you want. on on that level that's true and then also on in like a in the writer's room level you have to solve the problem of like why don't they just kill the people who are not part of the hive mind and it's like we can't kill um i did think it was interesting our listener liz was like if human if the implications of never being able to kill or cause harm to any living thing because they mentioned last week's episode that there several people were mauled when the lions were let out of the zoo right yeah if humans can't protect themselves against lions with their lives on the line what else does that extend to do viruses or bacteria count and if all these other living things start killing people is there a chance that this hive mind could be the end of humanity entirely whether that is intended or not a bit depressing to think that violence or animosity could be inherent to humanity and necessary to survival i think it probably would be the end of humanity in certain ways like including just very literally and the fact that the hive mind supposedly has this code but also does not really seem to give a shit about hundreds of millions of people dying in the takeover the contradiction of that is very juicy and very interesting and like i don't know how you could square it in a way that makes this all feel above board like there's just no way we're getting the odyssey because matt damon was on a horse and spazzed out and like went straight into the ocean so it's like all of these things cannot be true like the art will not continue humanity will not continue in its current form and these people or the hive mind or whatever they are don't seem like terribly like they want to make people happy yeah supposedly but i just don't buy the biological imperative line um can i say how much i want to start getting these stories about like matt damon fell off a horse into the ocean or whatever because um not you matt damon but like like in that leftovers like specific pop culture mark lynn baker sort of way like who died in in the the plural busing of the world we need to we want to know give us names give us specific names um okay we already mentioned the sort of violation of Zoja talking about the ice hotel.

1:06:22Really hurt my feelings when she did that. Really tough. And then the grenade blows up the house. So I guess now we know why they wanted to build their own cul-de-sac because they were going to blow up a house inside of the cul-de-sac. Anything else you want to say about that? Well, that seems to be like where the money is this episode, Joe, is not just building, but demolishing your own house and your own cul-de-sac. That's a flex if you have the budget to do that sort of thing. And what I love that they were talking about on the official pod is that they knew that when they were building the house, so they built the house just so that we could blow it up with sort of like minimal long-term repercussions or whatever.

1:06:57To be fair, that's the way many houses and apartments are built these days without any thought for what might happen beyond six months from now. Fair, fair, fair. When I said my like where's the money in this episode, where's the$15 million? For me, it's emptying out entire sprouts and then restocking it. Seems expensive. I guess they had access to that Sprouts for three days only. They had to film all the exteriors in a different parking lot because they didn't have enough access to Sprouts to get everything done. And they wanted like that sort of the way that the director described it was like a Busby Berkeley-esque sort of coordinated ballet.

1:07:34They wanted to do that. They wanted in Vince Gilligan style to show us them restocking everything. And they simply did not have enough time in the Sprouts to do that. So they sort of did it in the parking lot instead with all the crates and hand trucks. But I thought that was really interesting. I mean, you do get sufficient like label turning and positioning of various produce. Again, it's like the OCD in me is singing watching this stuff. Olives, a real star of this episode, honestly. What did you make? Look, first of all, when Zosia is kind of like reading Carol the ingredients in her fridge.

1:08:10Red olives. I assume that's like a I mean I guess a Kalamata could be a red olive I guess like a Cerignola is a red olive but like who has a jar of Cerignola olives just like sitting in their fridge um who even knows what a Cerignola olive is they're not all red but they can be red only Rob Mahoney love that uh would you call like a pimento a red olive because it has like red in it it's a filling I agree oh wait you're talking about separate pimentos not pimento in the olive. Well, I am talking about a pimento in the olive. That's a green olive usually. I agree. I'm just trying to answer your prompt.

1:08:49I don't know. I will say this. I do have olives in my fridge at all time. Same. That's for martini purposes and no other real reason. See, I love an olive. And frankly, I thought dropping off the cloche with the breakfast is a little disrespectful because we see the fridge and she has what looks to be like a pretty decent like wheel of brie cheese in there or something like that it's like you got the cheese and the olives there's probably some bread in here like you are halfway to a spread you know if not further you're telling me she couldn't make a meal of this i simply don't believe it charcuterie but no meat because uh we're not we're not curing meat anymore in this absolutely new world um okay carol's in the hospital we get extreme close-up on um care oh sorry carol's in the hospital waiting for zoja right um i really love the moment when when zoja comes out she collapses she's like don't worry helps on the way and that's when the sirens turn on i really like that as an idea of like the sirens are just for carol right they're so carol knows that help is on the way right helen already like called them via the ethernet so it's it's and it's not to get like traffic out of the way because all the hive mind knows the ambulance is coming so the sirens are yeah yeah both both in the sirens coming up for carol and also zoja rolling up to the house as thank you for being a friend plays again it's just like the little things with this show thank you for being a friend blaring into the empty cul-de-sac is is pretty phenomenal uh turns out like you should not mix hand grenades with xanax and vodka that's just like not the cocktail uh you want it will land you in the hospital we get an extreme close-up on carol's hands as she's waiting uh to hear news of zocia and then here comes our dhl guy played by robert bailey jr just an all-timer Phenomenal.

1:10:31Like episode stealer. Like they got to bring this guy back. Please. Have to. Please bring him back. We'll order whatever we need to order for the DHL guy to show up. But bring him back, please. I wanted a moment to talk about people still being in their various uniforms. Like the TGI Fridays person, the pilots, the DHL guy. This idea that like a uniform marks you as part of a collective. Right. Like, but also in this case, it makes you stick out a bit from the, you know, like we could say the DHL guy, the TGI Fridays girl, like et cetera, et cetera. Why do we think a DHL guy still dresses in uniform?

1:11:09And are we headed towards a future hive mind reality where like everyone is just wearing like matching hemp jumpsuits or something like that? Do you know what I mean? Like why is fashion, what is style, what is uniform, what is any of this stuff still doing here? How much of is it for Carol's benefit and how much of it is something else entirely? you know i mean i think a lot of it is for carol's benefit right right it's the idea of having your pilot not be the woman from tgi fridays and instead be wearing a pilot's uniform even though they're technically the same thing at this point like who really cares but it feels a way yeah and i wonder if this point it is just more about the projection of normalcy right of like you're used to seeing people working out in the world and it would be kind of weird if everyone was just in plain clothes right if no one was in uniform that would be upsetting and in like a visually different way that said it's a little odd to that like for example the dhl guy gets conscripted into being the one to come talk to carol who's like he's kind of zoja and kind of not when everything about zoja is so tailored right like her appearance what she wears how she is styled all very specific they could have put this guy in a tuxedo they could have put him in and they could have made him a police officer put him in scrubs absolutely right they could have made him anything make him look like noah wiley from the pit why not why not get noah wiley to come deliver this is the thing right dr robbie happened to noah wiley this is what we want to know wiley okay in in the pluribus universe we need i need him to be okay yeah we should say on that front like one of one of the things that uh was flagged to us over email too is like the plane that carol is on is a wayfarer airlines plane yes which is an airline that is referenced very specifically in a plane crash in Breaking Bad.

1:12:51I guess spoiler alert for Breaking Bad. So it's not not in the Breaking Bad universe. This is my detail, my like super detail that I want to mention, which is not Wayfair Airlines, though that's on my list. But Fiona Com, which is the bill for Helen that she sort of lingers on. This is a this is a better call. So we saw like Fiona Com billboards and vans and like ads and stuff like that. So we are. Yes, this is the same. There is a Kim Wexler out there somewhere she has a perky ponytail and i don't know what she would make of carol with her greasy unwashed hair bob but this is a this is the same universe and i i love that honestly incredible did you have a detail you want to shout out specifically for me it's a very simple one which is when the hive mind calls carol on the caller id it says it's us carol every bit of text and chyron in this show yeah it's so good it's so funny and like again having all of this stuff is what makes this show feel so watchable because yeah they're throwing all of these heavy huge questions about it like to us and all of these like very perilous circumstances and like what carol is dealing with is as big and as serious as it gets and that this show can still just be so funny all the time really a miracle and really what a vince gilligan show does so well anything inspired by this idea that like carol asks about an atom bomb and our favorite character DHL guy is like would you like an atom mom like that they would give her an atom mom the to go back to the grenade moment um on the official pod they were like they would have let her blow herself up if she insisted on it like when Zoja takes the grenade she says like basically may we can we take care of this if we may if we may right so like which is funny and it's sort of like and her delivery is so good but also it's a consent like carol has to like give her the grenade otherwise they would have let carol not only carol blow herself up but carol blows zoja up like they would have let that happen so in terms of like what will the hive mind do or not do an atom bomb is is fascinating you know as a as a player on the board here so well the nuclear football is back in play joe you know it's carol is right there for the taking i i would say i had two takeaways from the sequence first like one of the clearest signs of somebody in captivity is the way that they test the limits on what they're allowed to do and so the idea of asking could i have another grenade could i have a bazooka could i have a nuke if i asked for it like this is carol you can obviously see the gears turning for her as far as what she is allowed to ask for and what that might allow her to do in liberating humanity or whatever it is that she hopes to accomplish i also thought it was really interesting the way that even though dho guy is impeccably acted and super helpful like on face yeah the way that he is talking to her is really patronizing too right it's also like it is very like we we would need to have a talk we'll explain to you all the pros and cons of you having a nuke and if you still really really want it we'll go get you that nuke you know it very it very much is like you know your daughter wants an ice cream cone well you know carolina said this on the official pod that like as a mother She channeled some of her like dealing patiently with a cantankerous child sort of energy that she's harnessed over the years in her scenes with Carol, with Ray as Carol.

1:16:15And so like that idea of thinking of Carol as a child, an unruly child, ties into sort of that idea also of Zoja saying to Carol, if you saw a drowning person, right? They think humanity as it exists is drowning and we want to save you. You're a child. You don't know what you're doing. you throw a tantrum and we restock a sprouts for you. Like you don't quite know what you're doing. And there are ways in which that's aggravating because it is so patronizing. And there are ways in which it's like, oh, but is it a little, like, are they more evolved? Are they? Yes. That's the ongoing question of the show.

1:16:50If they're not suffering, if they're not like falling in love, if they're not having sex for pleasure, if they're not doing this, that or the other thing, are they actually more evolved or do they just think they are? It's a great question. I thought that whole conversation about Carol drowning and the idea of throwing the life preserver, because on a species level, Zoja is correct. Like we as a species are drowning. Like we do not have a handle on what we're doing, on how to navigate being people in the world and cultures in the world. And on a Carol level, I also don't think she's wrong. Carol is clearly drowning in a bunch of different ways, in part, to be fair, because the takeover killed her wife.

1:17:27So, you know, like let's take a little accountability, Zoja and the hive mind for that. The thing that gets stuck for Carol and I think would get stuck for almost any of us is like, what gives you the alien virus the right? Not just are you more evolved? Because even if you are more evolved, fuck you. Like what makes you the arbiter of all of human existence? And there are ways in which that's like true of all humanity. There are ways in which that is true of like Americans. That is true of white Americans. That is true of blonde white lady Americans. Like all this sort of stuff. so like that's a key demographic blonde white lady americans listen we we we matter do we i don't know it's a good question to ask okay so um i do not think we have time to get all to all the comps that our listeners emailed in but there's like a bunch of them we'll talk about them there's twilight zone there's star trek there's an octavia butler story like there's all this stuff that people wrote in about that i really want to get into next week licking the donut at gmail.com That's D-O-N-U-T at gmail.com.

1:18:26Please keep them coming. Your emails are amazing. Just because we couldn't get to them all didn't mean we loved, like, didn't love reading them all. They're fantastic. Rob, anything else you want to mention before we go? I would love to know, just on a personal level, if people want to email us at lickingthedonut at gmail.com. Yeah. If you were in a post-apocalyptic alien virus-led world and you needed your personal cozy time with the Golden Girls, what is the appeal of the loose-knit blanket? Like, I just have never understood it. a big holy blanket and I would like to get it other than it's clearly feeling cozy coated.

1:18:57I feel like Afghans are usually like inherited, like passed down, but I could be wrong. I don't know. I feel like they're pottery barned. Oh, unpleasant to contemplate. Licking the donut at gmail.com if you have some sort of loose woven Afghan thoughts. Also, what would be under your cloche outside your front door? I would like to know. Licking the donut at gmail.com. We'll see you next week. Thanks so much to Donnie Veachan. Thanks to Justin Sales. thanks to Rob Mahoney and thanks to Pluribus what a great show and we'll see you soon bye

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