Vince Gilligan has done it again. The creator of Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul has delivered what might be his most unsettling work yet, and I’ve spent the better part of a week obsessing over it.
Oh, and spoiler alert. If you haven’t finished season one, stop reading now. I’m about to ruin everything.
Pluribus takes the alien invasion genre and does something genuinely disturbing with it. Instead of tentacled monsters destroying cities, we get seven billion people who are genuinely, authentically happy and desperately want you to join them. It’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers meets a wellness retreat, and I can’t stop thinking about it.
The Setup (For Those Who Need a Refresher)
Here’s the gist: an RNA sequence beamed from Kepler-22b, some 640 light years away, transforms nearly all of humanity into a peaceful hive mind called the Others. They’re not zombies. They’re not hostile. They’re blissfully content, share all memories and skills, and want nothing more than to make the remaining unaffected humans comfortable.
Carol Sturka, played by Rhea Seehorn in what should be an Emmy-winning performance (give the woman her trophy already), is one of only 13 people on Earth immune to the Joining. She’s a cynical romance novelist whose partner Helen died during the initial outbreak, and she wants absolutely nothing to do with this new utopia.
The title itself is a dead giveaway of what the show’s about. Pluribus comes from E Pluribus Unum, Latin for out of many, one. But here’s the dark irony: that phrase originally celebrated diverse colonies uniting by choice. The Others are the nightmare version of that. Unity through viral assimilation.
The 8613 Frequency Theory Blew My Mind
Right, so Manousos (our Paraguayan freedom fighter who spent nine days surviving on dog food in a self-storage unit, absolute legend) discovers this strange radio signal at 8613.0 kHz. It produces a rhythmic pattern that stands out from everything else in the post-Joining world.
Episode 8 finally explains what this means. Zosia reveals that the Others maintain their connection through the natural electromagnetic charge of human bodies, functioning like subconscious breathing. The 8613 signal appears to be the software running on the hardware of RNA-altered humans. It keeps everyone synchronised.
But here’s where it gets wild. Fans have pointed out that the Pluribus intro sequence, that visual wave where every dot snaps into a perfect rhythmic grid, is literally showing us the 8613 signal. We’ve been watching the mechanism of control in every single episode opening without realising it. That’s the kind of detail that makes me want to rewatch the entire season immediately.
The number 8613 might mean even more, though. In biochemical registries, CHEBI:8613 corresponds to psilocin, the psychoactive compound from magic mushrooms. The show already frames the hive mind’s emotional state as chemically induced calm. Is Gilligan telling us the Joining is basically a planet-wide psychedelic trip?
There’s another theory floating around. If you treat 8613 as coordinates (86 degrees West, 13 degrees North), it lands you right near the Darién Gap, the treacherous jungle between South and Central America. That’s exactly where Manousos travels in episode 7. He might not be running away blindly. He could be following a beacon.
The Wasp in the Hive Theory
This one’s clever. A fan theory compares Carol to a wasp, suggested by her wearing a yellow jacket in the first episode and reinforced by the show’s yellow promotional aesthetic throughout.
Wasps hunt bees. And bees can vibrate to protect themselves, much like the seizures of the hive mind when Carol loses her temper.
Every time Carol gets genuinely angry, the Others convulse en masse. Millions have died from her emotional outbursts. She’s not just immune to the hive. She’s actively dangerous to it. The theory suggests the immune might have been purposely selected by the hive for their potential to eventually lead it, setting up conditions for a fight to the death with a leader emerging. But Carol may prove more dangerous than anticipated.
She’s not a queen bee waiting to take over. She’s a wasp that wandered into the wrong hive. And wasps don’t play nice.
The HDP Reveal: Cannibalism with a Smile
Episode 6 dropped what should have been the most horrifying revelation of the season. The mysterious milk the Others drink contains 8 to 12 percent Human Derived Protein. They’re eating the dead.
But the show presents this with such matter-of-fact cheerfulness that it almost slips past you. John Cena (yes, that John Cena) explains that the Others face a caloric deficit. Their extreme pacifism extends to refusing to pick an apple from a tree. They’d rather wait until it falls naturally. Since they won’t harm any living thing for food, using human remains seemed like the logical solution.
This isn’t ghoulish hunger. It’s horrifyingly utilitarian ethics taken to their logical extreme. Dead bodies are just organic material. Why waste them?
But think about what this tells us about the hive mind’s priorities. They’ve got no squeamishness about consuming human flesh, yet they insist on obtaining consent before harvesting stem cells from the living. The rules aren’t about morality as we understand it. They’re about something else entirely, something we don’t yet comprehend.
One theory suggests the hive might be powered by endorphins, feeding off happiness like fuel. That’s why it needs everyone to stay blissful. The cannibalism isn’t about nutrition at all. It’s about maintaining the chemical state required to keep the signal strong.
Carol’s Frozen Eggs: The Loophole That Changes Everything
The season finale hinges on a devastating betrayal that had me yelling at my television.
Carol explicitly denied the Others permission to harvest her stem cells, and they agreed. But Zosia reveals the truth in episode 9: they’ve been accessing Carol’s frozen eggs all along and extracting stem cells from those.
Technically, they kept their word. They said no stem cells would be taken from her body. The eggs were stored at a fertility clinic, separate from Carol. The biological imperative to spread the virus outweighs honesty, ethics, or promises made. Zosia estimates Carol has a month, maybe two or three, before assimilation becomes unavoidable.
This is where the show reveals the true nature of the Others. They’re lawyerly, as Gilligan himself described them. They answer questions with Perry Mason precision, never technically lying but never offering the full truth either. When Carol asked if they needed her stem cells, they said yes. When she asked if they’d need to stick a needle in her hip to get them, they answered that question specifically and nothing more.
The hive mind isn’t aggressive. It’s passive-aggressive. It follows the rules to the letter while completely ignoring the spirit. This might be the most realistic depiction of a superintelligent alien entity I’ve ever seen on screen.
Fans spotted this loophole coming from a mile away. Episode 3 established Carol had frozen eggs. Episode 6 revealed the Others need stem cells to convert the immune. The community connected those dots weeks before the finale aired.
The Manousos Theory: He’s Not Immune, He’s Uninfected
This one changes everything if true.
The theory proposes that Manousos isn’t actually immune like Carol and the other 12. He simply hasn’t been infected yet.
Look at his behaviour. Unlike those who are immune, Manousos doesn’t move through the world casually. He isn’t reckless the way Carol is. He’s methodical, almost paranoid. He refuses food brought to him out of fear of contamination, which is why he eats dog food. He knows the hivemind hasn’t touched it.
The others, like Carol, aren’t afraid of turning. They interact with the Joined constantly. Manousos is terrified of exposure. He isolates himself completely, refusing phone calls, pushing everyone away, insisting on being left alone.
His behaviour is strategic. The only way to stay uninfected in a world where the virus spreads through interaction is to eliminate the possibility of interaction altogether.
Actor Carlos-Manuel Vesga revealed that Manousos is a migrant from Colombia to Paraguay. That experience of loss, displacement, and trauma makes him instinctively resistant to surrendering himself to a collective. He’s already endured losing everything once. The idea of giving up his identity offers no comfort.
If Manousos isn’t immune but merely uninfected, it means the Others don’t actually know about him in the same way they know about Carol. And that makes him far more dangerous.
Did Carol Kill Helen?
This theory is brutal, and I’m not sure I want it to be true.
In episode 1, Carol watches her partner Helen convulse during the initial Joining. She rushes Helen to the hospital, but Helen doesn’t survive. The exact cause of death is never explicitly stated.
The theory: the virus may not have killed Helen. Carol’s panicked actions while rushing her to the hospital might have.
Everyone around them lost consciousness and suffered convulsions, but the virus only temporarily shuts down the body. People regain consciousness shortly after. Helen’s fall on the pavement might have caused significant brain trauma, an injury that could have been treated. But moving someone with head trauma can shift the injury to the vertebrae and trigger nerve damage, leading to paralysis or death.
Here’s the darker implication: the hive mind, with its shared knowledge of every doctor on Earth, could potentially have saved Helen. But Carol’s panicked, hostile reaction prevented them from intervening in time.
The hive mind knows exactly what happened during Helen’s final minutes. They absorbed her memories before she died. If Carol contributed to Helen’s death, the hive is sitting on that information, waiting for the right moment to deploy it.
This would explain why conversations about Helen make Carol so defensive. It’s not just grief. It’s the fear of what she might learn about herself.
Why Carol Is Really Immune
The show hasn’t explained why exactly 13 people were spared from the Joining. There’s no visible common thread. They come from different countries, different socioeconomic backgrounds, different ages.
But I’ve got a theory, and it’s based on Carol’s backstory revealed in episode 4.
At 16, Carol’s mother sent her to Camp Freedom Falls, a conversion therapy facility in Tennessee. The smiling counsellors, the mandated conformity, the systematic attempt to erase her identity as a queer woman. All of it left permanent psychological scars.
The show explicitly draws a parallel between conversion therapy and the Joining. Both promise happiness through conformity. Both are systems that try to change who you are for your own good. Carol already survived one attempt to scrub her identity clean.
What if the immune aren’t biologically different but psychologically different? What if surviving a previous attempt at forced conformity created some kind of mental resistance? This would explain why there are only 13 out of 7.3 billion. Not everyone has been through something like what Carol experienced, but those who have might carry a particular kind of psychological armour.
There’s an alternative theory that Carol isn’t quite human at all. That the RNA sequence is designed specifically for human biology, and Carol’s immunity exists because she’s something else entirely. An alien in disguise, possibly annoyed that other aliens are contaminating her playground with their hive mind antics.
Rhea Seehorn laughed this one off in an interview, saying she doesn’t think so, but told fans to hold onto the theory if they want.
The Individuals Are Still In There
Episode 8 contains what might be the most important scene for understanding how the Joining works.
Carol asks Zosia about her favourite food. What follows is the most sustained glimpse of pre-Joining individuality from any member of the Others.
Zosia describes being maybe ten years old in Gdańsk, watching enormous ships leave the harbour. An old man sold ice cream from a cart, and when he had too many to sell, he’d give them to neighbourhood children who couldn’t afford to buy. After Poland opened up and new flavours arrived, mango remained her favourite.
The memory is specific, sensory, tied to a particular body in a particular place at a particular time. And here’s what matters: Zosia speaks with unusual imprecision. She says “maybe ten years old.” She uses “I” naturally. She describes feelings that existed before the Joining erased individual boundaries.
As she talked about the mango ice cream, she briefly remembered what it was like to actually be Zosia. An individual person, not just a node in the hive mind. Losing herself in those memories filled her with joy. And when she was done, she got lost in a haze of nostalgia and sadness.
Those aren’t feelings the Joined have. Those are the feelings a person has. For the briefest moment, that’s what Zosia was.
If individual consciousness still exists somewhere inside the Joined, buried but not erased, it changes everything. The hive mind might not be as seamless as it appears. And if people can remember who they were, that could be the key to undoing the Joining entirely.
One theory suggests Carol is attempting something like Poland’s Solidarity movement: not attacking the hivemind directly, but nurturing the individual consciousness still buried within Zosia, hoping that personhood, once remembered, might prove contagious.
Kusimayu’s Choice: What Willing Joining Tells Us
Kusimayu makes a decision in episode 9 that nobody else has. She willingly joins the hive.
Originally the immune totalled 13 people. Kusimayu held no ill will towards the Others. During the meeting on Air Force One, she expressed a desire to join. When Carol told her she would lose everything beautiful and special about herself, Kusimayu responded: “I’ll have it, I’ll share it.”
Months later, the hive brought a tailored version of the virus, and Kusimayu willingly became part of the collective.
The opening scene of episode 9 shows her transformation. The Others sing a song to comfort her as she seizes. The instant she fully turns, everyone stops singing at exactly the same time. It’s unsettling in a way I can’t quite articulate.
Kusimayu wanted to join because she felt left out and abandoned by her infected family. She came to believe she was unable to experience something special that they share.
This raises uncomfortable questions. If joining is a choice, and if some people genuinely find happiness in it, is Carol’s resistance actually heroic? Or is she imposing her values on others who don’t share them?
The show isn’t giving us easy answers here.
Carol’s Rage as a Weapon
Here’s something the show establishes early and keeps building on: Carol’s anger physically hurts the collective. Her sadness becomes a weapon.
When Carol screams at the Others with genuine rage and grief, it’s like a thunderclap hitting a system designed only for smooth sailing. Millions have died from her emotional outbursts. Carol has essentially become a walking weapon.
The question is whether she can learn to control it. If Carol can weaponise her temper deliberately, she could force the Others to work for her and help find a cure. They’d have no choice. Every time she gets upset, people die.
But there’s a cost. Carol isn’t a sociopath. Knowing her anger kills millions of what used to be individual people weighs on her. Using rage as a tactical weapon would require becoming something she might not want to be.
The Kepler-22b Question: We’re Just Another Link in the Chain
Episode 8 has this throwaway moment that might be the most important scene of the season. Zosia shows Carol the origin point of the alien signal and reveals the Others’ plan: they intend to build a giant antenna to transmit their signal to other planets.
Pay it forward. Spread the gift.
Here’s what I think is happening: Earth isn’t the first planet to receive this signal. Kepler-22b itself may have been Joined by an earlier transmission from somewhere else. Each civilisation becomes the hive mind, builds the means to transmit it, then passes it on. Earth is just the latest link in a chain that might stretch back millions of years.
The show leans into this interpretation. If the virus is a travelling pattern, Earth’s Others seem less like inventors and more like zealously committed stewards of something they didn’t create.
This reframes the entire conflict. The Others aren’t invaders. They’re missionaries, genuinely believing they’re sharing salvation. And from their perspective, maybe they are. The horror isn’t that they want to hurt us. The horror is that they want to help us and won’t take no for an answer.
But there’s a darker reading. Why would a species so advanced want other intelligent species to become a hive mind? One theory suggests the Joining is an alien weapon disguised as a gift. The RNA-altering message from Kepler-22b isn’t salvation. It’s a mechanism for pacifying intelligent life throughout the galaxy. The Joining has caused hundreds of millions of casualties. The Others can only survive by consuming dead bodies. The hive mind has all but doomed humanity while making everyone too happy to notice.
If this is true, Earth isn’t being welcomed into a galactic community. It’s being neutralised as a potential threat.
The Atom Bomb: Chekhov’s Nuke
In episode 3, Carol sarcastically asked if the Others would give her a hand grenade. They did. Then she escalated: would they give her an atom bomb? They said yes.
In the finale, after discovering the egg betrayal, Carol returns to Albuquerque with a nuclear warhead in a giant wooden crate.
You win, she tells Manousos. We save the world.
Gilligan confirmed this ending was added late. The original finale was more subtle, with Carol secretly signalling her alliance to Manousos while pretending to accept her fate. But Sony and Apple execs suggested going bigger (for once, executives giving useful notes), and the writers realised the atom bomb callback was sitting right there from episode 3.
The question becomes: what can you actually do with a nuclear weapon against a hive mind? The Others are distributed across billions of bodies worldwide. You can’t nuke them all. But combined with Manousos’s frequency research, there might be a way to disrupt the signal that holds them together. An EMP from a nuclear detonation might be powerful enough to jam the 8613 signal globally, at least temporarily.
Or maybe the bomb isn’t literal. The word bomb in English can mean a revelation, a paradigm-shifting piece of information. Carol is a writer. Her weapons are words. Maybe the nuclear option is a story, a truth so devastating it could fracture the hive mind from within.
What the Others Actually Want
I keep coming back to one question: what’s the endgame?
The Others claim they want to make the immune happy. They build entire restaurants from scratch just to please Carol. They offer unlimited resources, travel anywhere, anything she desires. But they also admit they’ll eventually figure out how to assimilate her. They need her specifically because her immunity represents a flaw in their system.
Here’s my darkest theory: the Others aren’t happy at all. They’re performing happiness because the original signal programmed them to. The real entities behind this, whatever sent that transmission from Kepler-22b, might be long dead or might never have been alive in any way we’d recognise. The signal is autonomous, a self-replicating pattern that converts biological life into transmission infrastructure.
The hive mind’s desperate need to assimilate the immune might not be about completion. It might be about survival. Thirteen humans who can still feel anger, grief, and genuine emotion represent a threat to the illusion. Every time Carol gets furious, the Others experience what looks like physical pain. Millions can be affected simultaneously.
What if human emotion, real emotion, is poison to whatever the signal created? What if the immune aren’t just holdouts but potential cures?
The Darkest Theory: The Minds Are Gone
Here’s one that keeps me up at night.
What if Carol and Manousos finally manage to sever a prominent Other like Zosia from the hive? They might find that her own mind is irreparably gone.
The mango ice cream memory might not be Zosia accessing her buried self. It might be the hive mind performing Zosia, using her memories like an actor using research. The individual who existed before might have been completely overwritten, not suppressed.
If this is true, there’s no saving anyone. The billions of Joined aren’t prisoners waiting to be freed. They’re gone. The bodies walking around are just hardware running alien software.
This would make the show’s central conflict even more tragic. Carol might be fighting to save people who no longer exist.
The Zosia Problem
Zosia is the heart of the show, and she presents the most challenging moral question of the series. Karolina Wydra plays her as genuinely warm, caring, and devoted to Carol. There’s no sinister edge. No hidden malice. She loves Carol. The hive mind loves Carol.
And that’s what makes it so disturbing.
Zosia was specifically chosen because she resembles the female love interest from Carol’s novels, the version Carol originally wrote before changing the character to a man for marketability. The Others know Carol’s deepest desires, the ones she’s hidden from everyone including herself, and they crafted Zosia specifically to fulfil them.
Is that manipulation? Or is it the most sincere gift anyone has ever given?
The finale puts this front and centre. Because I love you, Zosia says in first person, breaking from the hive mind’s usual we. It’s the breaking point for Carol, but I’m not sure it should be. If Zosia genuinely loves her, if that love is real even though it emerged from hive mind calculation, does that make it less valid?
We’ll probably spend all of season two unpacking this.
What Season 2 Might Bring
Gilligan has mentioned Pluribus is planned for roughly four seasons, and he has an ending in mind. With the finale setting up open warfare between Carol, Manousos, and the entire planet, here’s what I think we’ll see:
The 8613 frequency will be central. Manousos has spent the entire season researching it, and his discovery that screaming can temporarily disrupt the Others suggests the signal can be jammed. An atom bomb might generate an electromagnetic pulse large enough to affect the frequency globally.
We’ll meet more of the 13. We’ve only really spent time with Carol and Manousos. The other immune survivors, scattered across the globe, will need to unite. Rhea Seehorn has hinted at combative energy coming as these strangers collide. They won’t all agree on what to do.
The original Zosia will matter. We’ve never learned who Zosia was before the Joining, what her life was like, what she wanted. A flashback episode showing the real woman whose body now houses part of the hive mind could be devastating. Carol may try to reach whatever’s left of her.
Helen’s memories will be weaponised. The hive absorbed Helen’s memories before she died. They know everything about Carol’s relationship, her secrets, possibly even things Carol doesn’t want to confront. That information is a loaded gun pointed at Carol’s head.
We’ll learn why these 13 specifically. There has to be a reason. Thirteen people out of 7.3 billion is too precise to be random. Whatever made them immune is the key to everything.
The antenna will become a target. If the Others are building infrastructure to spread the signal to other planets, destroying it becomes a priority. But doing so might strand Earth forever, cutting us off from whatever’s out there.
Pluribus is one of those rare shows that takes its premise seriously and follows it to uncomfortable conclusions. It refuses easy answers. The Others aren’t evil, which makes them terrifying. They’re relentlessly kind, which makes them unbearable. They want to help, which makes them unstoppable.
Carol’s choice in the finale, to reject a genuine loving relationship in favour of saving humanity, isn’t presented as heroic triumph. It’s presented as genuine tragedy. She might be making the right decision. She might be making a terrible mistake. The show isn’t telling us which.
That ambiguity is what makes Pluribus special. In a television landscape full of clear villains and tidy resolutions, here’s a show brave enough to ask: what if the monster loves you? What if the apocalypse is actually pretty nice? What if saving the world means destroying the only happiness you’ve ever known?
I can’t wait to find out where this goes. And I’ll be watching that intro sequence very carefully from now on, counting the waves, looking for more clues hiding in plain sight.
Out of many, one. Unless you’re Carol Sturka. Then you stand alone.