Hi, Carol! It’s time for the Season 1 finale of Pluribus, and you’ve probably got some questions after that bomb of a episode, titled, “La Chica o El Mundo,” aka “the girl or the world.” Well, we’ve got some answers for this ending explained for the Apple TV hit, as well as some speculation about Season 2.
And yes, before we get into spoilers just know that there will be a Season 2 of the series, so Carol’s (Rhea Seehorn) mission to save the world isn’t done quite yet. But with that in mind, let’s recap the episode in brief, followed by the ending explained, and a few other odds and ends.
Pluribus Season 1 Finale Recap
Leading into the finale, we’ve gotten the tease that after eight episodes of build-up, Carol is finally going to meet Manousos (Carlos-Manuel Vesga), aka the only other non-Joined human being who wants to reverse the Joining and save humanity (whether it wants to be saved or not is another question). Manousos was last seen crossing the Mexico/US border having refused the help of The Others, ready to find out what Carol knows about saving the world. Only liiiiittle problem with all that is Carol has been happily shacking up with Zosia (Karolina Wydra) for the past few weeks. So will Carol want to help Manousos? Let’s find out.
We start off about 71 and a half days into the Joining, but not with Carol or Manousos… We’re back with young Kusimayu (Darinka Arones), the girl whose family was all Joined except her. And in what I would personally argue is one of the most horrifying moments in the series so far, we see her small, remote village happily pretending life is continuing as normal, until the formula to join Kusimayu is administered — with her permission… And it all disappears. The second she’s joined, everyone stops singing and cleaning the village and tending animals, as well as pretending they are separate organisms. Instead, theyimmediately abandon the village and walk to join the Others, elsewhere.
It’s this sort of cultural destruction and assimilation that Carol was railing about last episode right up until Zosia distracted her with her stupid sexy pirate lady lips, which of course was the point. But even if we’ve barely spent any time with Kusimayu, it really tips the scales in favor of “joining bad,” whatever you may have thought about the debate over the course of Season 1.
Okay, that’s enough about Kusimayu, who probably went to go sleep in a stadium somewhere. Let’s talk about Carol v Manousos: dawn of just us.
The main event kicks off with Carol and Zosia watching Manousos drive him in his ambulance from some drone footage, about 12 days before Kusimayu was assimilated (this will be important later, by the way). Carol asks if Manousos is dangerous, and Zosia says, “…We don’t think he’d hurt you.” Which certainly indicates something, and also points to despite how much they smile and seem helpful, the Others aren’t above some mental manipulation to get their goals.
Finally in Albuquerque, Manousos and Carol spend most of the episode trying to bridge their language gap in ways both serious and not so serious. Carol won’t go into Manousos’s ambulance; Manousos won’t go into Carol’s house, so she pulls out a phone translation app in airplane mode, so the Others can’t monitor them. But Manousos doesn’t trust it, and throws the phone down a sewer drain, having to fish it out as a peace offering. Next up, they take a big pink umbrella and stand outside so the Others can’t read their lips. Manousos also thinks Carol has a bug in her house. Side-note: Manousos calls them “weirdos” which is undeniably hilarious.
The ideological divide between the two finds Manousos taking a hard line/lack of trust, while Carol ends up defending them based on the info she’s learned. She’s also put off by Manousos’s rugged masculinity and demanding nature when he snaps at her (literally, with his fingers).
Manousos thinks he’s found a bug in Carol’s liquor cabinet, but that’s not it at all… Instead, it’s a movement sensor that was placed by Helen (Miriam Shor) back in 2011 when they were freezing Carol’s eggs. Basically, Helen wanted to know how much Carol was drinking, which is something the Others can use to drive a wedge between Carol and her old life; but it’s also a helpful reminder that Carol froze her eggs (do we even have to say that will be important later).
Deciding she’s tired, Carol takes Manousos to the house next door so they can save the world “mañana,” with Manousos not being into appropriating someone else’s house (and Carol shooting back “oh, so that’s your ambulance” out in the driveway). Her vodka is getting warm, so she heads back home to fall asleep drunk in front of Golden Girls again, while Manousos does the most horrifying thing possible: asks to speak to Zosia.
Waking up in the middle of the night, a terrified Carol takes Zosia away, though Zosia already told him “everything.” As Zosia explains to Carol, Manousos asked questions, they answered, and then we get to the crux of it when Zosia says “I know this is hard to understand, but we love him the same as we love you.”
“No,” says Carol. “You can’t love him the same. It’s not the same. It’s different.”
We, the audience, are aware — or I hope we’re aware — that Carol is lying to herself if she thinks that Zosia is romantically involved with her, and has feelings for her other than an attempt to consume. It’s something that Manousos clearly does understand with his flat refusal to engage with the “weirdos” in any way. Carol, meanwhile, has never really left the denial stage she hit after Helen died, and has been in variations of that point of grief ever since.
Perhaps Carol could have reached this revelation herself, but then Manousos yells at one of the Others. It’s all an experiment of his, and he brings up the strange radio frequency he discovered earlier on in the season in Paraguay. Carol is horrified when she sees what he’s doing, she knows millions of bodies are dying. But for Manousos, the lives of the many are more important than the lives of the few. He thinks he can bring this Other back to individuality by disrupting the Joining and channeling the radio signal, and he may be right; after all, Zosia did explain the Others communicate through electronic signals, so perhaps this is the key to saving the world.
But per the title of the episode, Carol chooses the girl, not the world. She doesn’t want Manousos to do what he’s doing if it means Zosia’s life. So she goes shotgun crazy and stops him. Laxmi (Menik Gooneratne) calls, pissed, and then Zosia and the Others all leave Albuquerque for their safety, same as they did with Carol earlier on in the season.
Manousos is excited because he thinks there’s a way of saving the world, but Carol doesn’t care. She wants Zosia, so they leave together on a beautiful trip across the globe. Fun side note: their first stop, by the pool Carol is reading The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin, a sci-fi classic about a man trying to communicate with aliens, but unable to figure them out because they are ambisexual.
There’s also a sense of weirdness to this whole sequence… Whereas most of the show has felt extremely grounded in reality, multiple sequences here seem to be matted from green screen, or digitally altered — ending in an enormous ski chalet in the mountains that is close to a cage. Perhaps this is to heighten the unreality of the sequence, that Carol is living in a dream world. Or maybe it’s just not filmed that well.
Either way, that brings us to our endgame.
Pluribus Season 1 Ending Explained:
In the chalet, Carol talks about being deliriously happy, something completely foreign to her, with Zosia noting that “it only gets better.” What gets better, exactly? The Joining, of course, which Carol reclarifies can only happen with her stem cells, and she does not consent to them being taken from her body.
Say, there wouldn’t be any way of getting Carol’s stem cells without her consent, right? Oh yeah: the eggs she froze 11 years ago. And sure enough, they can make the stem cells from her eggs, with Zosia linking up the timeline by explaining that Kusimayu just joined “and I promise you, she’s happier than she’s ever been.”
There’s a ticking clock, too. Zosia explains that they’ll be able to make Carol join in “a month, hopefully, maybe two or three.” And there’s no way around it. The Others have to assimilate her.
So that takes us to nearly the end of day 75 of the takeover the world, and back to Manousos, who is learning basic electronic engineering, as well as, you know, English. He’s trying to figure out what he can do with that mysterious radio signal, when another strange sound begins.
It’s a helicopter, dropping a crate in front of Carol’s house, which then lands and lets Carol off — Zosia is, of course, flying the helicopter, and they give each other a sweet, sad look of goodbye.
“You win,” says Carol to Manousos. “We save the world.”
“Carol Sturka,” asks Manousos, pointing to the crate. “What is this?”
“Atom bomb,” Carol answers, as “Conquistadora” by Chantal Claret blasts over the closing credits. If you’ll recall, Carol asked if the hive mind would ever give her an atom bomb. Now, we have our answer.
The big question, though, is not necessarily how Manousos and Carol will cure the Others, but rather whether Carol is doing this out of selfishness? I’d venture the answer is “yes” which means she is perhaps not yet doing this for the right reasons. Whether that matters for Pluribus Season 2 is TBD, for sure. But if we’re focused on Carol’s journey as a human, she should be getting better, right? Or perhaps cranky individuality is the key? Happiness is a drug? Your metaphor of choice?
Even at the end, Pluribus refuses to be pinned down with an exact metaphor, and that’s okay because now that Carol is a nuclear power, everything has changed for Season 2.
Will There Be A Pluribus Season 2?
Like we said above: heck, yes. The show was initially picked up for two seasons by Apple TV back in 2022 after a bidding war for the series. That was a long time ago, and there have been plenty of reversals on second season pick-ups before. But Pluribus has been a hit for Apple TV, so there’s no reason to think we’ll have a League of Their Own situation here or anything. In fact, Pluribus is the most-watched Apple TV show ever, passing Severance and Ted Lasso, according to the streamer. Wild! So yeah, Season 2 is all but guaranteed.
When Will Pluribus Season 2 Premiere?
This is where things get a little tricky. Normally, we take a look at the cadence of production and post-production for a first season, but this one was in development for a long time, then interrupted by the WGA/SAG strikes.
As for production, that was a little smoother with filming running from February to September of 2024. Meaning an eight month shoot, then over a year of post-production until the first season began to release on Apple TV.
We do know that a writers room for Season 2 opened in late November, according to showrunner Vince Gilligan. “We’re lucky that we have a series 2 already in the offing,” he told the Radio Times on November 16. “We’re going to open the writers room for that next week, about a week from today, as we record this. And I’m excited about that, little nervous too. I don’t have all the answers. My writers and I, we don’t have all the answers.”
While that all leaves us with a big shrug/question mark, we actually do have something we can base our educated guess on: Better Call Saul. While they’re very different shows, they’re using a lot of the same crew and there’s every reason to think they could hit similar schedules. The first season of Better Call Saul was in production for eight months, but subsequent seasons lasted around four or five months. The gaps between seasons varied widely, though, with the first four seasons coming out yearly, then a two year gap between the two final seasons of the show.
That’s the simplified form, but the point here is Pluribus is a show made by people who know how to make TV. Typically in the streaming age you’d give about six to eight months for production, and then eight to 10 months for post-production (for a more effects heavy show). Including time to actually write the season, it’s likely that we won’t see Season 2 of Pluribus until some time in 2027. If they hold it for as long as Season 1, we’re possibly talking Fall of 2027; but more likely it should be ready by Summer, or possibly even a little earlier.
It’s possible things could move quicker since they know how to shoot around Albuquerque and the sets they’ve already crafted for Season 1. But Gilligan productions are pretty exacting, so they’ll likely take all the time they need, and Apple will likely let them. So to shoot our shot, I would say Pluribus Season 2 will premiere in Summer of 2027.
And as for number of seasons, that’s TBD as well. Definitely two, though Gilligan is willing to go as long as Seehorn would like to (he does have an ending in mind, though). Hey, hopefully we all live that long. After all, Carol now has an atom bomb.
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