Pluribus

i've seen bad takes but that takes the cake.

You think the plurbs are high school drama students who did it all for show? they were just butt hurt so they put on a huge emo production for literally no ones benefit, Carol was asleep when they left her, only the audience saw it.

You're saying the plurb are spoiled little children pitching a fit like this?



Diatabe asked them to pretend make believe so they granted his request.

Carol almost killed zoshia/broke her with the truth serum and they decided, without any input or feedback from Carol at all, to abandon the city and keep their distance from her. They won't even answer the phone, they make her leave msgs on voice mail.

They abandoned the city. Of course that wouldn't actually work IRL. You like the show so you are making excuses for it, mental gymnastics to make up for bad writing. It's ok, everything isn't a fucking attack. I like the show too. my only point was I would like it better if they kept things more vague and stopped trying to explain shit poorly and introducing situations where you gotta do mental gymnastics to excuse the bad writing.

And that was only the minor quibble I had with the episode, my actual beef was what they were doing to Carol and Manousas character that episode, making her capable and competent, where loneliness was her downfall, and taking him from being stoic and competent and making him an imbecile.

I didn't consider your take on it though, that they were setting it up for Manousas to become the antagonist. it has merit I suppose. I think the point remains though, if things had stayed the same then he would have become the star of the show and it would have been about him fixing the world, so they had to do something to keep the show focused on her.

Sylas said:

i've seen bad takes but that takes the cake.

You think the plurbs are high school drama students who did it all for show?

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Yes.

Sort of.

I think they are consolidating massively across the globe as they are starving. Or something. And they have 13 little pockets of fake activity for the uninfected. Some pockets, like ABQ, are larger than others because the dumbass infected ask for the lights on. The fact that some of the Solyent Amber was left in the warehouse is explained by them mostly abandoning the city except for the Carol Life Support Crew (Worst job in the Pluribverse)

Sylas said:

I'll once again point to the wolves from episode 2, 3? First week since the conversion and they were scavenging trash and trying to dig up helen's corpse for food. This was a narrative choice, not a realistic, logical outcome. Wolves avoid people, especially with an entire city of cats and doodles and newly released and no longer protected live stock to feast upon, there is no way that the wolves just happen to intentionally go and attack the only person in the city who still has their fucking lights on at their house. That scene made no logical sense, It was simply foreshadowing that the hive was scavenging the dead and eating people.

So the wolves aren't actually scavenging, you just have to pretend that scene didn't actually happen *in the world* , it was a dream, just setup for an episode cliffhanger + later reveal. Because otherwise, where are the wolves now? They spent an entire episode following Carol as she went about her life *completely alone* in ABQ, the weeds are growing in the golf courses because no one is maintaining the lawns, bunny rabbits are just out and about living their best life. Buffalo are free grazing by hole 9. No fear of humans (they haven't seen any in weeks, Carol is the only person in the city) No wolves, no predators of any kind it seems. Those wolves were just a narrative device, they weren't real, the same way this entire episode pretty much confirms it with their "nature is healing" and society is falling apart without the Hive motiff.

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Oh yeah, the wolves in retrospect make a littttle more sense given that the Plurbs are scavenging the entire planet at an industrial scale, literally one of the few mammal corpses in the city of ABQ not under Pluribus' possession might've been Carol's girlfriend.

It was still dumb because you'd need to have hordes of wolves and they'd have to be starving for there to be a good chance of encountering one in ABQ, there just aren't many wild wolves in the area. Maybe it was one of the wolves from Mexican Wolf Conservation Facility , lol.

that little rant was more about showing that the writers will serve the narrative over ensuring logical consistency. There are many times where you just gotta hit that "i believe" button and not think about it.

Which is my point about them abandoning the city entirely. Every fiber of your being is telling you "wait that doesn't make any sense, surely there is a crew running around hiding in the bushes watching after her" and i'm telling you that no, there isn't. Not in the context of the narrative they are crafting. This whole several episode character arc was about Carol coming to grips with being utterly alone in complete isolation almost going crazy and begging for the hive to come back.

I had hoped that they would focus more on the "life after people" post apocalyptic urban decay with the city falling apart and her begging them to come fix it, because a: that's what would actually happen and b: I thought that was what the whole tag up with Manousas was leading to. As I watched the episode and saw more and more shit falling apart I thought the episode was going to end with manousas walking up and saying "hello my name is manousas I want to save the world" and she would look up half in a daze and be like "great, but first can you fix my plumbing? The water has been off for 2 weeks I've been drinking toilet water from random neighbors houses"

Instead they focused on her psychological well being and almost descent into madness/going stir crazy and begging for companionship. That is why they had to neuter Manousas, and I believe you are correct they are gonna build up to him being antagonistic towards her instead of becoming the lead in fixing shit.

Sylas said:

i've seen bad takes but that takes the cake.

You think the plurbs are high school drama students who did it all for show? they were just butt hurt so they put on a huge emo production for literally no ones benefit, Carol was asleep when they left her, only the audience saw it.

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You assertion is the correct one based on Gilligan's past writing style applied to this show. The hive putting on a show for the audience either reveals something crazy about the nature of the show's world or it is terrible writing as everything has been legitimately, hamfistedly, diegetic up to this point. We learn as the characters do or just before. They exposition dumped everything that we learned without this specific group of characters to them either as a whole, to convey that everybody left has this knowledge, or specifically to an individual. We don't know any secrets that the characters do not so picking up and leaving as a ruse is the story knowing of our existence as it applies to itself and writing in a trick for the audience.

A non-diegetic exposition dump would betray the drip feed of information that adds in an element of humanism to the story. We can forgive us all not knowing something because Carol didn't or hasn't thought of it to ask yet. Anything done on camera is true in this story because we aren't characters that have to be deceived. We're the audience and they could be trying to trick Carol but they wouldn't be trying to trick us with information that she would never be privy to.

So I didn't know the name of the painting Carol stole but it's called Belladonna. Which is a poisonous plant. She also is wearing the blue and white of the painting at the end of the episode. Probably signaling she is going to be poisonous to the Hive.

He's from a landlocked country its entirely possible he has no experience with boats or being on the water, even hugging the coast could of been out of his reach.

I mean sure he crossed south America in a few minutes of a montage but he basically did alaska to the east coast by car just to get the Darien gap. A 2 day hike through the jungle is prolly better than risking the open ocean in something he could handle/afford (he would of least have left a note for the owner with cash or telling them he "borrowed" their boat and would leave it for them in Panama)

If you don't know how to sail and read charts it's super dangerous.