What does the end of “Pluribus” mean? I asked star Rhea Seehorn to explain

In its nine episodes For many Disassemble quietly Alien invasion The genre and its reconstruction in the signature storytelling style of Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan. Just a few years after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, it was a devastating blow Apple TV The series introduced a new disease where most of the world’s population is infected with the Happiness Virus from another world.

At the heart of the story is Carol Sturka (played by Better Call Saul’s Rhea Seehorn), a successful but angry romance novelist. When reality changes around her – and it does so quickly – her angry demeanor sets her apart from the happy mind that’s shaping up. She makes it her mission to set things right, but it’s no simple task.

Episode nine, titled La Chica o El Mundo, hits like a silent bomb. Its final moments refocus the show’s emotional stakes and urgency. What does it all mean? Where do things go from here? I sat down to chat with Seehorn to delve deeper into Carol’s mindset, the defining moment that brought her back to reality and her potentially exciting motivations for moving forward.

If you’re not familiar with the Pluribus finale, come back now. Spoilers for the main story follow.

The final act of the episode revealed Carol’s terrifying realization. Although she officially told the hive mind that they did not have her consent to access her stem cells in order to transform them, in reality, Zosia (Karolina Wydra) and the rest were actively working on an alternative solution: her frozen eggs. Up until that point, Carol had been romantically involved with Zosia, an understandable move after the hive mind abandoned her to live a solitary life as the only person in the entire state of New Mexico.

But this betrayal? It was the slap in the face Carol needed. According to Seehorn, the scene exists in layers and tells Carol’s struggle to maintain her free will and not deal with the grief of her wife’s death. “First of all, I thought I had to give consent,” Seehorn said. And so we did.

“This has been taken away,” Seehorn said. “That clock is now ticking again, and you will lose your individuality. Besides, the idea that all this time, someone would say they really cared for me, and that behind my back, you were still planning to change me. Even intellectually, Carol probably could have guessed that, due to its biological necessity. But it seemed to draw attention to the fact that Carol knew she was being foolish.”

Losing someone dear at the same time that the world is losing most of its humanity probably makes me do foolish things, too.

If you’ve been paying attention, the potential romance with Zosia was there from the first moment they met. Seeking physical love – and even the false idea of ​​emotional love – to soothe oneself after an extremely traumatic experience does not seem like a bad decision. It is this perspective that makes the following detail all the more stabbing in the back.

“The third way, of all the ways to do this, is through the eggs that I froze that represent my future with my wife, who is now dead because of her,” Seehorn said. “I don’t know how betrayal really gets worse. You could say, is it heroic to finally get over it just when you put it in danger? At the same time, I would counter that everyone tells me they’re fine. It’s not like I can fight for everyone anymore. They don’t want to fight these people. They don’t want to save the world, except for Manusus, who just wants to wipe out people, and that’s not the right way.”

In our conversation, Seehorn compared this breakup scene with Zosia to the dinner scene that happened in Episode 8, Charm Offensive. It was Carol’s favorite place to write when she was young, and it appears to have burned down, only for the hive mind to rebuild it and put her into a nostalgia-driven state of manipulation.

Was the relationship with Zosia the same? I think so, but Seehorn said it’s up to interpretation. However, she had not expected the questions about love—the things we do for it and how we react to it—that Pluribus asked in her.

“Because the show is so good, for me, it exposes a lot of questions about, like, how do you judge what true love looks like?” Seehorn said. “Can’t true love have any purpose when we do loving things for the people we love? We often have a purpose: I want you to love me back. I want to make you happy. So it was a very deep dive into what’s really going on here.”

So what is Carol’s state of mind now? Is she in a better place than when she pointed a lit fireworks cannon directly at her face in Episode 7, The Gap? I wouldn’t say better, but it’s definitely a different place.

Read more: Apple TV: 15 best sci-fi shows you should watch right now

On the one hand, she now had a weapon of mass destruction outside her home. What’s her plan with her? Seehorn had no comment on that, but if you look at the third episode, titled Grenade, and how Zosia reacted to that explosion, I have a sneaking suspicion that stepping up to a bigger bomb will disrupt the world – the world of the hive mind, that is.

As for Carol, she’s “scared, defensive, hurt, ashamed and embarrassed,” Seehorn said. “As we’ve seen, she’s very reactive and very impulsive with a little bit of anger inside her, and she can’t sit with those emotions.”

Seehorn told me it took two days to film the scene with Zosia, with everyone exploring the emotional spectrum of this betrayal from all angles. “In the end, I saw the path they chose, which almost went backwards,” she said. “We were trying something where I refused to be vulnerable in front of these people again. You don’t even deserve to see how angry I am or how upset I am.”

“She opened up a dime and said, ‘I need an atomic bomb,’ and I’m out,” Sehorn continued, laughing.

Season 1 of Pluribus is available to stream on Apple TV.