The ‘Pluribus’ Finale Really Delivered

This story contains spoilers for Pluribus season one, up to and including the season finale, "La Chica o El Mundo". Depending on your feelings about post-humanism or AGI or whatever the worst sentient LinkedIn profile has held court about at your holiday party, the opening of "La Chica o El Mundo," the Pluribus season finale, is either a march to an execution or a coming-of-age ceremony. We see one of the last remaining non-Othered individuals, Kusimayu, in her village with her now-Othered people in rural Peru. Another impeccable Vince Gilligan process montage unfurls, with a crate being moved across air and land, a relay race among the giga-competent pilots and drivers and handlers that make up the omnipotent flesh LAN as it prepares to subsume one more into its ranks. The sacred cloud of Kusimayu’s stem cells and alien DNA has arrived. She’s all in on being all out of individuality. She huffs the vapor. She collapses. The people of her village-the people who were her people-sing and she awakens. With an eerie smile she rejoins the daily tasks of her place. Only the adorable goat she had been cuddling in the moments before she clocked out of having an individual soul seems confused. Your heart breaks for it, in the way that anyone’s heart breaks for an animal who has lost its person. There’s a sly genius at work. Vince Gilligan, frequent chronicler of man’s perfidy , shoves us toward cheesy feelings felt the world over: Oh, will you look at that poor lil’ guy! “Charm Offensive,” the penultimate episode of the season, pushed us and Carol toward a similar goopy cliché. Maybe Carol is the kind of person who needs people. Maybe the Others have figured something out! Carol spends a night among the Others bunking communally in an arena, a scene like a Fyre festival for the Borg or an orientation activity at a pricey small college. A simulacrum of the diner that was Carol’s escape and her ritual-a la David Lynch at Bob’s Big Boy-is rebuilt for her. When she returns to her white boards of conspiracy and fact-finding, and disabuses herself of the notion that all of these kindnesses from the Others are harmless, Zosia seduces her. Meanwhile, thousands of miles away, our guy Manousos, our capo of the Darién gap , wakes up in a Panamanian hospital and goes Dog Day Afternoon , holding a doctor at scalpel point, demanding to know how much he needs to pay for his treatment. He bangs out an IOU slip. He hops into an ambulance, cheeks hanging out the back of his hospital gown, and heads north. For any wrestling fans reading, this is the moment when the Stone Cold Steve Austin glass breaks. Pluribus began as a one-person bell jar, part of a tradition of American storytelling tethered to the necessary compression of a movie- Rachel Getting Married or A Woman Under the Influence or Take Shelter -where one person steadily loses their shit. These kinds...

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