Writers On Manousos, Carol, Zosia

Spoiler alert: The following article comprises spoilers for the season finale of Pluribus.

After traversing roughly 8,000 kilometers — a few of it tedious, a few of it harrowing — Carlos-Manuel Vesga’s obstinate Manousos Oviedo arrives in Albuquerque, on Carol Sturka’s (Rhea Seehorn) turf, anticipating to search out the identical steadfast chief he glimpsed in her call-to-action residence video urging remaining survivors to hitch her in saving the world.

But because the Season 1 finale of Pluribus unfolds, it’s clear he’s caught her unawares — in a state of limbo the place her burgeoning romance with Zosia (Karolina Wydra) has overshadowed a lot else. As episode co-writer and government producer Alison Tatlock tells Deadline, it was inevitable that the duo’s first assembly “would have to start as a disaster.”

“Because the timing is terrible,” she explains. “If it had happened a couple episodes earlier, maybe we’d have a different story, but by the time he gets there, she’s in a completely different headspace. We, in the script even, had a moment where we, in a stage direction, referred to her kind of vaguely remembering that she made videos where she was calling everyone into action; it’s not where her head is at anymore. And that’s when he shows up, expecting the Carol Sturka that he saw on the video, and that person is a little bit dormant right now.”

Fellow co-writer, EP and director of the episode, Gordon Smith, provides, “All those things that give grist to the mill were really fun to sort of tease out, and fun to see them not quite be the people that they even think of themselves. Carol thinks, ‘No, I am a hero. Oh, wait, this guy just walked 8,000 miles [sic] to be here. Maybe I haven’t done as much as I thought,’ and vice versa, I think.”

Vesga, a prolific Colombian actor who was solid within the position after being up in opposition to 710 individuals, factors out the differing stakes between his character and Carol.

“At least when it all starts, they see the enemy in the Joining. I am not sure if their reasons and their motivations are the same,” he says. “I think they come from very different worlds. You have Carol, who is a first-class citizen of the world, and you have Manousos, who’s probably a fifth-class citizen of the world, who is a migrant from Colombia to Paraguay, with all that comes with migrating and leaving your life behind and experiencing the trauma of just landing somewhere else new, losing your world. And then the small, little world that he’s managed to build in Paraguay is taken away from him, so his motivation is like, ‘Hell no, not this time, not again.’”

For Vesga, meaning the 2 of them are approaching the issue of the Others in dichotomous methods.

“Here’s a guy who has nothing in the world: no food, almost no clothes and yet he has purpose. And we cut from that guy and we go to Carol, who has, quote unquote, everything that she wants and has no purpose,” he says. “Rhea’s an amazing actor, but that one [scene], when she’s sitting in front of that firework, and she knows that it might kill her, and yet she stays there — that is one of the best performances I’ve ever seen. And I was thinking, ‘There is someone who has everything and is without a purpose.’ They seem to be trying to [get] to the same place, but they are going [about it] in a different way for different reasons.” (Editor’s notice: Seehorn vehemently disagrees with this characterization, which you’ll examine right here.)

As Manousos and Carol battle to speak — due to their mutual unwillingness to cede floor, comparable caustic personalities (and definitely a language barrier doesn’t assist, although it does add to the scene earned levity) — the previous crystallizes his concern: “Do you want to save the world, or save your girl?” The apt distillation of their conundrum (the episode is called “La Chica o El Mundo”) is drawn into focus after Carol fires off a warning shot at Manousos as he triggers a seizure within the Others, not not like she did some episodes in the past. After conducting quasi-scientific experiments on representatives of the Hive, he reaches the conclusion that the Joining might be reversed; however because the Others pack as much as depart Manousos, Carol goes with them.

As Smith characterizes it, the following idyllic montage is Carol’s last-ditch effort to “give in” to the collective.

“That’s really the essence of what we wanted to make it feel like, and that journey was the most beautiful, placid [thing],” he says. “Carol’s giving herself this one chance to give in to the real temptation of the Others, which is, ‘Hey, the world’s beautiful. Come see it with us.’ Essentially, ‘Give in,’ and it needed, I think, for the fall at the end, to hit as hard as it can. Everything else needed to feel like it was just the best vacation, or best series of vacations, that you could possibly hope to take. So we tried to craft that — all of the sequence I feel like I was trying to make the transitions feel like they were gentle, and make the shooting feel like it was gentle.”

Carol and Zosia stroll alongside sun-soaked seashores, take a shower in an opulent Shanghai high-rise resort and unwind with an après-ski night in (all shot in Big Sky, Montana; as creator Vince Gilligan jokes, “They’re dressed for the beach, but they’re wearing galoshes to get through like a foot of snow and slush right outside the door.”) Just when this home serenity reaches its tipping level, Carol stumbles upon an alarming reality: The Others have positioned the eggs she had frozen with Helen years in the past and are actively engaged on reworking them into stem cells, a course of that may take as little as a month.

Tatlock says of the Others’ moral justifications within the matter: “We talked about it a lot, like, ‘What do they do? What will they not do? What line will they cross? What line would they not cross?’ And we agreed that, while they would not force Carol physically to have a procedure that would extract her stem cells, if she had already voluntarily given up her eggs in a previous chapter of her life, which she did, that that would fall under the banner of, not consent, but that would be accessible to them, and that it would not break any ethical rule in their minds. Of course, to her, it feels like a hideous violation. So that’s where they part ways.”

Smith recollects there have been “various pitches on the table” because the inventive workforce mentioned how the Others would inevitably purchase Carol’s stem cells, given the collective’s “specific” understanding of company.

Gilligan notes of the doubtful governing guidelines of the Others’ morality: “But, maybe, if the eggs had already been fertilized, they wouldn’t have been able to, right? Because they can’t [actively interfere]. Boy, that opens up [a whole can of worms]. We talked many, many, many hours about this stuff. It’s a quagmire.”

All episodes of Pluribus are streaming on Apple TV. Season 2 is within the works.