Pluribus S1E03 Review | “Grenade”
In which we see the awkward co-existence between efficiency and self-destruction.
[This review contains spoilers for Pluribus Season 1, Episode 3, “Grenade”]
In October 2024, Jon Stewart said that streamers like Apple (where you’ll find Pluribus!) and Amazon turn writers’ rooms into “ruthlessly efficient content factories.” Part of that comes from how these rooms operate, going from over ten people down to four, and “it’s got to be on Zoom.” Even the casual viewer can spot this change on the front-end as more of our television arrives not as 22-episode seasons with filler episodes, highs and lows, and a distinct texture, but as six-to-ten-episode jaunts that can end up feeling like long movies. They’re technically “correct” as a business, but they also lose what makes art feel human. An experience can be pristine and somehow lacking.
Showrunner Vince Gilligan came out of this world as a writer on The X-Files and saw up close the transformation of the TV business over the past decades. That wariness of efficiency takes center stage in “Grenade,” where Carol questions the primacy of bliss and the cost of such a desire. We get a neat little parable in the prologue as Carol and Helen visit an ice hotel seven years before the hive mind takes over. Helen is awed by the wonder, but the cinematography puts us into Carol’s viewpoint. We see the beauty of such construction, and yet there’s an unnerving uniformity that overlooks or discards human needs in its pursuit of beauty. Would a normal bed not suffice in the ice hotel? Carol, by her own admission, is difficult to please, but the ice hotel also requires guests to discard some of their critical faculties so they can marvel at the majesty of the northern lights.
But we need inefficiencies. For example, grief is inefficient. We need it to process trauma, but it hurts, it slows you down, and there’s nothing to be done but let time heal a mental wound. Carol is in an impossible place with her grief, as Helen is both dead and not dead. The individual Helen is gone, but she’s also been absorbed into the hive mind, and the hive, via Zosia, keeps using Helen’s memories to try and cater to Carol’s desires rather than understanding that not every desire has to be met with a product. As much knowledge as the hive possesses, it fails to grasp the emotional complexities inside this one person, or even the idea that someone could be biting in their sarcasm and anger rather than making a genuine request.
The impersonal symphony reaches a crescendo midway through the episode when Carol decides to go shopping at a local Sprouts in Albuquerque, only to find it empty. Gilligan is having fun with his apocalypse imagery here, as the typical visual of a grocery store in the end times is one of clear shelves, but also rampant raiding. The store is picked clean, but what remains has been ugly and violated. In the world of Pluribus, everything is orderly, so you get an empty Sprouts, but it’s perfectly clean with no signs of a rampage. When Carol asks why her grocery store is empty, the hive explains that food consolidation was more efficient, but they’re happy to restock it for her. Then comes a ballet of delivery trucks and worker bees to fill an entire grocery store for one person. It’s inefficient to provide all this food for one shopper, but the hive’s highest priority is to make Carol happy, so they deliver an entire shopping experience.
It’s all a bit much and leads Carol to further retreat, drinking alone and watching old Golden Girls episodes on DVD. This scene of despondency is where Pluribus feels the most normal, as we know the feeling of shutting yourself away and finding comfort with the familiar. But the choice of Golden Girls feels noteworthy because it not only calls back to the days of “inefficient” network television (25–26-episode seasons starring four older women who weren’t trying to mask their age), but also because wallowing, while not optimal in the sense of efficiency, is still necessary. It hurts and, as we see with Carol’s drinking, is also self-destructive, but arguably, self-destruction is part of what makes us human. It’s not a fun concept, but the stupidity of our species is also one of the things that gives us life.
This comes to a head at the episode’s climax when Zosia delivers a hand grenade to Carol because Carol had sarcastically requested one. In the scene, we see the limitations of both Carol and the hive. Carol is now more alone than ever before and can’t push past her grief, but the hive, despite all the knowledge in the world, has no idea when they’ll be able to assimilate Carol. It’s a bizarre impasse where the hive won’t ditch its “biological imperative” to absorb the individual, but also continues to cater to her individual desires, whether that’s turning on her lights or handing her a deadly weapon. Carol, not believing they would give her a live grenade, accidentally pulls the pin and releases the safety lever, requiring Zosia to save both their lives. The grenade explodes, Zosia is seriously wounded, and the episode becomes bookended by a strong visual juxtaposition: the ice blocks of the hotel at the beginning and now a front yard in flames at the end.
As Carol waits in the hospital to see if Zosia will be okay, the hive talks to her about how they can make her happy, and Carol proceeds to name larger weapons that the hive would supply if asked. When she reaches “atom bomb,” the hive hesitates a bit, explaining they would convey the dangers of such a device in her hands, but eventually admits that yes, they would give her access to an atomic bomb if she wanted it.
This brings us back to our current tech world that Stewart was talking about as a disruptive force in entertainment, but we can see it in so many other areas of our lives. The industry preaches both efficiency and satisfaction, but those concepts don’t always live in harmony. We need pain and suffering, even though they’re stupid, because those contours help better define the best of us. We need friction, not a perfect delivery system to any desire. To pleasantly hand someone a hand grenade misunderstands both the nature of a pleasant demeanor and the destructiveness of a hand grenade. Carol is now living in this dissonance, and to an extent, so are the rest of us as we see tech giants cater to our whims while also missing human complexities and contradictions. I don’t think Carol is going to blow up the world, but we should all shudder at such a desire being greeted with, “Well, if it makes you happy.”
Stray observations:
“The bed is made of ice?” “Yes! Isn’t that charming?”
I love that this episode finds both the humor and unease of being catered to all the time. Filling the grocery store and filling a request for a hand grenade come from the hive’s sanguine belief that all desires are equally weighted.
It will be interesting to see how much the show keeps cutting back to the past, and I’m inclined to believe that future prologues will show us more of Carol’s life pre-hive-mind.
Pluribus airs on Fridays on AppleTV. Matt Goldberg is a critic who lives and works in Atlanta. If you enjoyed this review, check out his newsletter, Commentary Track.