TL;DR: An intense, emotionally loaded episode that mixes dark humor with raw trauma and sets up one of the show’s most promising character collisions. Carol spirals, Zosia suffers, Manousos arrives like a conspiracy-theorist John Wick, and Pluribus continues to prove it’s one of the smartest sci-fi shows currently streaming.
Pluribus
Pluribus has always felt like the world’s most chaotic group chat, except the notifications come from a global hive mind and the mute button has been permanently disabled by cosmic forces. But Episode 4, Please, Carol, pushes the show into a sharper, stranger direction, the kind of hour where you sit forward on the couch and mutter oh no, oh no, oh no while the characters make the kind of decisions that keep therapists in business. The episode finally brings us face-to-face with Manousos Oviedo, the Paraguay-based storage-facility hermit who treats independence the way Charlton Heston treated mutant zombies: as a personal vendetta.
Carlos-Manuel Vesga plays Manousos with the delightful intensity of someone who has studied The Omega Man with the devotion of a religious text. Watching him ration sweetener packets, dog food, and pure stubbornness like they’re the holy trinity of survival feels almost nostalgic. But it’s also heartbreakingly clear he’s clinging to outdated logic in a world that’s already rewritten its operating system. His ham radio routine, his barricaded windows, his hilarious-but-also-sad argument with Carol—all of it reeks of a man who has built a bunker not just against the Joined, but against connection itself. And when the episode flashes back to that tense long-distance conversation with Carol, it suddenly clicks: these two are on a collision course, and neither is emotionally stable enough for the meeting to go well.
Back in Albuquerque, Carol is embracing her inner chaos avatar by joyriding a police car like she’s moonlighting as a reluctant member of the X-Men. When she returns home to find a swarm of Joined workers repairing the damage from the grenade fiasco, the episode leans into its signature blend of comedy and existential dread. Enter Jeff Hiller as Larry—Shorty—who has the emotional energy of the world’s friendliest community theater director. His inability to lie becomes the key that helps Carol confirm one of the show’s biggest mysteries: the Joined can only speak the truth as they understand it. Which would be great—if Carol didn’t immediately use that truth to dig up old wounds about Helen that the hive mind is incapable of smoothing over.
What’s devastating about Carol’s spiral is how understandable it is. She’s grieving in real time, surrounded by people who share consciousness but can’t share compassion the way she needs it. The Joined are honest, but they’re honest in a way that slices instead of soothes. When Larry calmly reveals Helen only made it to page 137 of Carol’s manuscript, I felt that. As a writer, that sentence hit harder than any apocalypse ever could.
But the emotional core of the episode belongs to Carol and Zosia. Poor Zosia—our endlessly patient emissary, hostage, friend, victim, and threat all wrapped into one exhausted woman—once again becomes the lightning rod for Carol’s desperation. I genuinely felt bad for her this week. First Carol interrogates her about reversing the Joining, then she drugs her, and then she accidentally puts the entire hive mind into psychic meltdown. The moment where the Joined start collectively wailing is one of the eeriest things the show has done so far, not because it’s monstrous, but because it’s heartbreakingly human. These people feel everything together, including pain they don’t understand how to process.
When Zosia tries to explain that Carol has no idea what it’s like not to be alone, the show reveals its true hand. This isn’t simply a story about psychic aliens or viral mind-sharing. This is a story about loneliness. About the scars isolation leaves. And suddenly Carol’s past becomes the missing puzzle piece. Her story about the conversion therapy camp at Freedom Falls, with its smiling counselors and mandated conformity, reframes everything. Of course she recoils from the Joined. Of course unity feels like a threat. She spent her youth surviving a system that tried to scrub her identity clean. Losing herself isn’t transcendence—it’s a nightmare she already escaped once.
The beauty of this episode lies in how gently it threads that trauma through the genre. One moment you’re laughing at Manousos screaming at a fly-ridden tin can, the next you’re gutted by a memory that explains Carol’s entire worldview. And by the time the credits roll, the show has quietly positioned Carol and Manousos as two volatile ingredients finally sliding toward each other in the apocalyptic chemistry set. Both distrustful. Both wounded. Both determined to survive by staying alone in a world that demands unity. And they haven’t even met yet.
Please, Carol is the kind of episode that hits your brain, heart, and funny bone at the same time. It’s raw, unsettling, darkly comedic, and filled with that specific Apple TV energy where the sci-fi premise is actually just a metaphor for extremely human pain. It deepens the mystery of the Joined, complicates every moral line Carol draws, and makes Zosia the emotional MVP of the season. If Pluribus keeps escalating like this, the hive mind might not be the only thing screaming by the finale.
