It has come to my attention, following some very concerning conversations with friends, that not everyone was as enthralled by Apple's Pluribus as I was. This is, for lack of a better word, unacceptable. It's shocking and appalling. Did we even watch the same tv series? I was glued to my seat every episode, at once frustrated with the slow plot development and utterly convinced of its purpose. There's an irony here which tempers my usual hotheadedness about tv a little bit. After all, if Pluribus is about anything, it's friction. The slight discomfort inherent to most human interactions, where we give up a tiny bit of convenience for intimacy to work. In On the Inconvenience of Other People, Lauren Berlant talks about the paradoxical desire to be inconvenienced by others.

It is not so much that we enjoy inconvenience, but that being disrupted and encroached upon is the price of connection, which we crave. Perversely, then, we seek out others even though they will inevitably force us into some level of discomfort. Carol, the series protagonist, encapsulates this tension perfectly. She is angry, short-tempered and difficult. Carol dislikes people who enjoy things, sneers at vacationers, and cannot fathom the other survivors not being on board with her big plan of de-Joining as soon as she sets up the meeting. At the same time, Carol is tethered to other people. She loves Helen, and her job is writing books for others to read. This presents an uncomfortable paradox, one which Carol usually tempers—at least historically speaking—with alcohol.

When faced with the possibility of being absorbed into the Joined hivemind, Carol fights for autonomy with every bone in her body, battering a tireless Zosia to the point of drugging. Consequently, the moment she feels her individuality is secure, it makes sense that Carol abandons all contact with the Joined. At first, she attempts to connect with the other survivors again, but these encounters are so grating and awkward that Carol quickly retreats to solitude. She's gotten a taste Zosia's perfect friendliness, and the idea of saving humanity is a lot less frustrating in theory than it is in practice. None of the other survivors are very interested in what Carol has to say. The Joined, meanwhile, are happy to give Carol the space she asks for, and for a while Carol lives out the dream of autonomy, every creature comfort included. She is ecstatic. No one can inconvenience her. She is free to do and be who she is. And yet, within 40 days, she's so sick of being alone that she begs for the Hive's return.

Carol is as uncomfortable in the paradoxical state of contact/inconvenience as she is in isolation/convenience. She despises people, drives them away with her unwillingness to compromise, but Carol is also terribly lonely. Is the price of contact ever worth the discomfort of awkwardness? The clumsiness of communication and negotiation? In the final act of the season, Carol decides no, and finds in the Joined what many of our own universe's lonely people find in chatbots: the fantasy of contact/convenience. Frictionless connection. Smiling at a mirror. It is an asymmetrical relationship, certainly. The Joined are focused purely on Carol's desires and needs, bending to her every whim, rarely pushing back, and seeking nothing but her happiness. While she ideologically rejects the anaesthetic harmony that binds them into one being, Carol enjoys playing house with Zosia, going so far as to make the hive perform individuality with "I" pronouns. It's as if Helen never died, or as if she were somehow improved upon.

The final episode, of course, gives the lie to that delusion. Carol realises the Joined never stopped plotting her absorption into the collective, and that her days as an individual are numbered. She gapes at Zosia, shocked at the fact that—in its own alien way—the Joined have a canniness about them. They cannot lie or harm, but they've found ways around these limitations. The season concludes with Carol returning to Manousos, a survivor with whom she's had nothing but friction and disagreement. She gives him a nonchalant shrug, again not quite able to articulate the breadth of Zosia's betrayal. Neither words nor gestures suffice to convey meaning the way that the electromagnetic frequencies between the hive drones do. As individuals, Manousos and Carol can never quite reach that fantasy of contact/convenience. Selfhood inherently requires some measure of uncertainty, ambiguity, and friction. Often, it resorts to anger and disappointment. Still, should she wish to stay alone, Carol's only way forward lies in the inconvenience of other people.