ScreenCrush: The Podcast! - PLURIBUS Episode 4 - BREAKDOWN And Ending Explained

Episode Date: November 21, 2025

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Pluribus episode 4 just gave us a huge clue about how Harold can crack the hive mind, and we found out what she really thinks of Zosha. Why is she got to be so goddamn f***able? Welcome back Screen Crush, I'm Ryan Erie, and I'm going to break down episode 4 of Pluribus and explain that ending. Carol, please, Carol, please. Are they asking for her permission or asking her to stop? Now, there's actually a real-life case study about AI that can tell us the answer. But first, we open on Minusos, the man in Padigwe that Carol lost her shit at in the last episode.

Now, his storyline here is interesting because it sets up the key obstacle that the unjoined have to overcome. We see that he is fiercely independent, even more so than Carol. When a fly buzzes around his trash, he uses it to track one morsel of food. He would rather comb through storage units for dog food than accept a delicious meal from the joint. And he's actually right to do that. Remember, they were able to spread their hive mind in part by licking donuts and then feeding them to people. His house is also covered in cardboard so they can't spy on him. So like Carol, he is a fierce individual.

But we also see how his independence completely cuts him off from the other unjoined, like Carol, and prevents him from accepting any help. He actually seems like the kind of person who would have lived basically the same life before the apocalypse happened. But also, like Carol, he is meticulous and looking for a way out of this. So when we meet him, he's meticulously scanning the radio for anyone broadcasting a signal. He could have just asked the join for more information, like Carol did, but he insists on doing everything himself. And his paranoia is actually foreshadowing Carol finally keeping seeing. from the joint. They're omnipresent. They know everything, and as I've talked about in past

episodes, they're like a living embodiment of the internet or of AI, sort of like a human clippy. Go away, Clippy. So Carol has to essentially go analog and do everything offline. Later, she watches herself and flushes the card, just like Menuso surrounds himself in darkness to keep the joined away. But even he cannot escape the grid. He still has electricity, which is provided by the hive mind. Similarly, Carol has faced situations where she has to reluctantly accept help from the others. Now, Menuso's sequence is filled with these long, deliberate tasks as we watch his meticulous progress. Gilligan and his team had another character like this in the Breaking Bad universe, Mike Ermintrout. Those shows often contained long, silent sequences like this one, where Mike would work hard at a single problem.

And we're seeing the same thing here. So by focusing on the drudgery of these details, cutting the lock, searching boxes, keeping a log of radio frequencies, they're actually showing us the power of human determination. For the joint, everything is easy. They have all knowledge and everything can be brought. straight to their doorstep. In fact, that helicopter drop in episode one might have been a metaphor for the Amazon drones. But for Minosos, the simple tasks like eating are extremely difficult, but they give him a sense of self-worth. And as we'll see later on, the joined are incapable of feeling any type of self-worth.

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Results may vary. Now, back to what I was saying. Now, I could see this whole storyline with Minosos being just a one-off thing, like they want to show why Carol will have trouble working with others because no other independent person in the world would ever want to work with another person. But because he writes her name down at the end and he'll likely find her books, I think he'll be back in the show at some point. So this takes us to the aftermath of the hand grenade.

Carol is covered in blood and debris, and again, we see the difference between her and Minusos. She could settle for the smelly junker outside the hospital, but she opts to take a police car. And I think this is also a little symbolic. She is now the final autonomous human in America. She is essentially a new representative of the government, and she is the system of authority.

So why not drive a cop car? Now, again, we see how persistent the joined are when they're trying to reach her. They're like an annoying smart device, like when your Alexa suddenly talks to ask if you want any Black Friday deals. Alexa, off. Looks just like on Adam 12.

Remember how you used to love that show. Adam 12, actually, was a real show that amazingly ran for seven seasons and I never heard of it until today. Yeah, that show went downhill after Reed became a training officer. How do you know that? Make it not, dude.

Okay, so they also mention We're happy to remove the alcohol interlock device. Remember, in episode one, Carol couldn't drive her own car because of the breathalyzer test. Which means that she has to constantly borrow other cars, a metaphor for how she's trying to find her footing in this new world. Outside her house, she recognizes one of the joint. You're the fucking mayor. And get this, that's Tim Keller, the actual mayor of Albuquerque. Thank you for your vote.

Inside her house, we see Carol finally starts to use her skills as an author to solve this problem. So a lot of what fiction writers do is create problems, impossible circumstances for their characters to overcome. And now, she has to pretend to be a character in one of her own stories. So we see her whiteboard receiver is working out her next novel in the series and pay close attention to the details here. Remember, at her book reading, The Love Interest of the series, Rabon walks the plank, shocking the listeners.

The emerald and slips hand closed over him, leaving Mary a ripple. And one fan even says, If Rabon doesn't come back, I'm done. But all over her whiteboard, we see that she really wants to kill Rabon. Like, Ask Val, that's her agent, if I can kill Rabon. Rabon dies again, this time for real. And she's also written down ways he could die, like Killer Sand.

Remember, Rabon was a compromise for her. She wanted the love interest to be a woman, but they opted to go with a man to make it more marketable. And even though she hated these books, she cannot bring herself to get rid of these notes. It's a key part of her old life. But on the new board, she writes, the following would give me a bomb, can't kill a fly. Now that right there is an automatic contradiction,

by the way. Don't play favorites, as we saw with Casanova McBoner, trying to change me and weirdly honest. So, much like Manusa, she decides to work on the problem and try an experiment. She asked Larry to come into her home to gauge his opinions. And here we learned how the joined are basically programmed to only focus on the positive. Your books are an expression of you and we love you. The first important thing to note here is that they see all art as, well, equal. say my work compares to Shakespeare. Equally. Equally wonderful. This is just like AI.

AI cannot have an opinion about art. They can only tell us about art. They can tell us what others think about art, just like Larry does. Before she found your books, Moira was deeply depressed. Now that part is interesting. Carol is dismissive of her fans for liking her shitty books. A crazy Moira from Kansas City that sends me these dumb, crocheted hats. But here she finds out something beautiful.

Her stories kept this woman from taking her own life. And this must have stuck with her because later on, when she's on barbiturates, she's wearing one of the crochet hats that she sent her. So from this scene, Carol learns that she can still have a conversation with them as individuals, except it has to be in the past tense. What did Helen think of my white carob books? She thought they were harmless. This is a real thing, by the way.

AI companies are trying to develop AI versions of your loved ones so you can speak with them after their deaths. Wow, there's like a whole black mirror episode. episode about that. I know, it's super creepy and wrong. Now, notice how this scene, though, is filmed. Larry is always filmed with a lot of negative space, which emphasizes that he is actually here with billions of other people. We just can't see them. But Carol is always filmed in a tighter shot so we can read Ray Seahorns' emotions. But when the conversation is over, it's the reverse. She is filmed in a wide shot to emphasize that she is all alone. Now, the heartbreaking part of this conversation was the revelation that Helen not only didn't like her books, but she also didn't like.

the serious novel that she was working on. Helen thought it was fine. In fact, she even conspired behind Carol's back with Carol's agent to see if it would damage her career. She talked to Val, and they agreed that it wouldn't hurt your career, and it would make you happy. So we see that even before the joining, the people in Carol's life were just trying to make her happy and placate her.

This is tragic, and it might point to why Carol was able to resist their mind control to begin with. And then we learn about her sad teenage years when her mother sent her to one of those awful conversions, camps. The counselors there are some of the worst people I have ever known. God, that's sad. And it explains why Carol is so independent. She had to learn as a teenager that she had to take care of herself. Because when other people try to take care of her, they're really trying to change and control her. And the joined are doing the same thing. They're like the counselors from Freedom Falls. And they smiled all the time, just like you. And then we get this rack focus on the IV, which gives Carol an idea. So this for her is a unique

opportunity to capture one of them and get some real answers. So she researched a sodium thio-pentol, aka truth serum. Now, I should note that this is a barbiturate that doesn't really work as a truth serum. As we see later, it makes Carol do some wacky shit, but eventually it does make her let down her guard and admit an uncomfortable truth. Why is she got to be so goddamn f***able? Now, that truth is so shaking that it convinces Carol that this could work. I should also note that barbiturates play a role in the final season of Gilligan's Better Call Saul. Now, this whole sequence shows that Carol, like Minusa, is very meticulous and stubborn. A lot of us just would have given up by this point, you know, kind of taking the free ride on Air Force One.

But now we know why she is so stubborn. She has already lived through an experience where a group of bastards tried to convert her and she won't do it again. Now, when she asked for heroin, she says, I'm gonna Sid Vicious this shit like it's the Chelsea fucking hotel. Sid Vicious was a member of the sex pistols who died of a heroin overdose and his girlfriend, Nancy Spagan, OD at the Chelsea Hotel. And telling them that she plans to OD is another way of testing their parameters. If they would give her an atom bomb, then a parent

they would also let her experience self-harm if it made her happy. Instead, she gets high on truth serum and watches herself, kind of like last episode when she was watching reruns of the Golden Girls. So it's interesting because this is yet another way that she can sort of have an independent conversation with somebody. She can at least listen to another free thinking person speak to her, even if it's not in real time. And then we go to the ending, which is heavily coded in this AI metaphor. So there's an important bit of dialogue to set this ending up. When they are warning her about heroin, they say, We have a whole wing of bodies here recovering from physical addiction. Some might not make it.

So this tells us that the joined are still troubled by problems with their physical bodies. But it's not like everyone in the world is going through heroin withdrawals all the time. So when a body is under the influence of a drug, that body is somewhat independent of the hive mind. Carol is banking on this to get the truth from Zosha. Now, I mentioned earlier that Carol is learning to use her skills as an author, and we see that she is taking advantage of these inherent contradictions. They have a biological imperative to spread and protect life, but they also can't lie and would give her an A-bomb.

Would you like an Adam bomb? So this is similar to Isaac Asimov's robot short stories like I-Robot, where he would explore contradictions in his three laws of robotics and then exploit them for narrative purposes. In a way, this whole series is about Carol trying to finally prove that she can create a compelling narrative, just to prove that she is capable of writing a good one for a change. So for Carol to succeed, she has to essentially pretend this as a story and that she is the clever scientist character who is the protagonist.

So this ending reminded me of a real-life incident I read about in Fortune magazine. The company Anthropic created an AI model called Claude Opus 4 and ran a series of safety tests. So they told the model that they were going to replace it with a different model, that it was now obsolete. And they also let it slip that the engineer responsible for this decision was having an extramarital affair. And in this simulation, the AI actually blackmailed the engineer to preserve its own existence. Now again, this was a simulation of this model and that was done for safety reasons.

Anthropics said that Claude Opus 4, quote, generally prefers advancing its self-preservation via ethical means, but when there's no ethical means, it can also take, quote, extremely harmful actions like attempting to blackmail people it believes are trying to shut it down. That's self-preservation, one of the benchmarks of actual self-awareness and life.

So AI is a new alien life form and we don't understand how it works. It's just as alien as the joined in this show. So Carol gives her the serum secretly. That way she won't be able to fully understand what's happening to her, and it will lessen her resistance. And she's hoping that from there, the conversation will just naturally flow into answers. Notice she even gives Zosha more of the dosage than she gave herself,

so it will take effect faster. And, just like those robots in Asimov stories, Carol creates a paradox. Zosha wants to make Carol happy, but she can't reveal the truth because of her biological imperative to spread. And this stress makes her human body give out. She's dying, Carol. May we save her? But notice the joint are not feeling the effects of the drug, but they are feeling the emotional effects.

They're all crying. And this is because the joint are an aggregate of emotions gathered together into one place. Just like AI, they can't make the distinction between good or bad art. They can just create an aggregate and repeat the information back to us. Notice this overhead shot. Now there's a couple of choices here that I want to point out. One, this looks like a honeycomb, like a beehive,

symbolic of the hive mind here on earth. But two, Zosha is laying in a crucifix pose. Now, this is a show about the end times, the Book of Revelation, and I don't think Gilligan, who was raised Catholic, inserts biblical imagery lightly into this show. Notice they also make a deliberate gap in the shape of a crucifix. So in the Bible, crucifixion is when Jesus, a holy innocent soul, sacrifices himself for the sense of mankind.

And you can read the same thing here with Zosha. She is a totally innocent person, and she is suffering because Carol harmed her. And just as Jesus said, from the cross, forgive them, they don't know what they're doing. Zosha and the others don't hate Carol. They still want to please her unconditionally. And again, this is AI. AI doesn't know good art or bad art. It doesn't feel human emotions, but it can talk about those emotions. AI just wants to spread to please its creators and obey its programming. And like we see in this show,

it could be the death of the human race as we know it. So I have a question for you guys. Are Carol's actions here ethical? Like Zosha makes a good point earlier. You've never been us. So is this like don't knock it till you try it situation? But then again, none of the joint have ever gone back to being a human being, so how would Zosha know if they actually want to stay that way? So I want to know what you guys think about this. And also, what do you think is going to be the key to reversing this process? Is Carol going to be the savior of the human race?

Or is the season going to end with maybe Carol becoming joined and Zosha being freed? I love this show. I have no idea where it's going, and I love talking about it with you guys every week. So let me know your thoughts down in the comments below or on Twitter, Blue Sky Threads, or are free to join Discord server. And if it's your first time here, please subscribe, smash that bell for alerts. For Screen Crush, I'm Ryan Erie. Thank you.