Review: Pluribus, "HDP" | Season 1, Episode 6

Some places we never see abandoned. They’re always crowded with life, day and night. Apocalyptic scenes often underline their setting by showing those places in unfamiliar, eerie silence. Think Times Square in Vanilla Sky or the San Francisco shoreline in On the Beach. When Carol drives into Las Vegas, she finds empty streets bathed in neon. But there’s a twist. It’s not that all the people have disappeared. It’s that wherever Carol goes now, she drives the Others out, like the south pole of a magnet pushing through metal filings. No matter where she goes, she carries that bubble of solitude with her—at least until the Others decide they can coexist with her in the same space. And that, we’re told, won’t happen until Carol has a “change of heart.”

We had quite a bit of discussion in the comments last week that boiled down to “I hope the reveal of what shocked Carol isn’t just Soylent Green.” So the rug pull this week—yes it is, but why are you being so dramatic about it, Carol?—is pure delight. The detective work Carol takes such pride in, the urgency with which she records the revelations, her decision to drive to Diabaté’s Las Vegas residency herself rather than trusting the hive mind’s drone delivery service, all deflates when he interrupts her buildup: “Is it about them eating people? Yes, it is troubling …”