(Warning: Spoilers ahead.)
Spending 40 days utterly alone does a lot of damage to a person’s spirit. For Carol Sturka (Rhea Seehorn), the life-changing experience makes her reevaluate how to navigate the newly changed world in Pluribus.
Rather than keep Zosia (Karolina Wydra) at a distance, Carol now welcomes the Others representative into her life—and bed. Oh yes, big twists are happening, and we got to chat with star Rhea Seehorn to unpack them all.
It is a week of significant milestones in the penultimate episode of Vince Gilligan’s brilliant, thought-provoking Apple TV sci-fi series. Seehorn reunites with the Better Call Saul creator as one of a handful of people not infected by a virus engineered from an extraterrestrial signal.
The global population is now a hive mind, psychically connected; the world is at peace, but there’s no individual thought. After an extended period of solitude, Carol is learning to compromise with the friendly, if slightly creepy, status quo. But she is still trying to find a way to reverse this dystopian event.
Carol goes from using her creative profession as a cover to continue her ongoing investigation into the hive mind, so she can save the world, to sitting down and banging out the first chapter of a new Wycaro novel, independent of trying to put humanity back to where it was.
The artistic spark gets a boost from another crucial relationship development: Carol sleeps with Zosia, the woman selected as Carol’s official companion because of her striking resemblance to Raban, the Wycaro hero. Getting laid ignites inspiration, including turning the heterosexual couple at the heart of Wycaro into the lesbian romance she always envisioned.
“You see her spring up that next morning, and she’s out of bed before Zosia is,” Seehorn tells The Daily Beast’s Obsessed. “Yes, it’s like she’s almost playing house and having this fantasy relationship that some part of her brain must know is not completely authentic, but there’s a reason to put pants on again. There’s a reason to go to my desk again.”
Reminders of her interrupted Wycaro plans are visible whenever Carol adds something new to the hidden whiteboard in her office, charting growing discoveries and theories about the Others. Hanging out with Zosia yields multiple new findings (now totaling 12), such as communal sleeping, trains used to transport food, and the possibility of psychically communicating via the body’s electrical charge. Carol is a one-woman subreddit at this point.
When Carol requests more whiteboard pens, an excited Zosia takes this to mean Carol is working on new Wycaro material. While this isn’t initially the case, Zosia’s reaction—regardless of how manipulative—is a reminder that a core part of Carol’s identity is no more. It isn’t only the life she had with Helen (Miriam Shor) that was cut short.
“I didn’t want to ever forget the grief of not just the people she’s lost—her primary person as well—but her raison d’être as far as her career and something that she loved,” says Seehorn. “Even though she does mock it in the beginning, it’s more about self-loathing and trying to beat everyone to the punch to say that she writes popcorn and not real stuff.”
Carol’s change in attitude is a direct result of her recent experience. “Vince would remind me sometimes that she’s broken; the time spent in solitude was much greater than it was in filming,” Seehorn laughs. Zosia’s giddy response to the promise of more Wycaro lights a fire in Carol, underscoring their electric chemistry and Carol’s shifting perspective.
“That acknowledgement of, ‘Oh, right, I’m the only person who could write something new that the world has not seen,” says Seehorn. “One of the only—as far as she knows—others that are creating art of any kind. There is still that ego, that passion, but also that ego of Carol that’s like, ‘Oh, fans!’ But also having a purpose.”
It is this idea that she has fans waiting for the next Wycaro instalment that awakens her drive. “It’s her grasping for any life raft, and one of those is, ‘What if there was a reason to write again? What if I could have a career again?” says Seehorn.
Being alone hasn’t made Carol lose all perspective, but there is an exploration of how the Others successfully tap into what makes Carol tick: “She’s having some fun living in her delusions of, ‘Hey, maybe this new freedom is great. Maybe this new world is great. I get to write whatever I want to, and I’m not judged, and everyone loves me.’ Of course, the other part of her brain is like, ‘Yeah, but that’s because they love everything the same, so that’s weird.”
(I would love to say that flattery and praise as the way to a writer’s heart would never work on me, but who am I kidding?)
There is a profound, personal element too: Carol can write Raban as a woman, as she always wanted to. There is no fear of backlash to a queer romance at the novel’s core. When Zosia reads these new pages, their conversation about ways to make the plot canon using established Wycaro lore reveals a side of Carol we haven’t been privy to. She is vibrating.
“I thought it was very funny in the scene that Jonny Gomez wrote, and Melissa Bernstein directed so well, where she’s nerding out, getting to speak to somebody who knows all of these crazy details about her work,” says Seehorn. “It’s kind of pathetic, but very human. I think Carol is very excited in that moment to just have somebody really know her stuff.”
Art provides connections, but human experience is also predicated on moments with other people. It is why Carol is starting to embrace what is on offer, despite her previous actions and concerns.
“There are two things at play going on there: Carol’s intellectual understanding and her emotional need in that moment. It isn’t just being broken from how lonely she’s been. It is the existential crisis of thinking it may never end,” says Seehorn. “I may just die completely alone, unless I’d like to at least accept love in some form from someone else, and this is the closest person to her. It’s easy to play a game, in her head, of starting to take some of it as sincere.”
Conflict arises after the Others rebuild Carol’s favorite diner, where she sat for hours at the start of her writing career; the hive mind’s grand gesture is a time machine. Carol is touched before bolting from the orchestrated snapshot of her past.
“It is manipulative and terrible what they’ve done, but was done out of love, and is actually a sort of extraordinarily beautiful thing,” says Seehorn. “But Carol also knows it’s all to the end of ‘because you want me to become one of you and to agree to this thing.’ It’s a lot to wrestle with.”
An argument over the ethics of the diner setup leads Zosia to lean in to kiss Carol, who immediately steps back in shock, only to succumb to desire. Seehorn had conversations with Bernstein and Wydra about how to play the psychology and Carol’s anger, which could provoke a physical reaction. “She does care. She doesn’t want to kill millions of people. Now I think she sincerely cares about Zosia as well,” says Seehorn.
Some takes were “too hot,” and they’d have to bring it down, navigating the unique parameters of this world. “We also had conversations about who leans in first on the kiss. In the end, it made more sense that the Others could sense, feel, and see the need in Carol before she could even fully own it,” says Seehorn. Still, there is room for the audience to interpret whether “is that a manipulative act as well or not?”
Seehorn singles out Wydra’s performance in depicting the ambiguity: “The job she’s doing is so deceptively difficult, and she’s doing such a phenomenal job at it.”
Significantly, Zosia is now using “I” instead of “we,” further distancing Zosia from the hive mind. When Carol asks her to share something from Zosia’s pre-Joining, the delivery of a mango ice cream memory adds to the notion that Zosia is not like the rest of the hive mind (even though she is). “It’s interesting to me, like, are they somehow able to access real and sincere thoughts in that moment of the mango ice cream, or is that a lie? Or is it both?” asks Seehorn. “I don’t know.”
How long before the honeymoon comes to an end? The impending arrival of the uninfected Manousos (Carlos-Manuel Vesga), who has done everything in his power to avoid interactions with the Others, could be a huge wake-up call.
“She’s going through this period, which I know hopefully makes many people in the audience want to white-knuckle through it,” says Seehorn. “Like, please don’t go to the dark side, or the light side—depending on how you look at Carol.”
No matter how you cut it, finding community either in Manousos or Zosia is better than going it alone again.
