Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Dustin Rowles | TV | November 24, 2025
After this week’s episode of Pluribus, I actually have two theories to explore. The first is this: The Paraguayan we meet at the beginning of the episode is not immune from the hivemind, like Carol and the other 11 people are. The Paraguayan simply hasn’t been infected yet.
The evidence supports this. Unlike those who are immune, the Paraguayan isn’t moving through the world or interacting with others. He isn’t reckless or casual the way Carol is — he is methodical. He refuses food brought to him out of fear of contamination, which is why he eats dog food. He knows the hivemind hasn’t touched it. The others, like Carol, aren’t afraid of “turning.” The Paraguayan is terrified of exposure. He isolates himself to avoid any contact — he refuses their phone calls, pushes everyone away, and insists on being left alone. His behavior is strategic. The only way to stay uninfected in a world where the virus spreads through interaction is to eliminate the possibility of interaction altogether.
This also suggests that Carol and the Paraguayan share a quiet, desperate motive: the hope of undoing the process. The Paraguayan is clearly trying to locate other uninfected like himself over short-wave radio. It isn’t a search for converts or allies in the hivemind — it’s a search for survivors.
The potential gut punch, of course, is that if Carol and the Paraguayan begin to connect as the last two people on Earth who share this mindset, there’s a very real Vince Gilligan-style possibility that before they make a breakthrough, the Paraguayan becomes infected. Carol would lose the one person with whom she has finally forged a meaningful connection — not to death, but to the very thing she has spent her life resisting.
The second theory is this: Once Carol realizes that the hivemind cannot lie to her — but can resist telling her the truth — a conversation with Zosia essentially reveals that there is a way to reverse the process. Carol obtains heroin and injects Zosia with it, hoping that she’ll be so compromised that she will reveal the reversal method. Before she can, however, Zosia goes into cardiac arrest and dies.
Here’s where it gets interesting: What if the virus isn’t biological? It’s informational. By dying, Zosia resets, and when she is resuscitated, she briefly awakens virus-free. But she’s not like Carol — she remains susceptible, and within moments, she is re-infected.
That still gives Vince Gilligan a minute or two to play with — a brief glimpse into who Zosia actually is. Maybe she could impart something to Carol, or at the very least, reveal that she is not happy as a pod person. That would be genuinely chilling: to learn that there is a soul trapped inside, desperate to be free of the virus. Potentially more chilling? That she desires to be a pod person again.
More importantly, the episode definitively reveals the virus as informational, and if the virus is informational rather than biological, Carol may be able to break the cycle not by avoiding exposure like the Paraguayan or resetting like Zosia, but by exploiting the hivemind’s limitations. She could force the hivemind into paradox, provoke contradictions, or destabilize its informational continuity. In other words, she could defeat the hivemind by corrupting its language.
