This Moment From the ‘Pluribus’ Finale Defined the Others

Pluribus, the series about an alien virus (kinda) that joins most of the Earth in a hive-mind (sort of) that extols the virtues of pacifism and happiness in community, is one of the funnier mind-screws of recent years. Never have existential questions about humanity gone down so smoothly. Pluribus tackled big questions without becoming dour in the process. The finale didn’t exactly buck that trend, but one sobering sequence stuck out to me as a definitive thesis of the show: happiness, community, and love don’t mean the same when individual identity is obliterated.

The season one finale (“La Chia o El Mundo”) returns to Kusimayu (Darinka Arones), the indigenous Peruvian woman who viewers have seen before. Living outside the modern world gives her a different perspective on the Others’ offer. She’s been raised to value community, so when the Others claim that “the joining” will give her just that, Kusimayu accepts. Viewers have seen that the loneliness of being one of the few humans immune to the initial takeover is no joke. One imagines that for someone who finds joy in community, loneliness is even more dire. The moments leading up to the joining are like a festival. The Others, acting as Kusimayu’s kin and neighbors, dance and sing in her native language. This seems like the way for Kusimayu to rejoin her people, to remain in a community. Then she inhales some strange vapor, and her eyes roll back. The music stops, and everyone goes silent. That familiar customer-service smile spreads across Kusimayu’s face. The Others drop their cultural performance and begin tearing everything down.

With her joining, Kusimayu’s people, their culture, their songs, their values, they’re all wiped away. It is as if neither she nor her people ever existed. It’s a devastating loss, only more so when it’s considered that Kusimayu thought she would be entering a new community instead of destroying her own. This appears to confirm what I already suspected about the Others, but this many-layered tragedy is still stubbornly stuck in my mind. It could be that I held some hope that the Others weren’t the terrifying force they seemed to be. Pluribus did such an excellent job of keeping the Others ambiguous, neither entirely villains nor entirely heroes, that it reminded me of the Richard Matheson book, I Am Legend. The paranoid vampire survival thriller turns the hero/monster dichotomy on its head and forces the reader to look at the vampires through a new lens. This could still happen on Pluribus, but for now the Others’ goals have been made clear as day: to join all life under one consciousness and destroy anything that may allow individual identity.

Whether the Others represent AI, conformity, globalism, corporatism, collectivism, or any other looming, world-changing thing depends on the viewers’ worldview. For me, the Others represent a homogeneity that obliterates cultures, lives, and memories; the beautiful differences that give color, joy, and meaning to human lives. They represent an absolute monoculture that leaves no space for any thought or value but theirs. They’re a community that professes love for its members, provided those members give up all of who they are.

They also represent a false dichotomy between community and individuality, as if the two can’t coexist in balance. For all their all-knowing serenity, the Others cannot grasp the nuance of being both an individual and a part of a greater whole. In this way, the Others seem quite childish. They’re so afraid of any friction, any discomfort, any struggle, no matter how productive, that they’d rather wipe out all dissent. Instead of creating an inclusive community or preserving a record of what the world was like before them, the Others simply erase it all. This absolute monoculture is the kind of round, unchallenging idea that makes more sense in a college freshman’s head than in reality.

Kusimayu sought a community, one that wouldn’t destroy all she is for joining them. It’s what all humans deserve. Pluribus has definitively shown what the Others are and what they will destroy without a second thought. If Carol and Manousos get their way, they won’t just be saving the world; they’d be saving the memories of everything it ever was.