rewrite this title ‘Pluribus’ Cast, Creator Unpack Zosia & Carol’s First Kiss, Budding Romance: “Is It True Love, Or Is It Artifice?”

Spoiler alert: The following article discusses the plot points for the penultimate episode of Pluribus Season 1, “Charm Offensive.”

After a biblically maddening period of isolation — 40 days, to be exact — Carol (Rhea Seehorn) finds respite in the arms of Zosia (Karolina Wydra), her envoy from the Others, chosen specifically because of her resemblance to the romantasy author’s initial sketches for her novel series’ love interest. Their poignant reconciliation (a dam of emotion ruptures, as Carol’s hyperventilates and clutches to Zosia’s arms like a lifeline) closes out the seventh episode of Pluribus, and this week’s penultimate showing deepens the two’s relationship, as Carol and Zosia share a kiss, bed and sunset-tinged strolls.

And though “Charm Offensive” offers Carol an interlude of sorts to her monumental grief — at the state of the world, at the loss of her wife Helen (Miriam Shor) — it doesn’t preclude her ongoing investigation into the hive mind.

As star and recently minted Golden Globe nominee Rhea Seehorn tells Deadline, “I assumed this [Zosia and Carol’s relationship] must be a complication because they’ve sent her to her to be enticing and attractive. But then we started going down this road of Carol being utterly broken by the isolation she’s put through, as well as the existential threat that this could be your life for the rest of your life; never speaking to anyone again until you just die on your couch alone, and it’s horrific and jarring to say the least. So she’s in this very fragile and vulnerable place.”

While Seehorn classifies Carol’s feelings toward Zosia as genuine, “There’s another part of her though, the whole time, going, ‘Don’t be stupid. Don’t be stupid. This can’t be real.’”

Throughout the episode’s several tenderhearted vignettes, Zosia and Carol go on dates, ranging from the flirtatiously competitive (a croquet match) to the awe-inspiring (on a hike, the latter confesses her favorite sound in the world is the forlorn whistle of a train horn, something she’s never shared with anyone before; Zosia unconsciously wills the passing caboose to emit the noise). But their lazy days spent getting couples’ massages is interrupted when, in a gesture of support for Carol embarking on a new Winds of Wycaro book (with a WLW romance at its center this time), Zosia brings her to the newly resurrected diner where she first began penning her initial drafts, recreated down to the server who would allow her to commandeer a four-seat booth all day. Carol, who usually finds a way to find fault with everything, reminisces fondly about a time before her big break, when she was still broke, before the bubble bursts.

“She remembers what was great about it, and comes away, realizes, this is manipulative,” Seehorn explains. “This is all part of a ploy, but at the same time, it is an act of kindness. It was a loving thing to do. Are those two things mutually exclusive? And these larger, rippling questions of — I think she’s starting to feel like she’s going a little crazy — ‘How are you defining what real love is?’ And if there is nobody that loves her or wants to be around her anymore in the way that she used to define love, then can this be real love? Is it Carol’s hang-up that real love has to be unique to me; it can’t be that you love someone else the same, because now you’re taking away from that? The same as saying, ‘My book is great, but so is this, and so is that?’ [And that] somehow takes away the compliment? Is that a failing of Carol’s or a manipulation of theirs? She’s playing a lot of chess in her head, or maybe weighing things out, but she’s definitely tipping the scales on purpose to support a delusion that is a salve for how broken she is.”

As show creator Vince Gilligan told Wydra, the collective doesn’t “have secrets, they’re not secretive, they’re not manipulative, they’re genuinely good, loving, kind, unflappable beings.” So if that’s the case, is the dynamic between Zosia and Carol real or illusory? Does it matter that Zosia, albeit with difficulty at first, uses the word “I” to assert her individuality, or is this another attempt at placating Carol?

“I want people to have their own experience of what comes up for them, and have their own opinions of what it is,” the actress says. “Is it that Zosia is finally pulling away from that collective mind and from the hive and becoming an individual? Is she evolving within the the collective mind? Is she evolving to become her own person and showing her own personality? Is she falling for real for Carol? Are the feelings that she [is] experiencing real, or is the collective mind full of memories and information about who Helen was and what Carol likes, and to make her happy, they perform for her?”

Gilligan, as he’s made known before, wants viewers to untangle these colossal questions for themselves: “I know this is never the most satisfying answer, but I really — with this show more than any show I’ve ever worked on — want the audience … to come to their own conclusions. I want the audience to decide: Is this true love, or is it artifice? What does it represent?”

Alison Tatlock, who co-wrote the finale and serves as executive producer, adds: “I feel like it’s sort of a perfect storm for Carol to be vulnerable enough, after being deprived of human interaction for such a long time and having gone through the trauma of the first couple of episodes of losing her wife in such a horrible way and then being abandoned. She is desperate for some kind of human connection, and we all have the ability to trick ourselves or to tell ourselves a story that suits the moment, and her story for the moment that she needs is this is a person, this is an individual and I can make a connection.”

Put another way, finale director/writer/EP Gordon Smith, says, “Sometimes when a question like that gets asked, it’s like, ‘OK, would I rebound with an alien, sort of hive-mind creature after 40 days alone in the desert and shortly after the death of my wife?’ I don’t know.” He adds that Carol certainly “could be susceptible to that situation,” though Gilligan humorously notes, “The tricky thing is: We always say Vladimir Putin’s in there somewhere.”

Pluribus will air its Season 1 finale early next week, Dec. 24. It has already been renewed for a second season.