Season 1 Episode 7: The Gap
Air Date: December 12, 2025
Synopsis: Manousos begins a dangerous trek to meet Carol. Returning home from Las Vegas, Carol gets creative with her rebellion.
Directed by: Adam Bernstein
Written by: Jenn Carroll
You must log in or # to comment.
Nothing on this planet is truly yours. You cannot give me anything because all that you have was stolen.
Manousos, ‘nothing, on this planet, is yours.’
Fuckin’ epic. Loved that whole ‘stolen’ speech. Just before the hive offered to take his car with him I knew he was going to torch it. They didn’t understand, it was his sacrifice. (One of many.)The episode however, as a whole, really laid out the most egregious issue I still have with this show. It’s slow. It drags. It’s honestly just poorly paced. There’s so much to explore, so many questions, yet only so much screen-time.
Some of it is art and artistry, but a lot of it just feels stretched rather than expressive and contemplative.
Here’s an example:+ Carol listening over and over to the same line on the phone, is an artistic choice that relays the feeling that leads to her suicidal lack of caring at the end. It had meaning. A repetition she’s forced to endure. Albeit she could just ask for them to shorten it, she doesn’t. She’s choosing to listen to it. Even going about useless activities like the scratch’n’win during. That wasn’t stretching screen-time. It was… depressing. And she was, depressed.
- Whereas, Manousos’s montage of Paraguay could’ve been condensed. Beautiful location shots, don’t get me wrong. But when I want to watch a nature documentary I vastly prefer Attenborough. It wasn’t in service to the plot. We get it, red line, map, took a while.
The suicidal lack of moving at the end was good character development. And it’s been headed this way for a bit, notably when she laughed off staying with Diabeté.
PS: As a Canadian seeing fireworks sold in convenience stores is weird. That shit’s dangerous, yo.
I agree a lot, but disagree that Manousos’s adventure was not in service of the plot. We’re meant to see how determined he is.
Remember Carol was also fiercely independent… Until she drove to a grocery store and it was empty.
As we saw this episode, Carol broke. Manousos? He isn’t going to break. Or if he does, its going to be Carol that breaks him. Or more likely, it’s going to be Manousos that forces Carol “back” to being against the hive.
I think next episode Carol is going to fall in love with Zosia and the idea of the hive. She isn’t going to join, but she’s going to try and live a more normal life. As Carol grows to like the more, Manousos is going to dislike them more.
When they meet… who knows? But we know Manousos is strongly willed. We lived it. We felt it.
I think we could’ve gotten the same gist in 7-10 minutes for Manousos instead 15-20ish, without losing anything. And filling the saved minutes with something else, like what some of the others are doing, or, anything, really. I’d love some shots of what the hive is doing in general as a personal example. We some of that with Manousos’ travels TBF but I’m curious about elsewhere.
I’m also curious how the Zosia reunion will play out as well. How manipulative the hive can be, particularly since they seem to have a method to en-hiven that requires consent. Did they use isolation (and a long phone message) to help steer Carol towards consenting on purpose?
And following that, is Manousos our actual “hero” of the story? (As opposed to protagonist, that being Carol.)
I think Carol is our hero, but she’s going to go down some wrong paths.
I do agree that I want more story, because I have so many questions, but I don’t think it’s being held back for no reason. I think it’s being held back because they aren’t doing anything.
We know they’re looking for a way to infect Carol and the others. And they’re working on surviving. And their working on providing services to the uninfected. But that’s it. We’ve seen it all.
I think Carol wants them to be “evil”. (Less so after this episode, but otherwise this season.) I think Manousos wants them to be “evil”. But they are not. They just are. But they also aren’t human. I think that’s one (at least) big question of the show. What is being human?
I welcome a show that isn’t 45 minutes of green screen and asplosions. Crap has given viewers ADD and no one reads books any more. Good on Gilligan for ignoring these “slow pace” comments.
As someone who spends about thrice their time reading as watching, lol. Mmmkay. I think viewers are a bit more nuanced than that take.
Were these real nature shots this episode? It’s gotten to where I can’t tell anymore if a show actually shoots on location.
Twenty-minutes worth of episode stretched to 45 minutes.
Also, Carol put a shot gun in her golf bag and didn’t use it. Chekhov’s gun denied. For now.
I think Diabaté has the right idea. Not Vegas, necessarily, but generally just experiencing and enjoying what there is to do, now that there are no limits. Also, consider that while they “can’t pick the apple”, they seem to have no problem eating what is already picked–the warehouses full of produce. So, while the vast majority may starve, they don’t all need to die. The unconverted could band together, and do the harvesting part, which seems to be the only roadblock–keeping a small community alive as long as the unconverted live. Small tribes would probably persist, regardless.
I haven’t watched it yet, but at the end of the last episode, when he jumped in the car planning to drive to North America, I wondered how they’re going to deal with the Darien Gap. I’m guessing from the title, it’s going to be a pretty important part of the journey!
I’d imagine that without the human element it probably gets a lot easier, though he could just use a boat and circumvent it entirely.
Ok, creators of this show really like to torture us: THE SAME PLURBIN VOICEMAIL THREE TIMES IN A ROW!
I don’t find obvious product placement to be an issue there, it adds realism. It’s the same case as in Like a Dragon video game series.
Manousos has amazing mental fortitude, but he’s still just a human and not truly independent. Maybe his rescue will make him change his mind a bit. He may sway Carol to return to her rebellious streak, as she has currently given up.
The voicemail is all Carol has. The rest of the world won’t listen to Carol, but the voicemail and in turn the hive will.
It also shows that Carol has infinite time. She doesn’t need or want to speed up the voicemail.
The way I see it, her not asking them to change the voicemail is Carol being defiant in her own way
That song playing during Manousos’s journey is “Esperanza” by Hermanos Gutiérrez
I haven’t seen anyone point out the political symbolism here too. I don’t think it’s a stretch considering Carol’s statements earlier.
This episode shows an American, formerly considering herself the leader of the free world, in a hedonistic death spiral. Meanwhile, a South American pursues his dream to save the world, encouraged by the history of said American, by taking the absolute hardest path. The South American takes it upon himself to learn another language while undertaking his perilous journey, ready to assimilate to the culture.
I’ve seen elsewhere people say that the hive manipulated Carol, but did they?
The hive was nothing but helpful, Carol attacked one of them, nearly killed one of them, and they backed off, but still helped her. Carol did something wrong, Carol showed remorse, the hive came back.
Both Carol and Manousos want the hive to be “evil”, but they’re not. Diabaté doesn’t view them as evil and he’s enjoying life… but as we saw last episode with the fake storyline and the sandwich something isn’t quite right either. They’re not evil… But they’re not human either. The world isn’t at peace, the world no longer exists.
Both Carol and Manousos want the hive to be “evil”, but they’re not. Diabaté doesn’t view them as evil and he’s enjoying life… but as we saw last episode with the fake storyline and the sandwich something isn’t quite right either. They’re not evil… But they’re not human either. The world isn’t at peace, the world no longer exists.
They’re not evil (the concepts don’t really mean much to them), but that doesn’t necessarily negate the validity in opposing what they’ve done.
I agree, hive can manipulate people by omiting truth, but it wasn’t a case this time.
Sure would be nice to have an episode with some action or story.
These super long no talking cuts are really annoying. I found myself fast forwarding through most of this episode.
I understand where this viewpoint is coming from, but this episode had both action and story. We saw just how defiant Manousos is, willing to torch his car in defiance. We saw how determined he was during his hike, repeating his mantra that he’ll deliver to Carol. We saw him fail, fall into the tree, try and recover, and fail some more. For Carol we saw her grow truly alone to the point of suicide.
The slow scenes are slow so that you really feel them.
I was on the edge of my seat the whole time. I loved this episode.
I found it quite the opposite of annoying. This episode had some beautiful cinematography showing the south america trek to the point I was questioning if this entire thing was funded by tourism boards. Maybe not the most exciting to watch but I’ve mostly come to expect as much.
I was “disappointed” with the lack of development in what we know about the others, but the episode was very good. I am not sure how to say that without sounding judgmental but if you feel the need to fast forward scenes without talking you’re probably unaware that in a visual medium images tell part of the story. Possibly not an accessible series (I hope there are audio tracks for visually impaired folks) but flushing half of it down the toilet says more about what dopamine-factory-media did to our brains in the past few years than it says about pluribus itself.
Or it was just boring.
The entity is absolutely, deliberately manipulating Carol through social isolation. The collective knows what social isolation does to people; there’s a million or so therapists it can draw that info from. There are also many ways to perhaps combat it that they could be offering to Carol, but they aren’t doing that. The entity has its own agenda, likely a set of Asimov-esque rules of robotics, serving a primary goal of propagation (with most of the human race out building satellites and radio antennas powered by solar to blast the signal further).
Traveling logistics. For the entity to be able to deliver items to Carol while she is on the road so quickly, I imagine there’s a fleet of cargo trucks following her around, just a few miles behind her (beyond her view), with delivery drones ready to fetch and deliver whatever she asks for.
You think this show is slow? There is a big difference between a series that is paced with deliberation to cultivate a tone and establish character motivation… and a series that is just insufferably drawn out. I remember Serial Experiments Lain. Pluribus is fine.
Pluribus isn’t manipulating Carol…not in the way a human would manipulate another human. They didn’t intentionally isolate Carol…you know this. Carol repeatedly hurt them.
We now know that Pluribus doesn’t wish to “propagate”. Pluribus will starve to death and isn’t reproducing. You’re just making up that Pluribus is building satellite dishes? I admit that would be an interesting future plot point…but there’s no evidence for it.
Don’t be confused by the editing…the show isn’t presented in real time. It takes as long as it’s reasonable for Pluribus to deliver items to Carol.
This episode feels like dragged down, I get it’s done for character development but still feel like it could be done shorter.
One thing I really hated is that sometimes when someone speaks Spanish it does in a broken way, bad accent, even getting words wrong, one would think the hive would speak with the accent that makes the most sense to the person they are taking to.
Love a series that doesn’t shy on irritating the viewer: Carol was bored and they carried the feeling by using a sloth pace, speedrunning it wouldn’t have conveyed the proper character development that they are masterfully doing in this show.
Manusos storyline is great and every shot during his trip is wonderful and sad at the same time. They show his determination even though he almost never speaks a word, but when he does, he kicks!
You believe the intention is to irritate? I doubt that. I think it’s the opposite: the show wants to appeal to our patience, and reward us. If you want instant gratification there’s a gajillion action thrillers to watch…this is a rare show that takes its time, and some of us appreciated it from the get go.
I mean…I think you agree.
I think some scenes are supposed to be, yes (I didn’t mean the whole episode): the petrol station scene or the window golf mainly. In most other cases, fully agree with you.
