Given the space sex occupies in our own lives and how desire, both positive and stunted, drives so many societal forces, sex belongs front and center in narrative fiction. The sex that happens at the end of this excellent episode of Pluribus, though, deserves more thought than most, on as basic a level as noise.
The sounds made by Carol Sturka when she and “Zosia,” the woman selected to be Carol “chaperone” out of everyone on the planet because she most closely resembles the woman of her wildest fantasies, finally kiss. She makes noises that sound like they’re coming straight from her solar plexus — half groans, half sighs, forceful but vulnerable, indicating pleasure, yes, but also desperation, and plain relief. Here’s a woman who went for over a month without human contact of any kind, and who hasn’t been lovingly touched since her wife died in her arms during the apocalypse. Finally being passionately embraced must feel like dying and being reborn.
Her moaning was sweet, it was hot, it was tender and moving and erotic, and it got me to thinking. Carol reacts the way that she does because she’d kept every victim/beneficiary of “the Joining” at arm’s length, and they she, this whole time. But of course it’s insane to completely remove yourself from humanity, even the strange form of it represented by members of the hivemind like Zosia. You need that contact, however peculiar it has now become. Or Carol needs it, anyway: When she was totally cut off, she really did begin losing her mind.
Yet at the same time, I couldn’t stop thinking that it was also insane to talk with Zosia, to befriend Zosia, to make love to Zosia, like Zosia is a real person, when in fact she’s…well, all real people, all at once. She is the original Zosia. She is Carol’s dead wife. She is Carold’s dead wife’s relatives. She is Carol’s own relatives! She is every woman Carol ever fucked, and every woman they ever fucked, and so on, and so on, and so on.
Is the intimacy required for even the most exhibitionistic and non-monogamistic sex possible when your partner is every living human being, minus one dozen? What about the intimacy required to confide, to conspire, to share hopes and dreams and frustrations and inside jokes? To stargaze amid incredible romantic red lights, to play croquet on the 50 yard line, to get massages, to visit an old haunt like the Mulholland Drive–esque diner the plurbs rebuild for Carol’s enjoyment? To do all the things friends and lovers do?
Keep in mind also that Zosia is also all of the world’s greatest lovers. She is every woman who’s ever given head and every woman who’s ever been given head. She’s every man in that same equation, if for some reason that knowledge should come in handy. By the time she and Carol have sex, the episode has already established that Zosia is literally unbeatable in games of skill or knowledge, having instantaneous access to the thoughts — but not the physical or emotional feelings — of every human being on earth. Tough to imagine this idea was introduced in the same episode where she and Carol fuck out of pure coincidence, right?
So is it mind-blowing? Is it the best sex she’s ever had? Is it tailor-made to match the performance and preferences of a familiar lover, like her wife? Is it deliberately dialed down by a collective consciousness that knows every sexual trick in the book, including how not to overwhelm your more inexperienced inamorata? Is there a reason it’s happening now?
What about the lengths to which Zosia, as the mouthpiece of the plurbs, goes to ensure Carol gets going on a new novel in her Wycaro series. (This time the love interest is female, and wouldn’t ya know who she looks like!) Is there a motivation other than pure delight in a new thing? Because that might be enough: Keep in mind the collective, which does not create art, has experienced everything there is to experience on Earth more or less, so there’s nothing new under the sun unless and until Carol or one of the other survivors creates it.
But involving Carol in a romantic relationship and immersing her in the writing of a new novel, all while Manousos inexorably makes his long and lonely way to Carol’s doorstep…well, that’s some timing, isn’t it? This is a man who took one of the plurbs at scalpel-point to escape from the hospital where they saved him from his jungle-incurred infection, and who’s pouring hydrogen peroxide on the gaping wounds left behind rather than seek help. How is he going to feel when he arrives to discover Carol, ahem, playing croquet with one of them? How is he going to feel when he learns she’s doing this even knowing, as she does, that the hivemind intends to build the largest transmitter in history in order to broadcast its genetic code across the galaxy?
I can’t imagine he’ll take it well. And you’ve got to figure that the hivemind representing every brain on the planet save twelve figured it out, too.
Sean T. Collins (@seantcollins.com on Bluesky and theseantcollins on Patreon) has written about television for The New York Times, Vulture, Rolling Stone, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pain Don’t Hurt: Meditations on Road House. He lives with his family on Long Island.