this post was submitted on 01 Dec 2025
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I mean, the protagonist seems pretty obviously in the wrong, she's not a good person and most all of the other non-integrated people have no problem with it. The hivemind is genuinely not dystopian, at least yet.
The Stalin line is a little anti-communist though, but just the normal amount, not a part of the core theme.
No. She is. What are we doing here? While Carol is a complex character with multiple flaws, the argument we see presented by the other survivors are either facile ("I sure do like having a harem!"), or based on information we know to be untrue ("Each instance of the hivemind remains an independent individual"). She gets dinged for not even having asked the hivemind what it's like, but she's pretty obviously not a villain protagonist.
It killed near a billion people to assert itself, it refuses to give people choice in their assimilation and it cannot handle the idea of something not going to the plan to the point of shutting down.
Pluribussy. (somebody had to say it)
Such a Carol response.
She's so unlikeable but at the same time relatable, I'm really rooting for her but I also find myself saying "Oh Carol, not this again" every couple of scenes.
Did the show actually conclusively prove this is wrong? I took the interaction with the kid to be a failure to prove anything, like sure the kid wouldn't normally know that stuff but reading a book and gaining knowledge from it doesn't de-individuate me. From the information presented, unless I'm missing something, it is feasible that people could still be individuals who are glad to participate in the hive mind.
It's not like those people were killed intentionally, they had to speed it up because the military discovered them. And presumably if they didn't speed it up, and the military did their thing, many more people would die. It's true human corpses were hinted at, but surely there's plenty of other things that could be shocking to Carol? The hivemind isn't really exactly comparable to communism, but revolutions often require large amounts of bloodshed, because the right-wing military is going to slaughter you otherwise.
The hivemind explained their whole attitude to death, and honestly it's pretty logical. They won't kill or harm any humans or animals, but if it's already dead there isn't any real need to respect it. That's why they'll cook already dead animals for the living people, but won't slaughter them. It's not like the dead person would care what happens with their body, they're dead. It seems like a pretty ethical and morally consistent position to me.
I'd rather not be sharing my mind with Netanyahu or anyone else. Hiveminds in human context are dystopian.
They're also
spoiler
Making people eat Corpse Starchspoiler
Oooh is that what it isspoiler for the last scene of the latest episode
I think she found frozen corpses in the freezer last episode and they're just liquefying them. Would explain the neutral PH too, as human bodies average on neutral with a slight tendency towards sour.spoiler
ThanksI watched the ep where she went to the milk factory, and I remember she walked into a coolroom or something but I thought it left on a cliffhanger (you could see her reaction but couldn't see what she was looking at). It being corpses in a freezer makes sense.
(I probably wasn't paying sufficient attention tho....(
spoiler
You did pay attention to it, that's what happened. I'm theorizing the human body thing bc of all the chemical experiments she made after They were gone from the cityspoiler
Okay cool. I thought her experiments were perfunctory and that was kind of the point? Like testing the ph with ph strips and smelling it, just observing colour. She's not a scientist but she did what she could, but that's not enough to say that the liquid definitively resembled, say, plasma.
I don't doubt that soylent green is people but yeah I'm glad to be reassured that I didn't miss anything obvious like actual corpses in the freezer.
Thanks for explaining :)
spoiler
You're welcomeIt could just be perfunctory though, I'm just assuming that there is a connection that she just wouldn't see as a non-scientist. Let's see if I'm right, next episode is sure to come.
The fact that it was one line made it seem like a studio note, not Gilligan's one opportunity to shit on communism.