It has come to my attention, following some very concerning conversations with friends, that not everyone was as enthralled by AppleTV's Pluribus as I was. This is, for lack of a better word, unacceptable. It's shocking and appalling. Did we even watch the same tv series? I was glued to my seat every episode, at once frustrated with the slow plot development and utterly convinced of its purpose.

There's an irony here which tempers my usual hotheadedness about tv a little bit. After all, if Pluribus is about anything, it's friction. The slight discomfort inherent to most human interactions, where we give up a tiny bit of our own independence, our convenience, in order for intimacy to work. In On the Inconvenience of Other People, Lauren Berlant talks about the paradoxical desire to be inconvenienced by others. It is not so much that we enjoy inconvenience, but that being disrupted and encroached upon is the price of connection. Perversely, we seek out others, even though they will inevitably force us into some level of discomfort. Carol, the series protagonist, encapsulates this tension perfectly. She is angry, short-tempered and difficult. Carol dislikes people who enjoy things, sneers at vacationers, and cannot fathom the other survivors not being on board with her big plan of de-Joining as soon as she sets up the meeting. When faced with the possibility of being absorbed into the Joined hivemind, Carol fights for autonomy with every bone in her body, battering a tireless Zosia/the Joined to the point of drugging her/them. She is, in short, an incredibly abrasive person.

Consequently, the moment she feels her individuality is secure, it makes sense that Carol abandons all contact to embrace independence. At first, she attempts to connect with the other survivors again, but these encounters are so grating and awkward that Carol quickly retreats to solitude. The Joined are happy to give her whatever she asks for, albeit via a very annoying voicemail, and she can live out the dream of autonomy with every creature comfort. Briefly, Carol is ecstatic. And yet, within 40 days, she's so sick of being alone that she begs for the Hive's return, and when Zosia arrives, blandly smiling, she's welcomed with open arms.

Like all of us, then, Carol is uncomfortable in the paradoxical state of contact/inconvenience. Perhaps a little more than most, in fact. She despises people, drives them away with her unwillingness to compromise. But Carol is also terribly lonely. In the Joined she finds what many of our universe's people have found in chatbots; forget inconvenience and friction, the Joined present the dream of contact/convenience. Frictionless contact. The Joined are focused purely on Carol's desires and needs, bend to her every whim, rarely push back and seek nothing but her happiness. While she ideologically rejects the anaesthetic harmony that binds them into one being, Carol enjoys playing house with Zosia, going so far as to make the Hive perform individuality with "I" pronouns.

The final episode, of course, gives the lie to that delusion. Carol realises the Joined never stopped plotting her absorption, and that her days as an individual are numbered. She gapes at Zosia, shocked at the fact that—in its own alien way—the Joined have a canniness and goals of their own. Convenience and connection end up being impossible after all. The season concludes with her returning to Manousos, a survivor with whom she's had nothing but friction and disagreement. The only way forward, Pluribus tells us, is in the inconvenience of other people.