This is a cool show. I can’t help but hate Carol, and I can’t figure out if the show is trying to make me hate her or if she really is supposed to be some kind of antihero. It’s interesting that we have very little information about what the lives of the other individuals were like before the joining. Carol is very petit bourgeois coded, clearly your archetypical western chauvinist. She’s basically monolingual, a fantasy slop mogul, deeply uncurious, self centered, and stubborn. She assumes that everyone else who is unjoined is of the same mind set, and the only other character aligned with her appears to be even more antisocial then she is.
It’s hard to say what this show is really about. There was that throw away line in the second or third episode where Carol says she is the “second greatest mass murder next to Stalin” and you could read this so many ways. Yet the show makes it very clear that the world Carol wants to return to is one full of harm and violence. That her resistance to this situation actively kills people
Hopefully this doesn’t turn into a show that doesn’t know how it ends and keeps running on a treadmill for several sessions.
Yeah it’s not consistent either I feel. Why did they dig the grave of they can’t harm any living thing? Wouldn’t that have harmed the grass? The line has to be drawn some where. Do single celled organisms count as “living things”? Its not even an awful thing theyre doing, it’s an incredibly silly thing. They won’t even build robots to farm for them because that’s harm by proxy. It reads a lot more like “This is the logical terminating point of your silly kumbaya ideology and why it ultimately fails”
The one that gets me is the claim that they can’t infect the survivors because that would require the consent of the survivors.
What do you mean?!
Hundreds of millions of people died without ever being asked if they wanted this!
They can’t do harm I think is the hitch. That means operations that cause pain and require some form of recovery. Their biological imperative allows them to infect people in harmless ways. Like kissing.
Dying is a harm. It’s one of the ultimate harms.
Also the first human infection was done by bite. Although the mice based hivemind may not have the ability to do ethical reasoning.
Edit:But also if this is the case, then the suicidal empathy with all living things exhibited by the woke mind virus is an emergent property of human ethical reasoning. Which throws the idea that it is a bioweapon for a loop.
Sure but that was a rat brain with rat memories. I think it will reveal that the rules stem from human thought. They admit they didn’t know people would die. We also know that they cannot lie but they can lie by omission.
The whole do no harm policy is really flimsy as plot device. It’s either part of the virus, which doesn’t make sense based on your point, or it’s a manifestation of the joining stemming from human thinking, which is also silly since humans have been eating plants for all of time.
But for the remaining, they’d need stem cells which are harvested via a painful procedure, that’s the consent.
People who were currently operating heavy machinery were infected and went into seizures. We see people fall down, we see people die. None of these people consented.
Right, the in universe explanation is the spread was done initially quietly and with no harm. Then they were quickly forced to spread to everyone which unfortunately caused harm.
I agree it’s not great logic, but their reasoning is they require consent for direct harm, which includes harvesting stem cells.
The bigger thing for me is the food production. Picking an orange or plucking potatoes from the ground does not do harm because those things do not have central nervous systems.
But it isn’t. The issue explicitly isnt that this was an emergency requiring extenuating circumstances, or it would equally apply both to the infection of the survivors and their own food situation. They are all going to die and they have a biological imperative to spread that apply equally now as it did then.
There is a school of thought/religion called jainism, and I feel like their views on the value of life are pretty relevant to this discussion.
It’s even more silly when you realize the writers didn’t even need to go this route to provoke this conflict. There’s so many pesticides used in our food production, for example, that kill millions of insects and result in lost biodiversity. Retiring them all at once could very feasibly result in famine via pestilence.
But instead they went for “no can pick apple :(”. This is just plain bad writing. Maybe that problem was too “solvable”?
Antibiotics are also a thing. Do we consider bacteria in this equation of life and death? Probably had to kill millions of bacteria to keep Zosia alive so, unless the bacteria has its own hivemind ability to clear out of its own volition (probably also resulting in its own die-off by declining access to resources. Huh… see, that would actually be an interesting analogy!!), I’m going to guess the answer is no. But plants? We couldn’t pull a leaf from a branch to save our lives!
The more I sit with this the more I realize that so much is “morally” off limits and/or rendered null-and-void by the virus that it’s questionable what the hivemind is even ultimately working towards besides spreading the virus and maybe conservation of the planet itself? Indeterminable joy? What are the other 7 billion plurbs even doing all day when they’re not catering to the 12 survivors’ every demand?
I demand world building !! Writing your main character as an incurious anti-social american chauvinist does not excuse you from world building !!