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.
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.