Pluribus episode 8 answered the series’ biggest question. Vince Gilligan explains.

Ever since the pilot episode of Vince Gilligan’s science fiction show Pluribus, fan speculation has first and foremost revolved around two central mysteries. What does the hivemind that now links almost everyone on Earth actually want? And more directly: While the show is focusing on one scared, angry hivemind-immune woman navigating the new world order, what are the seven-billion-plus hiveminded people who aren’t dealing with her doing instead?

“Great question,” Gilligan tells Polygon via Zoom. “We’re still figuring some of this stuff out ourselves.”

Pluribus episode 8, “Charm Offensive,” gives us an initial answer — in a perversely, even hilariously subtle way. If you aren’t looking at the screen at the exact right moment, you’ll miss it. Gilligan and Pluribus executive producer and writer Alison Tatlock help us unpack what they currently see as the hivemind’s goals and intentions.

[Ed. note: Major spoilers ahead for Pluribus episode 8.]

“Charm Offensive” returns to series protagonist Carol Sturka (Rhea Seehorn) shortly after her emotional breakdown at the end of episode 7. After she drugs her liaison Zosia (Karolina Wydra) in episode 4, to pump her for information about the hivemind’s vulnerabilities, the hivemind members — in Pluribus parlance, the Others — abandon Carol’s Albuquerque hometown en masse, leaving her in complete isolation. (Not as a punishment, Gilligan told us in an earlier interview, but to “put her in time out” for bad behavior.) In episode 7, after weeks of entertaining herself in increasingly self-destructive ways, she paints a sign on her cul-de-sac roundabout that says “come back.” When Zosia arrives, Carol collapses into her arms, weeping.

Throughout episode 8, Carol slowly, awkwardly figures out how to relate to Zosia — including finally asking her some of the basic questions about the hivemind experience that Carol’s fellow Originals all asked right away. During a tenuously friendly conversation while looking through a telescope at the solar system where the hivemind-creating signal originated, Zosia explains that while the Others know nothing about the civilization that sent the signal, they’re grateful to that alien race, and will do whatever they can to “pay it forward, however long that may take… We have to share their gift with whoever else may be out there.” Carol asks how.

We don’t hear the answer, but we do see the result: Carol writing on her secret whiteboard of gleaned information about the Others, “Building GIANT ANTENNA!!! Using all power in world to send signal to space!” The shot of the whiteboard is very brief — Carol, still writing on the board, almost immediately moves in a way that blocks some of the text, as the camera zooms out and refocuses on her looking for a fresh dry-erase marker.

Image: Apple TV

It’s a huge revelation — but the low-key way it’s communicated to the audience is a reminder that Pluribus has generally been focused more on Carol’s emotional experience than on blockbuster-style reveals. (Look how quickly the show defused the “They eat people!” cliffhanger.) The whiteboard reveal seems intended to blunt any sense of horror or excitement about this revelation, and to muffle it in the much more mundane detail that Carol’s dry-erase markers have all run dry.

It’s possible Carol had a much bigger, more emotional reaction to learning that the hivemind she’s been fighting intends to infect any and every other civilization it can reach. Episode 8 elides that reaction, though, not letting the audience catch up with her until she’s processed the information enough to turn it into just another bullet point on her intel list.

But that means we don’t get to hear Carol shake Zosia down for any details or clarification about the plan — so we asked Gilligan and Tatlock about it instead. Zosia has repeatedly said the Others have a “biological imperative” to incorporate as many people as they can into their gestalt — the one need that overrides their willingness to give Carol and the other Originals their freedom and agency. But Tatlock says they have other collective goals, besides spreading the signal.

“It seems like spreading the good word is the most important thing to them,” she says. “But I wouldn’t say it’s the only thing, because they seem genuinely dedicated to the comfort of the leftover people that they’re helping to care for. So that is also something they care about. The most important thing to them is their biological imperative to survive and expand. But they care about the Earth.”

Image: Apple TV

“They love the Earth,” Gilligan adds. “I think they’re good shepherds to the Earth.”

But Gilligan suggests that the bliss of being part of the hivemind eliminates most other desires.

“If they’re as happy as they seem — which, I have no reason to doubt them — just surviving and keeping the human race going, and passing along the good word, and changing the remaining old-schoolers, we call ’em, the people like Carol — [those are] the first orders of business,” he says. “And after that, maybe it’s just enjoying being alive.”

At the same time, that lack of desire might create its own problems, particularly as the Others face mass starvation.

“I tend to think it’s the unhappy people who make the world go round,” Gilligan says. “If you are dissatisfied with a particular situation, you typically do something about it.”

Episodes 1-8 of Pluribus season 1 are now streaming on Apple TV. Additional reporting by Jake Kleinman.