With its fourth episode, the new sci-fi hit series, Pluribus, has managed to take a very interesting science fiction concept and make it seem extremely real. In fact, in this episode, “Please, Carol,” Pluribus takes an idea that was made very interesting by Liu Cixin’s The Three-Body Problem and makes it even better.
Warning! Mild spoilers ahead.
The notion of honesty, or the lack thereof, is, when you stop to think about it, a uniquely human concept. Few animals are capable of true deception, making the human capacity for lying one of our most dangerous features. Science fiction loves exploring this concept, especially when it comes to concepts of telepathy. In Alfred Bester’s 1953 classic novel, The Demolished Man (and the first novel to ever win a Hugo award), a world of telepathy makes premeditated crime impossible. The Borg, in various incarnations, have a hive mind that makes secrets not just impossible, but irrelevant. But it was perhaps The Three-Body Problem that presented this concept in a very straightforward way, as the telepathic San-Ti were terrified of humanity based on our ability to lie.
But, on this point, Pluribus takes what The Three-Body Problem threw down and makes it much closer to home. In Episode 4, when Carol (Rhea Seehorn) sits down with one of the many humans who have become part of the Joining, she wants to know what the hive mind actually thinks of her romance novels. Because so many people love the books, the hive mind puts these tomes on equal footing with Shakespeare. And in one touching moment, we discover that one of Carol’s most annoying fans in Episode 1 was actually so comforted by her books that she avoided suicidal thoughts.
Helen and Carol in the first episode of Pluribus.
That said, we already knew that Carol’s books were popular, so the hive mind validating that fact isn’t the truly interesting thing here. Instead, Carol asks what her late wife, Helen (Miriam Shor), really thought of her unpublished, more literary novel, Bitter Chrysalis. And it’s here where Carol learns something she could have never known otherwise: Helen didn’t even finish the book.
In the first episode, before nearly every person on Earth was absorbed by the hive mind, Helen straight-up told Carol that she really liked this unpublished book, but because the shared worldwide telepathy had access to Helen’s mind before she passed, we now know that Helen didn’t really care for the book and was really just humoring Carol about it.
In The Three-Body Problem, currently being adapted by Netflix, this revelation that the aliens are fearful of lying has huge, global implications. But in Pluribus, as Carol writes the phrase “can not lie” on her list of things she knows about the hive mind, it’s a chilling moment. For one thing, it indicates that Carol always kind of knew, deep down, that Helen didn’t like Bitter Chrysalis. The confirmation of her sneaking suspicion proves to her that the hive mind can’t lie. To put it another way, Carol’s intuition is validated in a not-so-subtle way. We all know that even the kindest humans keep small lies between them, and when confronted with that fact, Carol isn’t shocked, but rather, intellectually vindicated.
And yet, the brilliance of this scene is contained in the way a character’s epiphany is utterly connected to something that could never happen in real life. In The Three-Body Problem, the discovery of telepathic alien honesty raises the stakes on a geopolitical level. In Pluribus, the same idea allows one woman to confirm a sad truth that she actually knew all along. In the context of the story, yes, this proves the hive mind can’t lie. But it also suggests that perhaps, human lies aren’t as effective as we think they are.
