Even Rhea Seehorn Can’t Decode Carol’s Pluribus Finale Twist — Pure Impulse

Pluribus drops the kind of finale stinger that makes you sit up straight and say, 'Wait, she did what?' And Rhea Seehorn, who plays Carol, has thoughts... sort of.

Big, flashing spoiler warning for the Pluribus season 1 ending below.

In the final minutes, Carol is not exactly radiating zen. The big gut punch: those eggs she froze years ago to start a family with her wife Helen (Miriam Shor)? Yeah, The Others have swooped in and repurposed them to pull Carol into their hivemind, and they did not ask first. That violation is the push that sends her spiraling into the closing gambit.

• The finale frames Carol with a nasty binary choice — 'get the girl or save the world' — which is also the title payoff for 'La Chica o El Mundo.'
• She cuts an uneasy deal with Manousos (Carlos-Manuel Vesga), which is as comforting as it sounds.
• Then comes the last twist: she has an actual atomic bomb delivered to her neighborhood. Not a metaphor. A literal bomb. It's also a dark callback to episode 3, 'Grenade,' where she joked about exactly this kind of escalation.

It is a striking final image — the sort fans will chew on until season 2 shows up — so I asked Seehorn what Carol is thinking in that moment. Her answer is a peek behind the curtain you do not often get from actors:

"I honestly don't know. I made peace with [that]. Even if Vince [Gilligan] was saying we don't know where we're going with it, usually as an actor I would make an intentional decision about what I think Carol's plan is."

Seehorn laughed that this might make her sound like a 'bad actor,' but explained it was a choice: Carol can be wildly impulsive — a flaw that occasionally turns into a superpower. In her view, Carol knows she has to do something huge. She just has not decided what that 'something' is, even as she wires up the biggest swing imaginable.

Pluribus is now streaming on Apple TV. Season 2 suddenly has a very large, very radioactive question to answer.