15 March 2026 # Surviving Utopia: Queer and Posthuman Temporalities in Pluribus Earth welcomes a newly interconnected and interdependent humanity living as a mutual participant in the planetary ecosphere, no longer its self-appointed master. Overnight, every prejudice has been abandoned. Skin-color, nationality, gender, and sexual identity no longer produce fear, hostility, or contempt. Mental health, physical disability, and age are no longer grounds for social exclusion or injustice. The enforcement of oppressive family systems that once produced generational trauma and abuse has been abandoned. But not everyone is happy about the new state of affairs. What’s not to like about Utopia? Early press for Pluribus carried the tagline “The most miserable person on Earth must save the world from happiness” (Shanfield, 2025). Pluribus depicts a posthuman evolution that risks becoming a totalitarian “zombie utopia,” prevented only by queer negativity—figured by an immune minority who function as a structural discontinuity preventing systemic closure.  Pluribus, a 2025 streaming science fiction series from the producers of Breaking Bad, depicts the events surrounding a human-extraterrestrial encounter. An interstellar radio transmission carries the formula for a novel RNA sequence. Exposure to the sequence instigates ‘The Joining,’ a biochemical process that unlocks a telepathic connection to a shared global web of unconscious communication. Joined individuals comprise a new collective identity that writer/director Vince Gilligan refers to as ‘The Others,’ while a remainder of thirteen humans, whom Gilligan dubs ‘Old Schoolers’ are biologically immune to the effect and retain their individuality (McCaleb, 2025). Pluribus invokes and subverts genre expectations set by apocalyptic science fiction and horror media like The Last of Us, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and Omega Man, with the Others’ affirmative ethics, empathy, engagement, and happiness. This essay argues that Pluribus dramatizes the danger of a Posthuman Queer utopia that resolves differences without addressing the underlying sovereign logic of Humanism. The biologically immune Old Schoolers function as a necessary discontinuity within the Others’ utopia. Their various positions of refusal, negativity, antagonism, and self-interest operate collectively as a queer function that preserves the vitality of future possibilities. Pluribus is a productive text for working through key ideas and critiques of two minoritarian temporal imaginaries: Queer Utopianism and Affirmative Posthumanism.  # Queer Utopianism Queer Utopianism offers hope for the biological and ideological survival of non-normative subjects and their sexual, political, and cultural futures in minoritarian collectivity (Muñoz, 2009). The Others share an eidetic collective memory containing the knowledge and life experiences of every joined individual. As a result, the Others have experienced the full spectrum of gendered, sexual, and paraphilic subjectivity and performance. They are radically indifferent to the hierarchies and frameworks of sexual stigma, they have no attachment to the reproductive futurism of monogamy or the nuclear family. For the Others, “affection is always welcome” (ep. 2). Their collective identity is structurally queer—nonbinary, polyamorous, and polymorphously perverse.  But a Queer utopia requires openness to difference and desire (Muñoz, 2009, p. 25).  As Lee Edelman puts it, “every attempt to totalize, to construct a universal or closed idealized political system will always exclude something and that exclusion will be, then, the locus of queerness” (IPAK Centar, 3:05). The focal character of the resistance, Carol (Rhea Seehorn, USA), is a homonormative Lesbian romance writer who straightwashes her writing and is unwilling to disclose her sexual identity to her fans. Carol reveals a formative experience in the episode “Please, Carol”. Zosia (Karolina Wydra, Poland), serving as the Others’ intermediary, attempts to convince Carol that she will be happier once she assimilates. Carol responds, “Freedom Falls. You know what that means, don’t you? ...Tell me about Camp fucking Freedom Falls.” The parallels between pressure to assimilate to the Others and pressure to assimilate to a heteronormative world are made explicit. Freedom Falls was “a conversion therapy camp” and for Carol, the counselors were: “Some of the worst people I have ever known. And they smiled all the time. Just like you.” This exchange is mirrored again in the season finale “La Chica o El Mundo” and is the last straw in driving a wedge between Carol and the Others.  Carol: “[sighs] If you loved me, you wouldn’t do this.” Zosia: “Carol. Please understand we have to do this *because* we love you…” # Affirmative Posthumanism Affirmative Posthumanism provides a framework for the survival of biological, technological, and ecological life by challenging anthropocentric norms—decentering humanity to imbricate an ecosophical identity entangled in a transversal of zoe/geo/techno kinship (Braidotti, 2013). The Others’ diet relies upon windfall and stocks of preserved food from before the Joining. They refuse to interfere with plant life by picking fruit or harvesting grains. They have freed all the animals from the zoos and do not keep pets. Braidotti describes her posthuman subject as a “conceptual persona” and a figuration in the line of Haraway and Deleuze, which “[actualizes] the virtual” (Braidotti, 2017, p. 10-11). This persona is a nomadic subject, “not linked to bound individuals, but rather takes place transversally, in between nature and technology, male and female, black and white, local and global” and affirmatively overspills these binaries (Braidotti, 2017, p. 12). The others have abandoned ideas of private property and market economics. They have a very different relationship to individual death and funerary practices as we will see in the section on ‘HDP.’ Braidotti also describes Posthumanism as an ethic of “monistic vitalism… driven by nomadic, embedded, embodied and technologically-mediated subjects” (Braidotti, 2019, p. 13). Because of the unconscious psychic communication they share, the Others collectively share intellectual and embodied kinesthetic expertise. Anyone can fly a plane, or perform open heart surgery. Significantly, Braidotti also explicitly links her thought with Queer theory (Braidotti, 2017, p. 14). The Others are a post-identarian, ecosophical collective organized around a leaky nomadic subject; they approach Braidotti’s affirmative ideal. But the Others have replaced the unitary individual subject of Humanism with a unitary collective subject, and Humanist “logics of conquest, slavery, and colonialism” persist (Jackson, 2020, p. 140).  # Humanist Sovereignty In a sense it is not what is new about the Others that threatens, but what remains unconscious beneath the surface from before the Joining. Namely, their selective application of normative categories. The Others are unable to lie, but they can strategically withhold crucial information. They may say “Your life is your own” but The Others are already reengineering your stem cells to overcome your immunity. They sleep collectively in order to save resources, but they will accommodate the most extravagant whim of the Old Schoolers. The flexible moral logic they use to selectively apply their ethical framework demonstrates the psychic remnants of Humanism’s  categorical binaries like those used to “[divide] organic life into “human” or “animal” based on wholly unsound metaphysical premises” (Jackson, 2020, p. 22). There may be no binaries or hierarchies among the members within the collective mind, but the Others see the immune humans as inferior, defective—relics of the past who must be rescued from their isolation. The Others’ demands that the Old Schoolers assimilate are framed variously as compassionate, or as a “biological imperative… like breathing” (ep. 2). It is unclear exactly what this means, as there are a number of different orders of human biological imperatives. Air, Water, Food, Shelter, Reproduction, could all be described as biological imperatives, but humans can choose to forgo each of these for a time and some of them forever. But the Others are “working around the clock” to find a “cure”. And although they tell Carol “Your life is your own” (ep. 1) and they “can’t purposely kill, harm, or otherwise interfere with any form of life” (ep. 6) they continue to bypass Carol’s refusal to consent because to the Others, immunity is a life-threatening glitch that can be repaired. Zosia equates being unjoined to drowning. To the Others, Carol’s refusal to join is not agentic or ethical, but self destructive, and for the Others, any injury to an individual is a collective injury. Carol is not a sovereign subject but a misbehaving organ in a larger body. Jackson clarifies that the “liberatory possibilities of symbiosis and its metaphoric use in posthumanist theory must be carefully considered alongside critical reflection on the antiblackness that has historically accompanied developments in scientific discourse and biotechnology” because “racial discourse is not simply a by-product of the discourse of species, but rather race and species discourses are homologous and symbiotic” (Jackson, 2020, p. 164). Reconciling the discontinuity between Carol and the Others in Jackson’s framework is not as simple as asserting Carol’s sovereignty, because “claims to self-ownership are paradoxical in that they reject the master’s authority but not the property relation” (Jackson, 2020, p. 157) for “the self-determining and self-defining subject” (Jackson, 2020, p. 153). To the Others, the Old Schoolers are ungoverned, primitive, they are “terra nullius, or empty, vacant space appropriable for the Self” (Jackson, 2020, p. 138).  The most significant distinction between their ethical practices and our own are not exactly where the lines are drawn, but their absolute global unanimity in drawing them.  # Eggs This property relation is further developed in the plot around the Others acquiring Carol’s frozen eggs to produce stem cells. This has significant resonances with Octavia Butler’s “Bloodchild” and Jackson’s analysis of it in Becoming Human. Eggs recur often throughout Pluribus. Carol refers to the 886 million casualties in the joining as: “gotta break a few eggs, huh?” (ep. 2). Zosia offers to make eggs after Carol causes a second mass extinction event in episode 2. Carol jokes about freezing her eggs in the ice hotel after being told she will feel “like a yolk in an egg” (ep. 3). We will later address the eggs Diabaté makes for Carol in episode 5. Helen placed a surveillance device in the liquor cabinet after Carol froze her eggs (ep. 9). And finally Carol realizes that her frozen eggs have been taken by the Others and are being used to generate the stem cells which will enable her Joining. For Edelman the eggs represent the reproductive futurism of the Child. For Braidotti, Carol’s eggs represent the possibilities in biological and technological entanglement. For Jackson, the eggs are both “mutational possibilities” and also the unresolved tension between a belief-in and the limits-of individual sovereignty (Jackson, 2020, p. 138).  For Carol, the eggs are a betrayal, a betrayal by the Others, a betrayal by the reproductive biomedical apparatus that she was subject to, and possibly, a betrayal by a future with Helen that never happened. This is “the slow cancellation of the future” (Fisher, 2014, p. 16).  Eggs ‘haunt’ Pluribus (Fisher, 2014). Without her consent the Others have taken possession of Carol’s potential and turned it against her. The eggs are a gap, a “terra nullius” (Jackson, 2020, p. 138). ——— # ‘Other’ Temporalities “Heteronormative culture makes queers think that both the past and the future do not belong to them. All we are allowed to imagine is barely surviving the present.” (Muñoz, 2009, p. 112) Pluribus opens with a cryptic timestamp, imposed on a cloudy moonlit sky, counting down: “439D 19H 56M 11S”. The increasing temporal pressure will rupture in a singular event, the Joining. The opening scene is fourteen months before the temporal origin of Pluribus. An extraterrestrial recipe for an RNA sequence is identified by radio astronomers. The next scene is timestamped seventy-one days before. Scientists are synthesizing the formula. The first Joining happens twenty-nine days before, when a researcher is bitten by a rat test-subject. Three hours before, Helen (Miriam Shor, USA) and Carol arrive in New Mexico after a Wycaro book tour and go out for a drink. Outside the bar, Carol notices a strange pattern of planes in the sky, and soon, nearly everyone in the world simultaneously goes into a seizure. At the end of the one hour episode, the countdown clock reads fifty-nine minutes and is now counting up instead of down. The temporal crisis occurred somewhere within the episode, but also in a sense, when you started the episode.  This is not to imply the temporal mechanics of the Others are extremely sophisticated. Like the modern west’s practice of dating from Anno Domini, the Other’s calendar is still linear relative to a single fixed point and proceeds in both directions, counting upwards and downwards as the calendar accumulates time. Compare this to a more complex circular and perpetual calendar system like the Balinese (Ginaya, 2018, p. 25). This is a rupture with Human time, but not Queer time per se. Cruising Utopia presents an immanent Queer future that resists hetero-normative defaults for gender and sexual subjectivities, “straight” linear temporal structures, and bourgeois place-making. In describing time, Muñoz borrows Bloch’s formations “no-longer-conscious” and the “not-yet-here” (Muñoz, 2009, p. 30). He contrasts Queer and Straight Time: “Straight time is a self-naturalizing temporality” (Muñoz, 2009, p. 25); Queer Time is fluid, rhizomatic, always in flux (Muñoz, 2009, p. 97). Muñoz equates time with desire and ecstatic freedom: “Indeed, to live inside straight time and ask for, desire, and imagine another time and place is to represent and perform a desire that is both utopian and queer” (ibid, p. 26), and “Queerness’s ecstatic and horizonal temporality is a path and a movement to a greater openness to the world” (ibid, p. 25). Utopian time is horizonal, oriented to “a horizon of possibility, not a fixed schema…. a moment when the here and the now is transcended by a then and a there that could be and indeed should be” (ibid, p. 97). But the temporal mechanics of the Others are not horizonal, they are exclusively here and now, and do not desire the  “no-longer-conscious” or the “not-yet-here.” The Joining consumes the past and the future, compressing them into a present that lacks desire and the possibility of surprise. # Affect Effects: We need to talk about Carol Helen: “Oh, come on. This is completely your bag. You love feeling bad” (ep.3). Carol: “Oh. Man, I’m sorry. I don’t think I’m good at just feeling good. [scoffs] What does that to you?” (ep. 9). The name Carol is a feminine derivative of the Latin Carolus (from Carl), meaning "freeman," it may also be a “joyful song’ (“Carol - Etymology, Origin & Meaning”). Before the Joining, Carol Sturka was the bestselling author of Wycaro, a "speculative historical romance literature" series that she calls “mindless crap”---with a devoted audience of neurodivergent women, whom she frequently shows contempt for (eps. 1,4). Wycaro is financially successful but Carol is clearly intimately familiar with other forms of Queer failure. Her relationships are strained, she is unhappy with her writing career, her magnum opus, Bitter Chrysalis is unpublished, she has an alcohol interlock on her car. During the joining, her partner Helen dies from an accidental fall. Carol is not doing okay. Carol is not happy, and the others can't handle unhappiness. Negative affect also causes the Others to shut down in a way that closely resembles the joining itself. During the joining process, transitioning subjects convulse and lose motor control in a temporary seizure; a little while later they awaken as part of the collective. For those driving cars, flying planes, or in otherwise vulnerable positions this may be catastrophic. Several times in the series, Carol becomes so upset with the Others, or with her situation, that she blasts Zosia with her full feminist killjoy fury. In her alcohol-fueled grief, Carol stuns the Others so badly with her rage that the ensuing global chain reaction causes eleven million accidental deaths. When Carol asks Zosia about it, she simply says “We’re affected by your emotions. The negative ones, if they’re directed right at us, they can be a little tough to take” (ep. 2).  Carol seems to be comfortable, or at least familiar with her negative emotions. She frequently refers to the collective as “aliens” or "the afflicted" and frames herself and the other individuals as "survivors" who need to put things back the way they were. She curses ecstatically, using some conjugation of ‘fuck’ at least seventy times in the first season, an average around every eight minutes. Her confident negativity and her alcohol abuse alienate the other Old Schoolers quickly. By the end of  the second episode she has retained friendly relations with only one, Koumba Diabaté (Samba Schutte, Mauritania). In the third episode, after Carol drunkenly activates a hand grenade that she requested sarcastically from the Others, Zosia intervenes and protects Carol with her own body. In the fourth episode, while Zosia is recovering in the hospital, Carol spikes Zosia’s IV bag with sodium thiopental in an effort to find out how to reverse the joining. This drives the others to abandon Albequerque, and cut off direct communication with Carol, leaving her in total isolation for forty days. Carol is an “affect alien” who “[insists] on the freedom to be unhappy” (Ahmed, 2010, p. 593). But the question this unhappiness raises about the Others is posed by Sara Ahmed: “Does bad feeling enter the room when somebody expresses anger about things? Or does the entry of anger simply mean that the bad feelings that circulate through objects get brought to the surface in a certain way?” (Ahmed, 2010, p. 582). Isolation is painful for Carol but productive for the resistance. While Carol is in isolation, she discovers that the Others are storing and processing dead bodies, and begins sending out video recordings to the other Old Schoolers to encourage them to resist assimilation. She receives no responses. Carol tries to survive in isolation, but becomes progressively more despondent to the point of self destructiveness, if not suicidality. Eventually Carol asks the Others to return.  From Carol's anti-social queer perspective, (the paranoid reading) where humanity is defined by the individual subject, the others are a "Borg" typical of the genre, an invader that threatens colonization and extinguishes individuality to produce a field of totalizing domination. “We’ve all seen this movie. And we know it does not end well.”  Carol believes her refusal to *assimilate* is a "heroic" performance situated in Queer anti-sociality and a rejection of forced totalitarian normativity. More personally, Carol’s resistance is rooted in her formative experience of being sent to Freedom Falls, a conversion camp. Carol has deep concerns about the lack of meaningful relationships “between” the Others, as seen in her rejection of the appearance of the waitress in the diner. But, until she is isolated by the Others, Carol is in relation, though conflictual, with the Others, specifically through Zosia. This relational engagement differs from the total abjection of Manousos, which we will analyze in a later section. The opening scene of “Pirate Lady” introduces us to Zosia. We follow Zosia moving wordlessly as a fungible body in a global machinic assemblage, from working on a cleanup crew reclaiming a dead body, to flying as pilot and sole passenger of a military cargo plane. Zosia lands in New Mexico, stripping off her filthy rags and dropping them in the recycling as she strides purposefully, though stark naked, through an eerily empty airport. A team of attendants are preparing a makeover including a shower, wig, and makeup. We next see Zosia arrive at Carol’s house as an emissary from the Others. She is clean and wearing western clothes, tight jeans, a cable knit sweater, and brown cowboy boots. Carol asks: “Why are you standing in my yard, talking about whatever the fuck it is you’re talking about? Who are you?” Zosia puts it plainly: “Someone we thought you might like.” Carol figures it out almost immediately. Zosia looks just like the pirate from her Wycaro book cover. The Others wanted to connect with Carol and chose the body who looked most like the romantic hero from her book series. Zosia is a quantum in the Other field. The fact that she was over six thousand miles away was apparently irrelevant to their decision. From the Others' posthuman perspective, where humanity is one part of an assemblage of zoe/geo/techno intra-actions, the Joining produces a post anthropocentric, non-hierarchical, transverse kinship, affirmative ethics, and Carol's refusal to *participate* is situated in an individualism that resists evolutionary change in preference of a self-interested maintenance of status quo, where she is isolated, self-destructive, and profoundly unhappy. If they leave Carol unconverted, The Others also risk the paradox of tolerance, where Carol is capable of profound disruption to their global project, just by her capacity for negativity. The Others send Zosia as a lure or as a pacifier to satisfy their biological imperative. But the Others also need Carol’s capacity to generate surprise, as evidenced by their enthusiasm and desire to encourage Carol to begin writing again. In episode eight, when Carol asks for whiteboard markers, Zosia asks with what I read as barely contained enthusiasm: “Does this mean what we think it means? … you’re writing again? …Well, don’t let us keep you… We are just so excited to have something new to read…” For the Others, their new world is a perfect utopia. But that perfection carries the threat of stagnation, and of totalitarianism (Blanco-Fernández, 2024, p. 443). Sarah Ahmed crystallizes the totalitarian potential of happiness in The Promise of Happiness (Ahmed, 2010) in her analysis of “happiness dystopias” and “the problem of happiness.” (ibid, p. 192) while questioning whether “all forms of optimism as well as utopianism…would require negativity to be located in those who cannot inherit this future” (ibid., p. 161). Still, Ahmed finds hope in Utopia (ibid., p. 163), and even finds hopefulness in Edelman’s construction of No Future as “possibility opened up by inhabiting the negative” (ibid., p. 161), but she takes Dystopian imaginaries as “the possibility that the future might be something we have already lost—this is not a vision only of an unhappy future but the possibility of no future at all, where no future is not conceived as unhappiness (which would be predicated on the survival of a subject) but no hap, no chance, no possibility” (ibid., p. 163). Ahmed makes excellent work of the power of possibility. After a brief description of “Happiness Dystopias” and a “hope dystopia,” (Ahmed, 2010, p. 192) where subjects are deprived of the freedom to be unhappy she hypothesizes: “The freedom to be happy restricts human freedom if you are not free to be not happy. Perhaps unhappiness becomes a freedom when the necessity of happiness is masked as freedom” (Ahmed, 2010, p. 193), because “To share what deviates from happiness is to open up possibility, to be alive to possibility” (Ahmed, 2010, p. 196). I am framing the possible future of Pluribus where all of the Old Schoolers are assimilated as a Zombie Utopia, genuinely experienced by its participants as happy, but where all other possibilities are dead forever. In a meaningful way, this lack of future is a lack of desire, a lack of lack ## Eating the Dead The Others’ extreme dietary restrictions are revealed to be unsustainable at current human population levels. In “HDP” we learn that the Others’ reliance on windfall and preserved food, has led them to develop and manufacture a milk-like substance which is their primary form of sustenance, HDP. As the individual formerly known as John Cena confirms, HDP is Human-derived Protein, made from the bodies of those who died during and since the Joining. Diabaté explains to Carol “even with the HDP, most of the world’s population will starve to death within the next ten years.”  Another, less on the nose representation of how the world of Pluribus is eating its own past is shown in how the Others prepare food for the Old Schoolers. In “Pirate Lady” the English speaking unjoined are gathered together for a beautiful lunch in Spanish countryside. The Others have prepared each of the Old Schoolers a familiar dish, for Koumba Diabaté (Samba Schutte, Mauritania) at least, literally. “Poulet Yassa! [chuckles] Incroyable. Mmm. Exactly like my tantine Awa made it when I was a child!” But they each individually appear to be eating a food typical in their culture, rather than sharing a new collective experience. Similarly, when the Others try to pacify or woo Carol, the food they make is a reproduction in an attempt to access her past. “It’s the exact meal you had at that B and B you stayed at in Provincetown. 2012? Remember? …The sorghum flour pancakes…” and When Carol orders food  in “The Gap” it is less like a menu than reviewing a diary: “Martha’s Vineyard, 1999. [chuckles] Helen’s birthday, 2008. [chuckles] Oh. Maritozzi. ” Compare these to the breakfast scene in the Westgate penthouse, where Koumba Diabaté kindly cooks Carol a simple breakfast of eggs, avocado, and toast. Carol awakens on a sofa to the sounds of cooking, from a hard night after learning she is being excluded from regular meetings with the other Old Schoolers. The warm blurry reflected light captures her hazy hangover. A medium two shot of Carol sitting across from Diabaté at the bar, and in the background, a huge framed photo-portrait of Diabaté hangs on the wall. Carol is subdued, she thanks Diabaté and begins unconsciously scooping and scraping her avocado onto the toast, topped with the eggs to make a modern millennial breakfast sandwich. Diabaté is watching, amazed. His chewing slows as he takes in this revelation, and with a sudden thrill of energy, Koumba copies her actions. Samba Schutte sells this moment all the way to the cheap seats. It is clear, both are a kind of reproduction, but Poulez Yassa is a reenactment, this breakfast sandwich is a discovery. ## Eating Culture After the Others find a way to assimilate the immune, Kusimayu (Peru, Darinka Arones) desires to join her aunt and cousin as an Other. Episode nine opens on Kusimayu’s Andean village seventy-one days after the joining. Kusimayu is sweeping while watching a plane fly over her valley—it carries the antidote to her immunity. A wide shot embeds her isolated village in a picturesque montane ecosystem. The Quechuan villagers, or rather the Others, are preparing Kusimayu for her transition with a traditional acapella song—and simultaneously operating the seized machinery of the global capitalist supply chain to deliver the immuno-suppresent. Kusimayu is holding and stroking a tiny kid goat while villagers gather in brilliantly colored handwoven costumes, hats, wearing the braids of their culture. They continue to sing while an insulated container is lifted from a flight case. White vapor rises from the canister as Kusimayu breathes in the Cure. When she begins to convulse, the villagers lower her onto a stunning traditional alpaca blanket. The Others freeze and go eerily silent. After a minute, the individual formerly known as Kusimayu awakes with a wide smile and stands up. In unison, the entire village gathers a few belongings, extinguishes the communal fire, opens the animal pens, and walks away from the village. The blanket is folded and carried away. Kusimayu has been living in the memory of her village for seventy-one days.  Quechua backstrap weaving dates back thousands of years and is central to Andean culture. The indigenous knowledge-practices required include animal care, spinning, dyeing, and the processes and patterns of weaving (Festa). These kinds of cultural production change and evolve over time—creating history by recording it. The Others share an eidetic memory that contains a perfect record of the knowledge and experiences of every member. It seems clear that the Others will not be continuing the cultural production of Quechua weaving. While the Joining will preserve the cultural practices of this village, they will be frozen, at this moment in time. There will be no new innovations to refine the drop spindle. ## Eating Desire It is unclear whether the Others desire. Their equanimity is hard to read, and it is always unclear whether what they say is “true” but primarily a means to make Carol happy. I contend they do seem to experience real emotions, as long as they are happy ones. In “Please, Carol” Carol is interviewing the individual formerly known as Lawrence J. Kless, played by an adorably earnest Jeff Hiller. Larry beams as he recites “the description of Lucasia’s gown on page two.” When he says Carol’s Wycaro books are “equally wonderful” as Romeo and Juliet he suggests that the Others’ feelings about Wycaro are informed by the experience of the joined individual Moira McCallister who found in the books, “...something to live for… That’s how we see you, and your work, through Moira’s eyes.” In “The Charm Offensive” Zosia seems genuinely curious several times to know what Carol is thinking. In a lovely panorama of the American West, from a bluff, Zosia and Carol watch sunlight glinting from the metal roof of a passing train far below them. Carol is in a blue tank top that matches the boundless sky and an unbuttoned plaid shirt that matches the Arroyo, “Come on, I must have told some human being at some point that I love train horns.” Zosia flutters her eyes, presumably accessing the global unconscious. “I thought you knew everything about me.”  “Not this,” Zosia responds. When the train whistle blows we watch while Rhea Seehorn follows the moments passing on Carol’s face. Surprise. Thrill at the coincidence, or maybe even destiny. Paranoia at the realization that Zosia, or more precisely, the Others, blew the horn intentionally for Carol. Anxiety. Acceptance. Sure, it’s a conspiracy… But it is also nice.  This theme is repeated again in a different register in the diner that Carol and Zosia visit. This time, instead of a panoramic vista, it is a commercial vision of the American West. The Others have reconstructed from scratch a hyperreal simulacra of bourgeois possibility which is precious to Carol. A spectral diner every bit as dislocated as Hopper’s Nighthawks, but sunnier.  The warm sunlight filters through yellow drapes and glows on the peach blouse of a woman standing next to a pie display, apparently paying for their meal. Carol and Zosia seat themselves in an immaculate diner that appears to have been frozen in time from the early eighties. Two men sit alone at the breakfast bar, one is working on a crossword puzzle, and various couples are scattered among the booths. “I never thought I’d be here again.” Carol gushes as a wave of excited nostalgia carries us along to her early days writing Wycaro. Zosia watches Carol closely as she retrospects, “Would you tell us what you’re feeling? We’d be honored to share it with you.” Carol lapses into reverie, details her past practices of stealing office supplies to Zosia—not her present feelings. It's an amusing story, but not new. in a description which has almost certainly been rehearsed and performed before, for book tours, definitely for Helen, whose memories are part of the Joined. It is the story of a no longer conscious Carol and a story the Others already possess. As this scene plays out a thought occurs. The Others don't pay for their meals. The others can’t “do” a crossword puzzle. Not only is the Cruciverbalist formerly known as Will Shortz one of the Joined, and every fact available to the Others instantaneously, but most importantly, if one of the Others creates a puzzle, every one of them already knows every answer before they look at it. It’s like trying to tickle yourself.  Do the Others desire to make Carol happy? They say they want to and appear to make great efforts to do so, but their exact motivation is unclear. It would make Carol happy if they stopped trying to assimilate her, but that doesnt seem to be a possibility. They actually appear to desire to acquire Carol, access to her memories, her feelings. This is relational. The Others also seem to desire to build an antenna to broadcast the message of the joining to “share their gift with whoever else might be out there.” although they acknowledge that, like the other Others on Kepler 22b, they’ll “probably never learn the first thing about them. They’re too far away” (ep. 8) Desire is always relational and cross-temporal. It must be for an Other, which is why it is always relational. One can only desire what does not exist in the present which is why it is temporal and always across time. The subjective experiences and personal histories of the old schoolers are also a Gap, a terra nullius. They are an unknown that enables curiosity, desire, thrill of discovery. Each time the Others acquire, seize, possess an Old schooler, the gap is filled. It becomes unitary, therefore solitary, no longer relational, no longer temporal. The horizon draws closer. These horizonal possibilities of the Others will continue to shrink as each Old Schooler joins or dies.  Carol’s inassimilability is a prophylaxis against this totalitarian perfection and the production of a “zombie utopia”, but her queerness isn’t strictly a property of her individual personality, sexual identity, biology, or historical trauma. The intensity of queer resistance is not tied to or located within Carol as an individual. Once Carol believes she is safe from forced assimilation, she begins to accept the Others as a new status quo. When Carol feels safe from assimilation, and her interpersonal needs are being met by the Others, she is content with the novelty of global travel, romance with Zosia. Carol begins writing Wycaro again to the delight of the Others, and seems to be adjusting when the locus of Queer resistance flows to Manousos in the global south. Manousos has crossed the Darién Gap to complete his 4000 mile pilgrimage from Paraguay and arrive at Carol’s door.  # The Gap The Darién Gap is a sixty mile stretch of undeveloped rainforest within the isthmus that connects Colombia and Panama. It is a deterritorialized lacunae of more than 2000 square miles. There is no road that crosses it. It is populated by indigenous peoples, cartels, jaguars, crocodiles, fer-de-lance, overflowing rivers, swamps, mountains, and dense jungle, but to the colonizing mind is a persistent “blank space on the map” (Youkee). It is a terra nullius. It is ungovernable. The Gap is between Carol and Manousos. Manousos is across the gap, but in another way Manousos is in the gap, abjected from the others by his immunity. And in still another way Manousos is the gap, for the Others, Manousos embodies the unknown. Manousos was a surprise. “...his name is Manousos Oviedo. We weren’t aware of him for the first 33 hours. He manages a self-storage facility in Asunción. So far, he hasn’t really communicated with us” (ep. 3). Manousos is separate from the others in a non-relational way that Carol never was. Even during her forty days in the wilderness, a voicemail reminds Carol, “Our feelings for you haven’t changed, Carol. But after everything that’s happened, we just need a little space.” Manousos is a Greek name that means “manly.” The Spanish word mañoso means “handy” or “clever.” Manousos doesn't relate as much as he transacts. He is highly methodical but he is also buried alive. When we first see Manousos he is isolated. The sign outside says Espacio Unico, individual unit. The is still cruising. Clocking the airwaves on his radio, checking the frequencies with precision. Watching the flies to see what they are feeding on. Watching the Others from a gap in the wall. If the Others are the virtual Posthuman future, Manousos is burrowed in a preserved analog materialist technological past. His ham radio, mechanical timer, his perfect MGB, his phone, the signs printed on tractor feed paper. In isolation, Manousos doesn't resist; he only rejects. Turning over the food delivered to him. Surviving on scraps, condiments, and dog food, savoring the unsavory.  He does not transmit on his radio; he only monitors. Answering the phone, he only listens. Finally, once Carol speaks to him, he is briefly activated, engaged. Manousos speaks Carol’s language. “No me jodan más! ¡Déjenme en paz, putas.” Fortunately, Carol speaks a little spanish: “¡Chingada tu madre, Cabrón!” They have made a connection. Manousos is painfully straight, but also perpendicular. Manousos has maps. He has tools. He has English audio cassettes. He has a machete. He has money. When Carol learns from Diabate in episode six that the Others need her stem cells to convert her, and that they need her permission to collect those stem cells, she begins to believe that the threat to her right for unhappiness is over. You can see the relief move through her body and across her face. She is pacified. She loses a certain tension and she leaves Las Vegas. The next scene is Manousos monitoring the radio, checking the mysterious signal again, and then receiving the video cassette Carol made in episode . It has Carol’s return address. Learning there are other immune from Carol’s video cassettes, Manousos is mobilized and moves into the gap. # The Old Schoolers Although the Old Schoolers may be read as a plucky Queer resistance set against an invading empire, each individually resists simplistic reduction to a heroic figure of Queer disidentification.  They are not Queer Subjects, their Queerness is not the property of any of them individually. They are a Hap community.  “...the rules that govern social life are suspended… what it means to inhabit specific forms has not been decided. We would no longer be sure what it means to say: a family is this, a friend does this, a lover means this, and a life has this… If we don’t know what it means to be or to have this, then we have to work out and work through what it means. A revolution would not simply require that subjects be revolting; it would demand a revolution of the predicate, of what gets attached to the subjects of the sentence. The subjects would be plural, as the “we” is not only called on to make a decision about this but is created as an effect of this decision. Hap communities take shape in such moments of suspension, where a “we” is assembled by being thrown together, acquiring a sense of purpose in throwing the meanings of this into question.” (Ahmed, 2010, p. 191) The Old Schoolers figure a Queer Function.  The Old Schoolers: Carol, Manousos, Diabaté, Laxmi, and Kusimayu, each have unique relationships with the Others, and they have one thing in common. The Old Schoolers are subjects who literally cannot be assimilated into the dominant regime. They are subjects whose predicates are in revolt. The Old Schoolers, at least initially, are not self-selecting but apparently mutational lottery winners. Their immunity is not determined by choice, subjectivity, identity, orientation, class, race, gender, or any other factor, property, or positionality. They are each operating in a different self-interested or transactional way: Carol’s homonormativity and ambivalence, Diabaté’s decadence, Manouso's total abjection and drive to annihilation, Kusimayu’s assimilation, Laxmi’s denial. Their alliances form and dissolve a fluxive relational field. Queer function arises out of necessity within a larger assemblage that contains both the Old Schoolers and the Others. Although the instigating crisis of the series is called the joining, the alien RNA sequence more accurately enacts a division; what Karen Barad would call a cutting together, an agential cut that produces both phenomena: The Others and the Old Schoolers. Without the Old Schoolers, who are the Others other than? Neither group could exist without relation to the other.  Although the Old Schoolers figure the minoritarian discontinuity that prevents total systemic closure, their relationship with the arrival of the Others is not a conflictual interaction between competing visions, on the one hand a perfectly totalized posthuman future where everyone is an “Other”; and on the other—a future where the Old Schoolers “put the world right” by restoring the past. Instead the Others and the Old Schoolers are co-constitutive members of an assemblage that contains both, and a face where they meet, or a tension between them. This provides a map, or a Deleuzean diagram of queerness as a contingent function of relational orientation. It is relational because it cannot operate in total isolation, and because it is a discontinuity that occurs within an entangled field. In a more pragmatic sense, this irrupture takes the form of a subject whose abjection and alienation are structurally constitutive of the default temporal and spatial hierarchies of binary opposition that define human subjectivity in a narrowly reproductive society (one centering White. Hetero. Masculinity.) By reframing this assemblage from an interaction of conflict between the Others and the Old Schoolers, contesting whose ideal will be realized—to an intra-action between co-constitutive partners in creating a becoming-utopia, we can see Queerness as a production of difference within; a **lacunal discontinuity** that arises to maintain openness whenever an assemblage threatens to achieve monolithic totalization or systemic closure. Pluribus confirms Jackson’s critique and depicts minoritarian resistance as necessary for survival (to prevent systemic closure). The minoritarian resistance in pluribus is asubjective, nomadic, decoupled from queer/progressive politics and identity, but it is also only possible in relational terms. Carol’s traumatic past and feminist killjoy present do not effectively sustain her resistance when she is not in relationship with the Others, or with the other Old Schoolers. Resistance is not possible at the outer edge—the gap must be surrounded—entangled within the relational field that contains both sides of the binary. Manousos’ negativity confirms the value of Edelman’s anti-social refusal, but in isolation that refusal is irrelevant. Only once he is in relationship with Carol, and eventually in relationship with the Others is his reactionary, transactional, humanist Queer/Not Queer resistance meaningful. Pluribus suggests that Queerness doesn’t depend on hope or pessimism, affirmative or negative politics, these are still humanist binaries. Queerness cannot operate outside of a relational field but serves as a protective opening within the field. Queerness is a relational orientation of structural inassimilability, a category that cannot be selectively applied, granted, or withheld by the dominant system.  Ağın, Başak, and Güvenç Arman Arı. “Thinking-with Muñoz: A Posthuman Queer Ecological Cruise.” _Utopian Studies_, vol. 36, no. 1, 2025, pp. 182–203. Ahmed, Sara. “Killing Joy: Feminism and the History of Happiness.” _Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society_ [Chicago, IL], vol. 35, no. 3, 2010, pp. 571–94. _orbiscascade-washington.primo.exlibrisgroup.com_, [https://doi.org/10.1086/648513](https://doi.org/10.1086/648513). ———. _The promise of happiness_. Duke University Press, 2010. Barad, Karen. “Diffracting Diffraction: Cutting Together-Apart.” _Parallax (Leeds, England)_, vol. 20, no. 3, 2014, pp. 168–87. _orbiscascade-washington.primo.exlibrisgroup.com_, [https://doi.org/10.1080/13534645.2014.927623](https://doi.org/10.1080/13534645.2014.927623). Blanco-Fernández, Vítor. “Thinking the Future Otherwise: Queer Futures and Queer Utopias.” _Time & Society_, vol. 33, no. 4, Nov. 2024, pp. 438–60. _DOI.org (Crossref)_, [https://doi.org/10.1177/0961463X241258307](https://doi.org/10.1177/0961463X241258307). Braidotti, Rosi. “A Theoretical Framework for the Critical Posthumanities.” _Theory, Culture & Society_, vol. 36, no. 6, Nov. 2019, pp. 31–61. _DOI.org (Crossref)_, [https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276418771486](https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276418771486). ———. “Posthuman Critical Theory.” _Journal of Posthuman Studies_, vol. 1, no. 1, 2017, pp. 9–25. _orbiscascade-washington.primo.exlibrisgroup.com_, [https://doi.org/10.5325/jpoststud.1.1.0009](https://doi.org/10.5325/jpoststud.1.1.0009). ———. _Rosi Braidotti: “The Concept of Human Has Always Been Associated with Relations of Power.”_ 2022, [https://youtu.be/mb2_a-UX1OE?si=dzoSMKXeBMafJT_v](https://youtu.be/mb2_a-UX1OE?si=dzoSMKXeBMafJT_v). ———. _The Posthuman_. Polity Press, 2013. _ProQuest Ebook Central_, [http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/washington/detail.action?docID=1315633](http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/washington/detail.action?docID=1315633). “Carol - Etymology, Origin & Meaning.” _Etymonline_, [https://www.etymonline.com/word/carol](https://www.etymonline.com/word/carol). Accessed 12 Mar. 2026. Fisher, Mark. _Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures_. Zero Books, 2014. Ginaya, Gede. “The Balinese Calendar System: From Its Epistemological Perspective to Axiological Practices.” _International Journal of Linguistics, Literature, and Culture_, Jan. 2018. _ResearchGate_, [https://doi.org/10.21744/ijllc.v4i3.671](https://doi.org/10.21744/ijllc.v4i3.671). IPAK Centar. _Interview with Prof Lee Edelman_. 2015. _YouTube_, [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NjTDLyKP2p0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NjTDLyKP2p0). Jackson, Zakiyyah Iman. _Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World_. NYU Press, 2020. _JSTOR_, [https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv1n6ptnn](https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv1n6ptnn). ———. _Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Loophole of Retreat: Venice_. 2023, [https://youtu.be/331n2m7oanM?si=-JMtzASoXMEbp7go](https://youtu.be/331n2m7oanM?si=-JMtzASoXMEbp7go). Kilgore, De Witt Douglas. _Queering the Coming Race? A Utopian Historical Imperative_. [https://orbiscascade-washington.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/discovery/fulldisplay/alma99161863581501452/01ALLIANCE_UW:UW](https://orbiscascade-washington.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/discovery/fulldisplay/alma99161863581501452/01ALLIANCE_UW:UW). Accessed 7 Jan. 2026. ———. “Queering the Coming Race? A Utopian Historical Imperative.” _Queer Universes_, 2017, pp. 233–51. McCaleb, Chris. “Pluribus: The Official Podcast.” _Apple Podcasts_, Apple TV, 6 Nov. 2025, [https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/pluribus-the-official-podcast/id1846198705](https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/pluribus-the-official-podcast/id1846198705). Muñoz, José. _Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity_. 1st ed., NYU Press, 2009. Sexual Cultures. Muñoz, José Esteban. _Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics_. University of Minnesota Press, 1999. Cultural Studies of the Americas ; Volume 2. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. _Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity_. Duke University Press, 2003. _read-dukeupress-edu.offcampus.lib.washington.edu_, [https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822384786](https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822384786). Shanfeld, Ethan. _“Pluribus” Explained by Vince Gilligan and Rhea Seehorn_. [https://variety.com/2025/tv/news/pluribus-explained-vince-gilligan-rhea-seehorn-1236571666/](https://variety.com/2025/tv/news/pluribus-explained-vince-gilligan-rhea-seehorn-1236571666/). Accessed 9 Mar. 2026. UMBCtube. _Sara Ahmed: Dresher Conversations_. 2019. _YouTube_, [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zadqi8Pn0O0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zadqi8Pn0O0).