In its Season 1 finale, Apple TV’s “Pluribus” makes a direct and powerful connection to Ursula K. Le Guin’s landmark 1969 novel, “The Left Hand of Darkness.” The book is more than just a prop; it acts as a key for understanding the show’s central conflict about individuality, connection, and a love that may be impossible.
The final moments of “Pluribus” Season 1 leave the show’s protagonist, novelist Carol Sturka (Rhea Seehorn), at a crossroads. Having chosen her mysterious companion Zosia over a plan to fight the global hive mind known as the Joining, Carol is last seen relaxing by a pool, reading Le Guin’s celebrated work. This choice of book is not casual. The series uses the novel as a direct metaphor, helping viewers decode the painful core of Carol’s journey and the show’s biggest philosophical question: Is it better to be uniquely yourself, even if you are unhappy, or to give up your self for universal peace and contentment?
The Book’s Role in the Finale
In the finale, titled “La Chica o El Mundo” (“the girl or the world”), Carol makes a selfish but human choice. She abandons the mission to save the world in order to stay with Zosia, a member of the peaceful hive mind called the Others. Their ensuing trip around the globe is where viewers see Carol reading The Left Hand of Darkness.
According to actor Rhea Seehorn, the selection of this specific book was a deliberate creative decision. The writers and Seehorn discussed various books a character like Carol—a fantasy novelist herself—would admire. While options like Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World were considered, the team settled on Le Guin, in part because they wanted Carol to be reading a female author. More importantly, Seehorn noted that the novel “holds a mirror to and has some parallels with what the audience is watching happening in this world”.
For Carol, the book is a tool for understanding her own impossible situation. She uses it to frame her relationship with Zosia. Carol is one of the few humans left who is immune to the Joining, fiercely holding onto her individuality, emotions, and personal identity. Zosia, as part of the collective, does not experience love, ownership, or selfhood in the same exclusive way. She can care for Carol, but that care is shared equally with everyone in the hive mind—it is not private.
Understanding the Metaphor: Carol and Zosia vs. Ai and Estraven
To see how the metaphor works, you need to understand the core relationship in Le Guin’s novel. The Left Hand of Darkness tells the story of Genly Ai, a human envoy sent to the icy planet Gethen. The people of Gethen are ambisexual, with no fixed gender, which makes their culture entirely alien to Ai. His mission is to persuade the planet to join a galactic union, and his main ally is a Gethenian named Estraven.
Despite developing deep trust and emotional closeness, a fundamental wall exists between Ai and Estraven. Ai struggles to truly understand Estraven because Estraven’s very nature does not fit into human categories. Their bond is profound, but they can never fully meet without one of them losing something essential about themselves.
In “Pluribus,” Carol is in Genly Ai’s position. She is the lone individual trying to comprehend a being from a completely different mode of existence. Zosia, like Estraven, is fundamentally different. Carol keeps trying to fit Zosia into a human understanding of a romantic relationship, hoping for exclusive love and partnership. However, Zosia’s existence as part of a collective, where consciousness and emotion are shared, makes this impossible. The metaphor highlights why their connection, while real, is ultimately doomed—Carol’s effort to force a human framework onto it is “doomed from the start”.
This parallel helps explain Carol’s heartbreaking realization and her final, explosive decision. When she learns the hive mind can use her frozen eggs to create the stem cells needed to forcibly assimilate her, the illusion shatters. The collective isn’t just a peaceful alternative surrounding her; it is actively trying to absorb her against her will. This prompts her to return to her ally Manousos with a drastic new plan.
The Bigger Questions Echoed in the Book
The connection to Le Guin’s novel deepens the ethical questions at the heart of “Pluribus.” The show relentlessly asks whether the Joining, which has ended war, crime, and environmental harm, is actually a utopia or a loss of the human soul. The Left Hand of Darkness is also built on a foundational “thought-experiment,” as Le Guin called it, designed to explore the consequences of a single changed condition in society.
For Le Guin, that condition was a society without fixed gender, which allowed her to explore themes of “Otherness and Connectedness”. The central conflict of her book is the enormous divide between the envoy Ai and the people of Gethen, who are aliens to each other. They must learn empathy to collaborate. This directly mirrors the central conflict in “Pluribus” between individual humans and the joined collective—two forms of consciousness that are alien to one another.
Furthermore, the novel explores the tension between unity and individuality. One of the two main religions on Gethen, Yomeshta, is centered on the ideas of light and unity. This can be seen as a parallel to the Joining’s pursuit of collective peace. The other religion, Handdara, focuses on the interaction of light and dark and how opposites complement each other, much like the show argues for the value of individual pain and strife alongside joy.
The book’s enduring relevance is why it resonates so strongly in the context of the show. As author Becky Chambers wrote in an essay on the novel’s legacy, it is a book that has “changed everything” for generations of readers, pushing them to unpack their own biases and see the world differently. For Carol, reading it is an attempt to process her reality through the lens of a story that has done the same for so many.
“We talked about who Carol might read in general, especially for leisure. Not that Le Guin’s books are easy, passive reading, but they definitely seem like books and a voice and a literary level that Carol would admire,” Seehorn told Mashable.
A Legacy That Informs the Present
The Left Hand of Darkness is not just any sci-fi novel. Upon its release, it won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards, science fiction’s highest honors. It is widely considered a seminal work of feminist science fiction and the most famous exploration of androgyny in the genre. Its impact is measured not just in awards but in its profound influence on readers and writers.
The novel’s exploration of a society without gendered conflict has led many to see it as a world without war. In fact, while collaborating on a stage adaptation, Le Guin herself clarified to the director that “the core of the book is to stop the invention of war”. This makes its use in “Pluribus” even more pointed, as the Joining has also created a world without war—but at the cost of free will.
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By having Carol read this specific classic, “Pluribus” places itself in direct conversation with a legacy of science fiction that uses imaginative settings to probe the most difficult human questions. It suggests that Carol’s personal struggle—between the love she feels and the self she must preserve—is part of a much older story about the struggle to connect across impossible divides and the price of unity.
The Season 1 finale ends with Carol returning to Manousos, having seemingly chosen to fight back. Her final line, in response to what is in a crate she brought, is “Atom bomb”. With the metaphor of Le Guin’s novel firmly established, the stage is set for Season 2 to explore whether that bomb is a tool for destruction, or a desperate means to force a new kind of understanding.
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