Apple TV’s hit series Pluribus wrapped up its debut season with a massive twist. The show’s finale, which aired on December 23, 2025, delivered on a darkly funny promise made earlier in the season, changing everything for the main characters and setting the stage for a major conflict.
At the very end of the episode, Carol Sturka returns to her home in Albuquerque and tells her reluctant partner, Manousos, “You win. We save the world”. When he asks about the large metal crate just delivered to her driveway, she gives a two-word answer: “Atom bomb”. This shocking moment pays off a joke from the show’s third episode, transforming it into a very real and dangerous tool for the story’s future.
The setup for this ending happened back in Pluribus’s third episode, titled “Grenade.” In that installment, Carol—frustrated and testing the limits of the hive mind’s patience—asked a direct question: if she wanted one, would the “Others” give her an atomic bomb.
Their response was both chilling and perfectly in character for the hive. An Other, speaking for the collective, told her, “Ultimately… yes… Wouldn’t necessarily feel good about it. But we would move heaven and earth to make you happy, Carol”. At the time, this exchange was a morbidly comic highlight, showcasing the Others’ twisted priority of ensuring human happiness at any cost. Carol left the request open-ended, saying she would have to get back to them. Viewers learned in the finale that she finally did.
The finale, written by Alison Tatlock and Gordon Smith and titled “La Chica o El Mundo” (The Girl or The World), forces Carol to live up to that name. The episode focuses on the long-awaited and tense meeting between Carol and Manousos Oviedo, the other remaining human fiercely dedicated to reversing the Joining.
Their partnership gets off to a rocky start, complicated by a language barrier and Carol’s changed loyalties. Having grown isolated and then intimate with her hive-mind chaperone, Zosia, Carol is no longer the rebellious figure Manousos saw in her video message. She defends the Others, while Manousos declares them evil. Their ideological clash plays out in a series of frustrated conversations, sometimes relying on a translation app on Carol’s phone.
“They are not human,” says Manousos. “They are still human,” says Carol.
Manousos, however, is determined. He uses his meeting with Zosia to learn everything about Carol’s situation. He then conducts a radical experiment, attempting to use a mysterious radio frequency he discovered earlier in the season to disrupt the hive-mind connection and potentially restore an individual’s consciousness. Horrified by his methods, Carol stops him with a shotgun blast.
Faced with a direct question from Manousos, Carol makes her choice. “Do you want to save the world or get the girl?” he asks. Carol chooses Zosia, driving away with her for a dream-like global vacation.
Carol’s romantic escape is shattered by a devastating discovery. In a quiet moment, Zosia mentions that her happiness will only get better. This prompts Carol to realize the truth: the Others have found a way to turn her without needing her direct consent.
Carol remembers she froze her eggs years earlier with her late wife, Helen. The Others have obtained those eggs and are working to derive the stem cells they need from them. A line from the third episode, where Carol joked about her frozen eggs, was actually a major clue planted by the writers. Zosia confirms they are working on the process and that Carol has only one to three months before they succeed.
For actor Rhea Seehorn, reading this twist in the script was a visceral experience. “It’s horrible. It gave me a pit in my stomach, and then when the answer comes out, I wanted to throw up,” Seehorn said. She described it as “the worst betrayal ever,” especially because it comes from Zosia.
This betrayal shatters Carol’s illusion. She realizes that her relationship with Zosia, and the happiness she felt, was part of a strategy to assimilate her. The Others’ biological imperative to spread their consciousness overrides everything, including individual love.
While Carol is on her trip, the finale shows Manousos hasn’t given up. Back in Albuquerque, he is studying intensely, surrounded by library books on electromagnetic fields, crystallography, and standing waves. His goal is to understand the radio frequency he discovered, which is 8613.0 kHz.
His earlier experiment suggested this frequency is key to the Others’ hive-mind connection, which Zosia previously described as functioning like an unconscious, homeostatic radio transmission. Manousos believes that by disrupting this signal, he might be able to “put things back in their place” and reverse the Joining. Fans have noted that this frequency is visually hinted at in the show’s opening title sequence.
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The final scene brings all these threads together. A helicopter drops Carol off at her home, along with a large crate. She wordlessly says goodbye to Zosia, who pilots the aircraft. Carol approaches Manousos, who has been studying outside, and tells him he has won.
When a confused Manousos points to the crate and asks what it is, Carol’s simple reply—“Atom bomb”—brings her old joke to a startling, concrete conclusion. The season ends with Chantal Claret’s song “Conquistadora” playing over the credits.
The big question now is what Carol plans to do with it. The show’s writers have admitted they placed this “Chekhov’s gun” on the mantle without a fully formed plan for its use. Alison Tatlock, one of the finale’s writers, joked, “I feel like future Alison might be a little mad right now… It really felt like an exciting big swing statement… But that did not mean in any way that we had a specific plan”.
Potential theories include using the bomb as a deterrent to stop her own conversion, destroying a giant antenna the Others are building, or as a last-resort threat against the collective. Its presence also symbolizes Carol’s total break from the hive and her commitment to a fight where she now holds unimaginable power.
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