What is the meaning of collective intelligence? For many? So far, the show hasn't given much of an answer other than a simple “Hivemind is good.” Meanwhile, protagonist Carol Sturka (Rhee Seehorn) is far more interested in undoing the Connection than she is in figuring out why it happened in the first place.
As if we shouldn't care about the ultimate goal of hivemind – if there is one at all. (Gilligan also has confirmed he doesn't know exactly where the show will ultimately go, so perhaps he's deliberately leaving things vague.) However, one detail from For many Episode 6 made me think that the series finale might be a lot darker than I ever imagined…
[Ed. note: Spoilers ahead for Pluribus episode 6.]
To quickly summarize some For manyRecent Shocking Revelations: At the end of episode five, Carol discovers that the hivemind is storing the corpses of dead people in a factory where they are being processed and consumed. In episode 6, she relays information to her fellow non-hivemind survivors, only to find out that they already know. It turns out that the hive mind is so peaceful that it cannot even harvest fruits, vegetables or grains, let alone kill animals. So they began to eat whatever sources of nutrients were already available to them, including the estimated 900 million people who died during the chaos of the initial mass Annexation.
This news comes with another twist: even with all these corpses on the menu, most of the hivemind will still starve to death within a decade if they can't find a solution. (Isn't lab-grown meat an option?)
This seems like a huge omission! After all, if some alien intelligence created a hive mind in the first place and then spread its recipe throughout the universe, shouldn't they have taken the whole famine problem into account? Why distribute a hive mind program if it will destroy everyone who receives it?
Unless that was the goal from the start…
Think about it. What is In general, what is the meaning of collective intelligence? Perhaps the recipe for collective intelligence is not a gift from space at all, but a weapon. Perhaps some alien species decided that humanity was a threat to the rest of the universe and decided to do something about it. Turning humanity into a hivemind that starves itself is a pretty clever way to do it.
To be honest, there are some holes in my theory. Firstly, not all the inhabitants of the Earth will die, but only “most” of humanity. It is also possible that the alien hive mind behind the original signal does not even consider non-hive minds to be intelligent, meaning it will not care what happens to humanity. Or that the goal is not to destroy humanity, but to save dolphins or some other endangered species. And even if this theory is true, what happens next? A full-scale invasion of Earth? Or will the aliens move on to their next target, leaving the surviving humans to make their own way?
A better point of comparison here might be another science fiction story: Three body problemtrilogy of books written by Liu Cixin and adapted into a Netflix series To Game of Thrones showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss. In the second book, Dark forestHumanity realizes that the Universe is actually full of intelligent civilizations that are constantly hiding from each other and trying to destroy each other. This theory, also called the Dark Forest, helps explain why alien life has never visited Earth.
In the books, the Dark Forest theory is ultimately used as a means to deter an alien invasion; A weaponized device threatens to reveal the location of both of their home planets to the entire universe unless the invaders retreat for good. However, when this device eventually goes off in a last-ditch attempt to save Earth, it ultimately dooms humanity, leading to our destruction by a third unnamed extraterrestrial civilization that sends a weapon to destroy us many years later.
This is what happens in For many? This may seem like an exaggeration, but at this point the Dark Forest theory makes as much sense to me as any other explanation for the ultimate purpose of hivemind.
For many Episodes 1–6 stream on Apple TV. New episodes are released weekly every Friday.
