Spoilers ahead.
The final episode of the first season, “La Chica O El Mundo” (“The Girl or the World”), opens with a focus on Kusimayu (Darinka Arones), the young girl who remained “unjoined” but who expressed the wish for it in episode 2. The hive has, with her consent, taken her stem cells and synthesized a version of the substance that will work on her specifically. She is in her native dress, in her remote Peruvian native village, surrounded by the language and ritual life of her people. As the canister is brought to her, her community sings what appear to be traditional songs. She inhales, has the spasmodic reaction, and then emerges with that big, dumb, euphoric smile of the hive. Immediately, the songs cease. The animal pens are opened. Now that she has been seduced, her people are vacating the village to do the hive’s more important work: processing the dead for consumption, building a giant antenna, whatever. It was a Potemkin village. It was an empty performance.
I found this to be the most chilling scene ever put on television, and I couldn’t stop thinking about it. It was also a perfect foreshadowing of what was coming for Carol Sturka. Finally, Manousos makes it to New Mexico, hoping to join the human resistance that Carol called for several episodes ago. But Carol is now in the position she criticized in others in episode 2. She has made a private peace, a separate bargain with this new order. She ends up choosing her fantasy of romance with Zosia over saving the world. And worse, she falls exactly to her own level of condemnation, enjoying the precise adult-theme-park-like pleasures she abjured earlier. Until it’s revealed as a ruse.
Some viewers may dislike this season. But I appreciate, once again, the moral realism. Carol has a noble purpose at the beginning. But she lacks the virtues — the sobriety, the emotional fortitude — to endure in it. And that’s what a lot of viewers have disliked about the show. Carol just isn’t who we want as our representative of humanity. But, as with all of Vince Gilligan’s shows, something in the protagonist must change.