Spoiler alert, the new Apple TV Show Pluribus gets another mention in a year-end edition of The Editors that is forthcoming.

I just want to point out that last week’s episode, “Charm Offensive,” was every bit as cleverly constructed as “The Gap” before it. The vast majority of the episode focuses on Carol’s relationship with the Others through Zosia. Carol learns more about how they are living in the city, how their telepathic communication works, but also how their method of saying “yes” to her requests and offering her pleasure is manipulative in the extreme. The virus that infected the Others didn’t just render them pacifists, but expert appeasers. They recreated in Albuquerque a diner that Carol loved, and not only that, but they brought back an older woman — now just another body in the hive mind — from Miami to New Mexico, just so she could fill out the passing, pleasing nostalgia tour. But, finally, having been fed too much of this sweetness, Carol recoils in disgust. Carol stands up and says, “You know I’m not going to give up?” on reversing the joining of humanity. They do.

In every way, those scenes played out like a blossoming friendship and romance. But in a crucial way, it was exactly analogous to the opening scene of the episode, which played out like an act-break in a thriller. Down in Panama, we see Manousos waking up in a hospital. A friendly doctor — one of the Others — welcomes him back to consciousness and explains that the antibiotics are having their effect on his nearly fatal infection, but that he will need a few weeks’ rest. Manousos sees a sharp medical implement within reach. Jump cut to Manousos holding his healer hostage, demanding a bill for the medical services. The others explain to him that they’ve instituted a non-exchange economy. He insists they bill him as if they were humans, and they give him one before he hijacks an ambulance that he can now drive through Central America, Mexico, and into the United States. Manousos treated his situation as a kidnapping and used the force of his will to escape.

But Carol, too, seems to understand that the Others’ appeasement is, in its way, a hostile act, a way of trying to take her into possession via seduction and softening. She sees no way through but to partly give in.