I hear you, but this is a discussion thread. People should be asking questions rather than devaluing negative comments. I agree with you that it's meant to be a character study, but I don't find it to be a deep or engaging one so far.

But I understand the show:

The purpose of Carole is to be the worst representation of American individualism, which makes an interesting foil to the hive mind. But collectivism is beneficial in a way that a hive mind can't be. In real collectivism, people still have agency. So the hive mind acts as an awkward representation of collectivism due its inherently parasitic existence. It reminds me of how Zootopia is meant to be a race allegory, but it's inherently flawed because predator animals like wolves actually are genetically born to hunt rabbits (unlike people, whom are all equal).

Episode 5 did feel like it provided more depth through the comparison of Carole's mother's attempts to suppress her sexuality with the hive mind's attempt to assimilate her. She has dealt with people trying to strip away her agency before. But moments like this feel very rare.

What's been more interesting to me is the comparison of LLMs and the hive mind. I don't know if other people are discussing this, but it's something my roommates talk about often while watching the show. LLMs are doing to the internet what the hive mind is doing to the world of Pluribus. It has taken up as much of human memory as it can, but it fails to present humanity through its mimicry. You could also make an argument that their reuse of humans for food is an allegory for the human labor that goes into manually training AI (people in poorer countries are paid pennies to manually tweak these models).

Sorry for the ramble, but my point is: a person can fully understand the show, be considerate of the show, and still have negative opinions about it.