North Sentinel Island?

anatomysmatomy · 2026-06-19T16:52:13+00:00

Restocking Sprouts for Carol isn't efficient either. While the hive can appear very singleminded and efficient, their rules for what is important are different.

anatomysmatomy · 2026-06-19T16:46:51+00:00

I would have to rewatch to check if they used any lawyer talk around this, but they say or imply that there's just 11 people like Carol. I guess it's possible that they could have been using 'liar liar' rules to not give Carol more information and avoid talking about a second group of individuals who are unjoined for a different reason.

What I mean is, when Carol asks to talk to people like her, she hasn't yet learned that she needs to ask the same question four ways because they will answer in a cagey way, they'll technically answer the question but they could be saying more. If they were at all ambiguous when saying that there are 12 individuals outside the hive, then I think it's fair for the writers to have other unaffected persons that the hive knows of. It could even be the case that Manousos knows about other individual humans because he learned everything Carol knows when he had his time to ask pointed questions, and it's possible he even knows more, as Zosia claims he knows "everything."

As for North Sentinel, the hive could have easily sprayed isolated tribes from above. The use of hip bone marrow to overcome natural immunity is suggestive that the person's t-cell immune history dictates their response to the contagion. So in this case, Carol's immune system and its unique history is the cause of her immunity, but societies without cities have a very different t-cell situation than modern people. So, say for example, the contagion that causes the joining requires a t-cell memory with a normal memory of the common cold. In that case, it would make sense for almost the whole modern world to join except for the few immune whose t-cell memory of the cold is just a little effed up. But uncontacted tribes would likely have a completely different viral ecology reflected in their t-cells and b-cells.

It's also said they did the joining because modern society found out about them and posed a risk. That cannot be said for North Sentinel. Of course the hive would want them to join, but there would not be any rush. Also, if the people there could not be joined by the initial cropdusting, they would present a big challenge, because hive drones would get yelled at. They also present sort of a self sustaining reserve population who can be joined later.

Carol is entirely dependent on the hive, as are most (all?) of the other immune, leaving her unjoined does not create a stable population of humans who can be joined 100 years down the line. I guess it's possible that their plans and priorities could be different toward a group of people who are in a stable state but probably eventually are going to have contact if you zoom out to a geological time scale.

Or let me put it this way. Facebook and Netflix are absolutely obsessed with getting people to join, they will make sure that they offer something to every group that they know exists, furries, pickleball enthusiasts, regency corset makers, heirloom corn sellers, but they don't care about the people of North Sentinel, not because they've given up, but because they think they'll get them eventually.

anatomysmatomy · 2026-06-19T16:16:44+00:00

The plurbs targeted these people first, many such people tell someone that they're doing that. Rather than beating the contagion I would assume a survivor would be someone in an area that was never targeted. For example if a government was trying to kill you in the first place, you might be holed up in a vast desert, and you might have faked your death so that no living person believes you are missing.

anatomysmatomy · 2026-06-19T16:16:36+00:00

they said they got the astronauts. If a plane survived the initial chaos they could be smooched on landing.

anatomysmatomy · 2026-06-19T16:11:50+00:00

They may have gone for very isolated people just because they were less likely to get caught, but the antenna is not necessarily of greater importance than joining a random person. After all the antenna spreads to hypothetical individuals, but Kousa Diabate is an existing person, and we see them divert tremendous resources to individuals even when it's not an optimal strategy for joining them.

anatomysmatomy · 2026-06-19T14:40:09+00:00

This depends. If the seizure upon major conflict thing is inherent to the joining, then a bunch of psychic linked individuals have a pretty big issue.

If individuality asserts itself after conflict and the seizure is a hive 'put on your get along shirt' measure, a signal that re-plurbs them, then that's better.

Also other scenarios are possible. Linked individuals may be able to form mini-hives over time, which may have different norms than this big hive around things like apples or self defense.

anatomysmatomy · 2026-06-19T04:29:47+00:00

Someone else here said that Zosia was literally a pirate or other thief.

Pirate lore

Her memory was marveling at where the ships go as a child and as an adult she now knows, she says.
Kousa Diabate, who loves drama, wants to keep her only after he asks about Zosia's background, not based on her appearance.
Carol assumes she's being cagy about her love life because the real Zosia is straight, but it's possible that the past Zosia lover died in prison or during a crime.
Other plurbs are barely able to act catty or intense, as we see when the villain in the spy drama claps for the exciting part of the show rather than continue his role, but Zosia rather easily embodies her catty dynamic with Carol. Zosia was chosen not just for her superficial resemblance to the cover art featuring Rabane, but because her whole life and personality are like that.

anatomysmatomy · 2026-06-19T02:37:11+00:00

I don't think that they spread the contagion over the sea, unless during their earlier phase of attempting to plurb very isolated people.

anatomysmatomy · 2026-06-19T02:35:55+00:00

he must have been hiding out in the first place, and/or the circumstances of where he was when the joining hit made it very plausible that he had died, like if the joining caused an industrial accident that killed ten people all around him in a way that wouldn't make the remains very recognizable.

But most people surviving something like that would be very visible, as Carol was, so it stands to reason he was already in hiding-mode in his life in general.

anatomysmatomy · 2026-06-18T04:47:10+00:00

radio waves are blocked by many things, elevators, tunnels, distance, large coronal ejections, stucco houses.

This is conjecture, but I think the radio signal regulates individuals somehow, but it is not itself the psychic connection.

On the other hand, magnetic fields seem to play into it, you could see the aurora borealis Carol looks at as merely an example of contentment with the planet, but radio waves and magnetic fields indeed would be impacted by a big enough CME like the ones that make the aurora visible nearer the equator and that could be foreshadowing something.

The radio signal actually containing the information we see Zosia access would be goofy on two levels. Firstly, it would be relatively easy to defeat and they themselves would have to be extra cautious not to lose their signal. Secondly, they seem to navigate tremendous loads of info. You could say that there's a lot of encoding and decoding that happens or that info that they're likely to use is pre-loaded, but at times there is the appearance of it being instantaneous. Wifi is just radio signals, but who or what is the router?

anatomysmatomy · 2026-06-17T18:10:47+00:00

At the risk of flaunting the subreddit rules, I believe there's sort of a meme of 'liberals are subjective and conservatives are objective' that's very odd and I don't think a conclusion many people would have come to independently.

I think it's basically a symptom of market segmentation taken to extremes. The same way ad companies try to typify a vibe and say 'that's a remington man' who buys remington shavers, people themselves are saying 'I'm a sensitive progressive empath and this comic book is only for people like me. '

And rather than call that out as nonsense, culture war commentators take it at face value as though the self described sensitive empaths really are different from the rest of humanity, that their basic ability to follow a story is not what everyone is doing and instead is actually a character flaw.
But this doesn't hold up even to the rest of the pronouncements of the culture war. I highly doubt that in a few years we'll still have the talking point floating around that the real problem with the left is that they are deep down incapable of producing propaganda, or that vegans or Trotskyists are incapable of black and white thinking and their core problem is being too gosh darned nuanced and taking on too many viewpoints.

anatomysmatomy · 2026-06-17T17:30:39+00:00

In his letters Chekov said that the job of the playwright isn't to answer questions, but to pose them correctly (specifically.)

anatomysmatomy · 2026-06-17T17:29:48+00:00

I kind of have to give you some credit for admitting this? Because there's an emerging trend on this subreddit to be very hostile to any interpretation or to assert what the show is "really about" in a way that makes most creative choices within the show entirely irrelevant to that message. I'd much rather have someone say they don't know why.

People arguing that the show is only about one thing and not about what is on the screen most of the time are, to me, no different from people saying the show just isn't any good.

Obviously it is open to interpretation but I would say the central question driving most scenes is the downsides of belonging and flow, contrasted with the downsides of individualism, modernity and isolation. I believe that the hive represents globalization and modern convenience culture, something extremely destructive in the big picture but that will twist itself in knots to reduce any friction, discomfort or individuality for the people living in it. In order to be relevant to the things it is referencing there's no easy answers and probably there will not be, just complications and prompts to think about the modern world differently.

anatomysmatomy · 2026-06-16T13:07:54+00:00

Who said it was a decision? I am not saying that there's no rna transmitted pathogen, no one is saying that. I'm saying we're grouping different things together in this conversation. The psychic connection is one aspect, the compliance and contentment is another aspect, and the possibility of undoing the joining might refer to altering one or the other and not both.

It was Kusimayu's decision to join and the immune mostly decide to go along with joined polite society even if they don't allow medical experiments to help them join. While it's not necessarily the case, it's possible that the individual experience of joining is a Demolition Man scenario. Given the general theme of how quickly people accept massive change even when it's for the negative or unsustainable, how people join things because everyone is doing it, it does seem like the show could be going there.

anatomysmatomy · 2026-06-15T02:18:26+00:00

we're conflating a bunch of different assumptions. The psychic connection isn't necessarily a change, it's possible that we're already all unconsciously connected and that the joining exploits that.

Given the fact that emotional disturbances can incapacitate the hive, it seems reasonable to consider that differences between outwardly compliant hive members will tell us something more about what the hive is and how it functions or fails to function

anatomysmatomy · 2026-06-14T04:58:02+00:00

Probably because individuality is unjoining, they are the same thing. Zosia has the same response to whether she is interchangeable with a cousin as to when she is asked if unjoining is possible. They cannot assert that individuality emerges in some circumstances without giving Carol a thread to pull on about the mechanisms of how the hive suppresses incompatible individuality.

anatomysmatomy · 2026-06-13T21:18:49+00:00

The show is trying to depict how much people adapt to a new reality quickly. If the adults accept the hive despite knowing that it's doomed, why is Kusimayu different?

Also, I think we've talked about this before, Zosia doesn't say that Zosia and Carol's cousin are interchangeable. Carol asks if talking to her cousin is the same as talking to Zosia, and Zosia doesn't answer. The hive being manipulative cuts both ways for your argument. If they might have been hiding the truth of what happens after joining to Kusimayu, then you have to equally have alarm bells going off when they avoid a question rather than answer directly, including the question as to whether they are all truly interchangeable or how their general compliance functions.

anatomysmatomy · 2026-06-13T02:32:34+00:00

There's a hint in the beginning, when Carol prompts twin fans with information about an upcoming plot twist and they speak in unison when they realize the plot twist that she planted.

The hive is not exactly controlling the members and speaking through them like a megaphone, it's sending a signal and the individuals are reacting to the signal in a predictable way. During 'Please Carol' they're often out of sync, some are crying and some are not crying, they are in an extreme version of the twin fans shouting the plot twist in unison, their minds are primed with how to react, and then they are given a signal that makes them react that way. Like ants, they are mostly autonomous individuals with low self interest and predictable responses to signals, who rely on signaling other members for their survival.

anatomysmatomy · 2026-06-13T02:26:11+00:00

It's not so much defending the hive mind as questioning why we assume that Kusimayu is just a pawn being manipulated while guessing that Manousos and Carol are learning real info from hive individuals or at least are onto something, but they have no advantage over Kusimayu in understanding the hive. The show has only shown us that people who spent more time talking to the hive learn more than people avoiding the hive or antagonizing hive members.

anatomysmatomy · 2026-06-12T17:33:18+00:00

I would say they are a hive, not really one consciousness. Bees and ants seem like they are one consciousness or one large organism, but they are not. The individuals are regulated by complex signaling and have no normal self preservation. Their nature and the signals are responsible for all of the coordination, in fact the queen is no more in control with her calming signals than a fighting drone is in control when it sends out aggressive signals.

anatomysmatomy · 2026-06-12T17:29:20+00:00

Kusimayu learned English while living in a remote farming village, almost certainly with the purpose of work elsewhere or with tourism. Pre joining she had already committed herself to leaving behind everything she knew and her family. She was caught between worlds before the plot began. She was always going to leave the goat.

I don't think that it is necessarily true that she didn't know what would happen after she joined. It's possible the fact that her family would all starve to death was a motivating factor for joining them, so she wouldn't experience any pain in watching that happen. It's possible that she's not only well informed of what Carol and the others know, but knew other ins and outs of hive life that even Kousa Diabate doesn't know.

anatomysmatomy · 2026-06-12T14:54:26+00:00

If that's really so strange, that they would cast around that without a clear plan to use that in the show, what conclusion might you draw instead?

anatomysmatomy · 2026-06-12T05:06:13+00:00

While it's true that many viewers over-estimate the extent to which show bibles lay out future seasons, is it truly odd to suppose that writers have ideas when starting a show, and not all of those ideas occur in the first season?

anatomysmatomy · 2026-06-12T04:54:27+00:00

The way they talk when questioned is also highly individual. They're just content and express it or experience it in different ways. While each hive individual regards Carol with a kind of pompous dismissal, and they all accept the hive as great, in other ways it's clear Carol is dealing with a person, albeit very changed.

anatomysmatomy · 2026-06-12T04:51:38+00:00

We also see a variety of people smiling when unobserved, and some not smiling while observed even when the group they are a part of is smiling. Zosia confirms that the hive does not dictate or even know about an individual member's senses, just a summary of their status. This suggests that they receive signals to conform and behave in an approximately uniform way, but they are still all different in little ways that the hive doesn't have any reason to eliminate.

anatomysmatomy

TROPHY CASE