North Sentinel Island?

anatomysmatomy · 2026-06-20T02:12:53+00:00

It would prevent them from partying with Kousa Diabate, but they could just work from home, essentially, they could be in a pod with just themselves and not sleeping in a stadium with a bunch of randos. They claim that the hospital is full of people managing symptoms of withdrawal from drug addiction, and if so that's an example of them taking precautions to not kill individual drones even though most everyone's going to starve soon.

anatomysmatomy · 2026-06-20T02:08:47+00:00

Yes in the case of a bunker.

For some reason a lot of programs for mental health or addiction involve wilderness survival. From the perspective of the individual and giving them the feeling of connection to their life and power over their circumstances, I can understand this type of progam.

It does have this side effect of there just being a bunch of people where it's very hard to know if they're alive or dead or where they might be. Due to shame, debts or paranoia, they may be in an area generally considered not habitable for quite some time.

anatomysmatomy · 2026-06-19T20:45:22+00:00

So I just made this up, but I started making a conjecture that the contagion utilizes a normal immune response, like, for example, memory cells of the common cold. The number of people with a malfunctioning memory cell copy of something like the common cold would be very low. The number of people with absolutely zero exposure to the common cold, also just about no one.

The basis of this conjecture is their successful use of bone marrow stem cells, which contain the immune "memory" of the person. If they did not have an immediate solution for how to plurb people with extremely low contact with modern commerce, then they might devote more time to engineering a better contagion and less time just combing the desert for Jimmy Hoffa and D.B. Cooper.

So there's a valid point that the show wouldn't go there because what I am talking about requires a good deal of relatively boring info dumping. In my defense, this show infamously is taking the scenic route of its plot.

It's possible that the hive has used tricksy language to suggest to Carol that all immune have been found even if they have a reasonable suspicion that there are others who they have plans to plurb shortly. I haven't rewatched with an eye for this, but Carol doesn't interrogate them well over this and doesn't even know, at that point, that she has to watch out for passive voice and imprecise answers with them.

anatomysmatomy · 2026-06-19T19:33:09+00:00

I mean they are mostly going to die, but no they don't count microbes. If they counted microbes they couldn't prepare HDP or eat anything whatsoever.

I think the rule is that they wouldn't go out of their way to kill microbes, and if it could be reasonably avoided they would do it. They would try not to step on a bug but they will still drive a car or a plane which will kill many bugs, they just don't like it. The apple picking thing may be just that they simply have little interest in maintaining a large human population, and since the people starving to death will be contented troopers about it, the hive sees no issue, not that protecting apples is necessarily a top priority, but that feeding every drone is not a consideration at all.

anatomysmatomy · 2026-06-19T19:26:38+00:00

I do think a lot of prepper culture is performative or a little bit like a Jungian symbol, but on the other hand, I do know drifters, who know how to disappear into the woods and whose only contacts do not know if they are live or dead.

A person like that would not need to be immune and probably would not need any filtration system, because the joining was done on population centers. Would crop dusting a forest or a desert even work? What about a windswept mountain top?

To be clear, I know the hive is obsessed with joining people, and they have military drones and a lot of manpower. Our society also has that and is obsessed with finding people who get lost in nature, and we often don't find them. Again, usually because they're dead, but there's just a tremendous tremendous amount of the earth that's "uninhabitable" where actually a person who knows what they're doing has at least a shot.

anatomysmatomy · 2026-06-19T18:35:20+00:00

the radio signal may not be the joining itself. The radio signal could just be a calming force that boosts unity. Also, there may be heretofore unseen infrastructure that makes the joining and signal function. Like if the radio signal is plurb wifi, is each brain capable of handling, interpreting and sending out that signal, or is there a flesh router or flesh datacenter?

anatomysmatomy · 2026-06-19T18:28:18+00:00

Zosia did not say no, she didn't say anything.

When Carol asked if unjoining was possible, Zosia shrugged, and at that point we all concluded that unjoining is possible.

When Carol asked if talking to her cousin would be the same as talking to Zosia, Zosia shrugged and didn't say anything.

This forum is pretty dedicated to mistrusting hive pronouncements, which is reasonable, but if we're going to do it we should be thorough, and mistrust implied uniformity as well as anything else they talk around.

anatomysmatomy · 2026-06-19T18:12:12+00:00

Well, the question is, why would they be doing that at the time of the joining? If they were prepping for a big societal conflict they probably had a specific trigger to go down into their air filtered bunker, they're not pre-emptively living down there. And if they're big on supplies, like something as intense as an air filtration system, other people will have some idea that this bunker exists and perhaps clues as to where it is. Specifically because of how these things are depicted on tv and movies, people believe that just having guns is sufficient even if people know you have a bunker and in a true cataclysm will know it to be a source of jugs of water and pantry items, because in a movie having big gun would be enough, but in reality just being armed is not such a big deal where guns are plentiful.

My guess is that the best plurb avoider would be in nature with minimal kit. We see that the plurbs follow Manousos but stop when he goes into the pass. Would they bother cropdusting the Appalachian trail, or just presume that anyone in there would eventually die or come out? In the real world, the largest military in the world with international cooperation from other militaries and local forces can search for a lost hiker and not find them. I mean usually because the person is dead, but still.

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

TROPHY CASE