Just finished the third episode. Early comments were that it was a show about a “woke mind virus” or regular Burgerlander anti-communism, but I’m not so sure now.
spoiler
Protagonist had her drunk rant about “why are you so special, you think you’re all so great, knowing everything about everyone all the time, the amalgamation of all human knowledge and understanding SO WHAT” etc etc. Paraphrasing obviously.
I’m starting to think that this whole thing might be a big rant from Gilligan about AI. In the sense that it attempts to amalgamate all human knowledge and experience into one giant blob that we all share from together, but at the cost what makes us all unique as human beings.
I could be wrong - it’s still early in the show, but that’s the vibe I get at this point and it definitely strikes the nerve that Gilligan seems to be feeling at the moment.
They did put a “This show was made by humans” disclaimer at the very beginning, after all.
Their mannerisms – or, imo ITS mannerisms, as this is a gestalt entity with a singular mind now are absolutely influenced by sycophantic AIs, but sycophantic AIs are trained on the boilerplate “professional” politeness to begin with. As points to make go “fake politeness and obsequiousness is off-putting” is not a very deep one and it’s definitely not going to be the focus of the series. There’s layers to it. Carol’s suffering from grief and loss as well as addiction and the shock of the entire world being turned upside down and her professional veneer and distance from the world being annihilated in one fell swoop. She’s not being given space to grieve and toxic positivity is all around her, even within the other individuals that are left. She’s literally the loneliest person in the world, and she’s not even able to have a real funeral for the woman she loved.
As it is now I have a feeling that Carol’s misery is going to be infectious in such a way that she might make the hive mind start rejecting individuals to protect itself. She’s already the only thing that it’s afraid of, the only thing that can hurt it. There’s complications to that, too. She can’t rage against the hive mind because it’s essentially holding 7 billion people hostage and more die en masse when she’s mean to it. Zosia in particular has been physically harmed by her actions and if she breaks free it’s likely she’ll have complicated feelings about how Carol treated her, and the fact that she does break free.