Yeah, Helen has been established as an enabler. Not even finishing though, ouch… that would hurt.
She probably read enough to know Carol wouldn’t be embarrassed if it were published but it wasn’t her taste so she didn’t finish it. It’s not an awful thing to do. It’s the kind of thing you would never tell your partner for fear of them taking it poorly or the wrong way.
I feel like @Darren_Garrison was making a Rick and Morty reference. In the Unity episode (whatever it’s called), Unity ends up telling Rick off with the help of a Borg-like species acting as the “safe” friend/intermediary to a toxic Rick.
One of my LOL moments while watching was when Carol demanded the restoration of the Sprouts while saying “I’m a very independent person!”
I laughed because she is nowhere near independent. The fact that she needed a small army of the Joined to get her food, not to mention what it takes to keep her lights on, her trash picked up, and her every whim catered to - given how quickly it happens, I’m guessing there are thousands of them available for immediate response, notwithstanding the number that will drop what they had been doing and make sure she gets what she wants if the immediate ones are inadequate to the task.
And frankly, she seems to have little regard for these “little people” (so to speak), whether Joined or not, given how much disdain about her fans she made known to Helen on her book tour.
So I’m wondering if there won’t be some realization by Carol about the degree to which she is interdependent upon others, and perhaps at some point a rapprochement between them because of it?
Another thing I’ve been wondering: how do the Joined, with the knowledge of every psychologist on the planet to draw upon, not realize the many paradoxes of human happiness, and how “giving them everything they want” is not going to really keep them happy in the end?
They’re not worried about the end as it ends with assimilation and the cessation of all mental health issues everywhere (well, presumably). They’re busy working on a “cure” to mental health, they just need to to keep those volatile immunes quiescent for the weeks to months needed to formulate it. Catering to every need is a pretty simple short-term fix until they get there.
I don’t see that at all. I see it simply as a predictable consequence of billions of people going into a seizure at an inopportune time. She had a seizure while she was standing on pavement. She collapsed with no one to steady her, and she unfortunately fell back in such a way as to hit her head, probably cracked her skull and suffered a catastrophic brain injury.
Yes, I agree. Remember that all of those hundreds or thousand of people Carol sees leaving in a mass exodus are functionally ONE person. Think of it as one single person getting a little bent out of shape and keeping some space from the other. It’s a couple’s dynamic, not mass sociology. It’s not millions of folks getting away from you, it’s just one.
I got the feeling that Helen was also supposed to be her agent or business manager. Maybe that’s just because biased me expects straight characters so I looked for another slot to put Helen in, before their true relationship was revealed.
Helen only reading part of the book really hits Carol in a place that she is vulnerable. If the joined could lie, that would have been the place to say a little white lie. Helen being critical would have meant she cared. Helen being dismissive is a slap in the face.
I suspect that your observation about Carol’s true independence is one of the themes the audience is supposed to take away from this show. Carol likes to do stuff for herself, so she is independent, but there is still a vast network people behind her ability to be independent. The writers play with this concept with the joined by explicitly taking the interconnectedness of society to the ultimate level.
I look at it that they are concerned about her happiness, just as any parent is concerned about the happiness of their toddler in a restaurant. Often though what is best for the child and will result in the greatest long term happiness is set aside for whatever will prevent a tantrum right now, “play with my phone while we wait for your French fries to show up,” “how do you like your police car?”
We see that Helen developed raccoon eyes (the dark bruising around her eyes) after she fell, which is apparently indicative of suffering a skull fracture. So, ostensibly, that’s what did it for her, but I guess it doesn’t rule out that there were other factors involved.
I liked how Carol made sure to hide her booze before she started making the video for the other 12.
Yeah Helen was definitely her manager/agent/business partner. In fact the first episode is structured such that you don’t realize they are a couple until they get into the limo and hold hands well into the scene.
Having now watched the latest episode, my thoughts on Carol’s final reaction is that it’s not “Soylent milk is peeopleee!”, it’s “OMG I just made a huge fuss to literally the entire world about something mundane.”
On an entirely different point, I don’t recall anyone else mentioning this but in the earlier conversation about her experience at conversion camp, Carol gives the name as “Freedom Falls”. Bit on the nose, that one.
There’s a song by Superorganism that would be fun to insert into the series at some point.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3dtOJymRPE&list=RD_3dtOJymRPE&start_radio=1
It’s the tallest waterfall on the planet. Right next to Woe’s Hollow.
Uh oh, now I’m going to spend the day wondering who would win in a fight between Lumon and the Others.
Fortified apple juice! Or is that just apple cider? Anyway, I see that apple juice has an acidic pH, so the fortifying agents must have a basic pH to offset that…
Hey, do you think this story is really an allegory for mental illness and the right to refuse treatment? All the formerly unwell are now “happy” in their medicated state, while Carol fights for the right to be miserable?
Has Ambrosia, the nectar of the gods, ever been described that way? In my head thats how I picture it at least.
Lumon tried to please the Innies and look how that turned out. And they did that with approximately 2000~ hours/per year of life and memories.
And waffle parties. Don’t forget the waffle parties.
I got the sense Carol isn’t publicly out of the closet, so Helen is her manager as cover for their relationship.
I agree she definitely is not out hence the George Clooney discussion just before Helen died.