Plus he looks official, sort of like that guy from Young and Restless. 
Ha ha, there are some creative writers on Reddit.
I mean, if I was named Carol and didn’t know about the show, I’d be properly freaked out by that too. But then if I had a fridge that ran ads on it I would probably have gone mad already anyway.
Eh, I’m pretty used to online ads and communications that are “personalized” with my name. If you have an account (and anyone with a net-connected fridge has an account), they know your name.
It wasn’t the case here – the ad says “Carol” no matter who you are – but in general, seeing your name in an ad isn’t pull-out-the-tinfoil-hat time for people who don’t already have some form of paranoia.
(And point well taken about ads on your fridge driving any normal person to madness.)
Well, the new episode was mostly exposition, but a couple of important plot points were explained. A very fun cameo from an unexpected celebrity too.
I noticed in the end credits that the eyepatch guy Diabate was pretending to play poker against was credited as Blofinger. I have to admit, that made me laugh.
Do you really do you really wanna taste this?
Is there a convention on how long we’re supposed to put spoiler tags on an episode once it’s been released? Out of an abundance of caution, I will, but the following only contains spoilers for the 12/4 episode:
Initial thought on that radio frequency with the beeps – I’m guessing it’s the frequency by which the hive mind is able to link all the joined together. So, if one were to jam that frequency…
Suddenly, a seemingly throwaway comment in the ice hotel takes on a HUGE significance!
One of the characters is listed as Vesper.
No need for spoiler tags at all. It would be polite if the first person talking about a new episode mentioned there was a new episode, so someone who forgot the day or is reading the thread later can know when the new episode discussion starts.
Mathing the math on Soylent Juice:
Summary
According to an article from science.org, “On average, an adult male human contains 125,822 calories of fat and protein, enough to meet the 1-day dietary requirements of more than 60 people.”
Around 800 million died in joining, not all of them adult males. For the sake of simplicity an average of 100,000 calories per person probably isn’t far off. That’s 80 trillion calories.
Again for the sake of simplicity, round off the average caloric intake of a person to 2,000 a day. That makes 40 billion days worth of calories in 800 million people.
According to John Cena, around 7.4 billion are currently alive. 40 billion days worth of calories means the 800 million dead from the joining could feed the world for around 5.4 days.
Also according to John Cena, nearly 100,000 people die each day. Using the same estimates as above, that is 10 billion calories. The amount of people that die per day is enough calories to feed the world for a little under 2 and 1/2 minutes.
Now, technically what type of calories you have matters: proteins and fats aren’t interchangeable. But from a practical point of view it doesn’t matter because no matter how you look at it the number of calories available is vastly insufficient.
The “within 10 years” is wildly optimistic given food resources and (virus-embedded?) behavioral inhibitions. One year of survival is probably pushing it. The optimal path of cannibalism would be to be constantly killing bodies off to feed the constantly diminishing population, but since they aren’t constitutionally able to do that, they will keep going until everyone is equally starving and those who die first have little meat left to help the very slightly less starved survivors. The only logical conclusion for such extreme dietary restrictions is that the virus is a weapon to quickly depopulate a planet.
The Orhers don’t NEED Carol’s consent, obviously. When will she figure that out?
Because of the frozen eggs? If so, I checked and frozen eggs don’t contain stem cells so I don’t think the Hive would be able to use them.
But they could use them to clone her.
ETA oh but I guess the clone would also be immune so they would still need consent
The frozen eggs is definitely coming into this. Real world science or not, stuff like that isn’t just dropped into dialogue for no reason.
Manousos is my second favorite character (after Carol). Can’t wait to see them meet!
Another thought - if they can use Carol’s eggs, can they use Diabate’s sperm, which he has quite clearly been spreading willy nilly?
I doubt they can use Carol’s eggs without her approval. And as for feeding the seven billion people without killing anything, can they also rely on the bodies of animals that die of natural causes? Can any nutrition be obtained through the chemical processing of urine and fecal matter? Can food be synthesized from base chemicals? And are they okay with milking cows and consuming the milk products?
Why couldn’t they use her eggs? The language they used on the big monitor seemed awfully specific - they won’t do anything to her body without her consent.
And why would they have included the line about her frozen eggs if it were meaningless?
One more thing - the radio frequency Manousos picked up may be a new radio signal the “others” are generating to further spread the virus. If someone wants to take the time, they could go back and watch episode 1 and see if they talk about specific radio frequencies.
It’s just my sense of their ethics that if they can’t force her to do anything they would also not do anything with her eggs without her consent. It’s possible that the eggs will be used to create babies free of the virus. (And I wonder about very young babies with the virus; are they able to participate in the hive mind?)
By the way, I was amused that Koumba Diabaté was happy to cosplay as James Bond; would that be any fun given that they’re all acting to make him happy?
They have already shown they are capable of lawyer-like deceit – the vegetarian stuff, for example. And I don’t think we should see it as “ethics” – more like biologically programmed rules. They have no ethics as long as those rules aren’t violated. The more we see of them, the more (very gradually) sinister they are appearing, IMO, at least after the first episode.