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- Unless Earth was specifically targeted, the signal suggests multiple planets have DNA/RNA-based life, panspermia. Wouldn't every animal also be part of the hive mind? After the initial rat-to-human spillover maybe they focused it on humans?
- Re: animals, if the zoo animals were canonically freed, and are neither incorporated or harmed by the hivemind, how were the lions stopped? Did the hivemind mess up and then tranquilize and release them?
- If the other survivors feel the hivemind people have value, then Carol killing millions a day just by accident would be a real crisis. You'd have to discuss the possibility of isolating or killing her.
- Why did Carol's blackouts kill significantly fewer people? Maybe fewer people on the road, it took less time, or they could see it coming and get into a defensive posture.
- If surviving humans can send messages through the hivemind, and can disrupt the hivemind with anger, they could use that to make demands of each other at any time (maybe I am just thinking Blindness)
- Why did the survivors come to the meeting if they don't have much to say? And they didn't look for something in common to explain their anomaly.
- What will hivemind people do all day? Build a dish to spread the virus?
- Could Carol or another survivor ask their entire city to act normal? Publish her serious book and go on tour? I guess it can't be fully normal as everyone would be too agreeable.
- I didn't like Carol repeating the ob/gyn bit in Ep.2. Maybe ask the woman how her son is going to go to school, grow up, get married, have kids, etc. or if everything is meaningless now with the hivemind? Will the hivemind continue to have babies?
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- The pandemic plot, empty airports, a White House address telling Carol no one is in charge and she should stay home, Carol at the head of the table on Air Force One, a hive mind, all very inspired by or borrowing imagery from 2020. Is it too much? Some people seemed to only pick up on this later.
- Carol calling the hivemind "ghouls" for reviving her wife's memories, and answers to specific things, maybe touched on AI / LLMs.
- When the virus spread by kissing, I thought, wait is this going to happen through the whole outbreak episode? So chemtrails were a good way to speed things up.
- An unprecedented level of defensive writing to explain Antarctica, astronauts, submarines, etc., are not alien parasites, and set the rules. People are finding this a relief after scifi being dominated by 'mystery box' shows.
- I think that the hivemind glitching is to explain why Carol isn't just raging out and attacking people
- Similarly the do-no-harm, vegetarianism thing is a roundabout way to explain why they wouldn't detain or kill the immune humans
- I saw someone say that the romance book scene in the beginning comes from Vince Gilligan hating the Breaking Bad fandom or something, but my guess is it's for fun, a way to bring up having a fake persona, and also a concrete non-creepy way to reveal Carol's dream partner
Nit picks
- If you believe in 'muscle memory', the idea that any hivemind member can fly a plane, cook a specific meal, perform surgery, is a bit farfetched. What about playing a musical instrument or gymnastics?
- There was time to archive Carol's wife's memories across the hivemind (into some kind of distributed storage) and everyone's memories has perfect recall (knowing what day and time something happened). This is an insane data transfer rate.
- How often do planets receive the message and NOT breach containment?
- Would 1/10 of the population die in the invasion? Up to 1/3 of the world ought to be sleeping, lying down, maybe sitting. Cars and planes crashed (a lot like FlashForward), and people can die from a bad fall, but Carol saw a lot of people in the bar who remained standing and the death rate was not 1/10.
- Maybe this is a non-issue since there's still power and frozen foods, but they shouldn't eat animals that died naturally