The show is largely driven by visual storytelling, which lends itself very well to people projecting their own meaning onto it.
That's why the discourse is all over the place, from "literally nothing happens" to "this is obviously deep commentary on my personal experience!" and they could be talking about the same exact scene.
I think the most significant thing about that scene, at least in regards to how the show is discussed more broadly, is that the show intentionally avoids casting a judgement on Carol either way. It's totally up to us, the viewers, to take in what we're shown and decide how we feel about Carol and the rest of the survivor's behaviors.
And I think that's where all this disconnect is coming from; this show is super heavy on visual storytelling, and so you get everyone making their own interpretation of it (it's about AI, no jk it's about it's collectivism, no jk it's about imperialism, no jk it's about Hamas
...) when really it's just a character profile of these highly imperfect and traumatized people reacting to an absurd high-concept sci-fi event.
The only thing I can say definitively about the story is that it's incredibly dialectical. Every character's actions and attitudes are presented in ways that are entirely reasonable and consistent with the rest of their actions and the story. Half the fun of this show is watching these characters in these absurd situations, reacting in entirely reasonable ways that are still fucking hilarious. For example, Carol spending a whole episode investigating the milk cartons, then rushing over to Diabaté to make a big deal about her "terrifying discovery" only for Diabaté to casually go, "is this about them eating people? Yeah, I know, I just asked them about it. Anyways, here's a video they gave me in which John Cena explains their militant veganism." My jaw hurt from laughing. Are the Plurbs fucked up for not even wanting to pick apples? Did Carol just waste a ton of time because she's too stubborn to understand that she could have just asked, especially given she knew by this point that the Plurbs can't lie? Yeah, sure, these are all valid questions, but it's also just fucking hilarious to do all that set up only for Carol to have "Human-Derived Protein" explained to her in detail by John Cena in a video that could have been capped off by
It's so fucking funny watching Vince Gilligan interviews - the man is nothing but humble (almost annoyingly so) and just repeatedly emphasizes the contributions of the cast and his fellow writers - and then opening Hexbear threads where all the critics of his show are calling him a self-indulgent, anti-communist hack (who also personally shit in their breakfast cereal this morning).
Also, people saying this show is boring or "filler" is wild to me. I can only assume that the Netflixication of shows (I'm looking at you, Stranger Things) where the characters repeatedly openly verbalize exposition about their characterization and the current plot status must have fried people's brains. Those "filler" scenes are packed full of non-verbal communication and symbols to unpack and analyze; it's one thing to find them uninteresting (to each their own) but to call them "filler" and saying "nothing happens" is objectively wrong
Take the sequence of Manousos showing up in Carol's cul-de-sac. Here is a man who has been through hell crossing continents, practicing his English all along the way so that he can announce that he is there to help her save the world. Then he finally meets Carol, and their personalities immediately clash and devolve into petty fighting. I've heard it described as "the real last person on Earth meets Carol" and every minute of it is
(I'm honestly surprised Carol haters didn't love this episode, Manousos could easily be read as an "actually has and lives by his principles" foil to Carol, who had given up and started indulging similar to Diabaté. And then once she discovers the Plurbs are using her eggs to engineer a way to infect her, she returns to Manousos recommitted to his efforts, this time with a nuke literally to maintain her invidual sovereignty against the Plurbs! )
Anyways, after Carol storms off, Manousos similarly storms off to grab his machete only for us to get a drawn-out scene of Manousos on his knees, cursing his circumstances while fishing out a cellphone from out of the storm drain he tossed it into earlier. The payoff of the machete is that he uses it to grab the phone by its magnetic back. And it's fucking hilarious! And it drives the plot forward, because we're getting character development from literally-the-most-stubborn-man-alive possibly showing a crack in his resolve by retrieving Carol's phone so he can resume communicating with her. It's okay that it's a "simple"/"boring" scene, it works because there's so much non-verbal communication happening throughout the episode, there's still so much to think about and analyze even if it's not straightforward dialogue being expositioned into our brains with a firehose.
I mained this gun in Bad Company 2. It was perfect on assault maps as a defender; damn near everything in that game was destructable, so I'd spam the grenade launcher to deforest around the objectives until it was basically an open field with zero cover.
"How is everyone content with sharing a psychic link to the hive? How do Palestinians feel about sharing a hive mind with Israelis??? Does everyone have perfect empathy now that their brains are completely linked, or does being in the hive just suppress the will of joined individuals so that they lack personal agency?"
The way the hive short circuits when Carol causes it too much stress, but somehow manages to contain the combined memories of e.g. both torture victims and their torturers, has me thinking it may be more of the latter. Or maybe the initial sezuires/freezing from the mass joining is caused by new plurbs speedrunning super therapy with the rest of humanity lmao, and it happens again with Carol but because she's not in the hive, they can't resolve the conflict via the psychic glue. The show seems to be going in a direction where the hive mind is never explicitly bad/wrong, and the question of whether being a plurb is good or not is ultimately left up to the viewer, but for that to work, there's still a lot of contradictions to be resolved.
If it turns out that being in the hive forcibly lobotomizes your individuality, that would cast the hivemind as a thing separate and different from the sum total of its joined humans, as well as casting the joined humans as little more than limbs of a larger, new organism. It's hard to see this depiction as anything less than the death of joined individuals.
I'm probably super lost in the sauce here, and I understand why they made Carol the main protagonist and not someone who would just hyper focus on grilling plurbs on the nature of their subjective experiences and the mechanics of their psychic glue.
Likely no one you'd consider a target for your margin notes would ever actually open the book to read it, so I agree with other commenters, just quietly replace it.
Tangentially related, Anton just dropped this fascinating vid: Why Did Consciousness Evolve? Exciting Research on Bird Brains. TL;DW: Bird brains evolved with completely different brain structures than mammals. And not only do they display signs of consciousness (the example used is pointing a laser on the animal and seeing if they recognize that the dot is on them while looking at themselves in a mirror), but apparently they're more efficient, being more capable than mammal brains for their size.
Yes, they did, where the fuck have you been for the last two years? Because the rest of us have been witnessing it happen fucking livestreamed from Gaza, while also both parties repeatedly vote to send multiple billions of dollars in fucking bombs. And you're a HUGE fucking piece of shit for denying that. But that's to be expected from the people who literally laughed and covered their ears when we protested you assholes in 2024.
I just want you to know, as bad as you think the maga crowd are, you're just as bad. Maybe even worse, because you somehow think you're better than maga because your racism and white supremacy has a nicer, more civil facade. But you are just as disgusting and vile under your team blue mask. Fuck you.
Tbh, I read the comments more like a cult testing its member's loyalties. Look at how they're trying to explain it away, even if they act upset by it. It's all "he needs to refocus" as if he's ever done anything focused to help these clowns.
Give them a couple of days to sync up on their talking points, and they'll be saying Reiner deserved it because libs didn't cry sufficiently when Kirk got Kirk'ed.
This show is packed with amazing comedic payoffs.
That fucking voicemail, I laughed harder every time