Season 1 Episode 8: Charm Offensive
Air Date: December 19th, 2025
Synopsis: Carol takes a different tack with The Others and discovers more than she anticipated. Manousos awakens in unfamiliar surroundings.
Directed by: Melissa Bernstein
Written by: Jonny Gomez
In a previous episode Diabaté staged a fake poker game. When he reveals his winning hand his opponent, who is supposed to be upset, can be seen clapping and enjoying the moment. Diabaté reminds him to stay in character.
I found the moment odd, why would the Hive forget to stay in character?
Seeing now how excited they were for Carol to be writing again, reading the first chapter of her new book, and coming up with theories of how the book might continue, further reveals just how much the Hive is craving something new.
It doesn’t have to be 100% original, and it doesn’t have to be great, it just has to be new.
We don’t see how the other, non-involved, Hive acts when one of them is obtaining new information, but I could see Carol and others creating a distraction in the future by creating something new.
It’s also possible that this want and desire will grow strong enough to override their base biological imperative. The Hive has already mentioned a few times that they’ve learned more about themselves. They may find they are able to grow into a more complex being. (Which we may have already seen with their ability to better interact with Carol.)
I rejected the analogies hive/AI until now, mostly because I believe the idea for the story started well before the current state of AI reached mainstream awareness (or well, exist in this state at all). I still think it’s not a good analogy, but the hunger for new content is reminding me of the starvation of pretraining material every big AI company is feeling.
I also wasn’t confident that AI played a big role in the story until now. I do think the original idea was happiness and humanity, but when you look at those ideas and start to expand on them, especially when looking at the current state of the world, a discussion of AI and the parallels are going to come up.