As we learn in Episode 2, nearly a billion people died on the same day Helen did. Those who survived—all except Carol and a dozen others scattered around the globe—have been integrated into a single being, bound by a “psychic glue” that allows unfettered access to the thoughts and memories of the entire collective. When Carol speaks to anyone with the virus, she is technically speaking to pretty much everyone else on Earth. The word “I” approaches extinction, since the mass speaks as a “we.” They differentiate themselves only for her comfort, beginning interactions with a cheerful download on the host she’s addressing: “This individual went by Lawrence J. Kless, or Larry.” Though Carol appears inexplicably immune, they’re amiable and keen to bring her into the fold as soon as they can figure out how. Their Stepford smiles take her back to the last time she was surrounded by upbeat strangers bent on changing her—as a teen-ager at a conversion camp. But her new keepers are welcoming of all sexualities; an uninfected Mauritian man named Koumba (Samba Schutte) notes that racism is also a nonissue. Carol’s reflexive resistance in the face of a peaceful, practically frictionless society becomes the animating principle of the show: What if everyone else’s paradise is your personal hell?