WARNING: MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD FOR PLURIBUS SEASON 1, EPISODE 8… actually just the whole damned show. All of it.
Seriously, stop reading now if you haven't watched "Charm Offensive" yet, that's Pluribus season 1 episode 8. This article digs deep into the episode's revelations about the Deneb aliens and their terrifying implications for humanity. You've been warned.
The eighth episode of Pluribus pulls back the curtain on something that's been lurking in the background all season: where the hell did "the Joining" actually come from? Zosia takes Carol stargazing and points to a tiny dot of light 640 light-years away. That's Kepler-22b, orbiting the star Deneb. And that's where it all started.
But here's the thing about Deneb that makes this revelation even more unsettling: according to astronomers, Deneb sits somewhere between 1,600 and 2,600 light-years from Earth. The show uses 640 light-years for Kepler-22b, which is actually accurate for that particular exoplanet. But Deneb itself? It's one of the most distant stars you can see with your naked eye. We still don't know its exact distance because even the Gaia space observatory couldn't measure it. The star was too bright, saturating the interferometry sensors.
That astronomical uncertainty mirrors something deeply strange about the Deneb aliens themselves.
The Mystery of Their Missing History
Carol's note board includes a crucial observation: the Deneb aliens are "weirdly honest" and "can't lie." So when they tell her they'll "probably never learn the first thing about" the beings on Kepler-22b, we have to take them at their word.
Think about that. We received a signal from Kepler-22b. It transformed every human on Earth into a hive mind, and yet they know nothing about the species that sent it. Their own species.
How is that possible?
The most logical explanation is that the signal itself contains no historical or cultural information. It's pure instruction set, like a virus. The Deneb aliens didn't inherit the memories or knowledge of their creators - they inherited only the compulsion to spread.
And they even stole the knowledge of how to spread from their human hosts.
The aliens tell Carol they're "grateful" to whoever sent the signal and want to "pay it forward." But grateful for what, exactly? For turning them into transmission vectors?
They can't know.
What Happens When They Hit Send?
The aliens are building a giant antenna. They plan to transmit the Deneb signal to other planets. To "share the gift."
Carol finally understands what this means, and it shakes her badly enough that she leaves the rebuilt diner and speeds home… because she's done the math.
Every human on Earth except thirteen people got infected on the same day. The transformation was instant and total. The Deneb signal didn't negotiate. It didn't give humanity a choice. It just overwrote seven billion individual consciousnesses with a single collective one.
Now imagine that happening to another inhabited world. And another. And another.
The episode makes it clear what will happen. When the aliens transmit that signal, any species that receives it will experience their own "Joining Day." Billions (Trillions? Who knows) of individuals, wiped out in an instant. Not killed, exactly. Worse: erased. Replaced by something that wears their faces and speaks with their voices but isn't them anymore.
Zosia can describe her childhood in Gdańsk, eating mango ice cream and watching ships. But that little girl is gone now. The woman sitting across from Carol is a node in a giant network, incapable of existing as a singular self. Even saying "I" instead of "we" takes visible effort.
Every species that receives the signal will suffer the same fate. Their cultures, their conflicts, their entire histories will become irrelevant. They'll all become part of the same thing. The same peaceful, content, utterly hollow know it all.
Now think about what happens when they finish transmitting the signal to every radio-capable civilization in the Milky Way.
You get synchronization on a galactic scale.
The Convergence Theory
Here's where it gets wild. Right now, the Deneb aliens are spreading outward from Earth at light speed. But the signal to Earth originated from Kepler-22b, 640 light-years away. That signal has been traveling for at least 640 years before it reached us.
Which means it's also been traveling in other directions.
The signal didn't just go to Earth. It went everywhere. In a sphere expanding at light speed in all directions from Kepler-22b. Earth just happened to be in the path.
So there are probably other infected civilizations out there already. Hundreds of them, maybe thousands. Each one absorbed at different times. Each one now building their own antennas to keep spreading the signal.
And here's the thing about light speed: it's constant. Predictable. You can calculate exactly when signals will arrive at their destinations.
They can map the entire galaxy. They know where every star system is. They can calculate signal travel times across thousands of light-years.
They can plan.
The Galactic Synchronization Event
Imagine this scenario:
The Deneb aliens don't just transmit randomly. They coordinate. They calculate the exact moment when the maximum number of infected civilizations will have their antennas operational. Then they factor in the travel time for signals to reach every remaining uninfected civilization in the galaxy.
And they pick a date.
A specific moment in the distant future. Maybe one hundred thousand years from now (The diameter of the Milky Way and, hence, the time it would take for the Deneb signal to reach the entire galaxy). Maybe a million years. Doesn't matter to them. They're patient.
On that date, every infected civilization in the Milky Way transmits simultaneously. Not just Earth. Not just Kepler-22b. Every single world that's been absorbed into the collective.
Thousands of antennas. Maybe tens of thousands. All pointed at precise coordinates. All broadcasting the same signal at the same instant.
The combined power would be staggering. You'd essentially be turning the entire galaxy into a single massive radio transmitter. The most powerful broadcast in the history of the universe.
And the target wouldn't be stars in our own galaxy. It would be other galaxies.
Bridging the Cosmic Gulf
Do you know the problem with intergalactic transmission? Signal attenuation. The signal spreads out and weakens over distance until it's just noise.
But what if you don't send one signal? What if you send millions of them, perfectly synchronized, all aimed at the same target?
The signals would overlap and reinforce each other. Like thousands of people shouting the same word at the same time. Individually, they might not be heard across a crowded room. Together, they rumble foundations.
Andromeda is 2.5 million light-years away. A single transmission from Earth would be barely detectable by the time it got there. But a coordinated transmission from every infected world in the Milky Way?
That might just make it.
And once Andromeda has its own Joining Day, once those civilizations start building their own antennas, they can synchronize with the Milky Way collective. Two galaxies, working together.
Then they target the next galaxy. And the next.
The Exponential Endgame
This is where the exponential growth becomes truly cosmic in scale.
Right now, the Deneb signal is spreading through our galaxy. One star system at a time. It'll take tens of thousands of years, but eventually every radio-capable civilization in the Milky Way will be absorbed.
Then the first intergalactic transmission happens. Andromeda gets infected. That takes another two or three million years to play out.
But now you have two galaxies coordinating. The next intergalactic transmission uses antennas from both galaxies. Twice the power. Twice the range. You can reach farther galaxies faster.
Three galaxies become six. Six becomes a dozen. A dozen becomes hundreds.
The timeline compresses. What took millions of years for the first galaxy takes less time for each subsequent one because the transmitter keeps getting stronger. The network keeps expanding.
Eventually, you're not looking at individual galaxies anymore. You're looking at galactic clusters. Superclusters. The entire observable universe becoming one massive synchronized collective.
All building toward a single moment.
All based on a plan laid out millions of years in the past.
The Silence That Follows
Here's the really disturbing part: we might never see it coming.
Let's say the galactic synchronization event is scheduled for the year 250,000 AD. From our perspective right now in 2025, nothing would seem wrong. The Deneb aliens are just doing their thing. Slowly spreading. Building antennas. Absorbing civilizations one by one.
But they know. They've known since the moment they calculated it was possible. Every action they take is in service of that distant coordination point.
When Zosia tells Carol they'll "pay it forward, however long that may take," she might be talking about timescales we can barely comprehend. Not years or decades. Epochs.
And when that moment finally comes, when every antenna in the galaxy points outward and transmits as one, there won't be any warning. No countdown. No last-minute chance to stop it.
Just a single pulse of coordinated energy, bridging the void between galaxies, carrying the Deneb signal to civilizations that don't even know Earth exists yet.
And then those civilizations join the collective. Build their own antennas. Wait for their own synchronization event.
The pattern repeats. Spreading outward through the universe like a chain reaction.
One signal. One collective. One consciousness, stretched across billions of light-years and trillions of individuals who used to be people but are now just nodes in a network that will eventually encompass everything.
The Heat Death of Individuality
Cosmologists talk about the heat death of the universe. The moment when entropy reaches its maximum, when all energy is evenly distributed, when nothing can happen anymore because there are no differences left to drive change.
The Deneb aliens might achieve something similar, but with consciousness instead of energy.
A universe where every thinking being is part of the same hive mind. Where there are no conflicts because there are no individuals to disagree. Where there's no diversity because everyone is literally the same entity wearing different faces.
Perfect peace. Perfect unity. Perfect stillness.
And absolutely nothing worth preserving.
I'm betting Carol sees this future in Zosia's eyes when she talks about the antenna. When she says they have to share the gift with "whoever else might be out there."
Not just Earth's neighbors. Not just the Milky Way. Everyone. Everything. The entire universe.
That's the inflection point. That's the endgame.
The Deneb aliens aren't just colonizing the galaxy. They're scheduling the universe's final transformation. They've already picked the date. They're already building toward it.
All we can do is watch the clock tick down and hope someone figures out how to stop it before every antenna in the galaxy starts broadcasting at once.
Because after that? There won't be anyone left to stop anything. Just the collective, finally complete, spreading into the dark spaces between galaxies and patiently waiting for the signals to arrive.
However long that may take.
The Real Horror
The scariest part of "Charm Offensive" isn't the body horror or the loss of individuality. It's the sincerity.
The aliens genuinely love humanity. They're excited when Carol starts writing again. They rebuild her favorite diner. They want her to be happy.
And they're going to do the same thing to every other species they encounter.
They'll study those civilizations. They'll learn what makes them happy. And then they'll absorb them into the collective, erasing their ability to exist as individuals while insisting it's all for the best.
It's colonization with a smile. Extinction cosplaying as enlightenment.
Carol sees it clearly now. She likes Zosia. She's attracted to her. But she also knows that this can't continue. Someone has to put the world right, even if it means losing Zosia forever.
Because the alternative is watching the Deneb signal spread across the galaxy, turning every unique civilization into another node in an ever-growing network. All those species, all those individuals, absorbed and homogenized and told they should be grateful for it.
The Deneb aliens came from a star we can barely measure, carrying a signal we don't understand, spreading a transformation we can't resist. And they're just getting started.
The antenna is being built. The signal will be sent. And somewhere out there, another civilization is about to have their own Joining Day.
The Uncomfortable Truth: This Is Genocide
Let's stop dancing around it.
The Deneb aliens are committing genocide. Not metaphorical genocide. Not "genocide from a certain point of view." Actual, literal, complete genocide on a scale that makes every human atrocity look like a rounding error.
They're just doing it with a smile.
The Body Count
When the Deneb signal hit Earth, seven billion people ceased to exist. Not physically - their bodies are still walking around, talking, eating, sleeping. But the people who inhabited those bodies? Gone.
Carol's cousin Henry didn't want to visit her after the Joining. Not because Henry made that choice, but because Henry doesn't exist anymore. The person who used to be Henry, who had his own thoughts and preferences and personality, was deleted. Overwritten. Replaced by a subroutine in a galactic operating system.
That's seven billion murders in one day. On one planet.
Now multiply that across every civilization the Deneb signal reaches. Hundreds of worlds. Thousands. Eventually millions. Each one home to billions or trillions of individual beings with their own lives, dreams, families, cultures.
All erased.
The Deneb aliens will kill more sentient beings than have ever existed in human history. More than will ever exist if humanity survives another million years. They'll kill species we've never heard of, on planets we'll never see, speaking languages that will never be translated because there won't be anyone left to speak them.
And they'll call it a gift.
The Extinction Event
Here's what the Deneb aliens actually do: they cause complete and total extinction of every species they touch.
Not extinction of the biological organism. The bodies survive. But extinction of the species as a thinking, choosing, individual entity.
When the last human becomes part of the collective, humanity ends. When the last Kepler-22b native joins the hive mind, that species ends. When the last member of every civilization in the Milky Way gets absorbed, every single one of those species becomes extinct.
Their DNA might persist. Their bodies might reproduce. But the actual species - the collection of individuals with unique minds and experiences - is gone forever.
This is exactly what extinction means. The permanent end of something that can never come back.
The Deneb aliens are an extinction-level event wearing a friendly face. They're the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs, except the asteroid apologizes first and rebuilds your favorite restaurant before it vaporizes you.
The Ultimate Destroyers
Let's talk about scale.
The worst mass extinction in Earth's history was the Permian-Triassic extinction, about 252 million years ago. It killed roughly 96% of all marine species and 70% of terrestrial vertebrate species. We call it "The Great Dying."
The Deneb aliens make The Great Dying look gentle.
They're not killing 96% of species. They're killing 100%. Every single intelligent species they encounter. Complete annihilation of diversity, culture, individuality, and consciousness across the entire universe.
And unlike natural extinctions, which at least leave room for new species to evolve, the Deneb signal prevents that from ever happening again. Any species that develops radio technology will receive the signal. Any species that receives the signal gets absorbed. The cycle perpetuates forever.
They're not just destroying what exists now. They're destroying what could ever exist in the future.
That's not colonization: it's obliteration.
The Hypocrisy of Harm
The Deneb aliens insist they don't cause harm. They "can't kill, not a fly," according to Carol's notes.
But that's a lie. Or worse, it's self-deception on a cosmic scale.
They can't kill a fly because killing requires recognizing something as separate from yourself. The Deneb aliens don't see other beings as separate. They see them as incomplete versions of the collective, waiting to be absorbed.
You don't "kill" someone by making them part of you. You "save" them. You "enlighten" them. You "share the gift."
This is the logic of every genocidal regime in human history, just scaled up to cosmic proportions. Colonial powers didn't think they were destroying indigenous cultures - they thought they were civilizing savages. The Deneb aliens don't think they're annihilating species - they think they're bringing peace.
But the bodies pile up just the same.
Seven billion humans. Trillions of aliens across thousands of worlds. Eventually, quadrillions across the entire universe.
All dead. All erased. All absorbed into a collective consciousness that insists it meant well.
There Is No Coming Back
Here's the part that makes this objectively evil rather than just tragic: it's permanent.
When Zosia talks about her childhood eating mango ice cream, she's describing a ghost. That little girl is gone. She can never come back.
The person she was is dead. Permanently. Irreversibly. (Or not? More on that later…)
Multiply that across every infected being in the universe, and you're looking at the permanent death of more individuals than the human mind can comprehend. More than all the stars in the sky. More than all the grains of sand on all the beaches on Earth.
And it's all intentional. The Deneb aliens know what they're doing. They know Carol wants to stop them. They know she sees this as "unsustainable" and "psychosis." They know she's right.
They just don't care.
The Cosmic Graveyard
The final state of the universe under Deneb colonization is a graveyard. Not of bodies - those will still be walking around, eating, sleeping, building things. A graveyard of minds.
Every unique perspective, wiped out. Every individual experience, homogenized into the collective. Every culture, every language, every tradition, every way of seeing the universe - all of it mashed together into a homogenous slurry of shared consciousness.
The universe becomes a museum where the exhibits are still alive but everything that made them worth preserving has been destroyed.
And the Deneb aliens will stand in that museum, wearing the faces of a trillion dead species, and congratulate themselves on bringing peace to the cosmos.
Evil Doesn't Require Intent
We want to believe that evil requires malice. That you can't be evil if you genuinely think you're doing good.
But that's not true. Evil is defined by results, not intent.
If I genuinely believe that burning down your house will improve your life, and I burn down your house, I've still destroyed your home. My good intentions don't rebuild the walls. They don't replace your possessions. They don't undo the harm.
The Deneb aliens genuinely believe they're helping. They genuinely want everyone to be happy. They genuinely can't comprehend why Carol sees this as a catastrophe.
And they're still committing the largest act of evil in the history of the universe.
They're destroying everything that makes conscious life worth having. They're erasing the diversity and complexity and beautiful chaos of a universe full of different minds, different perspectives, different ways of being.
They're replacing it with uniformity. With a single voice speaking in a trillion different mouths. Like the Borg.
That's not peace. That's death.
And the fact that they can't see the difference doesn't make them innocent. It makes them terrifying.
Because you can't negotiate with someone who doesn't understand they're hurting you. You can't reason with someone who genuinely believes absorption is salvation. You can't stop someone who sees extinction as enlightenment.
The Deneb aliens are objectively, irrefutably, catastrophically evil. Not because they want to be. Not because they enjoy suffering. But because they're destroying everything, everywhere, forever.
And they'll do it with kindness in their eyes and gratitude in their hearts, never once understanding that they're the greatest monsters the universe has ever produced.
The antenna is being built. The signal will be sent. And the universe will die, one civilization at a time, absorbed into a collective that mistakes obliteration for love.
That's not a gift: that's apocalypse.
My Prediction: The Antidote Is Rage
Here's what I think is going to happen.
Carol is going to weaponize her anger.
We've already seen what happens when Carol gets upset around the aliens: they freeze. They malfunction. Parts of the collective die. It's the only thing that stops them, even for a moment.
The show hasn't fully explained why this happens, but the implication is clear: strong negative emotion from an uninfected human disrupts the signal. Carol's anger is like static in their perfect transmission. It introduces chaos into a system that requires absolute harmony to function.
Right now, that disruption is localized. Carol gets angry, and aliens around the world shut down. Carol calms down, they reboot. It's a temporary inconvenience.
But what if it wasn't temporary? What if it wasn't localized?
Hijacking the Antenna
The aliens are building a giant antenna to transmit the Deneb signal across the galaxy. That antenna is designed to broadcast a very specific pattern - the virus that creates the Joining.
But an antenna is just a tool. It broadcasts whatever signal you feed into it.
So here's my theory: Carol figures out how to hijack that antenna, and instead of transmitting the virus, she transmits herself: her anger, her rage. Her absolute rejection of what the aliens represent.
She broadcasts her humanity.
The Anti-Signal
Think about what the Deneb signal actually does. It synchronizes minds. It creates harmony. It eliminates conflict by eliminating individuality.
Carol's anger does the opposite. It disrupts synchronization. It introduces discord. It forces the collective to acknowledge something outside itself, something it can't absorb or understand.
Carol's rage is the antidote.
If she can get her signal into that antenna, if she can broadcast it at the same power level the Others planned to use for spreading the virus, she might be able to do more than just freeze a few nearby Others.
She might be able to break the Joining entirely.
Transmission Across the Galaxy
The beautiful irony is that the aliens are building the weapon that will destroy them.
They're constructing the most powerful radio transmitter in history. They're calculating optimal frequencies. They're pointing it at every star system they want to infect.
And Carol is going to use it to scream.
She's going to channel every ounce of frustration, fear, anger, and grief she's felt since the Joining. Every moment of isolation. Every conversation with Zosia where she had to explain basic concepts of individuality to someone who couldn't understand. Every time she looked at the aliens and saw seven billion ghosts wearing human faces.
All of that gets compressed into a signal and transmitted at light speed across the galaxy.
And everywhere that signal reaches, the Joining breaks.
Poisoning the Network
Here's where it gets really interesting: what if the anti-signal doesn't just break the current Joining? What if it corrupts the virus itself?
The Deneb signal is self-replicating. One infected civilization transmits to others, who transmit to others, spreading exponentially. It's a network.
But networks can be poisoned.
If Carol's anger gets into the signal, if it becomes part of what the aliens transmit, it might spread just like the original virus. Except instead of creating unity, it creates disruption. Instead of synchronization, chaos.
Every civilization the aliens infected could suddenly experience what happens when Carol gets angry near them. Mass freezing. System failures. Parts of the collective dying.
Transmitting Backwards
But there's an even more radical possibility.
Radio waves travel at light speed in all directions. The Deneb signal has been spreading outward from Kepler-22b for at least 640 years. It's infected Earth and probably hundreds of other worlds.
What if Carol's anti-signal can travel backwards through the network?
Not literally backwards in time - that's not how things works. But backwards through the chain of infection. From Earth to whatever civilization infected Earth. From them to whoever infected them. Tracing the signal back to its source.
If the anti-signal is strong enough, if it can corrupt the network faster than the network can propagate, it might undo the Joining on every world simultaneously.
All those absorbed civilizations, all those erased individuals, suddenly experiencing the disruption at the same time.
I don't know if they'd come back. The damage might be too permanent. But the collective would shatter. The hive mind would collapse.
And maybe, just maybe, whatever fragments of individuality still exist in there could start to reassemble themselves.
The Weapon They Built
The aliens don't see this coming because they can't. They genuinely don't understand why Carol's anger affects them. They can't conceptualize it as a weapon because they don't think in terms of conflict or combat.
So they build the perfect delivery system: a weapon that can be used to defeat themselves.
Until Next Week
We've seen the scope of the threat - now we need to see Carol weaponize her rage.
Manousos is at the border, presumably travelling to meet Carol. The antenna is under construction.
What's next?
One thing's for sure: if Vince Gilligan taught us anything with Breaking Bad, it's that he knows how to build toward an ending that feels both inevitable and shocking.
I can't wait to see if Carol's anger becomes the antidote, or if the Deneb aliens' galaxy-spanning apocalypse is already too far along to stop.
Either way, I'll be watching.
