Love, grief and loneliness. How they got to Carol.

I related to Carol entirely too well and the finale was painful to watch. I'm in a very happy relationship, my partner and I get each other. We've built a life together, we have inside jokes, shared interests, lots of work from home days spent together... I love the hell out of him. I've had the occasional terrifying thought of what the hell would my life be if he died. The scenarios are unthinkable.

Episode 2, I felt terrible for Carol. 4 out of the 5 in attendance had the bodies of their relatives with them. Helens body was unusable by the hivemind, her family had disowned her. The others had the bodies and memories of their loved ones to anesthetize them from the fuckedupedness of what was happening. We don't know Diabaté's story. Maybe he had no one in his life to lose and was thrilled to have others willing to play pretend. Maybe he saw his person die in front of him as well and was coping in his own way.

As time went on Carol attempted to forbid the hivemind from using Helens memories, but of course they still did. Once she got closer, the hivemind ditched her and made her wander the wilderness for 40 days. Since the apocalypse had started, Carol had anything she could have wanted from her old life. The hivemind admired her as much as her old fans had. She had every creature comfort and luxury she could have wanted. None of it turned her away from her goal of bringing the world back. Even after the hivemind no longer shunned her, she still tried to find their secrets and bring them down.

Then the hivemind tried a new tactic. "Zosia" stopped acting like a timeserver salesman fueled by AI and started acting like Helen. She spent time with Carol, she started teasing like Helen (mocking her for her poor famous author routine), encouraging her to write like Helen had, she offered to let Carol sleep in the arena with all of them, in that shot I realized that we hadn't seen Carol sleeping in her marital bed to that point in the series.

When Carol kissed "Zosia" and started writing again, I was sad that Carol abandoned her quest. When Manousos showed up and Carol showed us she switched sides, I was deeply disappointed. Then I saw her life with "Zosia", knew why and rooted for Manousos to snap her out of it. Just like the others, she didn't want to undo the apocalypse because she would lose her wife. Unlike the others, she couldn't even fight for "the real Helen" to come back, Helens body had died. Bringing back "the real Zosia" would kill Helen again. If my partner had died (even typing that scares me because I don't want to will it into universe) I'd be untethered. I'd continue fighting the apocalypse because what would be the worst that would happen? If Billie Joe Armstrong showed up at my door, telling me the right stories, calling me the right pet names, saying the right jokes and snuggling me at the right angle, that Kool-Aid would have been drunk.

I'm glad the hivemind made the fatal error of telling Carol they had the eggs and I'm glad Carol was strong enough to stop accepting a Helen substitute. The pain and emptiness of the grief are more than I want to imagine.