Pluribus Star Rhea Seehorn And More Break Down Those Big Finale Twists — Watch Video (Plus, Grade The Season!)

Warning: This post contains spoilers for the Season 1 finale of "Pluribus."

"Do you want to save the world, or get the girl?"

That was the question — translated by a phone — that Carol had to answer in this week's season finale of the Apple TV sci-fi hit "Pluribus." She finally crossed paths with Manousos, the stubborn fellow survivor from Paraguay who drove all the way up to Albuquerque to meet her, since they're the only two people on Earth intent on stopping the Others. (Or the "weirdos," as Manousos calls them.) But Carol had fallen under the spell of Zosia, and she wasn't as eager to join Manousos in the fight... which led to them butting heads right away.

"What fun would it be if they got along?" series creator and showrunner Vince Gilligan asks in a video interview with TVLine — which you can watch above — with finale co-writer and director Gordon Smith adding: "All the things that brought [Carol and Manousos] together are the things that make them a little bit hard to get together. They're both very, very individualistic, and so that means there's going to be a little bit of friction." (Having to rely on a phone to translate for them didn't help, either.)

Carlos-Manuel Vesga, who plays Manousos, says of his character's friction with Carol: "I think it's endearing. There's something very compelling about them sharing this sense of urgency... and yet not finding a way of working together straight away. We actually don't know if it's going to work between them. But I remember reading that script and thinking, 'I love them even more now.'"

He notes that the friction "also makes them more human. If you compare them with the Joining, yes, they disagree, and there are arguments, and they butt heads," but that butting of heads is exactly what "differentiates them from the Joining."

Carol wasn't as gung-ho as Manousos about destroying those "weirdos," though, because she was busy falling in love with Zosia, and we saw them get closer and closer in the finale, traveling the world together. But the spell was ultimately broken, first when Zosia told Carol of Manousos, "We love him the same as we love you" (but how?!?), and then when Carol realized that the Others could actually harvest her stem cells without her consent... by using the eggs she had frozen to have children with her late wife Helen.

"It's a helpful kind of heartbreak, because it kind of clears her head a little bit," Gilligan says. "If someone loves you unconditionally, which these Others seem to do, but they love everyone else, every blade of grass, every banana slug as much as they love you, then is that really love at all?"

Alison Tatlock, who co-wrote the finale with Smith, adds: "As the kids say, there were a lot of red flags" in Carol's relationship with Zosia. Carol "chooses, we think understandably, to overlook some really major downsides of engaging with an Other in this way. So she feels really embarrassed. She not only is heartbroken and angry, but also angry at herself."

Carol is "wrestling with this idea of feeling so exposed and ashamed that she tried to allow herself to believe that she was special," star Rhea Seehorn, who plays Carol, says. But even though Carol is falling in love, "there are still these glimmers of... a consciousness in there. There is a skeptic in there that hasn't gone away," Seehorn observes, pointing to the scene at the ski chalet when Carol asked Zosia about her exes.

"You're with a gorgeous supermodel who will do anything for you, and you choose to bring up: 'Do you have exes?'" she says with a laugh. "We all know what a bomb that is on a date! That's not going to go well." But "she can't stop. There's still this part of her that can't stop picking at things."

Still, Carol had made up her mind to trust Zosia, and "there's a part of her that is absolutely supporting trying to maintain the infrastructure of this fake world she's creating," Seehorn recalls. "And then she gets kicked in the face with probably the worst betrayal you could come up with," when she learns of the Others' scheme to harvest her stem cells through her frozen eggs.

"From Carol's point of view, it's like, 'I said I didn't want this,'" Seehorn adds. "You won't stop it, no matter how much you say you quote-unquote love me. And it's with the eggs I froze with my now-dead wife that it's partially your fault is dead, and I will never have that future again. It's like, could there be a bigger kick in the face? Probably not."

In the end, Carol agreed to help Manousos "save the world" and fight back against the Others... and she got them a pretty serious weapon in the form of an atomic bomb delivered by helicopter. "We just thought she should ask for the biggest, baddest" option available, Tatlock says. "She's at her maddest, and so she asks for the most extreme thing she can think of." Karolina Wydra, who plays Zosia, sees the atomic bomb as a pretty clear goodbye from Carol to Zosia: "Well, she does ask for an atom bomb. I think that says it all. It's like, 'Check, please, and an atom bomb. Thank you very much. Let's call it a day.'"

Now it's your turn: Give the "Pluribus" finale — and Season 1 as a whole — a grade in our polls, and hit the comments to share all of your post-finale thoughts.