The details of Carol and Helen slowly revealed, and Carol having to reconcile the image of her wife and their marriage she has in her head and her memories with the new information that she never got from the real Helen but are told to her by the Hive, who are using Helen’s memories and mannerisms to manipulate Carol. It’s so fun to me, and one of the more interesting parts of the show.
I’m not interested in categorizing Carol and Helen as a failmarriage or a necessarily toxic relationship. I think it’s painful for Carol to grieve and miss her wife while also having to recontexualize important aspects of their relationship. Helen never finished reading her book. She thought of her writing as fluff, cotton candy. She put a motion sensor in the alcohol cabinet when they were preparing to freeze Carol’s eggs to eventually have a baby together. We don’t know what happened after that, but they never had a child together. I think we can speculate different possibilities, but my mind floated to Carol not abstaining from drinking, and Helen pulled the plug on them moving forward with having children, or brought up shelving the idea, but she never confronted Carol about her drinking when she was meant to be abstaining.
I don’t view Helen as controlling, but I think the parallels with the Hive monitoring are intentional. I think we are meant to see that individual humans are fallible, too. Humans do things under the guise of love all the time. We don’t see Carol and Helen’s history, we don’t know how alcoholism has marked their marriage. But Carol’s car has a breathalyzer, and Helen kept a motion sensor in their home. It’s clearly territory that has been tread before. Carol simply explains to Manousos that Helen didn’t like her drinking. We don’t know if Helen used the sensor after Carol froze her eggs. I lean on the side that she didn’t, not afterward, because Carol doesn’t seem to restrain her drinking in front of Helen. But it’s still there.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Carol jumped to assuming the Hive was bugging her and didn’t consider Helen, because Helen never gave her a reason to assume she’d track her movements (or Carol didn’t want to assume something like that of her wife). I also don’t think Carol would have believed the Hive so immediately had she not determined they can’t lie to her. But, of course, the new information still hurts her, deeply. And she can’t confront Helen. She can’t hear Helen’s side, she can’t forgive Helen, because Helen’s not here to ask for forgiveness. And the eggs—that future, it ends up coming around to hurt Carol in the end, again. That potential future promised for her and Helen, they never saw it through, and it’s been colonized by the Hive.
