west Asian woman

Isn't Zosia Polish? She mentioned that she loved mango ice cream from after the fall of the Berlin wall and saw ships around Gdánsk. The West Asian woman you're referring to (AFAIK she was in Algeria so North Africa actually ) doesn't appear again and she had a darker skin tone than Zosia.

I think people are overthinking and/or rushing to judgement on limited information when it comes to the consent criticism. Even if they weren't joined, what does Zosia being married before have to do with her entering a new relationship? Is not being monogamous a moral failing? Of course not. Some people aren't into that. As for the plurb, there is no ownership even in sex or relationships. There is no more monogamy. At the same time there is nothing but monogamy because it's one entity with 8 billion appendages. Do the bodies belong to the individual mind that once inhabited it (or still do but are networked to every other mind. if that's the case then no consent problem)? How does that work? Why does a specific mind own a specific body? What about the people who don't have bodies anymore like Helen? Her mind is in there. Is Helen existing within the body of Zosia problem? Or have we moved passed everything relatable and normal to our understanding of humanity that new rules need to be invented?

The plurb have a biological imperative to be happy and make others happy. They will say yes to just about any request unless it directly gets in the way of their imperative to spread. That's not a lack of consent, it's virtually unlimited consent. You could also describe it as a lack of social boundaries. It makes me think of Williams Syndrome. People with this issue need protection but it's from other people. Having a rare genetic disorder is about as controllable as getting infected by an alien virus in the air. It's not necessarily something that needs to be cured just because it's different from what came before it. Again, we're in a new paradigm and if we want to make consent an important issue, what about the consent of the hive? Is forcibly separating everyone morally or ethically correct than forcibly joining them? You can say yes because the joining results in human extinction through starvation. But the unjoining can just as easily result in human extinction through climate change or global war. Why is one existential threat that results from a new organization of society better than another?

Now, I think we're both giving this way more thought than the show currently deserves. The show hasn't explained anything in depth about how the plurb work. We're left to fill in the holes ourselves. Unfortunately I think that is intentional and will continue. I don't think it will ever be explained. If we ever find out that people can't be unjoined, then I would say we have to leave our own real world biases at the door because it's a new social order that will have its own contradictions and properties beyond unjoined society.

Having sex or forcing the plurb to do something you want is tantamount to removed/coercion of the individual, so Carol is aremoved which I think is really difficult to do for a TV protagonist, especially if the intention was not to make a dark horse TV antihero that Bravo Vince has done over and over again.

I guess one thing I wonder is, if the Plurb really is just all of humanity joined together, like it isn't just an alien virus but just an actual joining of all mind across all bodies, if the collective consents to an action does that mean all bodies in the collective consent? I guess it's a hard thing to conceptualize as being with individual minds and bodies attached together.