What would you do if the world was ending in seven months? In Netflix’s Carol & the End of the World, a mysterious planet, reminiscent of Junji Ito’s Hellstar Remina, is on a collision course with Earth. The planet is so massive that when it arrives, Earth will be completely obliterated. There’s nothing anyone on Earth can do to stop it. With an eye on the pre-established collision date, the citizens of Earth have resigned themselves to making the most out of their limited time. Except for a 42 year old Carol Kohl. While everyone else in her life is going on Eat, Pray, Love journeys and having orgies, she feels lost. She has no passion she wants to pursue and seemingly no friends. She clings to the normalcy of her previous life, with her only comfort being sitting in a long-abandoned Applebee’s.
That is until by chance she stumbles upon the accounting department for a food and beverage company that continues to function as normal despite most other workplaces having ceased operation. She begins her new job in the office where she finally finds the fulfillment she’s been seeking.
So back to my initial question: What would you do if you knew the world was ending? Well, you can keep your answer to yourself. Because that’s not what this show is about. The true theme of Carol & the End of the World is that it’s cool to make friends with your office coworkers and go to Applebee’s.
To be fair to the show, I don’t think this is exactly a terrible theme. Not one that particularly speaks to me in the way it’s presented, but it’s fine. Even if you don’t live an exciting life of a global surf tour or go to drug-fueled rave orgies, you can and should find real meaning in the more mundane parts of your life. Which, for a lot of people, can look like getting to know the people at work and going to the same chain family restaurant every week.
It’s a message that appeals to a lot of people. We’ve seen shows like The Office (US version) and Aggretsuko start off as a way for the audience to commiserate about their dissatisfaction at work. But over time as both the writers and audiences fall in love with the characters, the gradually became shows about how the office is your home and the employees are your family.
I disliked that turn for both The Office and Aggretsuko. And if the show had just stuck with this line, I wouldn’t have found it interesting enough to be writing about. What makes it stand out so much in Carol & the End of the World is the friction it has with the show’s premise.
This is a cartoon where the themes are more important than the practical logistics of the world-building. So I’m willing to give it some rope. Smashed-up storefronts and shuttered restaurants aside, the society in Carol & the End of the World is still functional. There’s no interruption of utilities or food. Even with most people leaving their jobs, the airline and tourist industries are conveniently fully operational so that everyone can spend the final seven months of their lives on luxury cruises and foreign resorts. After an initial panic, mostly everyone has accepted the news of their impending doom with grace and dignity, with only sparse segments turning to lashing out violently. This show certainly isn’t about the logistics of keeping up the power grid in a crisis, so I can look the other way for that stuff. Well, mostly. Even if we really focus on the themes of what brings meaning to people’s lives and what they would do if they knew the world was ending (which can be extrapolated as a metaphor for the inevitable death that we all know is coming in our mortal lives), I can’t help but feel some of these things are unavoidable.
This show is standing firmly in an upper-class, first world perspective. If we talk about people living life to the fullest and accomplishing their dreams, that inherently brings up the question of what was holding them back in the first place.
The show does touch on the obligation of work, but in the beginning it primarily looks through the lens of self-actualization. Carol isn’t jet-setting or learning a dream craft because there’s really nothing she wants in this new world. Nothing to do, nowhere to go. Her struggle is having no deep desires or passions while everyone else lives theirs.
And in real life, that’s true for many people. They’re being held back by self-actualization. They either don’t know what they want, or perhaps do know but are not able to motivate themselves to make the necessary effort.
But the more important obstacle is the material one. Most people don’t go on their dream vacation traipsing around Spain not because of a spiritual deficit, but because they don’t have the money.
Aside from public nudity, travel is the primary vice people take on in Carol & the End of the World. It’s a constant presence in the show. Carol’s friend travels to Tibet and accosts her to make her own trip there. Carol’s parents go on a worldwide cruise tour. In a fantasy episode, Carol roams the entire globe searching for the perfect surf wave.
Despite the show establishing up front that “work is a thing of the past,” somehow travel and tourism are left completely in tact. While we’re shown that soldiers have taken over some essential services like grocery store cashiers (why do they need to be cashiers if they’ve already established money is worthless?), we don’t see that for any of the luxury services. We see normal waiters serving the guests on Carol’s parents’ cruise. Are they following their dreams? Maybe you could argue that some pilots and boat captains are simply continuing to do what they love, but could you really say the same about their support staff like clerks and baggage handlers? And apparently someone in Tibet had nothing better to do but be tour guide to a couple of obnoxious Americans.
The show is appallingly uninterested in the labor that allows these well-off Americans to live out the last days of their lives in hedonistic luxury. The labor is made invisible and is taken for granted. And it certainly isn’t interested in the perspective of people living in countries where even with the world ending, they still wouldn’t have the opportunity to live a life of decadence and leisure. The only time characters like this are brought up, they’re Somali pirates. Although redeemed in the end, they’re primarily shown to be greedy, violent and selfish. It’s casually brought up that the life of a pirate is difficult, but of course has no interest in talking about the environmental and economic warfare waged against Somalia by wealthier nations that led to the rise of pirates in the first place.
There is one example of someone who was held back by circumstance in the pre-apocalypse world. Donna is the first of Carol’s coworkers that she gets to know. After getting pregnant as a teenager, she went on to raise five children singlehandedly while also running her own nail salon.
In one episode, she goes to visit her adult children for an early Christmas celebration (since the Earth will have been destroyed before December).
Listening to her kids reminisce, she realizes how much of their lives she missed because she had to work so hard to support them.
She feels deep regret for missing out on her family’s life. The Earth will be obliterated in less than six months. Her son invites her to spend more time with them. And what does she do? She turns him down to go back to work.
That is psychotic. Especially when we fully realize the truth about the office.
The office is informally referred to as The Distraction by Donna. At first glance it looks like a completely ordinary office accounting department. Which is actually very not ordinary because most workplaces are abandoned if not destroyed. In the first episode Carol gets a letter from her credit card company saying that they’re no longer accepting payment. What use is an accounting department when that’s the state of the world?
This invites the viewer to speculate, creating what is at first a compelling mystery to the show. The intrigue reaches its peak in an episode where Carol is tasked with finding new toner for the office copier machine while a performance review lingers over her head. The office begins to take on a sinister tone as she struggles to find toner in abandoned Office Depot stores, receives menacing voicemail messages at her desk, and eventually finds a pistol waiting for her in her desk drawer with a note saying it will “assist” her. The implication being that she will be expected to use the gun on someone else, or possibly that she will be pressured into suicide.
She attends a friend’s party, and exploring her mansion she finds a copy machine that uses the exact toner cartridge that she needs. She robs her friend at gunpoint and exits the party, threatening everyone along the way. She even uses the gun to threaten the teenage son of her recent one night stand when he comes to her for help.
This is where I thought the show was really going somewhere. The show was beginning to play its hand with the dark and sinister nature of The Distraction.
But no. Carol returns to the office and discovers that the copy machine already has a new toner cartridge installed in it. Donna tells her that the entire time there has been a closet full of toner right there in the office.
And that’s the end of that thread. It turns out that there is no sinister secret behind the office. The truth is that when the news of the apocalypse hit, the accounting department for a food and beverage company was beginning an audit to investigate a 38 cent discrepancy from the previous quarter. While all the employees abandoned the office, the boss stayed so he could find the issue in the books. Over time, random people found the still-operating office and one-by-one started working there to give themselves a sense of normalcy. There’s no grand conspiracy or purpose to the work. Why did they give her a gun in that one episode? Uh… forget that happened.
The work is meaningless. Their job is to iron out a 38 cent accounting error for a company that no longer makes or sells anything in a world where money has no use because everyone will die before the end of the year. Remember, this is what Donna is missing the rest of her kids’ lives for. This is the context for their “the office is your family” story. It is so incredibly bleak that they thought this was heartwarming.
The show mostly shows everyone making the most of their days as an orgy of hedonism. Travel and luxury. There could have been an opportunity to give a perspective on that kind of mindset. Especially since in one episode they focused so heavily on a pair of rich women who went on a vacation to Tibet and turned it into their whole personality. The consumption of privileged people disguised as enlightenment. But honestly the show doesn’t seem to have much of a perspective at all. I guess it is mildly saying that travel is overrated?
The show correctly posits that there are more ways to live a meaningful life than going on luxury cruises and having exciting novel-worthy adventures. But there’s a world of space between that and what it gives Carol.
You can have meaning in an ordinary life, but that doesn’t mean you have to be, or should be, satisfied with one where your entire world is the office and Applebee’s!
The show says that work doesn’t matter, it’s the connections with the people you see every day. But I disagree! The actual work you’re doing should be relevant! Especially in the world set up in this show. Even if people discarded a lot of non-essential work, there would still be a lot needed to be done to keep society running for the ~8 months left until the planet hits. We see hints of it, but learning that they’re basically just roleplaying office workers makes the lack of focus appalling.
Okay, fine! You don’t want to fuck at a giant rave in the park. You don’t want to climb Mt. Everest. You don’t want to learn an instrument. You just want a normal boring routine where you sit at an office and make watercooler small talk. But if your greatest aspiration really is just to work, putting all that energy towards something with absolutely zero productivity almost feels more selfish than going on naked cruise ships! Why couldn’t they at least be doing something useful? I don’t envy the waiters serving drinks to sunburnt naked cruise people, but at least they’re making something happen!
It goes back to the show’s first world upper class sensibilities that decide to just brush aside that hey, even if the world is falling apart, most people won’t be able to hop on a plane to their dream vacation. The show is completely uninterested in the people who would still have to work and struggle. Not for cosplay, but for real.
I don’t disagree with the core message of the show. But the choice to pair it with an apocalypse narrative creates a noxious combination.