Carol & The End of The World – Season 1 Episode 1 Recap & Review

Pilot

Carol & The End of The World Episode 1 begins with Carol sitting in an empty train while the sound of a ticking clock fills the air. She looks out the window and sees another train packed with people celebrating. She then sees another version of herself inside her train.

The other Carol smells something odd. Smoke fills the train and she begins choking. But it turns out to be a dream and Carol wakes up in her own bed. Outside her bedroom window, a mysterious planet looms in the sky.

Carol watches the news where a reporter says there are only seven months and thirteen days till the end of the world. Other reports show people quitting jobs, climbing Everest, swimming the English Channel and fulfilling dreams in general. But Carol isn’t like them. She goes about her day and makes an appointment with a doctor.

She drives to her parents’ house, where her mother and father live with a man named Michael. They watch a video from Carol’s sister who is skydiving. Afterwards, her parents express concern about her. Their friends saw her in an empty Applebee’s and they hope that she’s been going out there, living her life.

Carol lies and says she’s been learning to surf. In the evening, everybody sits outside and watches the spectacle of the setting sun. When her parents and Michael start getting intimate, Carol decides it’s time to leave.

On the drive home, Carol recalls her visit to Applebee’s. How she smelled the ketchup and liked sitting at the booth. After shopping at the supermarket, Carol bumps into an old friend named Janette. She describes a life-changing trip to Tibet and then makes Carol promise to narrate all her own adventures.

At home, Carol is happy to find a letter from the bank. She happily takes out her cheque book but the letter tells her to stop sending the cheques, as they’ve cleared her debt. The writer encourages her to live her life to the fullest.

At night, Carol heads to a music concert in a park but leaves after feeling overwhelmed. She’s sitting on a bench when a man named Eric arrives and takes a seat next to her. He says he was feeling overwhelmed too. They share stories about their fears and end up kissing. She goes back to his place.

In the morning, Carol leaves even though he’s made her breakfast. She sees a photo of his wife and son on a wall and even meets the teenage boy named Steven. Outside the house, she’s dismayed to see someone has sprayed the words ‘Carpe Diem’ on her car.

At home, Carol arrives to a message from her parents on her answering machine. While doing her laundry, a young boy asks Carol why she’s here. It makes Carol wonder what her purpose is.

While driving, she comes across Eric again and he convinces her to accompany him. They break into an abandoned restaurant and eat steak. He tells her stories and makes her laugh and she says she needed this. Then they go to a park and sit under the light of the oncoming planet. Eric suddenly professes his love for her. He says they’re meant to be together.

Carol is clearly uncomfortable and tries to leave but Eric exclaims that he can’t die alone and his son can’t die without a mother. She drives away and goes to her mother’s house. But another shock awaits her there. Her parents and Michael are going on a world cruise. They gift her a surfboard as a parting gift which makes Carol tear up. They misinterpret this and tell Carol how proud they are of her for truly living her life.

Carol wakes up from another nightmare to find she had fallen asleep in her car. A policeman tells her to move but her battery is dead. She goes to the train station where she sees a woman in a suit and seems to get enraptured by her. Carol follows her to a tall glass building. On one of the floors of the building, she finds the woman working in an accounting office where hundreds of employees seem to be working like nothing is wrong at the end of Carol & The End of The World Episode 1.

The Episode Review

Episode 1 of Carol and The End of The World immediately sets this show apart from the crowd. It’s short, crisp and packed with dry humour. The episode sets up the premise perfectly – Carol is surrounded by Carpe Diem-ers and YOLO fanatics but doesn’t belong among them. The whole universe is telling Carol to live her life with a capital L but she herself isn’t sure of what she wants.

A few interesting details about world-building stand out. We see how the streets are littered and a lot of cars are damaged while human beings find their ‘liberation’. Eric and his desperate need to have a romantic partner before the end is very telling of the intense pressures to tick certain boxes in our lives. Carol herself seems awkward and a little one-note but her nightmares signal that there is more to her character, which we will soon find out.