Carol & The End of The World – Season 1 Episode 5 Recap & Review

David

Carol & The End of The World Episode 5 begins with a band playing Oh Carol. Revellers dance and watch, Carol is amongst the latter.

A sudden shift shows us clips of a number of different people – all employees at The Distraction. On a normal workday, Carol tells Donna and Luis it’s weird that they don’t speak to the other employees or know their names. Donna encourages her to leave things as they are.

But Carol begins to learn the employee’s names through the personnel files. She even takes them home and learns her coworkers’ names. She then used the information to engage with the other employees by name – while distributing papers, getting coffee, and entering the lift. It seems to make the others a bit uncomfortable.

We then see a man staying late at the office long after everyone has gone. He stays through the night and into the morning when the employees return and barely moves from his chair the entire time. The next night he falls face forward with his head on his keyboard. Carol notices him while leaving late herself and tries wishing him goodnight. But she is shocked to find that he’s dead.

She gets Donna and Luis for help. Donna wants to leave him be but Carol insists they can’t. They, reluctantly, put him in Donna’s car and use his personal information to go to his house. When they reach, they ask for David’s wife but she calls out to ‘David’ inside the house.

They’re welcomed inside and meet a bunch of different people. The wife assumes David is somewhere upstairs even though she hasn’t seen him in weeks. Carol says they should leave. Outside, she tells them the family didn’t seem to care about David. They find an uncle listed as David’s emergency contact and agree to try there tomorrow.

The next day, other people begin to address each other by name which makes Carol happy. After work, they get in the car again and set about looking for David’s uncle. Unfortunately, the search leads them straight to the uncle’s funeral.

They drive back and give David’s body up to the authorities. His body is cremated and Carol receives his belongings which include a key to a room at a hotel named Sentinel Suites. Carol goes to the abandoned hotel and enters the room. She sits on the bed with David’s urn. When daylight comes, she realises the building is very close to her workplace. She’s overjoyed to find office clothes and a clerk’s manual in one of the drawers.

She walks into work with the urn in hand. She announces his death to everyone and makes an awkward speech. She invites everyone to a proper send-off on the roof but everyone just goes back to work. In the evening, she goes up to the roof. Donna and Luis join her. They say a few kind words and are then joined by other employees.

Everybody mentions nice things about David, even if they are minuscule details. Carol releases his ashes into the wind. Later, Carol says goodbye to her coworkers by name as she leaves. A man named Bruce even introduces himself officially at the end of Carol & The End of The World Episode 5.

The Episode Review

Carol and The End of The World serves up another emotional episode. This one revolves around a seemingly insignificant coworker at this office where no one knows what they’re doing anyway. But Carol refuses to let it remain that way. It is admirable how, even while stuttering and being unsure of herself, Carol keeps pushing to give David a proper goodbye. She’s compassionate and her kindness is clearly having a ripple effect on the people around her.

The story fits very well within the thirty-minute run time of the episode. It feels crisp and to the point, highlighting how people can not always get along with their imperfect families. In a sense, Carol probably sees a bit of herself in David, who went to The Distraction without any of his relatives knowing. With the sense of impending death looming over the other characters anyway, Carol & The End of The World Episode 5 puts an extra spin on the story about a coworker’s death.