Pluribus Season 1

Vince Gilligan is bonafide TV royalty in America, having springboarded from working on some of the best episodes of the X-Files to showrunning both Breaking Bad and its prequel series, Better Call Saul. For his next show, an Apple TV original, he returns to Albuquerque but switches genres in order to tackle a sci-fi story that plays out on a global scale.

I would count myself as a fairly enthusiastic inhabitant of Gilligan’s TV Island. I greatly enjoyed Breaking Bad (despite the racism and the last episode buying too much into Walter White’s hype), thought Better Call Saul was even better, but more than that I just find Vince Gilligan’s house style strangely cosy, even when it’s being used to depict bad things happening to awful people. So I was very much looking forward to Pluribus, even though I was bracing myself for a fairly big stylistic and tonal departure, given that it’s not part of the Breaking Bad universe (the Albuquerque setting was retained mostly so Vince could keep working with his Breaking Bad/Better Call Saul production crew, according to the show’s podcast) and is telling a radically different kind of story.

That premise revolves around Carol Sturka, a misanthropic author of highly popular fantasy-romance novels that she secretly hates. She also seems to hate her fans, most people she encounters on a day-to-day basis, and herself. The only thing she doesn’t hate is Helen, her wife and literary agent, although even then a casual observer might be mistaken for thinking otherwise. Carol’s a bit of a grump, to put it mildly.

But happiness comes for her whether she wants it or not, in the form of an alien virus that fuses everyone on Earth into a blissful hive mind…everyone, that is, except for Carol and twelve other immune people. The hive mind badly wants to discover the secret of this immunity so that it can welcome these lost souls into the fold, but in the meantime it’s happy to provide them with anything they might want. Anything at all.

No, really. Anything.

While the other survivors make use of this newfound hedonism to varying degrees, Carol is having none of it, in large part because Helen happened to die in a tragic accident on the night of the Joining. She finds her resolve on that front tested when the hive mind sends an ambassador to her in the form of her ideal woman, and before long she’s locked in a toxic disaster-relationship with seven billion people, all while her attempts to rally the other survivors cause an escalating series of mishaps and ripple effects.

Up-front, I think it’s important to clarify what Pluribus isn’t. It is not—at least in this first season--a sci-fi action/adventure series about a romantasy author Sarah Connor saving the world from aliens. It does heavily feature Carol trying to reverse the Joining, and there’s about as much action as the first season of Breaking Bad (think that bit where Walt blows up the dude’s office with chemicals), but the unique nature of the hive mind means that this isn’t, and can’t be, a story about good humans fighting sinister aliens.

The hive mind (dubbed “Plurbs” by the fandom, referred to by Carol and the show’s creators as “the Others”) are antagonists only in the most textbook sense of the word, in that they’re trying to further a goal that the protagonist is opposed to, and they make it clear early on that they’re not willing to take ‘no’ for an answer. But this is the one and only sense in which they pose a threat to Carol; in all other things, they’re endearingly eager to please her and are possessed of a childlike naivety regarding social interactions and norms, such as in an early scene where they inform her that they have a Reaper drone surveilling her house; they seem genuinely taken aback when being informed that the drone is unarmed doesn’t make Carol any less skittish about this.

Rather than being a story about evil aliens versus good (if highly flawed) humans, Pluribus is more about what happens when two different kinds of intelligences interact. Over the course of the season, it becomes gradually clear that the Plurbs’ schema of ethics—which they refer to as biological imperatives—is fundamentally different from that of humans. The fun comes from the fact that in most of its aspects, the Plurbs’ behaviour happens to align with traits that humans generally find positive: they’re accommodating, friendly, affectionate, empathetic, generous, selfless.

Much of Carol’s effort over the course of the story involves finding the places where Plurb and human morality don’t overlap. What she discovers in those mismatches is where Pluribus really deviates from what its audience might have expected. Over and over again, it seems that Carol has discovered some shocking twist, some evidence that the Plurbs are hiding something more sinister behind their cheerful façade; over and over again, that turns out to not be the case. There is no hidden conspiracy, there’s no secret agenda. The Plurbs tell Carol, truthfully, exactly what they are and what they want the first time they ever speak to her, and despite their claimed honesty not being entirely as iron-clad as they make it sound (they can’t outright lie, but they can withhold information that Carol doesn’t ask them about directly), their basic nature is never revealed to be anything other than what they present it as.

But the thing is, there doesn’t need to be a conspiracy or some ghoulish secret for Carol’s hostility towards Earth’s new dominant species to be justified. Even the most loving and altruistic gesture, offered with zero ulterior motive, becomes a violation if you can’t say no to it, and that’s why Carol’s relationship with the Plurbs is ultimately doomed: she doesn’t want what they’re offering, and they just can’t to accept that. As Carol’s attractive “chaperone” explains it, they can’t stop trying to bring her into the hive mind any more than she would walk away from a drowning person.

Would Carol actually help a drowning person? My description of her personality might make you doubt it, and I have a feeling if someone asked Carol herself, she’d say no (or at least, she’d claim it would depend on whether she could do it without getting her shoes wet). It would certainly make the show’s moral conundrums easier to resolve if she was as misanthropic as she appears to be. The thing is though, she’s not: during the chaos of the Joining we see a deep well of empathy emerge as she tries to help random strangers, and much of her actions during the rest of the season are ultimately rooted in a belief that what the Plurbs have done to humanity is wrong. Yes, she clearly wants the old world back in part because it was an environment she was personally invested in, but she also wants to free seven billion people who, as she sees it, have had their individuality stripped from them without consent. But at the same time, she still has empathy for the Plurbs themselves, going out of her way to avoid harming them. She is, clearly, a person who cares a great deal about others, and in light of that her bristly exterior comes across more as a defence mechanism put up by someone who is deeply afraid of being hurt, rather than someone who takes any kind of enjoyment in hurting others.

Just as telling is her attitude towards her romance novels. She dismisses them as “mindless crap” and insults the people who like them, but over the course of nine episodes this is slowly revealed to be a scab hiding a very raw insecurity regarding her skill as a writer—something that I found particularly well-observed as a hobbyist writer myself.

And then there’s the constant presence of Helen lurking in the series’ periphery. We never find out anything about how their relationship started, but they clearly loved each other, and Helen comes across in her brief screentime as a cheerful, well-adjusted person, so there must be something in Carol that made Helen want to spend the rest of her life with her, even if we in the audience can’t see it and the Plurbs can’t access it.

At the start of this review, I mentioned bracing myself for a stylistic shift from Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul. There is definitely one; there couldn’t not be, given that we’re comparing stories about drug dealers and crooked lawyers that take place mostly in one city to a tale of global alien possession that has scenes and characters all over the world. At the same time, there are still plenty of Gilliganisms for the Vince-heads: if you like long dialogue-free montages of people doing things competently, or close-up establishing shots on household objects, you will get a decent amount of that here. What you also get is some absolutely gorgeous cinematography. I don’t know if the Sony/Apple TV money facilitated it or if the demands of the plot just forced Gilligan and crew to flex their muscles, but this is an absurdly good-looking show, where the inside of a dumpster is as meticulously crafted and colour-coded as a sweeping landscape panorama. Vince even mostly stops putting an aggressive piss filter on anywhere south of the Rio Grande!

In case it wasn’t obvious yet, I really loved the first season of Pluribus. I think it’s the best series that’s come to streaming since Severance, which is high praise indeed since Severance is currently on track to be the best show of the decade. I wouldn’t say it quite reaches that level—Severance season one was so magnificent in part because it managed to feel like a cohesive story in its own right, whereas the first season of Pluribus is very much part one of a longer ongoing arc—but it’s damn close.

Many people have complained that the show is slow-paced. This is true. The overall plot doesn’t advance very far in these nine episodes; you could easily imagine a version of the same story that gets to the same place in half that time.

You could imagine it, if you were a FECKLESS RUBE who didn’t care about character development or atmosphere, both places where the slow pacing of Pluribus shines. Carol’s arc over the course of the season is so compelling because the show has time to really examine how she relates to the hive mind, spending an entire episode on a single shift in opinion or feeling instead of blowing through it in one scene. Similar attention is paid to another character who ends up becoming something approaching Carol’s co-star; their journey—physical and mental—is one of the highlights of the season, and a snappier pacing would definitely have necessitated cutting it back.