Pluribus: Season One Review

"Some of you think the world might be better off this way." 

 Vince Gilligan’s new show Pluribus introduces us to a world in which an extraterrestrial virus renders all but about a dozen people on earth into, basically, the Borg, if the Borg were Midwestern Nice and obsessed with galactic domination. 

This review is spoiler free until the Darian Gap. Cross the Darian Gap at your own risk!

I was on the fence about even trying Pluribus. It had taken me a few tries to get into Gilligan’s Breaking Bad, and I only committed once Billie started reviewing it. I wound up loving that show, just as I’ve wound up loving Pluribus, but even if I didn’t know this was a Gilligan show, even if it wasn’t set in Albuquerque, I’d still probably see the similarities: main characters pushed to the brink by feelings of alienation, doing uncomfortable, sometimes cruel things, and making choices that (I like to think) I would never make. 

But, like Breaking Bad, Pluribus grabs you and won’t let go. It all starts with a weird radio signal from space, which turns out to be an RNA sequence, which leads to scientists developing the RNA sequence, then there’s a rat who bites a human, and within a few weeks all people—except for a dozen—have lost their individuality. Everyone else has all the memories and knowledge of everyone else. They only use first-person plural. Speaking to one is like speaking to them all; they often speak in unison. It’s creepy as fuck. 

Carol Sturka is one of the few people who seems to be immune to the virus. As a result, she’s all alone in the world, surrounded by pod people who are very, very helpful and therefore extremely annoying. Carol was a romantasy writer; her wife was her agent. When her wife gets infected with the virus, she falls and hits her head. She dies, so Carol has to mourn both the world and her wife at the same time. 

Carol is played by the amazing Rhea Seehorn (previous of Better Call Saul), and she’s in nearly every scene. It must have been exhausting for Seehorn, because Carol is an exhausting person. Even before the virus she’s kind of a bitch. She’s the sort of person who complains throughout a vacation, who always thinks there might be something better, but won’t enjoy it when she gets it. In just the first episode, I started to feel bad for her wife for putting up with her. 

Antiheroism has been a trend for men since—oh, who knows? The Odyssey? Paradise Lost? Only recently have we seen a spate of female antiheroes, typically of the “self-hating sarcasm machine” type that we see in shows like Fleabag and various limited-run British detective shows. Those shows rarely appeal to me, but Carol’s prickliness is of a different sort. She doesn’t have the tarnished heart of gold of a snarky detective or the obsession with real, emotional connection of a romcom bad girl. She’s just picky, and traumatized, and better at doing good in the abstract than in the particular.  

Is that why Carol was one of the few people not to be infected? It’s never addressed, but the “Others” or “Infected” or “Los Raros” (aka “The Weirdos” as a later character calls them) aim to please. In fact, they have two basic “biological imperatives”: to spread the virus across the known universe so everyone enjoys hivemind happiness, and to never do harm, which means always trying to make people happy. They won’t even pick fruit from a tree, but Carol’s willing to yell at kids and steal a Georgia O’Keefe painting. (Not at the same time.) 

When Carol, quite reasonably, gets really angry and yells at her designated Weirdo chaperone Zosia (Karolina Wydra), she and every single other Weirdo have a seizure. Being confronted with that much anger directed their way  overloads the Weirdos. The result, though, is that millions of Weirdos die in just a few minutes (of things like car accidents), all because Carol had negative emotions. To exacerbate the problem: negative describes most of her emotions. 

It makes me think of male rage, like we see in Breaking Bad or Peaky Blinders or most superhero movies: whether loud and furious or scheming and cold, male rage generates plot, and is, for some of us, really fun to watch, especially when the CGI is good. It’s transformed into schemes, violence, or at least volume. Female rage, on the other hand, is so verboten that it’s almost not surprising that one woman can break the world by refusing to withhold her emotions. 

As viewers, we’re not trained in how to watch female rage. Some of my favorite shows and movies feature handsome men wearing hats and shooting things. Watching Carol—played with such skill by Seehorn—get truly angry unsettled me. And that is a good thing. We should be unsettled by rage, we should wonder when it’s called for, and we should be creeped out by the Weirdos. If we’ve already normalized and fetishized male rage, maybe we can start paying attention to other versions. 

Carol is not entirely alone, although of course she’s the sort of person who always feels alone. Early in the nine-episode first season, Carol meets some of the other people who didn’t get Weirded. All of them are a-okay with the New World Order. Most want to join the hivemind once the Weirdos figure out how to make it happen. In a world where everyone is basically the same, with a strong do-no-harm ethos, what’s not to love? They conserve resources, cannot engage in conflict, and just want everyone to be happy. 

But Carol was an individualist before the infection, and she’s an advocate for prickly individualism in a world that forces her to double-down on that position. She doesn’t know how to solve the problem, or how to deal with it. She doesn’t realize how much she depends on other people (even for basics like food) until she’s faced with a world in which she can’t just run to the store and pick up a few more bottles of alcohol. This is also not the first time people have tried to convince her to stop standing out: when she was a teenager, her mother sent her to one of those horrific gay-conversion camps. 

Watching Carol work through her personal losses, the loss of all humanity, the desire to fix the world, the challenge of knowing how to do so, and the always-tempting desire to just let a world of people-pleasers actually please her is the meat of the season, which is to say that the plot is an emotional roller-coaster more than a series of exciting events.

I thought it was absolutely wonderful, and I think you will, too. So please go watch the show, and then you can cross the Darian Gap spoiler space for more thoughts on the rest of the season. 

Spoiler Space! This is one of those trees in the Darian Gap.

There’s so much to say about this show, but this review is already about twice as long as it ought to be. There are a few things I can’t help but mention, though: 

Carole’s extended worldwide vacation with Zosia in “La Chica o El Mundo” was very weird to me. When Carol said she’d never felt so happy, all I could think was “Really? Because this is not what true companionship is!” Only when she learned that they planned to use her fertilized eggs did she finally push back and return home. 

Speaking of the Carol/Zosia relationship: the few reviews and comment sections I skimmed all raised the question of consent. Can Zosia consent to sex with Carol if Zosia isn’t Zosia but one physical iteration of a hivemind? If the hivemind consents, is that enough? Or does Zosia’s physical body belong to her “unique individual” self still, even though it’s not clear on whether there’s any individual we could call Zosia still remaining? It’s such an uncomfortable set of questions, and I’m glad the show is refusing to provide pat answers. 

There’s another side to consent, though: the Weirdos will only take Carol’s stem cells to integrate her into the hivemind with her consent (bodily autonomy). But, in the last episode, we discover that they do have her frozen eggs, so they are trying to generate stem cells from those. In other words: they’ll convert her by force once they have the means to do so, while lawyer-parsing the idea of consent to only mean the parts of her body that are still, you know, inside her body. Argh! 

The charming, handsome Koumba Diabaté (played by Samba Schutte) seems untroubled by the idea of consent. The Weirdos are happy to please him, so he is happy to be pleased. I hope we get to see more of him, because I’m curious about why he, a Mauritian, is so focused on the trappings of American wealth and power, like Air Force One and Las Vegas. Personally, if I wanted to really enjoy wealthy symbols, I’d fly in a Saudi jet and spend time in a casino on the French Riviera. 

Koumba, however, isn’t just a hedonist. He’s enjoying himself, but he’s also enjoying the way the Weirdos are fixing the world: less pollution, no racism, no discrimination. Equality for all; we don’t even need equity if everyone is the same. 

But if everyone’s the same, can we create new things? When Carol tells Zosia that she’s writing a new book, Zosia says “Oh, we’d love something new to read!” Because if everyone has the same knowledge and experiences, then everyone has already read all the books, seen all the movies, and knows all the things. Scientific progress, like how to infect people with stem cells, is possible because it builds on what has been known. But building on the past and creating something new are two very different things. If humans stop creating, what even is the point?

On a more practical level, there’s a flaw in the Weirdos’ desire to do no harm as they define it: they’ve let all the animals run free. (Pets are welcome to tag along with their owners if they “choose” to do so.) So, who is taking care of all the goldfish? What about cats that have never hunted for their own food but didn’t realize they were supposed to follow their human to the local arena? What about zoo animals who don’t know how to survive in the wild? I’m not a big fan of zoos, but I’m also not a big fan of the “sink or swim” philosophy of caretaking, which is what Kusimayu, the Peruvian girl who wanted to merge with her village and all the other Weirdos, did to her little kid goat. 

Maaaaaaaaaaaama!

My favorite character is Manousos Oviedo (Carlos-Manuel Vesga). He does what I hope I do if I ever wind up in a similar situation: devote all his time to trying to understand and solve the problem to fix the world or bring it back to the way it was. I loved him scanning every radio frequency. I loved that he yelled at the Weirdo in his mother’s body, claiming her knows it’s not his mom, because his mom was a bitch. I especially loved his determination to trek to Albuquerque without help or interference from the Weirdos. Episode Seven, “The Gap,” was my favorite of the season. 

Me, basically.

Once Manousos gets to Carol, though, things get rough. Two stubborn individualists who are on very different stages of their emotional journeys—I guess I should have expected trouble, except that I really wanted to give Manousos a hug and a cup of coffee. Carol’s treatment of him was harsh, and he was so single-minded that he acted like a jerk, snapping his fingers at her and not thinking about how weird it is to demand someone enter a random ambulance. But all that obnoxiousness is understandable. He’d been on a mission ever since the takeover happened, whereas Carol has made some videos but also spent a lot of time getting drunk and watching Golden Girls. 

But the thing that really made me love Manousos, whom I already loved, was how quickly he assimilated new information and even changed some of his rules. Prior to arriving in New Mexico, he refused to interact with the Weirdos. Once there, he quickly recalibrated, using the phone line to make requests and even having a long conversation with Zosia. (Who later tells Carol that “we love you both equally.”) Sure, he intentionally caused seizures in Zosia and another Weirdo, but he did so to test his hypothesis that the Weirdos were soulless freaks. By the season’s end, Manousos thinks each individual is still “in there,” trapped in their body. If he’s right, that makes saving the world more urgent. 

That’s where the season finale gets tricky. In a very old episode of the Writing Excuses podcast, Lou Anders discusses what he calls the “Hollywood Formula” for the relationships of protagonist, antagonist, and villain. Anders describe the antagonist as the person who gets in the way of the protagonist’s plans, whereas the villain is the entity to be defeated. In Ocean’s Eleven, for instance, Brad Pitt’s character Rusty is the antagonist, because he might get in the way of Danny’s (George Clooney) goal of reuniting with his wife. (“You can’t split Tess eleven ways!” is the clincher dialogue in support of this approach.) In Breaking Bad, Walt has many villains, but the true antagonist is his wife Skyler, because she might not let him break even worse. 

If Pluribus started with a clear, albeit flawed, hero in Carol, with the Weirdos as the obvious villain, then Manousos’s desire to fix the world gets in the way of the two goals that Carol has during the last episode. First, he wants her to help him, right as she wants to feel like Zosia loves her best. Second, he wants to fix the world, and now Carol’s so angry that she’s got an atom bomb. 

Gilligan’s not too bad at cliffhangers, right? 

Notes:

 • There’s been some ambiguity online about what to call the hivemind people. The Borg is obviously an inconvenient pop-culture shorthand. “The Others” still evokes Lost for anyone older than Gen Z. I like Manousos’s “Los Weirdos” (“Los Raros”) because it can mean the odd ones, the weirdos, the strange, similar to the Latin phrase rara avis—a strange bird, an odd duck. But “Weirdo” also means, of course, “rare” as in unusual. In this new hivemind world, though, Manousos and Carol are the rarities. 

 • There’s a really nice interview with Samba Schutte here. 

 • I want to be like Manousos, but the truth is I’d probably wind up somewhere between Carol and Koumba, saying things like, “Oh, no traffic!” and “Now I can finally catch up on my reading list.”

 • Like Breaking Bad, this show has so many moments of subtle-yet-hilarious comedy. My favorite was when Carol got so annoyed listening to the voicemail message each time that she started doing little chores and stretching her hamstrings, just like we all do when we’re sitting through something tedious. 

 • Vince Gilligan has described himself as “more conservative than most” people working in show business; he’s also said that Pluribus isn’t about AI. So I’m resisting the urge to read this show as an allegory of AI, or vaccines, or reproductive rights. I also think allegorizing things diminishes their messy nuance, and I love messy nuance. 

Four out of four languid grins. 

  Josie Kafka is a full-time cat servant and part-time rogue demon hunter. (What's a rogue demon?)