Civilization will outlive humanity in the new sci-fi drama Pluribus. On a night when the world as we know it is destroyed, a writer named Carol Sturka (played by Rhea Seehorn) sees cars and planes going off course, an emergency room full of convulsing bodies, and her city of Albuquerque burning. The President dies under mysterious circumstances, and, even more devastating for Carol, her partner Helen (Miriam Shor) also dies. Then, in less than an hour, the apocalypse cleans up after itself. People stop convulsing. They put out the fires. Sure, they've been taken over by an alien virus, but when they go to take Helen's body and Carol tearfully protests, they listen. “We just want to help, Carol,” they say in unison. Not since The Twilight Zone, when aliens arrived promising to “serve man,” have the end times arrived so obligingly.
Pluribus is the long-awaited sequel to Vince Gilligan's Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, in which Seehorn played the no-nonsense lawyer Kim Wexler. The new series shares elements with its predecessors, including the New Mexico setting, but for longtime Gilligan fans like myself, it's more reminiscent of his first TV job, when he was a writer and eventual executive producer on the paranormal procedural The X-Files. The show, which centered on FBI agents Mulder and Scully's investigations of unexplained phenomena, was the first to explore Gilligan's preoccupation and playfulness with the concepts of order and chaos. He made his directorial debut with the episode “Je Souhaite”, in which Mulder stumbles across a genie and dutifully wishes for world peace – only for the grinning spirit to destroy humanity. “Pluribus” includes a version of the same trade-off: destroying our species, as devastating as it may be for Carol, may be the best solution for the rest of the planet.
As we learn in episode two, nearly a billion people died on the same day as Helen. Those who survived – all but Carol and a dozen other people scattered across the world – were united into a single being, bound by a “psychic glue” that provides unfettered access to the thoughts and memories of the entire collective. When Carol talks to someone who has the virus, she is technically talking to almost every other person on Earth. The word “I” is approaching extinction as the mass speaks as “we”. They stand out only for her comfort, beginning the conversation with a cheerful download of information about the host she's addressing: “This man's name was Lawrence J. Kless or Larry.” Although Carol seems inexplicably unresponsive, they are friendly and eager to bring her into their fold once they figure out how to do so. Their smiles at Stepford take her back to the last time she was surrounded by optimistic strangers eager to change her – when she was a teenager in a conversion camp. But its new guardians welcome all sexuality; an uninfected Mauritian named Kumba (Samba Schutte) notes that racism is not a problem either. Carol's reflexive resistance in the face of a peaceful, virtually friction-free society becomes the driving force of the show: What if everyone else's heaven is your own personal hell?
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Even before her fellow humans were infected, Carol didn't seem to have much need for them. She spent her days churning out bestsellers that she considered “meaningless nonsense” and harbored a corresponding contempt for her fans, hiding both her oddity and her larger literary ambitions in an effort to attract a wider audience. Being a certified misanthrope, she makes no attempt to visit friends or family after the first disaster; Apart from Helen, it is unclear whether she has them. Most of the other survivors she meets have one or two loved ones (though it's hard to tell how close those relatives were to their pre-virus selves) and a surprising openness to the new normal. Carol is assigned as the hivemind's liaison, Zosia (Karolina Vydra), an unfailingly polite and stubbornly uninteresting woman who uses the wealth of information at her disposal to try to calm her hapless charge.
In the early episodes, mass is a powerful metaphor for artificial intelligence. It's destructive but caring, well informed but stupid as hell. When Carol sarcastically tells Zosa that the only thing that can improve her situation is a grenade in her hand, they immediately deliver one to her home. Always eager to please, they tell Carol that her works and Shakespeare's are “equally wonderful.” And they satisfy base desires with the same joy. Kumba uses them as a concierge service, sending Air Force One flying around the world, all the while with an entourage of leopard-print babes waiting for him. Zosya says that they are not against his meanness: “For us, affection is always desirable.” Gilligan said the show was conceived about a decade ago, before artificial intelligence became a widespread consumer technology. However, the end credits pointedly say, “People made this show.”
Leaving aside the millions of off-screen victims, it's clear that Gilligan is aiming for a lighter, more unusual film than his two previous series. (Even though Pluribus enjoys a creepy atmosphere, the sunny Southwest sun keeps things from getting too grim.) The creepy scenarios it creates are a source of humor, intrigue, and genuine suspense. But the show never adds up to more than the sum of its parts. Carol presents a protagonist with annoying tunnel vision—a man with a shocking lack of curiosity about the entity that has taken over the Earth, or even what the infected do all day when they're not offering to cater to its whims. Her one-note sullenness means Seehorn, who was heartbreaking as the depressed Kim in Saul, is wasted as the host of her own show. The contentment and willingness of the collective mind to cooperate is also difficult to dramatize.
The invaders' “biological imperative” to consume everything around them is a major source of tension in “Pluribus”: can Carol, who defies defiance but has none of the necessary skills, find a cure before she is subdued? But “joining in,” as Zosia calls it, can take weeks or even months, and the lack of narrative urgency is compounded by drawn-out sequences of time-consuming toil. In the pilot, Carol struggles to load Helen's collapsed body onto the back of a truck to take her to the hospital; later there is another difficult task: digging a hole deep enough to bury her in the backyard. Such demonstrations of trial and error became a revelation in Breaking Bad, when Walter White demonstrated the difficulties he faced in transforming from a humble chemistry teacher into a ruthless drug lord. (Nobody just knows how to dispose of a corpse.) In the new show, Carol, faced with layers of volcanic rock and possible heat stroke, is eventually forced to accept Zosia's help at Helen's funeral. The concession must seem significant, not least because Zosia was sent by the collective because of her resemblance to the love interest in Carol's novels: a fantasy meant to replace the real woman she lost. However, Seehorn and Widra's interactions are more stilted than tense.
I realize this is the kind of show we would be lucky to see in this disappointing moment on television. One of the genre's greatest authors has created something completely original and impressively unpredictable, in which the masses gradually discover vulnerabilities that seem truly unique in science fiction. But its otherworldliness also means that the show has a hard time developing Carol's relationship with Zosia—or anyone else—in any meaningful way. As the nine-part season progresses, the creature becomes less of a character and more of a puzzle to be solved. The AI analogy gives way to something far less satisfying: a horror story about what their version of living in harmony would actually entail. Carol, closed-minded as she was, could have said that from the start. As she grumbles from the start, “Nobody in their right mind is that happy.” ♦
