Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul creator Vince Gilligan’s new show Pluribus premiered last week on Apple TV. The first two episodes gave me some tonal whiplash, but together are doing something I’m not sure I’m sold on yet, but definitely want to see more of.
Pluribus follows Carol Sturka (played by Better Call Saul's Rhea Seehorn), a wildly popular romance author who seems to hate being a wildly popular romance author. She’s returned home to Albuquerque after a book tour just as a global disaster hits that turns everyone into zombies. Sort of: As the result of scientists decoding an alien message, almost all of the people on Earth now share a consciousness. Carol is one of a handful of holdouts, and the rest of humanity wants to bring her into the fold in the nicest way possible.
It’s an interesting twist on the zombie formula. The first of the two episodes that premiered Friday is your classic stuff: Carol and her publicist/secret partner Helen are at a bar when everyone goes rigid. There are beautifully-composed shots of Carol coolly driving through town with chaos in her back window, as we slowly notice that all her revived neighbors are acting strangely calm and helpful. There’s a great moment I won’t spoil where Carol figures out what’s going on via watching TV. As someone who avoids suspense and horror because I hate watching people just be upset, I found the first episode very stressful, but the subtle way the show threads in hints that this isn’t the standard disaster stuff helped me push through it.
In the second episode it becomes clear what’s going on: Basically all of humanity’s main goal now is to help Carol and the others who haven’t been “Joined” to get in on it, though they don’t quite know how. In the meantime, the entire world just wants to make life great for those folks. Because they all share the same brain, any one individual knows everything everyone else in the world knows; any random neighbor can operate heavy machinery, fly a plane, or know where Carol keeps her spare key. The episode becomes a twist on the “last survivor of the apocalypse” drama; instead of forging a new life all alone in the ruins of the world, the whole world is here to help Carol live her best life.
But Carol doesn’t want the life the hivemind can give her. In the second episode we meet some of the other remaining survivors, who deal with the situation in different ways. Some want to join the hivemind, or seem in denial about the severity of the situation because they can’t deal with the idea that their families aren’t the people they know anymore. One, Koumba, is taking full advantage of the deal by commandeering Air Force One and gathering an entourage of beautiful hivemind women who are happy to wear matching leopard print and fly to Vegas with him. I wasn’t totally sold on all of the survivors’ conflicts, with some of them feeling to me less like authentic character development and more like the kinds of thoughts a viewer might have that the show just wanted to get out of the way. I’m curious to see how else these survivors figure in as the series progresses and what else the show does with them.
But there’s also a lot of interesting stuff to explore among them: Is who someone is inherently tied to their individuality? (I studied Buddhism, so that’s a big question.) Is this very kind apocalypse worth it if it leads to world peace? What really is kindness? What motivates it, and how do those motivations figure into how we respond to it? How do we learn to accept love and care from others?
The last question is very much one Carol’s character explores. Before the world goes to shit, she seems to hate her fans for loving her, and she pushes away people who are nice to her. That has consequences for her relationship with the hivemind, and raises bigger questions about how our attitudes and responses affect those around us. The show touches lightly on one possible reason why she’s like this, but I’m hoping it digs into all this more to keep Carol from becoming just a one-note curmudgeon. Better Call Saul and Breaking Bad were both excellent at complex characters, so I have hopes the show and its characters will grow from these early episodes.
Even if I’m not totally sold on Pluribus yet, I’m definitely in to see where it’s going to go. I keep meaning to cancel Apple TV because I barely watch it, but just as I’m about to it releases some new show I’m curious about that keeps me sending it my ever-increasing dollars. The show will have nine episodes, releasing on Fridays.
