It's been a while since I finished Pluribus, about a week or so, but I wanted to set down some thoughts on it while the show was still relatively fresh in mind. The TLDR is that I really liked it, more than Breaking Bad and more than what I've seen so far of Better Call Saul, although I've still only seen one season of Saul. I'm looking forward to seeing where Pluribus goes next, but to discuss that, I'll have to engage in some SPOILERS, so proceed with caution after the jump.
The thing that grabbed me from the start, even before I watched a second of the show, was the description, that Pluribus was about the grumpiest person in the world against a perfect utopia. I wrote a story similar to that years ago, so I wanted to see what Vince Gilligan did with it. In the end it turns out to be very different from the story I wrote, but it still lives up to its premise.
It helps that Rhea Seehorn is pretty delightful as Carol, one of the few remaining individuals when the rest of the world is overtaken by an alien virus that turns them into a hive mind. It was fascinating watching her get to grips with the new world order, where everyone around her was creepily nice and happy to help. It was equally fascinating contrasting her with several of the other individuals, most notably Koumba Diabaté and Manousos Oviedo, who take wildly different approaches to the new normal.
Just as important as Rhea Seehorn is the setting. The show is set in Albuquerque, so we get a lot of similar shots as we did in Breaking Bad, but beyond the familiarity, Pluribus does a good job of showing how big and empty the city and the land around it are, especially when the Others abandon Carol for a few episodes.
Storywise, I liked the subplot where Carol investigates the Others, from nearly sending one of them into cardiac arrest when she asks about detaching them from the collective, to the part where she discovers that their primary source of nutrition is "human-derived protein". That reveal that they're eating people was a nice bit of misdirection, ending on an episode cliffhanger but then being explained away in the following episode (by John Cena, of all people): they're so averse to harming living things that they'll neither kill animals for meet nor harvest fruit and vegetables.
So they resort to HDP as a way to feed themselves, but this leads to an equally horrifying idea: because they won't harvest food, they're at risk of starvation and humanity dying out. This is where the different approaches of Diabaté and Manousos come into play. Diabaté seems content to watch the end of humanity as long as he gets to play out his James Bond fantasies. Meanwhile Manousos is so rigid and mistrusting of the Others that he refuses their help at every turn, but he's also instrumental in convincing Carol to continue the quest to save the world.
The other thing I found fascinating was the various philosophical questions that the show raised. I saw the takes that suggested Pluribus was an allegory for the Covid pandemic or for AI, and those certainly landed, but as I watched I kept thinking about what it would actually be like to be an individual in that situation.
To start, I found Diabaté's sexual escapades with the Others weirdly off-putting - they're so eager to please the few remaining individuals that they'll (happily) provide sexual favors or a hand grenade, or (less happily) an atom bomb. In that context, their bodies are basically meaningless and interchangeable, and although the collective is consenting to sex with him, or with Carol later on, the idea that a single intelligence was pushing individual bodies to do that was pretty distasteful. There was also the feeling of ick that came from the thought of having sex with one Other and the rest basically... knowing it all. Truly weird and off-putting.
The other thing that was a particular stroke of genius was of making the central character an artist. It struck me early on that the Others couldn't have any creativity, because every mind was subsumed into the whole. Art is all about communicating one's point of view to others, so if there are no other people, there can be no surprise, no anticipation. The show touches on that in a couple of points, like when it's clear that the Others sent Zosia as their representative because she resembles a female version of Carol's literary love interest; or when Carol actually writes more of her stories and shares them with the Others.
That scene felt particularly poignant, as Zosia tells her how great the new pages are, despite Carol's ambivalence toward her own work at the start of the show, and despite her lover Helen's own ambivalence toward Carol's work. The Others can't ever give any criticism, even constructive criticism, because they don't want to hurt Carol, but that just means they can't be honest.
That lack of honesty comes out devastatingly at the end of the last episode, when Zosia explains that the others are still working on a way to bring Carol into the hive mind, and they expect to accomplish that in a couple of months. Up until then Carol has been living out her best life with Zosia, her dream woman, deluding herself that this can go on forever, but it turns out that despite their protestations that they want her to be happy, the Others are still working to overrule Carol's objections. It really gives the lie to the idea that they're eager to help her.
By the way, the other scene that really brought home for me the horror of what they were doing was at the start of the final episode. We see Kusimayu, a Peruvian individual who met Carol earlier in the season, being inducted into the hive mind, using some unknown substance (but one that we know is based on her own stem cells). When she's still an individual, Kusimayu cuddles a beloved baby goat, but the moment she's subsumed, she loses all interest in it, walking away to whatever purpose the hive mind has for her village, while the goat chases after her, bleating piteously. This implies that whatever their thoughts on slaughtering animals for food, the Others have no interest in pets or cattle otherwise - meaning that the world is on the verge of a hell of an extinction event.
The season ends with Carol agreeing to join forces with Manousos to save the world, given impetus by that ticking clock of only a few months. My one hope is that there won't be as big of a gap to the second season, though a quick glance at Reddit suggests that hope is forlorn - if it takes as long as its fellow Apple show Severance but squanders its momentum, that'd be a real shame. As I said, I found myself grabbed more by Pluribus than by Breaking Bad or Better Call Saul, so I have some expectations that Vince Gilligan will be able to maintain the quality, but... pick up the pace, guys! We need to find out what happens with Carol's atom bomb!
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