Plur1bus

 I was vaguely aware of Vince Gilligan when, in 2008, the year that I graduated from college and moved out to California, my best friend and I watched through the entirety of The X-Files, a show that I'd been aware of growing up, but never actually seen. Gilligan was a frequent writer and director on that show. Later, of course, he'd make a far bigger name for himself specifically with his thrilling series about drugs and toxic masculinity, Breaking Bad, and its prequel/spin-off follow-up (which I have not seen yet) Better Call Saul.

In Pluribus (or, stylized as Plur1bus,) Gilligan returns to sci-fi with an interesting twist on Invasion of the Body Snatchers that asks: what if the pod people were super-polite?

The opening minutes of the series' pilot recall, to me, Stephen King's massive novel The Stand. In The Stand, the first half or so of the book shows how an engineered super-flu called "Captain Tripps" ravages humanity, killing off about 99.9% of the population. The small few survivors in the US, seemingly living by simple chance at having immunity to the virus, are then called separately to the side of two individuals, one representing good and the other evil.

In Pluribus, a group of scientists are shocked and thrilled to discover a genuine signal from an alien world, and after over a year of work, they determine that the signal contains an RNA sequence. Replicating that sequence, though, a mishap leads to the RNA spreading like a virus, swiftly taking over peoples' minds and compelling them to spread it.

Eventually, on one fateful night (though I guess it's day in other parts of the world,) the virus is spread to all of humanity.

We're introduced to Carol (Rhea Seehorn,) a successful fantasy-romance author who is deeply bitter and cynical about the ways she has chosen to sell out to make her books more popular, including hiding her own sexual orientation and original desire to make her novels' primary love interest a woman.

Helen, her partner, is clearly her better half, and someone she certainly relies upon to make it through life. Thus, when a strange pattern of airplanes flying overhead sends a nearby driver unconscious, crashing into a parked car, the most horrifying sequence starts in earnest: everyone around Carol starts to convulse, and Helen falls hard on the pavement outside the bar at which they were winding down from Carol's book tour.

Carol rushes to get help for her partner, but there's no one in a state to aid her, even when she drives to the hospital.

And then... everyone recovers. It's not clear to me if the infection itself kills Helen, or if the hard fall onto the pavement did (hitting her head). The point is, Carol finds herself alone amidst a mass of people who are now all walking and talking and speaking in unison.

She turns on the TV, and discovers that she is the sole person in all of America who has not been changed like this, and we find that the hive-mind now controlling the vast majority of humanity is... actually super nice and pleasant. They tell her that they're only there to help her, and they want to figure out why it was that she wasn't affected.

The "Joined" as they call themselves, are chilling in a way that the screaming pod-people of Invasion of the Body Snatchers aren't, because they're just so damned polite and understanding. They assure Carol is her own person, and free to do as she wishes, though they still make it clear that their intent is eventually to convert her as well.

We see the shocking coordination of this new Joined humanity - a woman in what I read as somewhere in the West Bank (though I'm probably wrong as it also seems near the Mediterranean coast, though maybe that's actually the Dead Sea?) cleans up corpses from the chaos that occurred when everyone was convulsing as the virus took over. (The juxtaposition between the modern structures of what I assume are Israeli settlements versus the cramped, dense houses of the Palestinians is potent, raising interesting doubts about whether a hive-mind that removes all the artificial divisions we've created amongst humanity is such a bad thing.) Without missing a beat, a young man comes and takes over her role, handing her his motorcycle helmet as she travels to an airport, gets into a plane, and flies to the US, where people are waiting to bathe, clothe, and do up her hair and make-up, all to present Carol with the person who most fit a feminine version of the art on the cover of her first novel depicting its romantic interest hunk, Rabad.

A few things are spelled out for us: while the signal that encoded this RNA sequence was alien in origin, the aliens don't seem to actually be actively involved in any of this. The sequence just creates a connection between anyone infected so that every body can access every mind in the network. The Joined claim that they cannot harm any living being intentionally (which does mean that everyone's going vegetarian as soon as the meat in peoples' fridges and freezers is eaten or goes bad,) and they don't push themselves on Carol, always stepping away when she asks them to.

As with so many stories of this ilk, we're invited to question whether individuality and free will are really worth all the problems they cause. After all, the moment that this takes humanity over, no one is murdering anyone anymore. Wars are all over, every prisoner is released.

We're given Carol as our main character, and she's a bit of a mess - she has clearly had problem with alcohol (hence why her car has a breathalyzer that is required to start it) and she's dismissive about all the fans who come to fawn over her books. While it might be there for some kind of ironic reason, she also has a Phrenology bust in her house. I think we're meant to really question: is she a good person?

When the Joined (primarily through "Rabad") agree to arrange a meeting with the five other people in the world (of 11) who speak English, Carol is shocked to find that they aren't nearly as upset as she is. Each has family that have all been Joined, and they seem to be ok with it. After all, the Joined are happy to cater to all of their needs.

Carol, of course, just lost the one person in her life who seemed to mean anything to her. One wonders how she would feel if Helen had survived, even if she was Joined (as the other Joined claim she was before she died - hence their insights into Carol's original intentions for the Rabad character).

I think it's also kind of interesting that she's the one American to be unaffected, and how that might inform her attitude.

Breaking Bad was very much an exploration of the toxicity of how men, and in particular, American men, are expected to behave. Walter White's evil comes from his need to be the alpha male - he can't stand that others are willing to help him when he's weakened by his cancer diagnosis, and his conflict with Gus Fring is largely due to his inability to be subordinate in any way to another person. Walter White has so many opportunities to avoid all the pain and death that he causes, but he isn't willing to take a path that doesn't make him the central paterfamilias.

I do wonder, then, if Carol's immediate assumption that the Joined are an evil that must be stopped, an attitude that is not shared by the other five English-speaking non-Joined, might be a comment on the extremist stance Americans tend to take toward individualism in contrast with the collective. I suppose that might make her seem more heroic if you have that gung-ho American outlook, but in my opinion, the "rugged individualism" so championed in American culture has, paradoxically, curtailed a lot of our freedoms by preventing collective action that might wean us from the power of corporate institutions.

I hate that I find myself boiling things down to a Left/Right political alignment so much these days - obviously reality and humanity is more complex than a one-dimensional spectrum. But I do think it's curious that the Joined, in their polite way of speaking, in their patience and affability, and in their vegetarian ethos, could be seen as a satire of progressive politics. (Funnily enough, the RNA sequence is spread through an aerosol distributed by planes overhead - literally chemtrails.)

At one point, Carol gets so angry at "Rabad" that she yells at her, and this sends the entire hive-mind into a minutes-long convulsion, which we discover caused the deaths of eleven million people. Should Carol feel guilty about this? Sure, it's rude to yell at people, but surely it's not murder.

I think, if you were so inclined, you could read this as a satire of the left-wing idea of needing "safe spaces," though I think that if that were your read, you'd be playing into an absurdist oversimplification of that concept that has become more of a right-wing talking point than a reality on the left.

What it reads, to my mind, is as emotional manipulation. An emotional abuser will often try to make themselves the victim, and make accusations of abuse out to be abuse itself.

I really don't know where the show is going with all of this. The most obvious path would be for the Joined to demonstrate greater and greater menace, perhaps pushing harder and harder for Carol to conform and manipulating her in more and more overt ways.

The alternative, though, that might be more original (though tricky to pull off) would be for the Joined to be exactly what they say they are: that they are truly just trying to do what's best for the other eleven humans, and that it's purely through Carol and the others that we'll get the conflict and drama of the series, up against a morally neutral force.

Still, I think it's a smart choice to make Carol a novelist. Carol is someone who has engaged in an artform that seeks to communicate something to readers - not just ideas, but a sense of world, of people. Her novels are fantastical, featuring pirates sailing on sand-ships across a purple desert. There is a joy in communicating ideas in this way, seeking always to find a more perfect way to share the feeling you have in your mind.

When we see the Joined acting with one another, no one ever speaks. No one needs to speak. Any information that one possesses, the rest do as well. With no challenge in communication, how can there be art?