TV titan Vince Gilligan is known for writing bad guys. Think Walter White in Breaking Bad or Saul Goodman in Better Call Saul. But for his highly anticipated follow-up, Gilligan dares to imagine a world where there are no bad guys, where evil has been eradicated in its entirety. And therein lies a very different kind of horror.
Pluribus begins with a scientific discovery gone awry, as is often the case with post-apocalyptic stories of this nature. One simple mistake breaks the world as we know it, unleashing a virus that melds the globe into one collective group mind. The horrific imagery that follows evokes everything from the devastating stillness of 28 Days Later to the chilling paranoia embedded throughout Invasion of the Body Snatchers (in all its incarnations).
So why was Pluribus surrounded by so much secrecy prior to its release? We’ve seen this all before, right? Well no, it turns out that Gilligan’s twist on the genre quickly takes these familiar tropes in wildly unexpected directions that intrigue, unsettle, and might occasionally test your patience at points.
Without spoiling too much, this global shift in thinking isn’t hellbent on domination. The virus has essentially won already, yet that was never its goal. Melding the world’s population into one singular mind was just necessary, a biological imperative akin to breathing. The result is a happy one, creating a utopia on earth where there is no more crime. Discrimination is a thing of the past and every caged animal has been set free.
At its core, this apocalypse brings peace and happiness to everyone on earth except the one woman who can’t stand it.
Carol Sturka, an unhappy romance novelist who peddles “mindless crap” numbers among the very few people on earth who have retained their minds still, somehow immune to the virus. As such, the collective is keen to draw Carol into their embrace, quite happily informing her that they’re working on ways to push through and infect her somehow.
It’s in this tension that the show’s defiance of straightforward tone and genre is most evident. Much like Carol herself, Pluribus pushes back against notions of good and evil, what’s right and wrong, in a funhouse mirror version of the grey areas Gilligan played with so adeptly in his previous works.
With a placid smile (smiles?) and kind reassurances, the virus wishes to erase Carol’s individuality and assimilate her completely. But would that be so bad? Other survivors reject Carol’s idea of “saving humanity”, believing themselves to be saved already in what could be considered a new utopia on earth.
It would be easy to read this as a push back against group think or conformity, but Pluribus doesn’t offer easy answers. Instead, the writing opens itself up to interpretation on multiple levels (unlike Carol’s own tawdry fantasy series). This idea that the ones who wish you harm will smile at you as they do so also speaks to religious extremism, gay conversion therapy, and even our political reality, while assumptions that the virus is bad also touch on the differences between individualist and collectivist societies.
Pluribus does offer easy answers in another sense, however, as the virus readily gives up information Carol seeks in her attempts to uncover what’s really happening. These tranquil admissions might lack the tension that a puzzlebox mystery show usually provides — with one even going so far as to undercut its own horror almost immediately — but this in itself sets Pluribus further apart as an entirely unique viewing experience.
That’s also true of its scale. Gilligan’s return to TV makes full use of that Apple TV budget with vast settings that ram home the global impact of what’s happened. Jumps back and forth in time expand this even further again, plus international locales beyond Albuquerque, New Mexico (also the setting of both Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul) are just a plane ride away, easily accessible thanks to “The Afflicted” and their endless altruism.
While you’re sometimes left wondering at the implications of this global shift beyond Carol’s perspective, Pluribus constantly finds ingenious new ways to touch on that through dialogue or outlandish scenarios that could only come from a premise this strange. Hearing a child draw on the group mind to discuss the ins and outs of gynaecology is as disconcerting as it sounds, for example, while a politician talking to Carol through her TV delivers one of the premiere’s most shocking moments through what’s essentially exposition.
Pluribus is alien in more ways than one, so it was smart to ground this story through a protagonist like Carol, a cynical grump whose anger is as useful as it can be destructive. Her outrage at what’s become of humanity spikes against the happiness of the collective, creating a push and pull dynamic that grows central to what Pluribus has to say.
Gilligan wrote this story specifically for Rhea Seehorn following their work together on Better Call Saul, and it’s the exact kind of calling card that could nab her an Emmy at last following three previous nominations. Whether she’s seething or yearning, raging or grieving, Seehorn is magnificent, adding dimension upon dimension to Carol against the smoothed-out flatness on the faces of everyone who surrounds her.
Pluribus is essentially a one-woman show in that respect, yet Karolina Wydra also does phenomenal work as Zosia, an avatar for the collective who Carol comes to rely on. Her prominence deliberately complicates our perception of what’s happening while also giving us a face to connect with in this multitude of billions.
Pluribus works as an inverted version of Sense8 in some ways, another marvellously inventive spin on what’s possible within sci-fi. Elements of Lost’s puzzle box enigma, the existentialism of The Leftovers and even the quirkiness of The X-Files — a show Gilligan worked on extensively before Breaking Bad — are also apparent in the DNA of Pluribus (not to mention the influence of seminal sci-fi authors such as John Wyndham or Kurt Vonnegut).
Much like the virus does to everyone except Carol, Pluribus twists familiar storytelling beats into something new and otherworldly. The result is one of this year’s most inventive stories across any medium, making Gilligan’s return to TV a bonafide rarity in a sea of recycled ideas we’ve seen countless times before.
Beyond the premiere — a truly perfect hour of television — you’ll need to be open to seeing the bigger picture at points, and patience is vital if you’re to go along with some of the wilder swings this show takes. But if you’re up for it, prepare yourself for what could eventually turn out to be a genuine masterpiece on the same level as Breaking Bad or Better Call Saul.
All it took was for Gilligan to make everyone and no-one the bad guy all at once.
Pluribus is now available on Apple TV.
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