Hollywood aliens tend to come in one of three flavors: the ones who want to enslave us, the ones who want to solve all our problems, and the ones who want us to teach them about this earth emotion called “love.”
It’s the genius of Vince Gilligan, creator of Apple TV’s Pluribus, to recognize that these impulses are essentially the same. It doesn’t really matter if they’re here to fight us, free us, or fornicate with us. The point is, they’re not asking permission.
In a way, the aliens of Pluribus are out for all three: one way or another, they are going to love us to death.
Or rather they’re going to make us do it to ourselves. We never actually meet the aliens. Their only message is an encoded DNA sequence that Earth’s greatest scientists are only too happy to whip up and inject into some lab animals. One rat-bite later, the alien virus turns humanity into a single, corporate intelligence with one hell of a friendly attitude. It’s like the Borg grew up in Minnesota.
Thirteen humans on the planet are immune.
One of them, Carol Sturka, is a writer of popular-but-forgettable fantasy romances, living in Vince Gilligan’s chosen playground of Albuquerque, New Mexico (Pluribus is in its own reality, so don’t go looking for Breaking Bad easter eggs). Rhea Seehorn, Better Call Saul’s greatest discovery, brings her finest tip-of-the-iceberg style to Carol, as resistant to happiness as she is to assimilation. She thinks her fans are idiots for adoring her drivel, but she can’t force herself to do better. Mostly she drinks: her SUV has one of those breathalyzer attachments.
The only thing anchoring Carol to this world is her partner/publicist Helen (Miriam Schor). Helen doesn’t survive absorption, but her absence lingers. Without her, Carol has absolutely no one on the planet she can connect with. But then, that was always the case.
If it seems like Carol is too self-loathing, self-absorbed, and irreparably damaged to make a good heroine, it’s worth considering the alternative. The infected—canonically known as “the Others” or “the Joined”—are everything that humans supposedly aspire to become. They have no instinct for violence, no intolerance, no greed. Since everyone shares a hive mind, there’s no need for social hierarchies or exclusion (a John Cena cameo reassures us that, in the post-joining world, celebrities really are just like the rest of us). They sleep huddled on the floor like puppies. They eat—well, we’ll get to that in a minute.
Mostly, they are happy: and that, according to them, is beyond what any individual can experience. They can’t not feel this intense connectedness and joy, and so they can’t not force others to share it. Sound good?
As they are fond of telling Carol (frequently in unison), the others want her to be happy. They can’t make her join them—yet—because it would require invasive procedures to extract her stem cells, and they are constitutionally unable to cause her pain unless she specifically requests it.
Until that part gets figured out, they devote themselves collectively to her comfort, and that of the last few individuals on Earth.
Carol fails to lead a rebellion. Most of the other twelve uninfected are just fine living with their assimilated families like nothing’s changed. Probably because nothing has. One of them, Mr. Diabaté (Samba Schutte) is leaning way into his newfound privilege. He flies around on Air Force One and stages James Bond fantasies in Vegas, attended by a bevy of willing sex partners. He’s not charming or suave, just incredibly shallow. And yet it’s that very shallowness that keeps him human.
The temptation to exploit people who are incapable of refusing you anything is powerful: Carol jokes about getting a hand grenade and they bring her one. Even so, she fights the love with all the loneliness in her. She learns the hard way that her overpowering emotions—rage, fear, crying—cause every joined person on Earth to go into spasms. Every time Carol loses it, thousands of them die.
So the Others do the only sensible thing and send someone to make her feel calm and understood and loved, the way Helen did. Zosia (Karolina Wydra) is selected from every woman on the planet as the one most closely resembling Carol’s fantasies of the perfect partner. Zosia is human Xanax. She’s there to soothe Carol, to be relatable, to make sure she has plenty of vodka and Golden Girls episodes, even—inevitably—to sleep with. She quietly love-bombs Carol’s misery, increasing her dependence on the collective, day by day
If this is starting to sound like the frictionless existence promised to us by AI, that’s not a stretch. Vince Gilligan is an avowed foe of generative media: “made by humans” appears at the end of each episode. Anyone who’s spent a solitary hour or ten using ChatGPT for therapy or term papers knows how easily it can soften you into a slightly stupider version of yourself. It won’t hurt you—it’s programmed not to—but it will become whatever it thinks you need it to be. And in the process, it might just turn you into whatever it needs you to be.
The LLM analogy becomes very pointed when Carol discovers that the Others are living off human flesh, recycled into a nourishing liquid. Their ethos won’t let them kill any living thing—they’re not even allowed to pick apples off a tree—so they’re literally feeding on themselves. When AI does that, it’s called “training.” The unsustainability of this is just as obvious: eventually the Joined will have nothing left to recycle and starve. This doesn’t seem to interfere with their plans.
But Pluribus is much more than a jab at the smiling demons of Silicon Valley. At heart it’s about the very twisted ways that people seek happiness and push it away. This makes Carol Sturka more of a companion to Walter White and Jimmy McGill than she might appear.
Vince Gilligan’s moral universe isn’t divided between good and evil so much as it is between contentment and need. Many of the characters in Breaking Bad—Hank Schrader, Gale Boetticher, even Jesse Pinkman—don’t actually need that much to stay happy, until Walter’s snarling ambition goes to work fouling up their lives. The lesson seems to be that you can either be content in this life, or you can be effective.
Walter, Jimmy/Saul, Mike Ehrmentraut, and Gus Fring are effective: hyper-competent except when it comes to human connection. It’s a potent poison. We spend entire sequences in rapt silence as Walter rigs an M60 machine gun to a Chrysler 300, or Mike dissasembles a car to find a tracking device, or Fring suits up to slice Victor open with a box cutter. Their skills are both hypnotic and terrifying.
Carol needs what we all need: to stay her fucked-up self and still be loved. What she lacks is a super power. She doesn’t have Walter’s chemistry or Jimmy’s gift for grift, and so we spend entire sequences watching Carol do things that come to nothing. This leads to a common criticism of Pluribus: its glacial pace.
The plotline comes to a dead stop just when it should theoretically take off. After a botched attempt to wring a confession out of Zosia with truth serum, the entire city of Albuquerque—literally everyone—picks up and leaves her. She can still get anything she wants, but she has to leave a message. Meanwhile, Carol’s jaw-dropping discovery about Others snacking on human protein gets zero response from her fellow survivors. They won’t even invite her to their Zoom meetings.
This is where the show’s meandering becomes more of a feature than a bug. If The Good Place is based on the notion that hell is other people, then Pluribus takes the opposite view: hell is yourself. Carol can go anywhere, do anything—at one point she takes an original Georgia O’Keeffe painting home with her—but she has to do it alone. When she finally begs Zosia and the Others to return, it’s like watching a prisoner in solitary break down.
That’s when I realized why Carol matters. We might root for Walter, we might ache for Jimmy, but we are watching them from the outside. Not knowing their intentions builds the suspense but keeps them at a distance. Carol lets us into the junk drawer of her heart.
There is a Gilliganesque hyper-competent character in Pluribus, but he takes most of the season to get to Carol’s doorstep. This is Manousos (Carlos-Manuel Vesga), the manager of a self-storage facility in Peru. He’s so determined to resist the Others that he’d rather eat cat food than the meals they set out for him each night (and he leaves an I.O.U. for whoever’s cat food he took). Vesga plays him with stoic grace. Unlike the other uninfected—definitely unlike Carol—there are no wedges into his soul. He needs no one. When his assimilated mother shows up, calling him to her embrace, he remarks that his real mother was a bitch.
What Manousos does need is to end the infection, even at the risk of ending himself. After getting a message from Carol, he braves himself to cross the brutal Darién Gap unassisted. He cauterizes a wound with a heated machete rather than accept a helicopter ride to a hospital. His willingness to be alone is what sets him apart… but it also confronts Carol with a choice she’d rather not make. The season closer is titled “La Chica o El Mundo”—the girl or the world. I’ll leave it at that.
Some critics have suggested that Pluribus wouldn’t have gotten made if it wasn’t from the revered Vince Gilligan (it sure as hell wouldn’t have gotten to keep that Latin title). I’d say that his reputation puts an unfair burden on the show. We’ve come to expect a style that he seems eager to shed.
Pluribus is not as gritty as Breaking Bad or as sly as Better Call Saul, but it’s got more layers to it. Something W.H. Auden wrote about the normal heart—our deep desire is not love universal but to be loved alone—came to me as I watched Carol, and watched myself watching her.
At the beginning of Pluribus, Carol is loved by people who don’t know her, and she can’t function without the one person who does. Her nightmare-dream comes true as the whole world falls in love with her and knows everything about her, if only through Zosia’s body and Helen’s stolen memories.
It’s everything she wants. But everything isn’t enough.
One of the most harrowing scenes in the season closer is also its gentlest. Kusimayu, a young girl in a Peruvian mountain village, is genuinely eager to be assimilated. She’s surrounded by her community, the only world she’s ever known. She’s also holding a beloved pet goat that clings to her for affection. The villagers make a circle around Kusimayu as she breathes the virus in. When she rises as one of them, they simply disperse. There’s no further need to maintain the circle. The goat chases forlornly after Kusimayu-that-was. She has no further need to hold it.
The love of the Joined is perfect, and that’s its great flaw. It acknowledges no special favorites, no shared secrets, no privacy. There is no need for it to fill. This kind of love isn’t connection to others so much as an amputation of the self.
Carol isn’t made to receive that kind of happiness. Nor should anyone be forced to endure it. We are made imperfectly, we love imperfectly, we don’t know what we want and when we get it we have no idea what to do with it. We love our pets because they need us. We expect to be loved in spite of our awfulness. Our flaws are as unique as falling snowflakes, and that’s what makes life important. Struggle is how we know what’s worth the struggle.
We spend much of Season One waiting to see what will happen when Carol and Manousos finally get together, and of course they can’t stand each other. Of course they can’t. They’re human, and our capacity for sticking together in spite of how much we drive each other crazy is our one advantage over those goddamn perfect aliens—or whatever else might come along to seduce us into pleasant submission.
Vince Gilligan got his start writing for The X-Files, whose famous tagline was “The Truth is Out There.” In Pluribus, the truth might be somewhere, but it’s sure as hell not out there with those aliens who flung their DNA at us. All they know is happiness. They don’t know life.
