Vince Gilligan, showrunner and mastermind behind the new Apple TV series Pluribus, has spent a long time in Albuquerque. He set his masterpiece Breaking Bad in the New Mexico city and used its barren yet beautiful landscape to accentuate every nail-biting moment of that series. When Breaking Bad ended and its spin-off Better Call Saul began, Gilligan had no choice but to set his prequel in the same place the original series had been set, but it seems fitting that for his first original idea since working exclusively in his own Heisenberg and Saul verse, he has stayed rooted in the city that he and a large proportion of the crew who worked with him have loved.
In truth, Pluribus could have been set anywhere. A sprawling adventure that tells a truly unpredictable story that isn’t rooted in a particular setting. Fans who only know Gilligan from Breaking Bad and Saul might find the first episode of this genre-bending series slightly jarring, as it owes more to Gilligan’s formative years as a fan favourite writer on The X Files, but the Vince Gilligan who created, wrote and directed a great deal of Breaking Bad is very much here. It’s another show which obsesses and revels in rules and process. It’s just that the rules and processes here are vastly different from Walt and Jesse’s process of creating blue meth. Not only that, but it also gives Gilligan another chance to showcase the brilliance of Saul’s leading lady, Rhea Seehorn, who is allowed to flex every muscle here in a role that not many would be able to pull off with as much as she does here.
The initially strange title, Pluribus, is a tip of the hat to the unofficial motto of America, ‘E pluribus unum’. Which in English translates to, ‘Out of many, one’. This goes some way to explaining ‘the collective hive mind at the centre of the series. Seahorn plays Carol, a successful romance novelist who is concealing two secrets from her loyal fan base. 1) She despises the stories that have turned her into a household name. 2) She’s gay and in a loving relationship with her manager, Helen. Deeply cynical, Carol grins her way through a meet and greet and a reading of her latest novel before she and Helen can escape to a bar. Her disappointment in the way her career has gone has led her to have a bit of a drinking problem, so much so that her car ignition is even locked behind a breathalyser
After a drink, they step outside, and Carol notices the planes acting strangely above them, whilst Helen checks her phone before collapsing violently to the floor. Carol, panics, races to find Helen help, but back in the bar, everyone is acting strangely, moving oddly whilst cars crash around her, and the once sedate setting turns into an unpredictable nightmare. When she finds a hospital, the people there are stuck in place and unable to communicate.
This isn’t completely out of nowhere; it’s just that Carol and the public haven’t been privy to. At the start of the episode, astronomers detect a radio signal from space that spells out an RNA sequence. Over a year, researchers reproduce the sequence in a lab, but an outbreak occurs one night, causing those infected to act collectively, spreading the virus through saliva. It turns those who are affected into one hive mind. One collective organism with the knowledge and skills of everyone on the planet. The first people infected in the lab lick batches of doughnuts and kiss each other to spread the virus along. And so, quickly the world empties out. Carol learns later, through a televised news conference directed directly to her, that she is one of only 11 other people across the world who hasn’t been affected by the collective and that they will be working on her finding ways for her to join them.Hundreds of millions were killed, we are later told, when the takeover program had to be accelerated due to military intelligence. From the first moments of the cold open to Carol’s complete isolation, a countdown tells us 439 days pass. As apocalypses go, even as alien invasions go, it’s a slow one. The world is still populated, of course, full of human hosts for the alien virus. But it still feels sparse, as Carol navigates around mindless drones going about their hive-mind business.
How will this sour, self-hating woman respond to her solitude? With seething rage, which is perhaps understandable. In the second episode,, the hive mind sends a woman with a striking resemblance to the original lead character Carol and Helen had designed for her books before changing him into a man to appeal more to the audience Carol has grown tired of. The woman, who introduces herself as Zosia (Karolina Wydra), is there to open a more personal line of communication to Carol, who occupies a special position among those unaffected. It would appear that whenever Carol gets angry, a vast number of the hive mind die, particuarly if they are doing something dangerous at the time. Her negative emotions send thousands around the world into a catatonic state, which most don’t reccover from. So, the hive mind has a vested interest in keeping Carol calm. She tells Zosia that she wants to meet the other people like her who speak English, which is quickly organised. When she meets them, Carol is again the outlier. The others are surrounded by family members (or in Diabaté’s case, an entourage) who have been turned into alien hosts. The others aren’t at all disturbed by what Carol characterises as the end of the world, and they are in no rush to save it. They’ve entered into relationships with their new overlords and wonder why Carol isn’t curious about the experiences of the drones around her. There are no murders, ignoring the fact that the hive mind has wiped out most of mankind, and the animals are free from the zoo (if you ignore the vicious attacks from lions and tigers during that process). The others don’t see the downsides at all.
The hive mind informs Carol and the rest of the others that they can’t or won’t kill (another massive contradiction given the situation Carol finds herself in) and that they want world peace. An admirable goal but one that seems unachievable even within this new era. Of all the people like Carol, it is Diabeté (Samba Schutte) who doesn’t seem completely sold on joining the collective. He does however, take advantage of what they can offer, insisting he flies to his meeting with Carol on Air Force One and taking lavish weekends in Las Vegas. It’s fascinating that no one shares Carol’s point of view. At the end of the second episode, she appears to make a choice; she flags down Air Force One for reasons unclear.
So what to make of Pluribus? It’s a stunningly exciting and fresh idea. Gilligan has admitted in interviews that, despite having the idea years ago during the early days of Better Call Saul, as soon as COVID swept the globe, he worried his once original idea wouldn’t be seen as original. But even with a global pandemic, two seasons of both The Last of Us and Severance, this still feels like nothing we’ve seen before. It’s the scale and the possibilities of everything that are mouth-watering. Adding Rhea Seehorn and Gilligan to the mix just elevates it above anything else, as you know you are in the safest of safe hands, and I just can’t wait to see where we go. And rarely, I have literally no idea where that could be.
Pluribus continues Fridays on Apple TV
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