On PLUR1BUS

One HELL of a series

Pluribus might be the strangest series I’ve ever watched. The concept itself is tricky. A hive-mind made up of every (surviving, non-immune) human on Earth is hard to wrap your head around. Our previous pop culture iteration of this idea was “the Borg” in Star Trek, but what is happening in Pluribus is not the Borg. There’s no physical capture, no forced cybernetic alteration, no installation into a “regeneration alcove” on a spacefaring hive-cube, and no “Borg Queen.” There IS something akin to the Borg’s endless drive for conquest and assimilation, but it’s what the hive-mind in Pluribus call “paying it forward”: transmitting the same signal Earth received. No lasers, no implants, no warp speed.

I’ve read a few reactions online where people are literally not comprehending the core concept of the show. Early on, for example, I read a comment on a review in which a viewer says the show makes no sense, because how could the motorcycle driver know to stop so that Zosia can take the bike and ride it to the airport? Well they ALL know because they are all one consciousness. It’s like my fingers knowing how to type these words — I will it and my hands coordinate magnificently. Or more accurately, it’s like my doorbell rings, and I manage my dogs, dry my hands, check my hair, walk across the house, grab the key, work the mechanisms, greet a stranger — and you ask how my left ring finger and my left pinkie finger could have possibly coordinated their set of actions. So familiarity with the Borg probably helps. But the Borg were slow moving battle-armored affectless drones. This hive mind is so much more CHEERFUL!

Pause for praise: Vince Gilligan is a master of desert vistas and meaningful silences — those long forever-views could stop the heart. And he tells stories so well through pauses in action, usually combined with some non-obvious gesture or facial expression that, in the context of the story, makes the viewer’s mind spin through the catalog of all the things that COULD be going on right now, before dropping the next turn. He did this in Breaking Bad, and he does it in Pluribus, and it’s gorgeous. There is so much NOT said, and that is so involving for the audience. Also, vast portions of the story are not in English. It’s incredibly well-done. Not everyone can write a story like this.

And not everyone could get a story like this made into a series. I think you’d have to have a big name and a record of creating massively popular award-winning shows to get funding, distribution, etc., for a story this completely fucking bonkers. Thank god he was able to, and thank god he did. Because this story is everything.

SPOILERS:

PLEASE ***DO NOT READ*** THIS

UNLESS YOU’VE WATCHED

ALL 9 EPISODES

It feels like this story was written so that each of the people who are immune to the virus that facilitates the joining of all humanity into a single hive-mind have something seriously wrong with them. CAROL, oh Carol. God I love this character, she is SO awful. I mean, yes, her wife was killed in what might qualify as an alien invasion and she’s grieving and pissed off and so on, but even before that, she was terrible. Incapable of happiness, incapable of authenticity, impulsive and fearful, with an ego like a hydrogen-filled Zeppelin. And Diabate:

Diabate is TERRIFYING! Who witnesses the absorption of the whole human race into a single hive mind and so quickly figures out how to turn it to their immediate material, hedonistic advantage? And Manousos — I love this guy. When the hive mind begs him not to enter the Darian Gap and offers to airlift him and his beloved car directly to Carol, he lights the car on fire and tells them they can give him nothing because everything they have is stolen. Manousos is a one-man rules-based-order. Even when he siphons gasoline from abandoned cars he leaves money on the windshield. He wants all debts listed, in writing. He is methodical, determined, and smart — maybe a genius, with his study of radio waves — and he spends the first weeks of the joining cowering in a rental office eating dog food rather than accept a morsel from the new global singularity. (Fun connection: join the singularly and you’ll get your nutrition in a surprisingly similar way!) And let’s not forget Lakshmi — that lady’s got anger issues! Maybe I’m reading too much into this, but it kinda seems like what makes a person immune is some fundamental defect in their personality.

On the other hand, we all have defects in our personalities — so maybe these are just random jerky ways of being. I’m not sure. But I’m fascinated by the way it’s playing out. One giant billions-of-bodies human hive mind, peaceable but neglectful, it forswears involvement with all other living things. Pets and livestock are abandoned. Zoos are opened up and the animals left to roam. The hive mind is unwilling to harm an ant, unwilling to pick a fruit, and unwilling to protect a baby goat. Its only defense against a hostile Carol is to leave Albuquerque to Carol and the coyotes.

The hive-mind is a being that only plays at what look like normal human behaviors — flirting and singing and dwelling in homes and eating meals — when it is necessary to placate one of the remaining individuals who are not joined. Some take very nicely to the “being placated,” and some don’t, and then there’s Carol, who’s so damn selfish she plays house with the hive mind until she figures out they’re going to eventually take her by (very kind and gentle) force. Manousos asks her, as she runs off after Zosia, “do you want to save the world or do you want to get the girl?” Well she apparently was willing to tell the world to eat shit and die if she COULD get the girl, but then she discovered that she only had a few months of being distracted by the girl, after which she’d be an interchangeable appendage just like everyone else.

And the planet Earth without any unjoined people will be an alien place indeed: consolidated heaps of people lying in sports domes, drinking cannibal-gruel and not talking, not even moving I suppose, unless their hands and eyes are needed for some survival-related task, like gathering up the dead and bringing them to the dog food processing plant.

The prospect of becoming part of the hive mind is absolutely terrifying — it’s not clear how much of the individual person “remains” in the body and how completely their memories are absorbed into the global brain, but based on particular moments in the show — like when Zosia is remembering eating mango ice cream, and how many tiny details about Carol and Helen’s lives together the hive mind has access to — it seems like at least something is left in there, and what’s shared is shared 100% and completely, more so than even a normal person would have access to their own memories.

So individuals are “in there” but suppressed, and have zero private memories. Total. Fucking. Nightmare. AND YET, the global hive mind has ended all war, all conflict, all crime, all murder, all pollution, all sadness… everyone in the world knows all languages, but they don’t even need to use them because they can all wordlessly and instantly coordinate. (Not “communicate” because they have nothing to individually say — they just “coordinate.”) So peace on Earth and all are one, sorta. Yet to me it looks like it’s the same kind of “peace” that would result with the obliteration of the human race entirely. It’s a post-apocalyptic “peace,” the “peacefulness” of roadkill.

One way to understand what’s happening in this story is that, with the exception of the tiny handful of immune people, in this story humankind is dead, wiped out by an alien virus, and the planet has been inherited by a new lifeform that has absorbed all human knowledge AND can use the leftover human meat-bodies to get tasks done.

OR maybe they’re not mere puppets, maybe it’s more analogous to an octopus, whose neurons are distributed among its tentacles, so that it’s arms “think”? But always act in service to the survival of the larger organism? Kumbaya?

One thing is sure: this story is NOT a neat allegory about modern life where the hive mind represents AI or “wokeness” or something — I’ve read people say that, and forget that, it’s wrong. An oversimplification. But this story DOES speak to the anxieties of the modern age:

in which we are having our ability to live normal human lives taken from us,

in which resistance to this theft is devastatingly lonely,

in which our ties to the natural world — including our food — have been deranged and broken,

in which OTHER humans always seem networked to an alarming degree,

in which we expect immediate service and immediate answers to our questions,

in which evidence of individuality can be seen as a sickness,

in which sensual pleasures have been gamified into hedonistic performance,

And in which all of this seems to be coming from something entirely outside of us and our desires. It seems instead to come from alien desires, maybe some weird rich guy somewhere? Or some awful algorithm baked into our tools? Or just a fucked “system”? But whatever it is, it is not us, it is not human, and yet it speaks with a human voice, with a human face, and, as Carol laments, it’s so damn fuckable.

In the plight of Carol on Pluribus I have witnessed a fictionalized, fantastical dramatization of exactly the way in which we are all having our humanity challenged, tempted, toyed with, degraded, and stolen. It’s a made up story that RINGS with truth.

I am so grateful to everyone who helped create this strange and beautiful — and seemingly effortlessly multi-lingual — masterpiece of a show.