Vince Gilligan, the showrunner of Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, has made his foray into science fiction with Pluribus. His vision of the apocalypse is a galactic spam-email virus. A transmission from 600 lightyears away reaches a baffled coterie of astronomers, who promptly set about testing what appears to be the genetic code for a lysogenic virus. When it leaks out, it leads to an ironically un-American spin on the Latin phrase e pluribus unum (out of many, one), causing all of humanity, except a dozen survivors, to become an apparently euphoric hivemind.
“As happy as you have ever been, that’s only the tip of the iceberg,” Zosia (Karolina Wydra), a Polish “member” of the hive, urges the survivors as part of the hive’s biological imperative to “join” the other survivors into their network.
It is, in many respects, a perverse spin on Advaita Vedanta, a Hindu philosophy which claims that the concept of separate individualities in different bodies is a false limit on our recognition of the eternal Atman/Brahman. Only correct knowledge leads to liberation (moksha), escape from suffering and rebirth. The show entertains a Western/Eastern divide, as the American Carol Sturka and the Portuguese Catholic Manousos Oviedo (Carlos Manuel Vesga) are the only two of the twelve survivors who appear to have any objection to this state of affairs. In an eerie scene, one survivor, an indigenous Quechua Peruvian, enters the hive. Her family promptly ends the ritualistic ceremony, and abandons the village to join the rest of the hive population.
Is all well in paradise? Carol Sturka vacillates between her present misery and the joy the hive promises. Secular society has not abolished pious Christian hope in eternal beatitude. “There is an insidious message that your generation has that had I grown up with, I would have had crippling anxiety,” claims psychologist Dr. David Rosmarin. “That message is that you need to feel good all the time.”
The desire to be happy all the time is a far cry from the call to “Take up your cross,” the scriptural injunction which nourished Medieval Europe in her painful centuries of cultivation. With the rise of affluent consumer societies, suffering became not a feature of this world, but an irredeemable loss. “Suffering is incomprehensible, so it needs no explanation,” says the priest of Ingmar Bergman’s Winter Lights (1963).
The whole mission of modern psychology since Freud is, in a sense, to reassert the need to constructively engage with negative experiences instead of simply repressing them. Pluribus resounds with an all-too-human embrace of life’s rough edges. When the hive wants to take the body of Helen (Miriam Shor), Carol’s partner who suffered fatal head trauma during the joining, for nutritional use, Carol fights to provide her a proper burial.
However, the greatest difficulty for the show is its lack of characterisation outside of Carol. So much of the show is split between the protagonist and the impersonal hive, while the other survivors are nearly as one-note as the hive itself. The dynamics between the survivors ought to be the heart of the show, but are neglected for exploring the mechanics of the hive, a vice common enough in science fiction.
Nevertheless, the show examines a particular aspect of post-modernity: the parasitic influence of the private sphere upon human life. In the present day, social media and consumer information technology provide an endless stream of services and affirmations of private identity, blurring the distinction between home and the public forum. Pluribus exemplifies this to a tee, with all humanity transformed into a mechanised server of the decadent survivors. With all their memories conjoined, Carol struggles to define her private identity.
There are beautiful exceptions: Carol is surprised to find that Zosia doesn’t know about her love for train horns. “It is … the loneliest sound in the world.” The show is at its best when it concretely carves out the necessity for friends to escape one’s own ego. Carol doesn’t want to remain unjoined because she loves listening to her voice: her primary motivation is to have another through which she can affirm her own self-worth.
The hive threatens what Hume called the greatest punishment of all: a perfect solitude. He prefigured the narrative of the show when he wrote, in 1739, “Let all the powers of nature conspire to serve and obey one man: Let the sun rise and set at his command… He will still be miserable, till you give him some one person at least, with whom he may share his happiness, and whose esteem and friendship he may enjoy.”
In its first season, at least, the show has not come into its own. But Vince Gilligan has played the long game in the past, and he has made a promising start.
