by Adelaide Song on 2025-12-14.
Tags: tv sci-fi drama
This post will contain spoilers for Pluribus up to 1x07, the latest episode released at the time of writing.
Since her star turn as Kim Wexler in Better Call Saul, I’ve been waiting with bated breath for Rhea Seehorn’s next project. It didn’t hurt that despite my self-avowed disdain for awards shows, seeing a lifetime performance like “Waterworks” (6x11) get snubbed drove me—and Bob Odenkirk—absolutely mental.
So when Vince Gilligan announced that he was working on a science fiction show (!) set in New Mexico (!!) starring Rhea (!!!) I felt like I had won the lottery. Codenamed “Wycaro 339”, the announcement sat in the back of my head and fermented like a bad case of botulism. When we finally got that first 10-second trailer, I was so desperate for any scrap of further information I successfully over-analysed my way into figuring out the show’s premise before anything else came out. I’d built it up so much in my head that I was genuinely worried I was setting myself up for disappointment no matter how the finished product actually turned out.
And then I sat down on the couch for the pilot, and… no, it actually was that good.
I don’t have it in me for a more in-depth look at each individual episode. For one, deeper analysis would probably require a week spent manacled to my keyboard, something I just don’t have the budget or ankle strength for right now.
There is such a clear level of obsessive craft apparent in basically every frame of this show. It says a lot about the state of gaffers in 2025 that I am genuinely shocked when a low-light scene is readable, let alone dramatically effective. I genuinely did not expect them to pull this feat off several times throughout the show’s 7-ep run so far, typically to stunning effect: Carol’s exploration of the plant in “HDP” (1x06), Manousos’ showdown with the shade of his mother in the same episode, or the thin slices of moonlight draped over his sleeping form in latest episode, “The Gap” (1x07).
Selling the hivemind is also a serious hurdle. Vince’s characteristic obsession with detail, detail, detail demands similarly exacting choreography, and the difficulty of execution is only exacerbated by the number of extras on screen. But a scene as demanding as the pilot’s Petri dish conga-line doesn’t even seem like the show is breaking a sweat. It’s a set-piece whose spectacle is surely only matched by the pain in the ass that went into setting it up, and we only get maybe 30 seconds of screentime on it. The editing seems to say: “you thought that was good…”
Like I said. I could go on for a while just talking about how fucking good this show is to look at. (Yes, I know: a visual art form that’s appealing to the eyes? Stop the fucking presses.)
What really gets me so obsessive about this show, however, is its dizzying conceptual heights. It is taking enormous swings and it somehow has the narrative chops to pull them off in record-breaking time. For God’s sake, the apocalypse goes from start to finish in the B-plot of the pilot episode. There are a lot of things to admire about Pluribus, but arguably its most impressive feats are ones of sheer narrative compression.
Take the other survivors as an example. In another show, their existence might be hidden for the entire first season; reconnecting with them could be the narrative climax of a season; driving them away could be a devastating emotional blow that sets up finale. Pluribus looks at this set of perfect little plot hooks and it settles them all over the course of its second ever episode. It seems genuinely insulted that you think it would resort to something that obvious, that option-A. Its willingness to advance the narrative by miles instead of inches—and, just as importantly, its ability to do so without feeling rushed—are both such a change of pace coming fresh off my experience with two of TV’s most recent breakout hits, Severance and Succession. Succession at least had the excuse of having to juggle a double-digit main cast of ham-eating motherfuckers. On my latest rewatch, Severance’s second season seems almost straining to hold itself back from letting things happen.
It’s no surprise that a show so unafraid to throw haymaker after haymaker has a fanbase this intensely devoted to its discussion online. I am also, frankly, glad this seems to be happening over a wide variety of toothy and troubling subject matter—I enjoy a good “my dolls should be fucking” argument, but like every long-running genre of fight on the internet, it’s easy to get sick of after a while.
I wish it wasn’t a relief to see a show with A Gay in it let her play in moral territory that’s this explicitly bleak. In some senses it’s obvious why Vince fucking Gilligan is allowed to do these things, and most of the people I know could not publish it under their own names. The primary threat vector for me is getting Isabel Fall’d, and that crowd does not have the social capital required to genuinely hurt Vince in the same way.
I still can’t imagine that pitching something like this to a roomful of suits was any easier than pitching it to the most bad-faith actors of Twitter. Maybe Apple’s deliberately trying to make itself the home of high-budget sci-fi, given it’s also the money behind Silo and Foundation. Those are still two adaptations of multi-million dollar books, though. This is a wildly ambitious globe-trotting original demanding 12 million dollar budgets per episode, about a protagonist who is designed to drive chuds insane, going through genuinely knotty dramatic and philosophical quandaries. Surely we don’t live in the world where that gets made, right? Surely we’re in the Bad Timeline?
The touches of old-school sci-fi only add to the impression that this show wasn’t meant to exist yet; that it somehow fell, fully-formed, out of a time vortex. Gilligan got his first real start on X-Files, and Pluribus feels like a homecoming to the tropes of that particular flavor of 90’s conspiracism: the series starts when the US government gets an alien signal that instructs them to build a secret bioweapon, which they then disperse over the world via chemtrails. It feels like Mulder and Scully’s players just didn’t show up to play Delta Green one day. This particular flavor of tinfoil hat is almost nostalgic compared to something like Channel 4’s Utopia, whose driving conspiracy has its secret world order release a global pandemic as a pretense to sterilize the world with vaccines. I fucking love that show and will forever mourn it not getting a third season. I also cannot foresee anything good coming out of continuing that plotline in 2025.
There’s also some more overt, direct references to the masters. The Diabate subplot of “HDP” (1x06) features a clear riff on The Twilight Zone’s “A Nice Place to Visit” (1x28). Manousos’ epic roadtrip has shades of Patrick McGoohan’s titular Prisoner racing down the streets of London in its iconic opening, to say nothing of the equally unbreakable man himself fighting against a world that wants to break him with benevolence. There’s even some loving callbacks to Gilligan’s most famous work on Breaking Bad. Carol ends up visiting (and robbing) the Georgia O’Keefe museum that Jesse and Jane never did, which I’m sure BrBa fans feel so normal about. Another show would run the risk of diminishing itself, or coming off as preeningly smug. Here it just seems like the sign of a healthy cultural diet, the building block of every good piece of genre.
That wide variety of influences gives rise to a work which has a voice all its own, while never stooping to overt didacticism to make that fact clear. Look, we all love that one Darkplace screenshot, we all love to post that “satire without intent” T-shirt whenever our least favourite techbro posts American Psycho screenshots. I can absolutely find a place in my heart for thuddingly obvious messages; take A Scanner Darkly, one of the most devastating portrayals of addiction across any medium, and certainly no weaker for that singular focus.
What I can’t brook is the idea of crushing subtext out of your work for fear of being misinterpreted. I understand how fucking stupid people can be about fiction, but do we really need to let that be a manacle on our ability to write anything other than polemics? It’s been so fun—and frankly, relieving—getting to author all kinds of interesting reads on Pluribus, with textual evidence for all of them.
Take the hivemind itself. If you want to read it as a brute allegory, that’s absolutely within your rights, but the number of substantiated reads on the role of the Plurbubu is way higher than something like the purpose of Severance’s titular technology. For starters, the hivemind is a statistical average of the entire human population. It is obnoxiously obsequious and unable to refuse even obviously deranged requests such as an “atom bomBUH” (potentially the greatest line read of 2025) despite possessing genius-level intellect. It also appears to lack basically any interiority and is utterly mechanical in its conduct that isn’t specifically human-facing. It even uses data it’s harvested from Carol’s dead wife to pick out a specific body that it thinks Carol will find personable and/or sexually appealing. All of this is to say that the G-Pluribus-T interpretation of the World is an absolutely reasonable one, and in that light, the show illustrates the deeply unsettling and inhuman nature of the machine people are increasingly using in lieu of other humans. It speaks to the emotional reality of what it’s like—the hollowness of its facade, its dependence on the labor of unpaid bodies, its repulsively uncanny and irresponsible behavior—in exceptionally intelligent and lucid fashion, given the relative recency of gen-AI’s world takeover.
But this still feels like a significant flattening of what the show has to offer. You could argue instead that the World is “really” a stand-in for the invisible labor of capitalism’s underclass. The Sprouts scene is probably the most explicit demonstration of this: Vince’s infamous details fetish paints in exacting detail just how much goes into running the modern supermarket, most of which Carol—or the audience—either has never thought about, or prefers not to think about in detail, lest they go insane. Every single truck and every single unsettlingly-happy supermarket stocker that walks by is a reminder that the lifestyle we take for granted runs off of millions of bodies, many of whom get compensated about as much as the World does.
In a similar vein, I feel considerably more sympathy for Diabate than most other posters, but I’m not going to pretend that people have no reason to be disgusted by his hyper-hedonist lifestyle. The protracted shot of the World cleaning up the aftermath of his personal Casino Royale re-enactment comes to mind. It conjures the excruciating embarrassment of smashing a bottle at a restaurant or supermarket and knowing full well someone is being paid fifteen bucks an hour to clean it up with a smile on their face, or else. His ever-present, ever-smiling harem is an even more extreme source of discomfort. By contrast, Manousos’ staunch refusal to accept absolutely anything from the World—even a trip over the impossibly difficult Gap—seems to spring more from a genuine love of humanity than misanthropic paranoia. His insistence on paying zombified car owners back for the fuel he siphons is an act of totally ridiculous generosity that speaks to the strength of his convictions; he’s going to save the world, but he refuses to step on others along the way, Plurb’d or not. It’s an incredible reframing for the well-worn trope of the grizzled lone survivor, stripping out the overbearing machismo and replacing it with entirely earnest nobility.
Pluribus doesn’t just restrict its palette to shades of a single color—in the case of these prior arguments, the normalized evils of modern life. Befitting the legal drama heritage of Gilligan’s last work, it’s more than happy to set up high-stakes debates and give plenty of ammunition to either side. Nowhere is this more apparent than the actions of Carol herself. Her overarching character drive—cure the hivemind, save the world—still has plenty of reasonable opposition. The World coming into being effectively destroyed bigotry overnight and instantly levelled any meaningful conception of the class divide. There are incredibly compelling reasons for someone to willingly choose life as a lotus eater. For many of us the alternative is being subjugated, victimized and eventually killed by the status quo, and that is no alternative at all.
It’s not like they’re trapped in the stasis of The Matrix, either. As Carol is fleeing the hive in the pilot episode, we watch a parade of entirely un-sinister scenes rolling by in the background: a wounded amputee being ushered out of his car, a fire being extinguished, a fallen power line being cleared away. I—likely along with many of the readers—wish so desperately I could help my fellow man to this extent. Collective action isn’t just a catchy little slogan, it’s the only way change can meaningfully happen, and Pluribus offers a tantalizing fantasy of this idea run to its logical conclusion. You want a revolution…
Then, of course, there’s the tangled mire that is the central relationship between Carol and Zosia—inasmuch as you can have one between a human and whatever the World is. I know I mentioned earlier how sick I was of shipping discourse, but Jesus, what a minefield this one is. As Gunjou and Black and White’s strongest soldier I was still blown away that the show is explicitly setting up the possibility of a lesbian relationship whose premise is this fucking insane. They’re each other’s thematic antimatter, of course: Carol, the grieving widow and urchin-spined misanthrope; Zosia, the ever-cheerful, eminently fuckable courier of fun facts and hand grenades. There’s the foot of height difference between them. There’s the fact that the haughty, closeted blonde professional in an unstable relationship with a naive brunette is named Carol. These two were designed in a lab to be perfect yuri bait both in and out of universe.
All of that without getting into the specifics of what’s happened between them thus far. The titular scene of “Carol, Please” had me glued to the screen. Carol manacling herself to Zosia, tormenting her with her inability to make her happy, drugging her with anaesthetics and attempting to talk her into what amounts to suicide-by-Carol? Jesus fucking Christ, man. I hear all the arguments for the Plurbubus behaving like a textbook toxic ex, but I think I would also feel some kind of way if someone put me in a lesbian Saw trap so deranged it sounds like an average Kitanai chapter.
What only adds to this is that the World emphatically isn’t me! How much you can or can’t treat it as a human is one of the most furious and fascinating debates this show provokes, and your position on that sliding scale adds so many extra dimensions to how you perceive the rest of this plotline. Is it human enough for Carol’s actions to be eminently evil? In that case, subjecting someone in Carol’s already-unstable state to 30 days of what amounts to solitary confinement—one of the most horrifying psychological tortures you can inflict on someone—is equally unconscionable, maybe even moreso. Of course, only one of these parties has infinite grace, and only one of them has the option to resist the other, so how does that change the moral calculus? What if it’s a completely alien intelligence? How do you even begin to develop meaningful concepts of right and wrong when interacting with it—more to the point for Diabate and Carol, can and should you fuck the bodies that serve as its appendages? This setup is basically a gay piece of cheese underneath a giant box reading “QUANDARIES,” and I can’t get enough of it.
I’ll try to wrap it up, because I’m tired of hearing myself talk. I haven’t been excited for a serial work in a long, long while, and we’re fully out of the realm of previews and trailers. Everything that’s coming up is going to be totally new, and I already had a hard enough time anticipating anything past the show’s opening minutes. Were I to have plot leaks fall in my lap, I don’t think it would even hurt my enjoyment, because every minute of this show has been just as enjoyable as any new set of thorny ideas. My only complaint, and the last thing I’ll leave you with: why don’t we have a more in-depth title sequence yet? Maybe Severance is the better s—