‘Pluribus’ review: Vince Gilligan's show unfolds with novelistic self-assurance

I am not Shakespeare.

There can be no sentence that self-evident, and yet—after watching Pluribus—it bears mentioning. Pluribus, the sensational new Apple TV drama created by Breaking Bad maker Vince Gilligan, is about an earth where aliens have bound (nearly) the entire human population into a hive-mind, where they efficiently live and share the world’s resources with each knowing everything the other knows. This is a compelling what-if, with no war and no crime, and a world living and working as one, in perfect harmony.

However, within this hive-mind, romance novelist Carol Sturka is just as good as William Shakespeare. She creates plots, characters, arcs. Her books affect and move readers. She tells stories. Therefore, in the megabrain, she performs the same function. I was already appalled by the premise of forking over my free-will — not to mention the very idea of everybody on the planet knowing my murkiest secrets — but this frightened the hell out of me. Imagine a world where our taste was the same. Imagine a world where everything was exactly as good as everything else.

Give me war instead.

Not like we have that choice. The protagonist Carol—played by a brilliant Rhea Seehorn—is facing a genuinely impossible quandary. One of less than a dozen humans who are not locked into the collective consciousness, Carol resists the peace and tranquility of the hive-mind. She distrusts it. This is an open world where she can drive any car she chooses and go anywhere she wants. Carol is basically living inside Grand Theft Auto, and she doesn’t want to play. (Even though she does drive a police car.)

We can’t relate. Not just because of her quandary but because Gilligan and Seehorn intentionally make the character bristly and bitter. She is literally the world’s biggest spoilsport. We don’t root for Carol as much as we question her, and thanks to Gilligan’s notoriously slow-burn storytelling, we have enough time to keep pondering what we would do instead of what she does. What, indeed, would you do if your neighbour and your girlfriend and the Prime Minister were all the same person?

At some point Carol plays a board-game with one of the “weirdos,” as she calls them. The idea of playing against someone who knows everything reminded me of Ingrid Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, where a man plays chess against Death. The odds may be even more stacked here. “It’s like playing cards with fucking Google,” Carol gripes. Meanwhile, Koumba Diabaté, one of her fellow ‘survivors,’ surrounds himself with impossibly gorgeous women and makes the hive-minded folk act out 007-esque casino scenarios for his amusement.

There is, however, someone having an ever rougher go—one who has chosen an even harder life—than Carol. Manousos Oviedo is a Spaniard with a militant mistrust of the hive-mind, and while Carol rationalises using the hive-mind to reopen her grocery story and even allows herself to pick up a Georgia O’Keefe original from a musem and keep it in her living room, Manousos doesn’t accept their food and lives on tinned meals salvaged from storage lockers. He keeps an account. He intends to pay it back, even if nobody wants anything back in this new world.

There is a lot happening within this series, even (or particularly) in episodes where it seems nothing is happening. Gilligan, who followed up the iconic Breaking Bad with the superior Better Call Saul, is even sharper with Pluribus, telling an unfamiliar and startling story in an unfamiliar and startling way. Conceptually I was reminded of the unclassifiably stunning Mrs Davis, by Lost creator Damon Lindelof, where most of the world speaks to and is controlled by one omniscient Siri-like AI voice, as well as his show The Leftovers, where 2% of the world’s population suddenly vanishes. Yet Pluribus is very much its own apocalypse, one that unfolds with novelistic self-assurance.

Seehorn is extraordinary. She plays Carol as understandably—but unlikeably—malcontent, a woman so tight-lipped that it is an absolute joy when she meets a waitress from her past and actually allows herself to be happy. After discovering a particularly grisly secret, when Seehorn gasped loudly, I felt chilled instantly to the bone. It’s remarkable to watch her grapple with this new way of the world, finding her own boundaries and indulging some things because she deserves a break. In one scene she out-howls some wolves. Her triumph is contagious.

All the actors are strong. Carlos-Manuel Vesga as Manousos is superlative as he learns English while crossing a lethal forest, while Karolyna Wydra is great as Zosia, the hive-mind human assigned to interface with Carol because she looks like the pirate hero on the cover of Carol’s novels. Samba Schutte, of Our Flag Means Death, has a blast as Diabaté.

Despite having the world at her literal command, Carol makes it a point to dig her own ditches and buy her own groceries and cook her own food, all while Diabaté jets around in Air Force One. She is so overwhelmingly conscientious that this show, annoyingly enough, really made me care about taking out the trash. Is cleaning up after oneself, when the world is made up of drones and extras, the true meaning of Main Character Energy?

To be or not to be, that is the question.

Streaming Tip Of The Week:

The idea of being the main character in a world of extras was most strikingly expressed in Peter Weir’s The Truman Show (Netflix) where Jim Carrey played the unknowing protagonist on a reality show, filmed without knowledge (or consent) from birth. An essential film.

Raja Sen (@rajasen) is a screenwriter and critic. He has co-written Chup, a film about killing critics, and is now creating an absurd comedy series.