Pluribus

Pluribus is a terrible thing — which is to say, a rather good science-fiction series written by Vince Gilligan. That's not why its terrible; Gilligan is the guy behind Breaking Bad and co-creator of Better Call Saul. Unlike many people, I did not care for Breaking Bad, and subsequently I didn’t watch it's prequel Better Call Saul; but I understand they were considered to be well written. I did watch Pluribus and so I can say that show is well written and remarkably manages to engage with both social commentary and philosophy in a way that doesn’t make me want to throw up or shout at people.

The reason it is a terrible thing is that it has very slightly validated the existence of Apple TV+, which should not have been allowed to happen.

Had I not got it free with my mobile phone plan, I would not have had an Apple TV+ subscription. Like many people, I have too many subscriptions to TV services; but they each have that one show that, whilst it doesn’t exactly justify its existence, is enough that when I go to cancel one of them, I pause just long enough to forget what I was doing — which, depressingly, is not that long these days. Except for Apple TV+ — that one I could comfortably ignore. That was until bloody Pluribus came along.

If the last ten years of television have taught me anything, it is that Pluribus should be bad. The show features two female leads, strong racial representation, and a gay lead character. For any modern TV and movie content after 2015, these characteristics are a clear and urgent sign that what will follow is going to be terrible writing. Despite what modern TV studios think, representation alone is insufficient as a premise for a show. However, much like The Expanse and a small handful of shows before it, Pluribus reminds me that I am not actually a homophobic, racist, misogynist; I just hate bad writing. Pluribus works because:

A) the show is well written;
B) gender and sexuality are not the defining traits and motivators for every character; and
C) the gay female lead is an arsehole. Like human beings are. Like frankly many of my gay friends are. She is a messed-up misanthropic mess of a person. She is relatable because she isn't likeable; and that makes her a great lead character.

As I am writing this, I am aware that the trend of prioritising representation over good writing appears to be on the wane. Pluribus itself being an encouraging data point supporting this idea. But let’s not let them forget. These people gave us Velma, Lost in Space, The Rings of Power and the recent generations of Dr Who.

Anyway, I digress. I am now going to talk about Season 1 of Pluribus. If you don’t want the show spoiled (and honestly, why would you), read no further; spoilers will be immediate and plentiful.

Spoilers ahead.

OMG — when the aliens turn up and it turns out they’re in the Matrix and it was all a dream!

OK, well that will teach them to glance at the next line after a spoiler warning.

A Quick Summary Of The Premise

An alien signal is detected from outer space. Eventually, scientists figure out that it is an RNA sequence. Then—with the same can-do attitude as those guys who shoved their faces into the eggs in Alien—scientists immediately set about making what turns out to be a virus. What could possibly go wrong?

The virus escapes and infects all humanity. So, that; that could go wrong.

The show starts to get interesting when the virus does not turn everyone into brain-eating zombies or evil mutants bent on global domination. This is because (A) the virus appears to turn humanity into a gestalt entity, a conscious hive mind if you will, and (B) it achieves global domination almost immediately. The show then follows the fore mentioned misanthrope, author Carol Sturka, who is one of only thirteen people in the world who are immune to the virus.

Fucking-A, let’s go. An interesting premise, set up neatly in the first episode. It’s not entirely original, but it’s fresh enough that you could comfortably wear it for a day or two, provided you weren’t spending time with people you were hoping to form long-term relationships with — and that’s fresh enough for me.

What’s 1n A Name

Pluribus (stylised as Plu1bus in the title credits) comes from E pluribus unum and is a Latin phrase meaning “out of many, one”. I felt quite smug about knowing that before watching the show; but then realised that now everyone who watches the show also knows it. What’s the point of remembering an obscure Latin expression if a TV show is suddenly going to popularise it en masse? I felt the value of being me just got diminished. If everyone knows everything, then whats the point in individual distinction. Did you see what I did there?

For want of a better name (they are usually referred to as just “the Others” in the show), I shall refer to the infected gestalt entity as Pluribus.

In a further rejection of overused tropes in TV writing, Pluribus is not hostile; in fact, it is alarmingly passive, and at least superficially friendly. It immediately apologises for the inconvenience caused by its abrupt global domination and tries to be helpful and supportive to those it was unable to infect. There is the air of an automated phone message: “You are important to us”, and “an adviser will be with you as soon as possible”. I do not think those recorded messages are really all that sorry. The person in the booth who recorded them was probably thinking about how to represent perfect vocal tone — one that conveyed business values, elegance, clarity, and the impression of empathy towards what, at that point, was a purely hypothetical customer. If they were really sorry, they would pick up the damn phone. It is obvious to all the largely unhappy customers that they are just being nice because they want to string us along until someone has time to sell us things we do not need.

Pluribus claims it loves the uninfected. It wants to “help” Carol and the other survivors — by which it means fixing the virus so that they too can become infected. “Our virus will be with you as soon as possible.”

Ex Uno Plures — From One, Many

One of the reasons the show’s concept is so good is that the single entity of Pluribus seems to represent many different aspects of the modern era. Is it a metaphor for religion or cults, for globalisation, for communism, democracy, popularism, for AI, for drugs, for medicine, for the desire for conformity or the dangers of normativity? The answer is very much left to us to decide.

I decided the answer was 'yes'. Yes; It is all those things.

Kindly Ignoring Consent

No matter what the uninfected say to try to convince Pluribus that they don’t want to join it, it simply feels sorry for them and asserts that the rejection is a symptom of the very problem to which joining them is the cure.

Much like the current US president, the sinister nature of this idea raises many questions about normativity, identity and consent. We are invited to reflect on the terrible nature of disregarding our agency, even by those who think they are doing it for our own good. Being stabbed by a man who is delusional and believes he is helping you is much the same as being stabbed by an man who is angry and wants to hurt you. The harm lies in being unable to exercise your reasonable preference not to be stabbed; or for that matter sexually assaulted by the current US president.

The show mostly disregards all but four of the other thirteen survivors. Of the remaining four, each seems to represent a different attitude towards Pluribus. One refuses contact, one wants to join with it; one does not care, so long as she can still fulfil her role as a mother to her child. And then there is Mr Diabaté who wants to fly around on Air Force One sleeping with supermodels.

The extent to which these supermodels are actually consenting to this is, at best, highly doubtful; but luckily Diabaté is able to overcome this tricky moral dilemma by simply never thinking about it. Never has there been a show bold enough to imagine that the man riding around in Air Force One would be the sort of man to use his position to take advantage of compromised, attractive young women. Yet Pluribus dares to imagine.

At one point in the show, after Pluribus has appealed to Carol, saying that they are going to make her better — that they will fix her — Carol stands up and says she knows where she has heard this all before. Unexpectedly, this turns out not to be a timeless reference to the intro sequence to The Six Million Dollar Man TV show (Or 'Forty-three Million Eight Hundred Thousand Dollar Man' adjusted for inflation). Instead, Carol speaks about her time in a gay conversion therapy camp as a child. They too wanted to help — to fix her.

The point is lands very effectively; it is not laboured. It's just another thing to think about. Against the better judgement of seemingly all of the writers for the rest of modern television, the Pluribus writers rightfully trust the audience to not need the metaphor rammed home. However, keeping all ideas and metaphors open to reflection and speculation is not without cost.

Questions Very Loudly Unasked

By keeping the questions open, the show allows the audience to speculate and engage. Pluribus is reasonably effective at ensuring that the lack of resolution to these ideas and questions does not compromise the show’s coherence; but as the season progresses, the writers begin to struggle to move things forward.

In order to avoid resolving things too quickly, the show’s characters seem bafflingly uninterested in the nature of Pluribus. Even after they discover that it supposedly cannot lie, they seem incapable of asking many seemingly urgent and obvious questions:

What does it actually want?
What are its goals for humanity?
How does the hive mind function?
What is its opinion on things to which humanity hitherto could not agree?
Is the Pluribus virus in control of the people, or merely the network connecting infected humans?
When only one person was infected, why did that person immediately stop acting inline with their prior identity? A hive mind of one, is surely the same as not being a hive mind.
What's it actually like to be Nicolas Cage, and is it as amazing as it looks?

A few of these ideas are touched upon very loosely, but always vaguely and never pursued in earnest. Rather then addressing the urgent question of what its like to be Nicolas Cage, we get an appearance from John Cena, who isn't even once asked about Cage.

In order to gain answers Carol injects Pluribus with sodium thiopental. Whilst Pluribus appears not to be able to lie, it certainly seems able to wilfully withhold information. Carol suspects that it knows there is a way to return everyone back to normal and injects Pluribus to force it to reveal how — but once again we never get any meaningful answers or explanation; and the topic of Nicolas Cage isn't even mentioned.

And that makes sense.

What powers the show is not the mechanics of the virus, or even Nicolas Cage, but the ideas it presents us with — what we see in entity of Pluribus, and how it makes us reflect on things in the world outside the show. The moment the mystery is resolved, there is no need for speculation and we are on a collision course with resolution. The show is effectively over. Resolution is what the audience strives for, but if you give it to them, they will just walk away. Just ask David Lynch. Well I guess you can't as he has now ascended to a higher level of being; but if Lynch ware here; he would tell you all about it over a coffee and cherry pie.

Conclusion

Sci-fi always has to balance narrative momentum and resolution with the desire to keep the ideas alive. That’s why it often works well in short form and why it sometimes delivers ambiguous or unsatisfying endings.

Season 1 of Pluribus stayed afloat because it remained philosophically interesting without moving the plot forward very far; but that will only work for so long. Unfortunately, the success of the show will likely have Apple TV+ throwing money at it for an effectively endless run of new seasons and a whole set of spin-off shows. Inevitably this stretches the premise beyond the point where it can remain coherent. Audiences stop waiting for answers to philosophical questions (some but all about Nicolas Cage) that they suspect the writers have long since forgotten about.

I hope Vince Gilligan are smarter than that; there are encouraging signs he might be.

I think the best thing the show could do in Season 2 is end. Explore a few more ideas, bring the story home. Examine some repercussions, and leave as many questions unanswered as possible without becoming frustrating. We don’t need a cinematic universe; we don’t need prequels; we just need you not to kill the idea by drowning it in all the possible places it could be taken; but almost certainly shouldn’t be. Take the many ideas for future seasons, spin-off series, and cross-media, multi-channel marketing concepts — and just make one more really strong season with great writing.

In short, E pluribus unum, if you will.