Pluribus – Your life is your own.

Pluribus: 1x01 We Is Us. 

I want to preface the first episode of Pluribus, Vince Gilligan’s new, very expensive and very eagerly awaited show, with some thoughts on AI. Pluribus is not a mystery box show, or at least doesn’t seem to be: the very first episode answers most questions about the central mystery. Astronomers at a telescope array find a identify a repeating radio message from 600 light years away. One of them realises that it translates into a nucleic acid sequence that scientists begin testing on animals. Inevitably, and following horror tropes, this – not quite, but kind of – virus, makes the jump to one of the scientists when she is careless in the handling of a lab rat, and then it spreads. As soon as a person is infected, after an initial period of seizing, it creates a paradigm of proliferation, first through kissing, then through the synchronised effort of everyone affected to create the most effective delivery mechanism. At the point where these events intersect with the heroine of the story, Carol (an astonishingly great Rhea Seehorn), airplanes are spreading the virus and it has gone worldwide, and nobody remains disaffected. 
Pluribus isn’t explicitly about AI, but the questions it is interested in are the same thorny question that the advent of AI asks. I am not a believer in the likeliness of an Artificial General Intelligence arising, and I think that the risk of the ideology of AI lies less in what the catastrophising warnings imagine humanity would look like in an apocalyptic, Terminator-esque scenario: it’s the environmental destruction, the squandering of resources, the idea that humanity is outsourcing the creation of art and relying on a deeply flawed technology that can genuinely do less than its proponents promise, that worries me. But Pluribus is creating a world in which humanity is fundamentally changed to an extent that it is no longer recognisably human. Individual thought has been replaced with a hive mind that strives collectively. The argument is that this version of the world no longer has conflict and war, or even hierarchies, and this does mirror the idea that a AGI tasked with solving humanity’s problems would come to the conclusion that humanity is inherently flawed and has to be changed radically, or removed, for the AGI to fulfil its task of improving it, because programming could never be precise enough to account for the complexity and wealth of human experience. Maybe it is a jump to find parallels between a person who sees what the currently existing versions of AI are doing to humanity’s perception of reality and wishes to opt out and Carol’s refusal to buy into the happiness of being part of a hive mind, and the show is too smart to be an outright allegory, but it’s difficult not to see these connections. 

Pluribus’ first task is to create a character that would conceivably, even in the throes of profound grief, having lost everything she cares about, refuse the comfort of the hive mind. Carol Sturka is such an expertly written character that it takes only a few scenes to feel like she is established and complex. Her first introduction is a stop on her book tour: she is reading a scene from The Bloodsong of Wycaro (the “fourth book in a trilogy”, which gives a perfect summary of how long Carol thought she would have to labour at this and how she is now trapped in it). The room is filled with enthusiastic women and a few men who are clearly deeply engaged in the world she has created, but unfortunately, she is not particularly passionate about this project: she manages to sit through the signing in a way that indicates that she has become a professional at it, connecting to her fans, feeding them exactly what they want to hear, but in the car she deflates and it becomes clear that she hates everything about this. Her manager Helen (Miriam Shor) supports her, listens to her cynical remarks about her work and the people who read it, tolerates her misanthropic feelings about the life she feels imprisoned in. The viewers also realise, if they are paying attention, that Helen is her wife – a secret that she, the writer of heterosexual romantasy, is hiding from her fans. Helen jokes that Carol should be honest when a fan online asks her about her inspiration for her ravishing corsair, and it’s clear that this has been a point of contention in their relationship for a while – Carol insists on naming George Clooney, “to be safe”. In the bar after, Helen encourages her to finish her “serious” book, and the pieces fall into place. Carol wants to be a serious writer, but the romantasy books are making money. It’s like a monster of her own creation, and the only thing that helps her get through it is Helen. 
When Helen collapses and the world stops, Carol reveals herself to be both incredibly resourceful in trying to find help and willing to quite literally step on anyone else to safe the one person she loves. Unfortunately for her, all the old sources of help – an emergency hotline, the hospital, doctors – have stopped functioning. From about halfway through the episode, Carol is entirely alone, while everyone around her is in the throes of arresting seizures. This loneliness continues when everyone wakes up, because now Carol is alone in her individuality, while everyone else is connected to the hive mind – and Carol is dead, perhaps as a result of her fall or maybe because a percentage of people have a bad reaction to acquiring the virus. As much as Pluribus is a show about a miserable woman surrounded by artificially happy people, I think it’s more salient or meaningful to think about Carol as a woman who has found her one person in the world whom she loves – while finding almost everyone else distasteful and unbearable – and has now lost that person to the same entity that is asking her to join them. Carol’s loneliness and isolation hit harder because she had managed to build herself a life with someone else, and that person is now gone. 

The concept of the hive mind is a brilliant variation of the Body Snatcher theme, because this entity isn’t inherently evil. As soon as everyone wakes back up, the “drones” (I’m not yet sure what terminology I’ll stick with, but this seems apt for now) begin cleaning up, putting out fires, helping the injured, removing the bodies. The government representative (or rather, an undersecretary who happened to be wearing a suit when the rest of cabinet was wiped out) that Carol talks to once she has made it home is insistent that these accident – foreseeable, when a whole civilisation is stopped in its track wherever individual people have fond themselves in the moment – were unintended. The two creepy children who announce to Carol in unison that she has left spare keys under a flower pot five years ago wish to genuinely help her, but there is something so inherently unsettling about how they speak, how people act when they have become synchronised, that the resulting horror is almost worse than if the entity were genuinely evil. 

As impossible as it is for Carol to grasp what has happened even after this spokesperson explains it to her, the true horror for her hits when she realises that the goal of the hive mind is to figure out what makes her – and eleven others – immune, so it can be fixed. It is inconceivable for this entity that anyone would refuse to be subsumed, but Carol seems steadfast that she wants to remain herself. What does happen when she says no? 

Random notes: 

There is so much to be said for this first episode, but I want to start by saying that it made me think about the specific craft that goes into being a great television actor, which I think is a separate skill from being a great movie actor, in the same way in which acting in theatre is different from acting on screen. Much has been said about the “risk” of Pluribus relying on Seehorn in a show that doesn’t have famous movie actors in it, as has become the norm in these expensive exploits, and I think similarly to The Pitt, this first episode proves the value of seasoned television actors.   

There’s a wealth of detail in the author reading scene, and it’s fun to speculate if Vince Gilligan may have put some of his own feelings about overly dedicated fandoms into it – especially the guy who rocks up with a custom-made sharpened cutlass who corrects some technical details in Carol’s writing. 

It’s interesting how Helen’s “You make even one person happy, maybe that’s not art, but it’s something.”, originally said to give some grace to Carol’s romantasy books, reverberates through the new reality of the hive mind wanting to make everyone happy. 

There are echoes of a lot of other films and books and shows in this first episode, but Carol’s first contact with the virus – when a man crashes his car in the parking lot of the bar – reminded me of Stephen King’s The Stand, which has just recently been readapted and also received a fleshing out in The End of the World As We Know It: New Tales of Stephen King's The Stand, a collection of stories by a collection of great writers set in the same universe. 

One of the most visually gratifying aspects of Pluribus is the choreography of what happens, from the contrast between the chaos of scientific cooperation in the opening scenes, when the astronomers try to decode the radio message, to the arrested world that Carol wanders through, where people are frozen in whatever they were doing the moment the virus hits, to the synchronized efforts of the affected, perfectly effective, goal-driven, no movement wasted, like a Fordian fever dream. 

I think the quietly most affecting moment of this first episode, when Carol realises the extent of the horrors, happens in the hospital: she seems content to be quite brutal in her attempts to get help for Helen, but when she walks up to the counter, she stops a baby carrier from falling to the ground and while the audience doesn’t see what is in there, it’s clear from Carol’s face that the baby is seizing too, and that this drives home the horror for her. Again, astonishing acting from Rhea Seehorn.