This story contains spoilers for Pluribus up to and including episode 7, “The Gap.”
The first thing that a writer gets out into the world carries the germ of their whole career.
Vince Gilligan’s first script for The X-Files was “Soft Light,” a haunting, broken-man-on-the-run story. Tony Shalhoub plays a physicist, the victim of an experiment gone wrong that has left his shadow a literal black hole that eradicates anyone who wanders into it. Cops hunting him, good Samaritans—they all get gobbled up into subatomic particles as Shalhoub begs for them to stay away. “Soft Light” is one of the early-season gems that made The X-Files a phenomenon, the Twilight Zone-Twin-Peaks-conspiracy-theory feast that did for network TV what Enter the Wu-Tang did for ‘90s rap.
Gilligan wrote plenty more excellent scripts for X-Files and would helm the eventual The Lone Gunmen spin-off. And, if you haven’t been watching TV for the past fifteen years, he’d also go on to remake the American crime drama twice. But I’d argue that “Soft Light” is the skeleton key to Gilligan: Lonely people who can’t help but hurt others. Or, maybe, people who really do think that they exist best alone.
The formalities: his new show Pluribus is outstanding. One of the shows of the year, urgent and rich and thrilling in ways that only Andor and The Pitt could match. The sleight-of-hand shuffle among genres is exquisite: from sci-fi to noir to one-woman-play to farce to tragedy. The cold open of episode two, “Pirate Lady,” in which a woman we’ll come to know as Zosia (Karolina Wydra) traverses a Tangiers literally still smoldering from the alien hive-mind takeover hits like a wordless, balletic Bourne-movie set piece. Chisel star Rhea Seehorn’s name onto any and all TV acting awards for the foreseeable. Everyone else should just stay home. Her performance as Carol—very successful, existentially peeved Romantasy author left one of the last dozen non-hive-minded souls on earth—dances through absurdity, rage, confusion, resolve, horniness, trolling, devotion.
Each episode of Pluribus has at least one Seehorn masterclass. In “Pirate Lady,” you get two. Carol desperately wants to bury her partner, killed during the hive-mind takeover, in their backyard. Carol fails, her shovel hitting rock again and again. The rust-colored New Mexican earth will not give. Then she asks Zosia, her assigned ambassador from the hive mind, for help and the team—everyone on planet earth—helicopters in an excavator to dig the grave for her. What begins as Carol’s total commitment becomes failure becomes the kind of pissy resignation that you’d see on a gearhead uncle’s countenance when they have to call AAA.
In that same episode, Carol asks to be flown to meet the other dozen unconverted (there’s a religious metaphor inside Pluribus as rich as the body-snatching one). They stick Carol with a T.G.I. Friday’s server as the pilot—each individual member of the hive mind having access to all knowledge on earth, after all—and she squawks about how uncomfortable she feels having a twenty-something in wacky suspenders fly the plane. The next episode, “Grenade” starts on Carol’s return flight. The hive mind has now staffed the flight with two middle-aged, Ed-Harris-in-The-Right-Stuff types, actual pilots before the great joining. When she asks the dudes if they were allocated to her because of her anxiety on the last flight, they reply “That’s an affirmative, Carol.” Seehorn twitches from shame and then settles into momentary contentment—at least the cloud mind of alien DNA read her correctly. Absurdity is tragedy holding on for a minute longer. Seehorn is doing a one-woman Samuel Beckett play right here on Apple TV.
One take is that the extraterrestrial-virus hive-mind of Pluribus is a metaphor for AI. There’s evidence for that: the liquid, relentless delivery system of everything from information to personnel to fried eggs; the chipper, glassine tone and cult-member smizing of the formerly independent souls now joined up in efficient bliss. Vince Gilligan himself has made it clear that he might choose death over using AI in his work. But the AI theory is a little too tidy, a little AI-ish itself. There’s something more potent and more general going on inside the show’s soul.
I don’t think I’m alone when I say that AI itself doesn’t spook me too much. I believe that the technology can do important things for radiology and logistics and meteorology and pharmaceuticals and power grids. But I trust the humans building the ‘AI era’ as far as I can throw them. I roll my eyes at the mongers. I loathe the global decision-makers who ignore the actual geniuses with doubts. But, still, those people—the speculators and the profoundly self-interested—are baked into every business. This moment’s ghoulish Stanford bros are no different from Billy Bob Thornton offering sonnets on fracking on Landman.
I’m only really scared of the people who gulp down fan-fic movies on Sora. I fear the literal professors of education who use their own children as laboratories for chatbots and ‘educational’ platforms. I fear the educated and remunerated who clock in at the chatbot factories where they know in their waters (and then delude themselves that it isn’t the case, I assume) that their product actively hurts people. I fear the broad social shrug that any ‘era’ is incontrovertible. On Pluribus, the Others don’t symbolize AI itself. To me, they represent how easy it is to slide into the ‘new,’ the dreamily seamless and efficient promise of anything.
I thought this turn in the Pluribus story—that the uniform hive-mind was thrust without consent upon all but a dozen souls (religious reference!)—pushed the show’s spirit closer to George Carlin’s argument: When fascism comes to America it will arrive with smiley faces and general pep. Yes, the Others are global, but this whole philosophy of utilitarian cheer feels American. We are the country with no poor people, only temporarily embarrassed millionaires. Don’t Worry Be Happy. I believe the children are our future. Morning in America. Are You Ready for Some Football?
Half the marketing campaign for Pluribus featured images of a smiley face drawn into a petri dish. The joining offers a world where that optimism and efficiency is total. Those trademark Gilligan process montages—meth tucked into fry batter on Breaking Bad; lawyers fetishizing their sad fancy suits on Better Call Saul—are here on Pluribus. The montages are less textured, though, more predestined. One worldwide corpus executes all the steps without a glimmer of soul. If you buy into Christian imagery, that makes the hive-mind either Legion or God.
Where does that leave Carol? She believes that she’s the last person alive with anger. We know that her rage and critiques and endless cascade of questions and pokes are the only thing that can disrupt the Others. Carol takes on the loneliest of the important role in society: the truth teller, the dissatisfied, the critic. Carol’s grief for what the world was—as perpetually crooked and sad as it was—is her weapon just like Tony Shalhoub’s all-consuming shadow in that early X-Files episode. Both those weapons drive the world away. Carol’s uncomfortable emotions literally make the hive mind break down. Tellingly, the other half of Pluribus’s ad campaign was pictures of Carol screaming.
Carol insists on her own space. Her incandescent rage when she learns that her partner Helen was assimilated in the moments before her death reminds me of how the Others operate like the encroachment of digital surveillance into our private lives. That unrequested colonization of our lives matches what Lowry Pressly describes in his book The Right to Oblivion: Privacy and the Good Life. Pressly writes that in our era of constant surveillance, “privacy is more like private property or a preference rather than a fundamental interest.”
Carol’s criticism is almost editorial. When she meets those who have not been joined with the hive mind, many are with their families. Most of the last sentient souls don’t give a damn when Carol argues that these flesh-bag simulacra of their beloveds aren’t real. Only Carol can tell what’s really going on, how false what they are being offered by the Others is, how “you don’t ask a drug dealer to describe their heroin.” In the world of Pluribus she becomes a proper critic, with the same resolve and wit and memory that H.L. Mencken or Pauline Kael or Greg Tate possessed or that excellent critics like Ian Cohen or Merve Emre wield today.
Carol is merciless with herself too. In “Grenade” she tells the hive mind that in regards to Helen, “Never mention her again. Never think of her again.” An episode later in “Please, Carol” she demands to know what Helen really thought of her work. A node of the hive mind—Jeff Hiller, in full Central Time Zone nice-but-not pomp—makes it clear Helen thought that the lucrative Romantasy slop that bought them their life was “harmless.” He tells Carol that Helen couldn’t make it through Carol’s unpublished, deeply personal ‘literary’ novel. Later in the episode, Carol spikes up with sodium thiopental and videotapes herself to get a glimpse of her own masked emotions. A reminder: ‘Apocalypse’ means ‘unveiling’ in ancient Greek.
The fearless, deeply adult ability to find the necessity of grief and independence and non-compliance would have been enough to make Pluribus memorable. It refreshes and scours in equal measure. But the three episodes since “Please, Carol” that culminated in Friday’s “The Gap” dangle something else: fellowship.
When Carol finds out that remaining unconverted have cut her out of the group chat, she’s devastated. After weeks of living in true isolation after the Others have retreated from Albuquerque, she weeps at Zosia’s return. And thousands of miles away, the other flinty, brave skeptic emerges from Paraguay. It has been Carol’s broadcasts that have called him to leave the storage container where he dines on pet food. Manousos, Carol’s comrade in arms, sets out on his own to find this woman who has literally spoken to him. In rants begin responsibility. Isolation and self-conviction can keep you alive. They can make you strong. For a while. But you’re only hurting yourself, and probably others, if you don’t eventually allow room for hope and curiosity.
The replacement-level sci-fi of the past few years has jabbed audiences with the same dull futurist provocations about cyborg Rube Goldberg machines and posthumanism just like the dumb-dumb dystopias did with political provocations in the 2010s. Pluribus, blessedly, doesn’t revisit the tired question of What does it mean to be human? Instead, it offers the only question real art can ask: What does it feel like to be alive?

Original source: us