In the streaming era of television, some series are as immediately inviting and binge-able as the snacks we often consume while watching them, from “Stranger Things” to “Slow Horses.” Others have steeper runways to entry: When I recommend the essential comic drama “Succession” to the uninitiated, I usually tell them to give it three episodes for its hooks to sink in. The stunning sci-fi epic “The Expanse” takes a whole season, give or take, to rise to its full greatness.
With Vince Gilligan’s odd, sneakily transfixing new show “Pluribus,” on Apple TV, I would say it takes all nine episodes of the show’s first season, which finished airing on Dec. 24, to grasp the full range of what this thoughtful sci-fi series is up to. And, as much as I came to relish the slow, methodical build and circuitous dramatic logic of its premise—that humanity has been body-snatched by an alien super-intelligence that acts collectively through them, while contending gingerly with a handful of stubborn individual holdouts—I would not blame anyone for getting off the train early. For better and worse, “Pluribus” takes its sweet time. Indeed, even after nine episodes, the road ahead for its fictional world is unclear. In some sense, the journey of the show’s lead characters—two of those holdouts, played by Rhea Seehorn and Carlos Manuel Vesga—has only just begun.
It should come as no surprise that Gilligan, creator of “Breaking Bad” and “Better Call Saul,” is all about the long game. With those shows he proved his mastery of long-form narrative; both felt less like the hit-or-miss iterations of episodic TV than like multi-chapter tales with a firm authorial hand at the tiller. They handily earned our trust.
“Pluribus” stress-tests that trust. In the first episode, we see astronomers intercept an apparently extraterrestrial strand of RNA code, which, in an almost balletically farcical montage, turns into a virus that infects everyone it touches and soon enough is airborne. After a few moments of convulsion, the infected become happily contented worker ants in the collective projects of a single intelligence, a “joining” via what they later call “a psychic glue.” There are two immediate hitches: Some humans don’t survive the convulsions, and a tiny number—it later turns out to be a dozen worldwide—don’t get infected at all.
Both of these exceptions occur to Carol Sturka (Seehorn), a middle-aged writer whose success as a romantic fantasy novelist hasn’t made her particularly happy or fulfilled. She’s out drinking with her wife, Helen (Miriam Shor), when the virus descends on an entire city block, and the untouched Carol watches in horror as people convulse, then reanimate. Helen never recovers. We are thus summarily plunged into the quietly eddying storm of Carol’s grief, confusion and anger, as she confronts and tries fitfully to understand a brave new world of maddening emptiness and compliance.
“Pluribus” lingers under the dark cloud of Carol’s bad mood for much of its running time, mostly side-stepping or soft-pedaling the urgency of most end-of-the-world narratives to focus instead on the way all this makes Carol feel. Her boundless, mournful solitude and the ways she tries to fill it—with alcohol, snacks, comfort TV, assorted vandalism—can’t help but flash us back to the crazy-making quarantine days of the Covid lockdowns.
Carol learns the rules of this topsy-turvy new world mostly in conversation with a woman, Zosia (Karolina Wydra), who has been hand-selected to seem congenial to Carol. The hive mind, she discovers, can’t use violence or coercion, so there’s little danger of it taking over her consciousness without her consent. This makes its omnipresence and apparent omniscience both overwhelming and weirdly unthreatening—perhaps even tempting? Carol further learns that it cannot lie to her or deny her requests, nor can it easily withstand her occasional outbursts of rage. This leads to occasional paroxysms of frenzied activity to meet Carol’s demands—to restock the aisles of her local grocery store, for example, or to fly her to a summit with her fellow holdouts—alternating with periods of wallowing and wondering.
Taut television it is not. But under its deceptively placid surface there are two things going on, both compelling in different ways. For one, the show’s seemingly hollow, contemplative stretches make room for rumination, both on Carol’s part and ours, on human connection and collectivity, and on the costs and comforts of our technological world, in which so much material wealth is at our fingertips but we feel more isolated than ever. This kind of existential musing isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, I know. And while Seehorn is always a riveting performer, the misanthropic Carol wouldn’t be most folks’ first choice for a desert island companion. But given time to seep in, “Pluribus” makes us viscerally feel the bittersweet spectacle of a world seeming to end with a whimper rather than a bang.
The other thing that’s going on, of course, is the slow-moving machinery of the sci-fi plot. While Carol has bursts of investigative curiosity and horror as she uncovers details about what’s going on, the show’s true apocalyptic fervor resides with another holdout, Manousos (Vesga), a tightly wound Paraguayan whose presence on the show grows as the episodes roll on. Unlike Carol’s love/hate relationship with her new alien overlords, Manousos is on a defiant war footing against them, locking himself in a storage unit, subsisting on dog food, and making inscrutable calculations of signals he gets from a radio broadcast. Next to Carol, he’s hardly a barrel of laughs either, and his grueling journey through South and Central America to meet her in New Mexico is almost comically tedious and harrowing.
That’s “Pluribus” for you: It never takes the easy road when a bumpier, more scenic route is available. This echoes the show’s main thrust, of course. Would we be willing to give up the struggles and strivings of the human condition for life in a friction-free bubble of contentment? Would we fight for the freedom to feel real emotions, including bad ones, and to make choices, including terrible errors, against the promise of a world where all outcomes are inevitable according to a single benign intelligence? These are quandaries as old as Eden and as new as A.I. “Pluribus” sits with these questions, uncomfortably and resolutely, and makes us sit with them too. Must-watch TV? More like must-think TV.
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