I finally got around to watching Pluribus.
Okay, that’s a lie.
Normally when I write these WIT articles, the show has already long since completely aired.
This time around though, I’m actually on top of things. I’ve been watching each episode of Pluribus as it airs, and have been updating this article accordingly, with the intent to publish it once the season wraps. I think it’s due to finish at the end of December, so chances are this article’s going up in January.
I’m a pretty big fan of Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, and I know Vince also worked on The X-Files, so when I found out that he was coming out with a new sci-fi series I was intrigued. I was even more intrigued when I learned that Rhea Seehorn was going to star in the lead role. I really enjoyed her as Kim Wexler, and I haven’t seen her in anything else so I was interested to see what she could do in another role.
The events of Pluribus start when astronomers receive a signal from a planet 600 light-years away. The signal is decoded, and as it turns out it’s instructions on making a virus that turns those infected into a hivemind (which fans have taken to calling “Plurbs”). The virus quickly consumes humanity, and soon pretty much everyone is under the control of the hivemind. Carol Sturka (Seehorn), a middle-aged cynical lesbian who writes romance novels, is one of thirteen people who aren’t affected by the virus. For reasons unknown, the Plurbs go out of their way to please Carol and the other unaffected humans. The series revolves mostly around Carol’s attempts to restore humanity, and her interactions with a particular Plurb who looks suspiciously like the attractive woman on the cover of one of Carol’s books. It also follows her interactions with the other unaffected, who seem content on allowing humanity to stay infected.
Essentially, Pluribus is kind of like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, with a slightly more complex story.
If this is your first time here, WIT, short for “What I Thought”, is a compilation of idle thoughts and musings I had while watching a show. In the past I’ve done shows like Riverdale, Stranger Things, and Like a Dragon. You can check out the whole catalog here.
Anyway, let’s get to it.
1. This isn’t the Better Call Saul sequel I was hoping for.
When I found out Rhea Seehorn was the lead on a new Vince Gilligan project after Better Call Saul came to a close three years ago, I naturally assumed that the wait was over and we were finally getting Better Rim Kim:
We didn’t get Better Rim Kim, and I’m pretty confident that Vince Gilligan or Rhea Seehorn will never stoop so low as to do any kind of porn at all let alone porn involving ass-eating, but still, this series seems interesting enough so I guess I’ll watch it. Rhea plays a middle-aged lesbian who writes erotic novels, so maybe we’ll get a very watered-down lesbian sex scene thrown in somewhere. I mean, we’ve already had a guy kissing another guy. Sure, it was to spread the virus, but it gives me hope.
2. Throw the Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul fans a bone.
Carol travels on Wayfarer Airlines, which Breaking Bad fans will recognize as the airline of Flight 515, the plane that crashed over Albuquerque because Walt let Jane die. It was also the airline that transported Jimmy back at the end of Better Call Saul. This is a cute little nod to Vince’s two most popular series.
Fuck cute little nods, I want a full-blown tie-in. I want Los Pollos Hermanos trucks everywhere, I want Carol to pass a Saul Goodman billboard on the highway, I want Carol to receive a delivery from a hivemind-controlled Dean Norris wearing a DEA vest, I want a scene where the Plurbs get fucked up on Blue Sky meth. I want straight-up in-your-face cameos from Bryan Cranston, Aaron Paul, Giancarlo Esposito, Jonathan Banks, and Bob Odenkirk. I want Plurb Hector to roll up in his wheelchair dinging his bell at a very confused Carol.
Nah, I’m just kidding. A few little nods would be nice, but let’s keep this separate from the Breaking Bad/Better Call Saul universe. Could you imagine a scene with a Plurbed Walt and Jesse talking to Carol in unison? Eek, I actually cringed while writing that.
I wonder if being infected would let Hector talk again though.
3. The French harem guy is definitely going to do a heel turn.
We’re supposed to look at the guy flying around in Air Force One with a harem of supermodels like he’s an asshole, but let’s be real here for a moment. Most of us guys would be doing the same exact thing if we were in his situation. I know I sure would. I’d be having so much sex on that plane that Bill Clinton would look like a pimply-faced teenage dweeb who could just barely get past first base. I wouldn’t have any time for Carol’s bullshit meeting, because I’d be too busy railing J-Lo from behind while Sydney Sweeney licks my balls from underneath.
The show is probably setting this guy up to be a bad guy though. I got a feeling I’ll be saying “Called that shit” by the end of this article.
4. Carol compares herself to Stalin.
I appreciate the reference to a mass murderer who wasn’t Hitler, and was probably even worse than Hitler in terms of casualties. Thanks for doing your part to fight communism, Vince. Now just have her accidentally kill a bunch more and compare herself to Mao Zedong, and we’ll be set.
5. The Plurbs will give Carol working nukes if she asks for them.
Step 1: Acquire a shitload of nukes from the Plurbs.
Step 2: Have them positioned all across the world at strategic points.
Step 3: Ask the Plurbs to devise a detonation system that only you can control.
Step 4: Oh look, I can wipe out the entire planet in one shot now. The Plurbs won’t have shit to control when I burn the whole world to the fucking ground.
Step 5: Get the fuck off my planet, xeno scum.
6. Never mind, I was wrong before.
The plot of this series revolves around the Plurbs kissing Rhea Seehorn’s ass. In a way, this does in fact make the show Better Rim Kim.
Bravo, Vince.
7. That Patrick Fabian voice cameo in episode 5
That’s Patrick Fabian’s (Howard Hamlin from Better Call Saul) voice on the voicemail. Vince is obviously reading this article and taking notes. Which is really weird, because this probably won’t be published until January.
Maybe we’ve been Plurbed and just don’t know it yet.
8. The garbage bag drone
That drone hanging from the street light is going to be Pluribus’s version of the pizza on Walter White’s roof, isn’t it?
9. Why did the French harem guy show Carol that weird video?
What was up with that scene in episode 6 where the French guy says he’s aware of the Plurbs eating dead people, then showing her a video with nothing on it except random footage of food production and a bunch of blue backdrops with nothing else in the shot?
10. Tell them to change the fucking voicemail message already.
Getting Patrick Fabian to do a voice cameo was cute, but if I have to hear that long-ass spiel one more time I’m going to stick a Mossberg in my mouth.
If it’s annoying even to me as the viewer, I can only imagine how much more annoying it’s gotta be to a hyper-bitch like Carol. Just tell them to shorten the damn voicemail message already.
11. I’m probably wrong about the French harem guy.
If anyone’s going to do a heel turn it’s going to be the guy from Paraguay.
12. Based Boi Manousos
Nothing on this planet is yours. Nothing. You cannot give me anything, because all that you have is stolen. You don’t belong here.
As of episode 7, Manousos is my new favorite character. Death to all xeno scum.
13. Manousos taking a Plurb hostage with a scalpel
So wait, Carol says some mean words and it sends the entire hivemind into uncontrollable spasms and kills a million Plurbs. Yet, Manousos holds a scalpel to a Plurb’s throat and threatens to kill him if they don’t let him leave the hospital, and absolutely nothing?
That’s either a pretty big plot hole, or it’s a surprisingly nuanced yet accurate commentary on the state of modern society.
14. “All the brains in the world and you can’t even navigate a fucking pronoun.”
I can relate to this.
15. There’s my lesbian sex scene.
Does intense making out count as lesbian sex? I guess if I was 12 years old again.
16. “We love all breakfast food.”
Sounds like Walt Jr. was assimilated by the Plurbs.
This serves as conclusive proof that Pluribus takes place in the Breaking Bad universe. Bravo, Vince.
17. The final episode
Alright, so I understand why Carol didn’t want to get into the ambulance with Manousos. I also understand why Manousos was worried about the Plurbs reading his lips from space and Carol’s house being bugged (even though his bug search was pointless; the Plurbs have the brains of the CIA at their disposal, he’d have never found it if there was one). What I don’t get was why they couldn’t just go talk under an awning or something. Instead, they have a retarded battle of wills where Manousos insists talking under an umbrella in the middle of the desert. Like, what, you don’t think they could just adjust the angle on their drone’s cameras or something?
I have to give some credit to Manousos’s actor though. South Americans are notoriously homophobic. When Carol mentions that she had a wife, Manousos’s reaction was one of very subtle displeasure:
This is the perfect level of subtlety for this scene. On one hand, Manousos is most likely religious and homophobic (when he’s talking to Carol about the souls of the Plurbs, it’s implied that he thinks the Plurbs might be demons), but on the other hand he knows that Carol might be his only chance to fix things, so he has to put that homophobia aside to work with her. I don’t know if the writers intentionally included this, or if the actor himself decided to slip this one in, but that subtle yet telling reaction is so realistic and damn near flawless and shows that the actor is pretty talented.
Manousos screams in the face of a Plurb and it causes them to spasm. I stand by what I said in #13. Why did him holding a Plurb at knife-point not cause anything, but yelling does? Though it was pretty funny that the Indian lady assumed that it was Carol and called again to bitch her out.
If they’re using radio waves to coordinate their hive, why not just throw one of them into a Faraday cage? They’re not very hard to make.
I have to say though, I wasn’t expecting the season to end with Chekhov’s atom bomb. I wonder if Carol knows how to actually detonate it.
Final thoughts
A lot of people complained that this show was too slow and that nothing happened in most episodes.
I can see why people thought the show moved too slow. You don’t have gangbangers or cartels threatening characters, there’s no highly intelligent protagonist like Walter White carefully maneuvering themselves to take out the Plurbs, there’s no DEA investigation of Carol’s activities being spearheaded by someone close to her. The payoffs aren’t anywhere near as grand as they were in Breaking Bad or Better Call Saul. Compared to Vince’s other shows, Pluribus is definitely a much slower burn.
We live in a world where people are accustomed to consuming media in increments of 60 seconds or less, and I think that’s affected the average viewer’s patience. We need gratification, we need it immediately, and we need it repeatedly. Apps like TikTok and Instagram have changed the way we watch TV, in my opinion for the worse. I think many of the people complaining about Pluribus being too slow fit into the “give me immediate gratification” demographic, and this kind of show probably isn’t for them.
With that said, if this show wants to survive then it needs to pick up the pace at least a little bit. Some scenes run longer than they need to. We didn’t need a five minute intro of Zosia making her way across the world, we didn’t need ten minutes of Manousos fiddling with his radio and eating dog food, we didn’t need ten minutes of people singing while the girl in Peru was being turned. I understand that this is a staple of Vince’s work, and it works well in shows like Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul because those shows have significantly more action to contrast against those kinds of scenes. But Pluribus doesn’t have that kind of action. In a show where most scenes are just the main character talking with a single person, adding long and drawn out scenes, especially scenes with minimal dialogue, slows down an already slow-paced story. There is such a thing as too slow of a burn, and Pluribus comes dangerously close to that.
I’ll be honest here, I’m not finding Carol to be that interesting of a character. Most of her time onscreen is spent bitching at someone or playing grab-ass with Zosia. We’ve seen that Carol can be clever and resourceful when she wants to, so the potential for her to be a good character is definitely there. I want to see more of the Carol who did the investigative work in “Got Milk?” and shot Zosia up with sodium thiopental in an attempt to get her to give away how to turn everyone back. We need less of Carol acting like a Karen and more of her actually doing stuff to fight the Plurbs. Now that Manousos is in the picture and Carol knows she has a month or two until the Plurbs extract her stem cells from her eggs and turn her, maybe we’ll get a bit more action. The stakes have been raised, so ideally this should mean that Carol spends less time playing around and more time getting stuff done. Hopefully Manousos will share the spotlight and get equal screen time.
I’m also hoping that at least a couple more of the regular humans join Carol. One of the things that makes this series seem too slow is Carol’s lack of interaction with other people. It gets boring watching her either talk with Zosia or random Plurbs all the time. Having her link up with Manousos is a good start, but I think that it would be a good idea to have a few more of the other immune decide that she’s right and join her. The French guy would be a great choice here. You could have him slowly begin to get bored with his hedonistic lifestyle, and start to realize that Carol is right. We also don’t know much about the other immune, the only ones who got any real screentime were the angry Indian lady and the girl from Peru. There’s eight other people that could be utilized, so hopefully next season will include more of them.
Regardless, I’m looking forward to what Vince has in store for the next season.
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