Issue 11. Numbers

Alien invasion stories often feature flying saucers, monsters and high-tech weaponry. That’s not the case with Pluribus, a new American TV series. Instead, it offers a different – and arguably more disturbing – scenario: humanity peacefully merging into a single hive mind. The show’s first season presents this artificial unity as a guaranteed path to happiness, but at the cost of individuality and freedom of choice. (This review contains minor spoilers.)

Imagine an alien arrival. Pop culture suggests many scenarios: a flying, cow-stealing saucer with a beam of light underneath; an army of monsters, colonizing the planet using high-tech weapons; a wise species coming to Earth to deliver sacred knowledge.

Pluribus, an American TV series from Vince Gilligan, the showrunner behind award-winning Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, kicks off with a different premise: a virus – or, as it’s called there, “psychic glue” – that connects all people in a single hive mind.

The name of the show comes from the Latin phrase E pluribus unum which means “Out of many, one.” It is intriguing that this phrase resonates so deeply in the present moment, as Gilligan’s show reflects on the importance of diversity and individuality against sameness and ostensible unity.

E pluribus unum is also the motto of the United States, written on the country’s Great Seal. The thirteen letters symbolize the thirteen colonies that fought against the United Kingdom and became the original states. In an interview, however, Vince Gilligan has said that the plot should not be read only in an American context, but more broadly, as an exploration of humanity’s recurring desire for unity and happiness. Nevertheless, the American cult of individuality plays a major role here.

The beginning of the first episode resembles Carl Sagan’s famous 1985 novel Contact: a message from space is received by a group of astronomers. Only it is not schematics for a transport device to establish a contact, as in Sagan’s book, but a coded RNA molecule that turns out to be something like a virus. It spreads across humanity, causing hundreds of millions of casualties worldwide. The rest become the "Others," a hive mind, utterly happy after, losing their personalities in what they now call "Joining."

Like in other post-apocalypse stories, there are survivors: thirteen people, including our protagonist, Carol Sturka. She is a grumpy best-selling writer whose oeuvre contains a fantasy book series, Winds of Wycaro, read mostly by bored middle-aged women, and an unfinished "serious" novel, which she can never find time to polish between Wycaro tours. Carol and her partner and agent, Helen, are returning from a tour when the virus hits Albuquerque, New Mexico, their home. Helen does not survive, and Carol finds herself outnumbered: everyone around her has become part of the hive mind. “You are in no danger,” they say. “Your well-being is of the utmost importance to us.”

They literally cannot hurt her. Designed not to bring any intentional harm to any living being (the 886 million dead are dismissed as "collateral"), the Others can serve immune humans and provide whatever they need. One survivor exploits that possibility to comic effect – flying in Air Force One and holding James Bond-themed parties in fancy Las Vegas casinos. But not Carol.

She refuses to accept the philosophy of the Others: happiness achieved through the complete loss of uniqueness. In the world of Pluribus, a joined individual possesses all the knowledge others may have: languages, skills and secrets, both personal and of national importance. Because “all is one,” united in a single mind, there is no disagreement and loneliness anymore, no competition or power games, no hierarchies or struggles. So why frown? Prone to depression, black-humored and loyal to the true sense of self, Carol wants no part of it.

For Carol, the loss of humanity’s individuality feels like a tragedy layered on top of the grief of losing her loved one and being left alone to fight both internal and external demons. Carol is the only one among the twelve survivors she meets soon after Joining who refuses to accept life in the new world – the thirteenth survivor, Manousos, appears later.

Pluribus treats the idea of “all becoming one” with a great deal of sarcasm, but it also strikes a familiar note. In the past year alone, at least two celebrated films addressed the same aspiration in different ways. Ryan Coogler’s Sinners tells the story of two brothers fighting for their authenticity – in the broadest sense – against a group of vampires intent on turning everyone into their kind. The Testament of Ann Lee by Mona Fastvold focuses on the founder of the Shakers, a religious sect whose members practiced celibacy, dancing and ecstatic shaking during communal services. Although the two stories arrive at different moral conclusions – Sinners opposes the vampire’s blood-bound unity , while The Testament celebrates community as a refuge from a cruel world – both wrestle with the tension between individuality and belonging.

It is the middle of the 2020s and we are witnessing the consequences of social media changes. At the beginning of the century, social media promised horizontal connections, democratic transformations and worldwide interactions. Now, however,they function as engines of division, creating social bubbles through algorithmic feeds. Isolation, loneliness and deteriorating ability to form friendships increasingly shape social reality. Researchers claim that these conditions make people more susceptible to political extremism and less trusting of democracy. So why does Gilligan’s Pluribus still advocate for Carol’s radical individuality?

Carol can come across as unpleasant – one of the few women on screen allowed to be sour and intelligent, longing and lonely, depressed and occasionally desperate. Sometimes her decisions are questionable (not for the character, who is beautifully written, but for life itself giving us viewers plenty of time to scream at our screens); sometimes she is simply irritating. Yet Gilligan still frames Carol as fundamentally optimistic towards a world she no longer likes. She wants to reverse the Joining, which for her means saving humanity from the “virus of happiness” brought by the aliens.

When her alien chaperone, Zosia, explains that the Others merely want to "save" humanity, Carol replies that it is not salvation if it is done without consent. The freedom of choice – however bad that choice might be – is vital to Carol. She is grumpy by choice, and that personality trait is something the Others cannot take away from her, at least not yet. All the qualities that make up our personalities, good or bad, form the basis of genuine closeness. The unity provided by the hive mind is false because it erases everything that makes us humans, including our flaws, neuroses and destructive habits.

The hive mind is, in fact, totalitarian. When the Others finally figure out how to join the remaining survivors – a process that can happen only by consent – only one person agrees: a young woman who wants to reunite with her family. Watching her lose herself and become part of the Others is one of the scariest scenes of the first season – exposing the performative "niceness" of the hive mind.

There is a scene in the first episode of Pluribus in which Carol and Helen, before the Joining, arrive at an airport and pass by a bookshelf in a shop: Carol’s books are at the bottom. She looks meaningfully at Helen, nods towards the shelf, and raises her eyebrows. “I’ll get us some gum,” Helen says. She naturally places Carol’s latest novel at the top before heading to the counter. The hive mind would not even bother with gestures or hints: all individual actions are synchronized towards a single goal: efficiency. (And world domination, of course.) But Carol’s exchange with Helen is rooted not in unity, whether as a couple or as business partners, but in difference. As distinct personalities, they respect each other and agree to disagree. Carol hates her books but does not mind if they sell well. Helen mocks her whining, but still promises to carve out time in the schedule for Carol to finish the work she finds inspiring.

The beauty of different people existing together is what the alien invasion destroys, and that is what Carol mourns – in her spectacular, and sometimes inexplicable way – and it is what she longs to restore.