There’s something perversely exhilarating about watching Vince Gilligan‘s new series Pluribus work against itself. The show wants so desperately to make us clutch our precious individualism to our chests, to gasp in horror at the prospect of collective consciousness, that it accidentally reveals the narcissism at the heart of American mythology. It’s like watching someone try to make a propaganda film and inadvertently producing satire.
The premise is simple enough to be either profound or ridiculous, depending on your mood: a global event has fused nearly all of humanity into a single, blissful collective consciousness. Among the handful of holdouts is Carol Sturka, played with fierce neurotic energy by Rhea Seehorn, who treats this universal happiness as a personal affront. Gilligan, in his interviews, makes no bones about his intentions. He’s built what he thinks is an empathy machine for the rebel, the last woman standing against conformity. He’s even slapped a petulant “Made by humans” in the end credits, as if the show were a picket line against artificial intelligence. “I’ve had enough of writing anti-heroes for a while,” he announces, apparently blind to the fact that he’s created yet another magnificent anti-heroine, perhaps his most damning yet.
But here’s where it gets interesting: if you watch Pluribus without the cultural blinders that American storytelling insists we wear, the whole edifice starts to crack. The “Others” – this supposedly terrifying mass mind we’re meant to fear – have accomplished what mystics have chased for millennia. They’ve ended violence, eliminated greed, dissolved the barriers between self and other. They exist in perfect cooperation, having eradicated poverty and conflict. They’re essentially enlightened beings, and Carol, our supposed heroine, looks at their serene faces and sees zombies.
The American narrative has this one tune it plays on endless repeat: the individual über alles. It doesn’t matter what it costs, what it destroys, what misery it perpetuates – what matters is being special, being yourself, carving out your little kingdom and defending it to the death. We’re drunk on ontology, on the imperative to be, to be unique, to be someone. Carol embodies this drunkenness perfectly. She’s lonely, anxious, suffering, but she defends her suffering as if it were the Medal of Honor, because it’s hers. She owns it. She thinks she controls it. And that illusion of control is worth any amount of pain.
Watch Carol fight for her “free will” and you’re watching someone defend a fortress built on sand. If you actually observe how thoughts arise – and I mean really observe, not just nod along to the idea – you realize you’re not authoring them. They bubble up from some neurochemical abyss you have no control over. Nobody decides what they’ll think next; thoughts just arrive, like uninvited guests. Carol’s desperate battle isn’t for freedom; it’s for the right to take credit for what simply happens to her.
The show wants us to recoil from the hive mind, but what we’re actually seeing is the dissolution of ego, that thing Eastern philosophy has been trying to get us to recognize as the source of all our misery. The collective consciousness has solved the equation by removing the variable of “I,” and Carol, in her pig-headed determination, wants to reintroduce chaos just so she can say “I am.” It’s attachment to suffering, dressed up as heroism. The horror isn’t losing yourself; the horror is thinking you have a self to lose in the first place.
There’s a scene in episode six that crystallizes this beautifully, though not in the way Gilligan intended. The Others have instituted cannibalism of the dead – a perfectly rational solution to animal suffering, when you strip away cultural squeamishness. Carol reacts with visceral, atavistic disgust. And in that moment, she reveals herself as the true conformist, the real defender of stale conventions. The collective mind has had the audacity to break the ultimate taboo in service of reducing suffering, and Carol clutches her pearls like any suburban moralist. She’s obeying a cultural prohibition, demonstrating that she’s far more enslaved to groupthink than the supposedly mindless hive.
The irony is delicious. Pluribus wants to warn us about technology making us “all the same,” but it ends up being an advertisement for the death of narcissism. It forces the question: what if our precious individuality is just a phantom limb? We feel pain where there’s nothing there.
This reading also illuminates our current panic about artificial intelligence. The series deliberately uses AI-style language for the hive mind, trying to evoke its cold, irritating complacency. It’s an effective narrative choice, but that detachment only seems frightening if you worship at the altar of authorship and uniqueness. Western culture’s resistance to technologies of “distributed thinking” betrays our terror of losing an identity primacy that, from another philosophical angle, was always a con game. Eastern cultures, more comfortable with fluidity between self and world, might find in this “extended mind” a natural evolution – and gain a geopolitical advantage in the process.
What makes Pluribus worth watching is precisely this self-sabotage. It’s a swan song for American individualism that doesn’t realize it’s singing a dirge. We get a heroine who, in trying to save her soul, condemns herself and maybe everyone else to unhappiness. The show is a mirror, like AI itself – and what we see reflected back isn’t pretty.
Gilligan has created something more interesting than he intended: not a celebration of the individual, but an anatomy of why we cling to our isolation even when it makes us miserable. Carol isn’t defending freedom; she’s defending the right to be unhappy in her own special way. She’s claiming ownership of her misery the way a landlord claims ownership of land – mistaking a social convention for a human right, confusing a temporary arrangement for eternal truth.
The genius of the show – its accidental genius – is that it makes you root for the hive. Not because they’re perfect (they’re creepy as hell, in their placid GPT-esque way), but because Carol’s alternative is so exhausting. She’s all trauma because she’s all ego, and watching her flail against the inevitable is like watching someone try to fence with their own shadow. You want to shake her and say: just let go. But of course she can’t. That would mean admitting she was never really holding on to anything real in the first place.
This is what American storytelling keeps trying to sell us: that our suffering is noble, that our isolation is freedom, that the walls we build around ourselves are castles rather than prisons. Pluribus tries to peddle this same mythology, but the goods are damaged. The sales pitch keeps slipping into its opposite. And that’s when art becomes interesting – when it betrays its creator’s intentions and tells a truth nobody meant to tell.
1 thought on “Pluribus: Rooting for the Hive”
I finally found a review that sees this show the way I do. But I think you are missing one thing. Carol doesn’t realize she has always been dependent on thousands of people deprived of free will in order to service her every whim. She says she doesn’t want to order food on the phone so hundreds of people are engage to stock a store to give her the illusion of freedom and independence. The West depends on the slavery of others. I’m not sure whether Gilligan even sees the irony in his work.