[COLUMN] Pluribus is About the Loneliness - and the Selfishness - of Grief | by Darren Mooney

Note: This piece contains spoilers for the first two episodes of Pluribus, which is now streaming on Apple TV+. It is the best new show of the year, and well worth watching. So, if you haven’t seen it yet, feel free to bookmark this and come back.

Vince Gilligan’s Pluribus begins with the end of the world, both literally and personally.

Carol Sturka (Rhea Seehorn) is a massively successful fantasy romance author, who has made a career churning out a long-running series. She is in a long-term relationship with Helen (Miriam Shor), who is also her manager. One evening, as the couple are returning from a successful book tour, they stop at a bar. Then the world quite literally ends. The news reports a lockdown at a local airport base. Jets fly overhead, leaving trails of chemicals. People start having seizures.

It's a really shocking moment, in large part because it interrupts the otherwise peaceful mundanity of Carol and Helen’s return home. Carol is unaffected by whatever is happening, so she gets to witness it first hand. The imagery is apocalyptic. Cars crash. People spasm. The city seems to burn right before her eyes. It seems like everything is dying. Helen collapses in the midst of all this chaos and carnage. For Carol, this is the end of the world.

Ultimately, most of the people affected by this strange event recover. However, they are now part of a collective hive mind. Almost every human being on the planet, aside from Carol and twelve others, has essentially found their consciousness merged into a single entity that moves through seven billion bodies. However, Helen does not get up. Helen dies. She is one of the 886,477,591 people who died in the event that the collective will come to identify as “the joining.”

It is a very high-concept premise, something that feels lifted from The Twilight Zone. Although Gilligan is now best known for his work on Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, Pluribus is drawing very overtly from the writer’s experience writing on The X-Files. The show is an interesting genre piece, an abstract and absurdist work built around an outlandish premise. Like any great piece of science-fiction, it’s possible to read Pluribus in any number of ways.

At times it feels like a commentary on the proliferation of artificial intelligence, a technology of which Gilligan has voiced skepticism. After all, the survivors of this transformation are turned into a surreally chirpy and relentlessly upbeat uncanny entity that claims to exist largely to serve and please the twelve remaining individuals on the planet, trapping the other survivors like Koumba Diabaté (Samba Schutte) – who Carol nicknames “Casanova McBoner” – in a fantasy echo chamber, approximating human contact while also potentially facilitating human extinction.

However, Pluribus also feels like a much more personal story. Early in the premiere, Carol and Helen talk about Carol’s frustration at being known as a pulpy genre writer. This is perhaps something of a confession from Gilligan, who has spent well over a decade inside the universe of Breaking Bad. Gilligan has talked about Pluribus as a conscious effort to create something new. “Maybe it’s time for your serious book,” Helen tells Carol. Maybe this is Gilligan’s serious work.

Watching Pluribus, two major (and undersung) pieces of television come to mind. The most obvious in Damon Lindelof’s The Leftovers. Much like Gilligan wrote Pluribus coming off of Breaking Bad, Lindelof made The Leftovers after the smash hit Lost. Like Pluribus, The Leftovers is a decidedly less mainstream and conventional show than Lost was, a much artsier series in terms of its big themes and ideas. It is a more bespoke and personal piece of television.

Like Pluribus, The Leftovers is about the aftermath of a bizarre science-fiction premise, unfolding in a world where 2% of the world’s population just spontaneously disappeared, following a set of characters who were left behind and had to pick up the pieces. Lindelof has always been very candid about his work, and has spoken about The Leftovers as a show about grief and loss. Some of Lindelof’s most candid discussions of the show were with widowed critic Matt Zoller Seitz.

The other show that comes to mind watching Pluribus is closer to home for Gilligan. There is a lot of Chris Carter’s Millennium in Pluribus. Launched at the height of the success of The X-Files, Millennium followed profiler Frank Black (Lance Henriksen) as he chased serial killers. Gilligan was working on The X-Files at the time, and has always stood out as the rare X-Files writer from that era who didn’t get to write for Millennium, unlike his collaborators Frank Spotnitz, Glen Morgan, Darin Morgan, James Wong and others.

Still, Gilligan was aware of Millennium. During the first season of Millennium, Gilligan wrote two episodes of The X-Files about serial killers – “Unruhe” and “Paper Hearts” – which felt like audition pieces. When Millennium was cancelled, Gilligan was drafted to co-write “Millennium”, the X-Files episode that would serve as a stealth finale for Frank Black. There’s a key moment in Breaking Bad involving the song “A Horse With No Name”, which evokes a similar moment in Millennium.

Gilligan has cited Millennium as a key influence, inspiring him to add more humor into Breaking Bad to prevent the series from making audiences “want to slit their wrists after they watch it.” He has cited episodes of Millennium like “Somehow Satan Got Behind Me” as among his “all-time favorites.” Watching Pluribus, there is a lot of the second season of Millennium in the show, when incoming showrunners Glen Morgan and James Wong tilted the show towards apocalyptic anxiety.

The second season of Millennium was written while Glen Morgan was going through a very unpleasant divorce, and that is reflected in the story of the season as Frank Black finds himself separated from his wife Catherine (Megan Gallagher). One of the big central motifs of the second season of Millennium – and what marks it as one of the great seasons of television – is that it is built on the understanding that the world is constantly ending, on a personal, cultural and literal level.

Throughout the second season of Millennium, Frank Black is confronted with the end of the world in multiple forms – the end of a marriage, the break-up of a tribe, the destruction of a sense of community in a small town, the suicide of a lonely old woman, the kidnapping of a bunch of children, the loss of a father, the smothering of the potential of promising young men, the disappearance of a young boy looking for meaning. The world is always ending, in different ways for different people.

At the heart of the second season of Millennium was the thematic idea that the end of Frank’s world – the loss of the family that he had fought so hard to protect and shelter – was emotionally indistinguishable from the end of the world. The season builds to one of the most effective and unsettling depictions of the end of the world in mass media, as Frank loses everyone around him while the world descends into anarchy.

This feels like the animating idea of Pluribus. The opening episode establishes the death of Helen as an apocalyptic event. It is the end of Carol’s world. The grim punchline is that the world just goes on after this. Following the traumatic events of “the joining”, the survivors pick themselves up and go on about the act of living - at times feeling like a grotesque pantomime of normality. They clean up the streets. They repair the damage. They gather the bodies. They continue about an uncanny approximation of ordinary life.

However, Carol doesn’t. Carol’s world has ended. She takes Helen’s body home with her, and buries Helen in the backyard of the house they shared. Even in death, Helen remains part of the foundation of Carol’s life. Pluribus becomes a meditation on grief, as Carol tries to come to terms with the catastrophic loss that she has suffered. At times, Pluribus feels like an absurdist but deeply personal account of the loneliness – and perhaps even selfishness – of trying to navigate that sense of grief.

The people around Carol – all now part of some strange, uncanny, gestalt community – try their best to provide for Carol. They offer her food and water. They try to meet all of her demands to make her life among them as comfortable as possible. “We are here for you,” promises Dan Taffler (Peter Bergman) through her television. They are kind. They are understanding. They are patient. They smile. They accommodate her. They want her to join them. However, Carol doesn’t want to join them. She doesn’t want to be part of this new collective world consciousness. Instead, Carol wants to navigate this alone.

Pluribus suggests that Helen was the only person who really knew Carol, that Helen was the entirety of Carol’s world. Moments before “the joining”, Helen suggests that Carol come out to her fans about her sexuality, by answering a question asking her to name the man she was thinking of when she wrote her hunky male lead of her fantasy novels. Carol cannot do that. “Put George Clooney,” she instructs Helen. “It’s safer.” Carol has concealed herself from the world – that roguish male was written as a woman and then changed to hide Carol’s queerness. With Helen gone, there is nobody left who fully understands Carol.

Much of Pluribus is about Carol trying to hold on to Helen, both literally and metaphorically. She refuses to allow the others to take care of Helen’s body. She is uncomfortable with the implication that the collective also knew Helen, perhaps as well as - or better than - she did. Carol lashes out in anger, as grieving people can. That anger hurts others. “We’re affected by your emotions,” explains her handler (Karolina Wydra). “The negative ones, if they’re directed right at us, they can be a little tough to take.” Pluribus literalizes that metaphor, as Carol’s anger physically harms the entity. “How many people did I hurt just now?”

In this sense, Pluribus is of a piece with the recent wave of media about grief and loss; most obviously 28 Years Later, The Life of Chuck, Bring Her Back, The Shrouds and even Sonic the Hedgehog 3. While a lot of this recent fixation on death and loss feels rooted in the response to the recent massive global pandemic that left millions dead, Pluribus is especially explicit in evoking the sense memory of that collective trauma.

Swabbing is a major recurring image. The hive mind releases all the animals from zoos, effectively rewilding the world. Carol’s world is eerily empty and isolated, told to stay at home, receiving deliveries via drone. The hive mind spreads in a way “more akin to a virus.”  Without getting too heavily into spoilers, further on the season contains major reveals that are similarly couched in pandemic imagery. This makes sense, as Gilligan is a writer who has expressed an interest in exploring the pandemic through media, helping to raise vaccine awareness through writing.

As in other recent explorations of grief like 28 Years Later, Pluribus is not just the story of a character dealing with unimaginable grief in a post-apocalyptic world. It is a story about the insanity of having to navigate that feeling in the context of a larger world that refuses to even acknowledge the enormity of the loss. Carol is constantly frustrated by how “normal” everything seems to be, including how well other survivors like Koumba Diabaté have adapted to what she sees as insanity.

Pluribus feels like a major work, a profound artistic statement from one of the best writers working in the medium. It’s a high-concept science-fiction show, but it’s also both a biting social commentary on what feels like a moment of collective insanity and a deeply personal meditation on the emotional experience of loss. It’s a show about the end of an individual’s whole world, even if that whole world is just one other person.