If you ask TV writer and producer Vince Gilligan what his latest show, Pluribus, is about, he’ll turn the question right back around on you.
“I really like the idea of making a show and letting viewers tell us what it’s about,” Gilligan told Sojourners. “I don’t know that there’s any one answer to that question other than what the individual thinks.”
Gilligan isn’t trying to be evasive, though his answer is ironic given the hit Apple TV series’s high-concept premise. Pluribus imagines a scenario where all of humanity is infected with a virus that turns them into a perpetually happy, helpful hivemind. No one is an individual person, and there is no independent thought. Everyone knows the entirety of human knowledge at all times—everyone, that is, but a handful of immune people who haven’t joined the hivemind, including the show’s protagonist, pessimistic romance novelist Carol Sturka (Rhea Seehorn). Carol distrusts the group we eventually come to know as The Others and tries to find out what makes them tick in an effort to return the world to something resembling normality.
That setup opens Pluribus to endless philosophical questions. It’s easy, for instance, to compare The Others to artificial intelligence given the way the group absorbs information and responds to requests, with much of their behavior lacking discernment. In one recent real life example, a boy in California died from an overdose after asking ChatGPT for advice on taking drugs. On the show, when Carol asks The Others for a grenade just to see if they’ll give it to her, she’s shocked when they do so with no questions or concerns about how she’s going to use it. They simply want to make her happy.
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Other commentators have examined how Carol, prior to the disease taking hold, felt wholly unfulfilled in her career as a romantasy novelist. Her legions of fans didn’t care how corny her books were as long as they got their happy ending. Similarly, one of The Others later tells Carol, to her horror, that they regard her cheesy Wycaro romantasy series with the same reverence as the works of Shakespeare. In an interview with Polygon, Gilligan said that The Others would probably see as much beauty in “a big pile of cow poop” as in the Grand Canyon. It’s possible to see this as commentary on the way we carelessly consume art, entertainment, and even the news with no thought to its quality, messaging, or veracity.
All those thematic rabbit holes are there by design, Pluribus executive producer and writer Allison Tatlock told Sojourners. “People are actually debating what it’s about,” Tatlock said. “I have a daughter who’s in college, and she says her friends are truly engaged in philosophical debate about the meaning of the show.”
From a Christian perspective, the most interesting idea in Pluribus may be its consideration of peace. By absorbing the vast majority of humanity into a single shared consciousness, The Others have, effectively, ended all wars. All resources are shared. They sleep in large groups to conserve resources. The Others are so committed to nonviolence that they refuse to even pick fruit off a tree (even this innocuous-seeming act counts to them as the taking of a life). But of course, that “peace” has come at huge cost. The Others aren’t a community; they’re one entity spread among several million individual bodies.
The Others aren’t a community; they’re one entity spread among several million individual bodies.
Gilligan recalls a moment early in the development of the show when Tatlock and another writer got into a discussion about what it would really be like to live in such a world. “She took one side, and he took the other,” Gilligan said. “‘It’d be hell!’ ‘Why would it be hell? They’re happy!’” For Gilligan, it’s unanswerable: “What would true peace of mind feel like? It’s like asking what the far side of the moon would be like. I don’t know that I’ve had it really ever in my life.”
Gilligan’s right in that the only examples of peace we really have are what’s been illustrated for us. Perhaps the most famous biblical example is Isaiah 11:6-9, which still includes individual identity as part of a prophetic vision of the kingdom of God:
The wolf shall live with the lamb; the leopard shall lie down with the kid; the calf and the lion will feed together, and a little child shall lead them. The cow and the bear shall graze; their young shall lie down together; and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. The nursing child shall play over the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put its hand on the adder’s den. They will not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain, for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.
In Isaiah’s prophesy, opposed beings share common knowledge that comes from God, but it hasn’t changed what or who they are. A child is still a child. A snake is still a snake. Rather, the shared understanding of God’s peace allows them to live side by side. The peace God offers changes the way the world works, removing fear and all the selfish, destructive instincts it can lead to. True peace, like unconditional love, takes difference into account. It doesn’t force assimilation or dictate what change should look like, but rather invites us to participate in a true community where everyone is safe to be who they are.
The forced change caused by the virus in Pluribus is a large part of why Carol—a gay woman and childhood conversion therapy survivor—inherently distrusts The Others. She grew up understanding that her family’s acceptance was dependent on fundamentally changing who she was. When The Others inform Carol that they’re actively looking for ways to absorb all of the immune individuals, her included, into their hivemind, it feels like forced conversion all over again.
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What The Others offer isn’t true peace. It’s a singular mindset with no room for any feeling other than general contentment. When confronted by any behavior that doesn’t fit that mold (when Carol gets angry, for example), The Others simply shut down and leave. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer writes in Life Together, that kind of behavior is antithetical to true community:
“By sheer grace, God will not permit us to live even for a brief period in a dream world,” Bonhoeffer writes. “He does not abandon us to those rapturous experiences and lofty moods that come over us like a dream. God is not a God of the emotions but the God of truth.”
In the tradition of the best science fiction, Pluribus takes a simple concept—what if everyone on earth suddenly shared the same brain except for a handful of people—and uses that concept to explore a wide range of ideas from autonomy to conflict to the ethics of survival. How The Others’ hivemind works, or how the virus created it, is still a mystery at the end of the show’s first season. What is apparent, however, is that the sense of connectedness and bliss it creates is artificial, and not spiritual. We’ll have to keep watching to find out if it’s permanent.
Abby Olcese is a freelance film critic and writer based in Missouri. You can find her on Twitter @abbyolcese.
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