SPOILER ALERT: The following piece contains plot details from “La Chica o El Mundo,” the Season 1 finale of “Pluribus,” now streaming on Apple TV.
I have a confession to make: I love Carol Sturka.
In that way, I’m a lot like the hive mind that’s absorbed most of humanity in “Pluribus,” the Apple TV drama of which Carol is the star. I love Carol’s abrasiveness. I love how she responds to the end of the world not with high-minded heroism, but a self-centered defiance rooted in grief — a solipsism encouraged by how the hive mind caters to her every request. I love how Carol is tough enough to spend over a month on her own when the hive mind abandons Albuquerque rather than endure Carol’s efforts to undo their joining, but human enough to relent and give acquiescence a try in the season finale. (Humanity and its attendant flaws are in scarce supply in “Pluribus.”) I believe Carol is a truly great TV character, brought to life by a truly great TV actor in Rhea Seehorn.
Not everyone seems to agree. “Pluribus” is the third series from Vince Gilligan, the showrunner who earned himself a permanent place in his chosen medium’s Mount Rushmore with the back-to-back triumphs of “Breaking Bad” and “Better Call Saul.” Both those series focused on ascendant figures in New Mexico’s narcotics trade, an exciting hook that belied Gilligan’s evident fascination with the detailed gruntwork between violent confrontations. I always think of Jonathan Banks’s Mike Ehrmantraut silently disassembling his car, part by individual part, in search of a tracker over several minutes of screentime in an early season of “Saul.”
Apple’s largesse allows “Pluribus” to expand Gilligan’s purview to Las Vegas, South America and other far-flung locales, but also practice his preferred MO with a heightened focus. “Breaking Bad” and “Better Call Saul” — particularly the latter — could be rigorous, but they also distributed that rigor across a wide-ranging ensemble. In her Gilligan-verse debut, Seehorn’s Kim Wexler was just one of many fastidious obsessives in and around the Albuquerque underworld, joining kindred spirits like Mike and chicken-slash-meth kingpin Gus Fring (Giancarlo Esposito). In “Pluribus,” Carol and the hive mind are pretty much all we have, give or take a few fellow survivors like gleeful hedonist Mr. Diabaté (Samba Schutte) and Manousos Oviedo (Carlos-Manuel Vesga), who spends much of Season 1 holed up in a Paraguayan storage facility.
That puts pressure on both Carol as audience surrogate and the viewer asked to train their attention on a single person’s response to a global cataclysm. Lengthy scenes show Carol doggedly investigating the hive’s source of nutrition (Human Derived Protein, which is exactly what it sounds like), or Manousos studying radio frequencies and noting his findings by hand. Especially in the hive’s absence, “Pluribus” is quiet, deliberate, patient — and for some, those qualities cross the line into “boring.” Writing for The New Republic, critic Philip Maciak pronounced the show “a bit of a snooze,” echoing many complaints on social media about the hive’s noisy, chaotic genesis giving way to the placidity of a status quo where almost everyone is quite literally of one mind.
Clearly, I disagree. I can point to certain objective factors in Gilligan’s defense: “Pluribus” balances out the indulgence of languid scene-to-scene pacing with sub-50 minute runtimes and a nine-episode season; the show’s visual panache works against a sense of monotony, like a dumpster-diving sequence directed by frequent Gilligan collaborator Gordon Smith that gives the grossest of tasks uncanny color and symmetry. (Cinematographers Marshall Adams and Paul Donachie seem to bask in the desert sun.) But mostly, I think how you feel about “Pluribus” comes down to how you feel about Carol, and your investment in the trajectory she takes from closeted, self-loathing romantasy author to airlifting an atom bomb onto Manousos’s doorstep.
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The premise of “Pluribus” is abstract and allegorical by design, and Gilligan has said in interviews he prefers to leave interpretation to his audience. While the hive’s parallels to AI are uncanny — they even respond to prompts! — I’m partial to the most literal of readings. Millions of people don’t survive the process of assimilation into the hive, and Carol’s wife Helen (Miriam Shor) is one of the casualties. Carol is in mourning, and many of her most extreme, impulsive or just unsavory actions arise from that fact. So does our empathy for her.
In losing Helen, Carol has lost the one person on Earth who saw and accepted her for who she really was: her curmudgeonly qualities, but also the basic fact of her sexuality, which Carol hid from the public by making the romantic lead of her popular Wycaro series a man. Part of what makes the hive mind so eerie is how it’s able to provide a hollow facsimile of such intimacy. The hive absorbed Helen’s memories before she died, and deploys this knowledge in alternately earnest and manipulative ways. (Much of “Pluribus” operates from a place of ambiguity about The Joining and its consequences. That Human Derived Protein? It’s a last resort because the hive can’t kill what’s currently alive, so must make use of the dead for nutrition — no matter the species). Zosia (Karolina Wydra), the individual the hive deploys as its emissary to Carol, is chosen because she looks exactly like the romantic lead of Carol’s novels, before the character was genderbent into a man to reach a broader audience.
Though “Pluribus” is a science fiction show, it eschews the mystery box structure deployed by so many of its genre peers. Questions remain about the hive, its motives and its mechanics, but they’re secondary to how Carol feels about the Joining and how she responds to it. For every new detail we learn about the hive, there’s a Carol-focused revelation like her painful history with anti-gay conversion therapy, which tells us all we need to know about her near-allergic reaction to the prospect of being forcibly assimilated into a dominant majority group. The hive’s unconscious natural instinct is to absorb whoever it can, and when Carol notes this fact on her whiteboard, she puts it in understandably personal terms: “Wants to CHANGE ME” — the last two words underlined. Carol’s precious safe harbor has been inverted into her worst fear, an abstract anxiety “Pluribus” renders concrete as only great horror, and horror-adjacent character studies, can.
In the last couple episodes of “Pluribus,” Carol’s resolve is tested, as any hero’s must be. She experiments with using the hive, as Diabaté has, to manifest her deepest desires. Carol sleeps with Zosia, asks her to use “I” pronouns instead of the hive’s preferred “we” and generally performs coupled domesticity. (Carol and Helen went to an ice hotel; Carol and Zosia go skiing.) This results in an amusing reversal wherein Manousos, who’s traveled thousands of miles in search of another skeptic, is just as appalled by Carol’s willing self-delusion as Carol once was by people like Laxmi (Menik Gooneratne), who refuses to acknowledge the obvious change in her own son. Carol is shocked out of her complacency only after learning that the hive has obtained her stem cells without her consent — from frozen eggs, so she could have a child with Helen — and could absorb her within the month.
The big shift in the “Pluribus” finale isn’t in our understanding of the hive, whose intentions were already shared. It’s within Carol, who chooses to ally herself with a fellow misanthrope in Manousos as unlikely saviors of mankind. I think there’s something beautiful in Gilligan employing such abundant resources, from tracking down and casting a Quechua speaker to shooting in the Canary Islands, in service of one person’s internal evolution. I also understand why it’s not for everyone — though, in my less generous moments, I’m frustrated that a story centered on a queer woman seems to get a shorter leash than Gilligan’s previous work about men doing crimes. To me, though, enjoying “Pluribus” isn’t about eating one’s cultural vegetables. It’s about enjoying a strange, absurd, uncategorizable show that’s also thoughtful and restrained. And it’s about Carol Sturka, a highly specific person whose unease with others is nonetheless broadly accessible. I’d never exchange her spiky, pushy personality for permanent affability, and I understand why she wouldn’t either.
From Variety US