Summary
Pluribus promised proper mystery-box storytelling, and in “We Is Us”, it provides it with total confidence and heaps of panache. Nobody has any idea where it’s going, but it’ll probably be somewhere fun.
Nothing’s a secret these days. No movie releases without two or three increasingly obvious trailers having given most of its plot points away. No TV show debuts without the entire cast having done a podcast tour. There are no surprises. If an actor goes for coffee anywhere in the world, someone will have photographed them doing it, and someone else – probably on Reddit – will have identified their location to within a few feet based on how far apart the streetlamps are (or whatever). In this deeply mystery-less content climate, it’s a small miracle that Vince Gilligan’s Apple TV+ sci-fi epic Pluribus can even exist at all.
But it does exist. I’ve watched it, or at least Episode 1, “We Is Us”, which wasn’t provided to the press in advance to further preserve the mystery of what the whole thing’s about. They needn’t have bothered, since an hour later, and I still don’t know what it’s about, at least not in any way that I could explain for the benefit of someone else. There’s an alien invasion, that much seems certain (until it doesn’t). But it isn’t the kind of invasion you’d necessarily recognise as one. A lot of Apple’s annoyingly enigmatic marketing for Pluribus has revolved around the idea that you’ve probably never seen a show quite like this, and on that level, at least, it performs as advertised.
That comes with a qualifier, though. Vince Gilligan is notorious for taking even mundane premises – “high school teacher sells drugs”; “public defender becomes morally compromised” – and spinning them out into six seasons and a special, so goodness only knows what he has planned for the most legitimately out-there idea he has ever come up with. “We Is Us” luxuriates in a mystery that it provides no explanations for; that unfolds in a deeply, strikingly unusual way without any consideration at all for getting you situated in its world or invested in its drama. It’s mystery-box screen storytelling of the kind that, say, J. J. Abrams pretends to make, but the proper version. Rhea Seehorn’s character, Carol, ends the episode crying on the couch in confusion, and frankly, I know how she feels.
Interestingly, the most concrete information that we have about Pluribus so far is given away in the opening moments of Episode 1, although there’s no way to connect it with what’s happening until the very end, and even then, some inference is required. But in essence, a repeating radio signal discovered by some excitable poindexters is the key to everything. It has been broadcasting the same line of data, repeated every 78 seconds, from 600 light-years away, perhaps for all of human history. Scientists have been studying it. Rats have been experimented on. Eventually, and inevitably, one of those rats bites through a scientist’s glove, and thus begins the rapid transmission of a saliva-based zombie virus that spreads like wildfire through kisses, licked donuts, and petri dishes loaded with mouth-swab DNA.
This stuff is part comedy, part horror. Nothing overtly horrific is happening, but there’s a syncopated rhythm to the whole thing that’s eerily off-kilter. Sometimes Gilligan shows off, as in the sequence showing the mass-production of the petri dishes, which is shot and orchestrated like an Olympic-standard synchronised swimming routine. The point is clear, though. This is a hive-mind, devoted to spreading the infection (or whatever it is) as efficiently and widely as possible.
Carol, a deeply miserable novelist trapped in a prison of publisher mandates, thanks to the success of her mindless genre romance novels, provides our boots-on-the-ground point of view of the invasion (or whatever it is). Through her, we see it take hold of everyone it touches, including her manager, Helen, who becomes one of seemingly very many casualties. Not everyone is accepted into the hive. Some die, by accident or some other reason; it’s all an unfortunate consequence of what’s happening, whatever that might be. If nothing else, those who are assimilated seem pretty cheery about it. Many of them are even quite helpful.
And this, I suppose, is what’s truly unique about Pluribus. I can’t recall another TV show about an invasion – let alone Apple TV+’s other TV show about an invasion – that is defined by the invaders being really apologetic about the inconvenience. That’s very much the case in Episode 1, though. A big group of infected outside a hospital doesn’t try and eat Carol – they assure her they just want to help. They later help her find her house keys and let her have a moment to process what’s happening. In this, she’s helped along by a TV address of an important-looking man speaking at a lectern, which provides a number she can call for help. The number puts her straight through to the man on TV, who turns out to be Davis Taffler, the Under Secretary of Agriculture for Farm Production and Conservation, now elevated to the position of alien (maybe) emissary solely on the grounds of being nearby, alive, and wearing a suit.
Taffler explains that the radio signal the boffins discovered in the cold open works as a kind of mind virus, and has currently united every consciousness across the world as a single, thinking, unflappably polite and reassuring organism. So, not aliens, per se, and not an invasion either, though Taffler notably can’t quite explain how it works or to what end. What he does explain, though, is that Carol is one of only eleven people in the world who are naturally immune to it. For an author who writes humdrum genre fiction for the consuming masses, you’d think that’d be a good ego boost. Carol just cries.
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