Pluribus season onehas ended. As the wait for season two of the Apple TV series begins, newly minted fans of lead actor Rhea Seehorn are discovering something fans of her work on Better Call Sauldelighted in years ago: her early-career role as a Magic: The Gathering video game tutorial sorceress.
This piece of nerdy trivia—which dovetails pleasingly with Seehorn’s character on Pluribus, Carol Sturka, being a romantasy author—resurfaced on NPR’s Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me! podcast. Seehorn, a guest panelist on the show, was asked about her first credit listed on IMDB. Long before Better Call Saul or Pluribus, back in 1997, she played “the tutorial sorceress” in the Magic: The Gathering video game.
“That was a very early job, yes,” Seehorn said in response. “In the original game it was, like, software of the card game. But it came with a tutorial … about how to navigate through the game. And me and an actor named Reggie, we were playing sorcerer and sorceress.”
She continued. “It was so low-budget that they didn’t have shoes, but they wanted us to look like we were wearing gladiator sorcerer boots or whatever. So we’re just wearing tube socks with electrical tape in a criss-cross fashion.”
Asked if she’d ever actually played the game, Seehorn explained, “I was so excited that my photo was on the back that I went to Best Buy. I couldn’t afford whatever the game was back then—it was like $45 or something. I showed them the picture on the back, and I was like, ‘This is me, oh my god! I did that! Would you give me a copy?’”
Alas, Best Buy didn’t cough up a freebie back then—but Seehorn’s legacy lives on forever as part of Magic. The NPR interviewer even wondered how many “aging nerds” saw her on Pluribus and thought she looked oddly familiar somehow.
Listen to the whole Rhea Seehorn interview in the video below; the Magic chat starts around 26 minutes in.
However, while a cliffhanger ending was to be expected, the climb we took to get there was packed with Pluribus’ trademark blend of careful pacing, high-wire tension, and observations about humanity that are both hilarious and heartbreaking.
First, a deeply unsettling prologue kicks off “La Chica o El Mundo”: it’s now 71 days after the Joining, and we’re in a remote village in Peru, home of Kusimayu—one of the survivors who attended Carol’s disastrous summit back in episode two. She’s decided to join the hive mind.
We’re spared the part of the procedure that extracts her stem cells; we see what comes after. All she has to do is inhale vapors and endure a brief seizure, and when she opens her eyes again, she’s on the team. With that familiar bland smile now fixed to her face, Kusimayu opens the pen containing all her animals, including the most poignant baby goat this side of Severance.
In Albuquerque, Carol and Zosia watch satellite footage of Manousos getting closer. Carol is nervous about this intrusion; she’s just gotten comfortably settled into her newfound happiness (or the illusion of happiness, anyway) with Zosia, and his arrival is absolutely going to disrupt the fantasy. “I’ll just hear him out and send him on his way,” Carol declares.
(By the way, this is 60 days post-joining, so we’ve rewound to before Kusimayu’s transformation.)
Zosia makes herself scarce, and Carol receives Manousos alone, in a scene about a million times more awkward than we could have imagined. Their previous interactions consisted of screaming back and forth at each other over the phone—frustrating, but also a hopeful sign that someone, anyone capable of even having a screaming argument still exists. And as we’ve seen, Manousos was so intrigued by Carol’s video he made an agonizingly long trek to find her, learning English (sort of) and suffering grievous injuries along the way.
But upon meeting face-to-face, the two immediately clash. She’s leery of the machete he carries. He’s leery of entering her home, convinced the Others (he calls them “the weirdos”) have installed surveillance equipment without her knowledge. When they finally talk outside, he insists on holding an umbrella to prevent prying eyes from drones overhead. (Considering we saw how closely he was being watched on his approach to Albuquerque, his fears feel legitimate in this case, though his overall vibe is very paranoid.)
But even when they finally compromise on where they should converse, things are still very prickly between them. Carol insists she doesn’t want to “destroy” the Others; Manousos maintains, “These weirdos are evil” because “they have stolen everyone’s soul.” Carol argues that they’re still human; Manousos argues that they are not.
Then, Carol—who has just underlined the fact that the Others cannot lie—tells a whopper to Manousos, saying she doesn’t know why they returned to Albuquerque after abandoning her for 40 days. (Good thing she asked Zosia to have that giant “come back” plea she’d painted onto the street removed before Manousos’ arrival.)
Eventually, they move their chat—aided by the monotone of Google Translate, though Manousos’ English is by now far better than Carol’s very rudimentary Spanish—into Carol’s house. He won’t engage until he does a thorough search for listening devices and finds something very odd hidden in Carol’s liquor cabinet.
When Carol calls Zosia demanding answers, she finds out it’s a sensor that’s been there for years. Like, since 2011, when she was freezing her eggs. It seems Helen hid it there to keep discreet tabs on her boozy spouse, and it’s been hanging out ever since. Detail-obsessed Pluribus fans will remember that Carol has referenced freezing her eggs before, making a joke about it during that flashback to Carol and Helen’s stay in the Norwegian ice hotel.
So that’s two mentions of Carol’s eggs across Pluribus season one, and series creator Vince Gilligan isn’t dropping that information in vain. But before we get to that, we still have more Carol-Manousos drama to get through. Needing some time away from her new frenemy, Carol gets him to move into the empty house next door, something he’s very reluctant to do. This reaction is very much in keeping with his desire to pay for everything he takes, or at least sign an IOU for it. This guy has a moral code that’s remained firmly in place, even as the world has dramatically shifted around him.
At any rate, while Carol is getting drunk and falling asleep to Golden Girls, Manousos is prying into her activities by talking to Zosia. He could really talk to any of the Others—it would truly make no difference—but summoning Zosia in particular is designed to get a rise out of Carol, and it works. She’s furious. She drags Zosia away, but Manousos quickly requests another Other come talk to him instead.
While Carol is fumbling through Zosia’s gentle insistence that “We love him the same as we love you”—logically, Carol knows that’s how the hive mind works, but emotionally, she can’t comprehend that; Zosia is her special, uh, “chaperone,” after all—Manousos takes a page from Carol’s own playbook.
“Something’s about to happen,” Zosia announces, and calmly lies on the floor before she begins to shake. Carol, frantic, races next door and sees that Manousos has caused the mass seizure event this time. He’s been deliberately agitating the Other sent to replace Zosia to try and pull him out of his hive-mind stupor.
It doesn’t work, and to Carol’s horror, the Others decide it’s Manousos’ turn to be put in isolation—and since he’s now in Albuquerque, that means another mass exodus from Carol’s hometown.
“I think there’s a way to put things back in their place,” Manousos insists to Carol. “Now the work begins!”
When she hesitates, he goes for the kill, and here we learn why the episode is titled “La Chica o El Mundo”: “Do you want to save the world or get the girl?”
For a moment, Pluribus makes us think that Carol has chosen Zosia. There’s a blissful montage of the pair on various luxurious vacations (Carol’s beach read of choice: The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin). It’s peaceful. It’s idyllic.
But a fireside conversation on their ski trip brings all that to a screeching halt. Carol is happy, and she’s startled by how good it feels. “It only gets better,” Zosia beams.
Slowly Carol realizes she means… the Joining. It’s the thing Carol has vehemently resisted from the start. Though this newfound happiness has been blissful, she’d rather be miserable forever with her individuality intact.
And besides, back in Las Vegas, didn’t Mr. Diabaté assure her that the survivors could not be converted without their express consent? The stem-cell extraction process is invasive, and without getting permission to perform the procedure, the Others wouldn’t have the necessary material to bring a holdout into the hive mind.
That information was liberating. It put Carol in an actual good mood. But now, she has a horrible realization: her eggs. The Others have her frozen eggs. They don’t need to stick a giant needle into her hip. They’ve already got the goods.
“How long do I have?” she asks Zosia.
“A month,” Zosia replies. She’s thrilled that Carol will soon be forced into receiving this marvelous gift. “Hopefully not more than two or three.”
It’s now 74 days post-joining. Manousos is still alone in Albuquerque, and he hears a helicopter approaching. It’s toting a large box, which it sets down outside Carol’s place. We see that Zosia is the pilot, and Carol’s sitting beside her. They share a very loaded look as Carol climbs out. It’s a sad moment. But they’re sad for different reasons.
When a baffled Manousos approaches, Carol tells him, “You win. We save the world.”
What’s in the box? Why, an atom bomb, of course!
The Others sure hoped she wouldn’t ask for one after her semi-serious inquiry following the grenade incident. But they’re obligated to give Carol whatever she wants. Bringing a giant bomb into the story is bang-up way to set up the events of season two, isn’t it?
You can watch all nine episodes of Pluribus season one on Apple TV. A second season has already been greenlit, but so far there’s no word on when new episodes might arrive.
In parallel stories, Carol and the only other survivor upset by the state of things—the mysterious Manousos (Carlos-Manuel Vesga, whose presence is as formidable as Seehorn’s)—embark on separate journeys that make them realize nobody can remain an island forever. Even if they’re stubborn as hell, which both of these characters definitely are.
Carol’s two chunks of narrative, which chart her declining mental state as her weeks in total isolation roll on, frame Manousos’ more literal trip as he departs his home in Paraguay and points his car north, with Albuquerque as his destination.
Carol’s first segment picks up with her driving away from Las Vegas, and initially—perhaps buoyed by the information we learned last week, that the Others cannot try to convert her without her permission—her mood is almost… jaunty? Chipper? Euphoric?
Humming and singing REM’s late-’80s apocalyptic ditty “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (and I Feel Fine),” she dials up the Others’ “need some space” hotline multiple times. She has a very specific Gatorade order, which then requires a scolding follow-up because the drone-delivered beverage is not, as she requested, “ice cold.” She buys an alarming amount of fireworks. She grabs a scratcher and wins $10,000, which she can never collect, but it’s still nice to feel lucky.
The “Carol singing to herself and doing stuff alone” sequence continues. It’s 12-ish days post-Joining; we see her guzzling beer and setting off fireworks in her cul-de-sac (patriotically vocalizing “The Stars and Stripes Forever”). We see her playing golf, singing “I’m Alright” (the theme from Caddyshack, duh) as she carts around.
When her cop car finally dies, she takes her pick from the discarded rides outside the country club (a Rolls-Royce with “Just Married” decorations all over it) and zooms off to a nearby hot springs; her thematic song choices are “Born to Be Wild” and “Hot In Herre.”
Then she pulls up to Santa Fe’s Georgia O’Keeffe Museum (crooning “Georgia on My Mind”), takes a look around (it’s totally empty, just like every other place she’s been), and removes Bella Donna from its display. Back at home, Carol grabs the Bella Donna poster print she has hanging up and puts the priceless O’Keeffe original in its place. She smiles. She’s satisfied with this.
Then she calls the hotline and demands a fancy dinner at the restaurant “where Helen and I had our anniversary.” Dressed to the nines, she sits down alone to enjoy her (again) very specific menu requests, then selects an easy-listening version of “I Will Survive” on the electronic player piano positioned near her table. Carol will survive! At least, for now!
Meanwhile, Manousos is well into his own long voyage. His life as a defiant holdout is actually rather similar to Carol’s, despite their geographic differences. (No offense to Albuquerque, which is quite lovely, but the South American landscape we see here is drop-dead gorgeous.) And since the Others haven’t exiled themselves from his presence, even in the rural areas he travels through, he’s greeted with teeth-grittingly cheerful hails of “Hola, Manousos!” and offers of help, water, advice, and so on from the side of the road. The Others just want him to be happy, after all.
As he drives, he listens to language cassettes, learning English so he’ll be able to talk to Carol eventually. He trims his hair. He catches fish for food. He reaches the literal end of the road at the Darién Gap, the formidable swath of land that he must pass through to continue his journey. The Others beg him not to attempt it, because everything he’ll encounter—plants, animals, insects, terrain, weather—will be hostile and potentially fatal.
But Manousos is hostile too, and the confrontational speech he gives as he calmly lights his car on fire is an all-timer: “Nothing on this planet is yours. You cannot give me anything because all that you have is stolen. You don’t belong here.”
As he fights his way through the perilous forest, he adopts a sort of mantra. It’s the first words he plans to say to Carol when they meet: “My name is Manousos Oviedo. I am not one of them. I wish to save the world.”
When he’s gravely injured on an evil-looking tree covered in spikes, he falls to the ground and nearly passes out—still muttering Carol’s name—as a helicopter circles overhead, aiming to rescue him whether he wants it or not.
Back in Albuquerque, it has now been 48 days since the Joining. Carol has been alone-alone for weeks. She’s now hitting golf balls off a downtown rooftop, blasting Judas Priest (needle drop: “You’ve Got Another Thing Comin’”), and smashing through every office window her swing can find.
Then, we see her back in the cul-de-sac with more beer and fireworks. This is different, though. This is morose. This is “if a firework flies toward my head, I won’t duck.”
When one of the rockets accidentally ignites a neighboring house, she does get up with a hose to put it out. But the next day, her errand run (still in the Rolls) to the home improvement store isn’t to pick up supplies for repairs. It’s to obtain paint and a roller so she can inscribe a desperate message to the Others—who are, of course, always watching from the sky—across the pavement: “COME BACK.”
The last scene is Zosia (Karolina Wydra), fully recovered from her Carol-induced grenade injuries and subsequent heart attack, pulling up in her little blue car. When they reunite, Carol gives her the biggest, most grateful hug. Will this period of forced loneliness have changed her attitude at all toward the Others? Or will Carol be back to her boundary-pushing ways—and her detective work—next time we see her?
There are just two more Pluribus episodes to go, and we are extremely hopeful that Manousos will recover from his own grisly wounds and reach New Mexico before season one ends. Wonder what kind of music he listens to?
New episodes of Pluribus arrive Fridays on Apple TV.
Pluribus has reached its fifth episode—which was made available early, ahead of Thanksgiving—meaning we’re halfway through its nine-episode first season. The new normal has almost become an uneasy routine for Carol (Rhea Seehorn), but the Others change the game yet again. And as Carol continues her quest to fight back, she encounters a new foe in Albuquerque’s wilder residents.
After getting too aggressive in her pursuit of information in last week’s “Please, Carol”—the Others, unsurprisingly, are extremely reluctant to divulge any details on how the Joining can be reversed—in “Got Milk,” Carol awakens to an empty city. Whoever is left in Albuquerque is currently on the highway motoring away. When Carol dials the help line, she’s met with a gratingly polite, needlessly verbose voice mail recording (“After everything that’s happened, we just need a little space,” the droll voice of Better Call Saul‘s Patrick Fabian intones) that she must now sit through anytime she needs something.
And, independent though Carol insists she is, she does need the Others’ help on occasion. She starts recording videos for “my 12 fellow survivors,” which she demands the Others translate (as needed) and distribute worldwide. Their purpose: to update the world’s few remaining free thinkers on her findings, but it’s also clear making contact is important. She’s now more alone than ever before, and she’s growing lonelier by the day.
“We owe it to humanity” to save the afflicted, she insists to her presumed audience, even though, as we’ve seen, most of the other “survivors” are unbothered by the way the world is now.
But from what we’ve seen of Manousos (Carlos-Manuel Vesga)—the self-storage guy holed up in Paraguay—we can tell he’s definitely a wild card; Pluribus is clearly ramping up to tell us more about him in a future episode. This week, though, it’s all Carol… and some New Mexico wildlife that becomes emboldened by the newly empty-of-people landscape.
There are some wonderful moments in episode five, including a quick glimpse of the eerily appropriate book on Helen’s achingly empty side of the bed (And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie) and the pitiful failure of the drone sent to scoop up Carol’s overweight trash bag. The image of the drone drunkenly wrapping itself around a light pole—then the bag splitting open, dropping crap all over Carol’s cul-de-sac—says more about the way Pluribus‘ world now functions than any amount of dialogue ever could.
The snafu means Carol has to deal with the trash herself, but she discovers something curious while cramming her discards into a public waste can: milk cartons. So many milk cartons. The Others’ drink of choice… but why?
Carol’s detective work leads her to a factory that had, until very recently, been packaging a mysterious liquid made from a strange white powder mixed with water. Later, she traces the powder to a former dog food plant. We don’t see what she discovers, but we do see her let out a shocked gasp just as the episode ends.
Whatever she finds will, presumably, come to light in episode six. But she wouldn’t have picked up the milk-carton trail without having to go on a garbage journey—something she has to do when wolves start prowling around her backyard.
It’s an echo of what happened in real life during the pandemic. With covid fears keeping everyone indoors, nature began to reassert itself. Emboldened coyotes strolled down suburban streets; deer grazed without fear in city parks. In the Albuquerque of Pluribus, wolf packs stride through Carol’s upscale neighborhood, prowling for food in the one place they can still find food scraps in the garbage bins: Carol’s house. The first time they show up, she chases them off with a golf club. The second time, though, the wolves cross a line and start digging up Helen’s backyard grave.
It’s a bridge too far for Carol, who has so far kept her Helen-adjacent emotions rather well contained. In her panic, the only solution she can come up with is to rev up the cop car she’s been tooling around in, sirens and lights at full blast. It’s a messy but effective choice, and the wolves scatter.
In the next sequence, we see Carol driving to a building supply store and loading paving stones into her trunk—enough to cover Helen’s grave site and more. As the sun sets, after a long day of heavy lifting, she plants a marker to memorialize Helen’s final resting place, and we see deep sadness mixed with determination on her face.
Carol still has the independence she always had, even in these weird, mixed-up, isolating times. No wolves are going to dig up her late wife. Not today, and not ever. And the Others are not going to wreck the human race—that is, if Carol can figure out a way to stop them.
What did the gasp mean? What did Carol find? What puzzle piece will she uncover next—and will any of the other 12 ever respond to her video messages?
It’s going to be a hell of a wait until next Friday, when episode six of Pluribus hits Apple TV+.
The AppleTV series Pluribusstars Rhea Seahorn as Carol Sturka, a romantasy writer who doesn’t care for her genre. As the show opens, she’s released a new book, Bloodsong of Wycaro, and now you can read a little slice of it.
“I’m going to do something that is antithetical to capitalism: give my work away for free. A bit of it, anyway,” writes Carol in the letter for Bloodsong, which now has a free 11-page excerpt you can read on Apple Books. Like on the show, she’s fed up with her audience fretting about the lack of Raban on the cover, so the excerpt—Chapter 16, “The Isle of Sanantes”—confirms Captain Lucasia’s longtime lover Raban is alive and well after he was made to walk the plank in the previous book, Stormshadow. You may recall in the Pluribus pilot that Carol hinted as much to a fan.
As for the full Bloodsong book, Lucasia is tasked with saving her crew after they’ve been afflicted with a curse that’s left them bedridden. With few able-bodied workers left, they brave a nasty storm to reach the isle and find Madam Asclepius, a banished healer who may be able to help.
Along with the chapter and letter, the excerpt includes Carol’s author bio—her books have won “multiple honors,” including the Mars & Eros Reader’s Choice Award—and an end page hyping up the show. This whole thing may remind some folks of what Apple did for Severance, whose self-help book The You You Arefrom Ricken Hale got a downloadable version back in January.
New episodes of Pluribus premiere Fridays on Apple TV. For those who read the Bloodsong of Wycaro excerpt and have a romantasy background, let us know in the comments below how it’d fare as a real book in the genre.
The new Apple TV series Pluribus stars Rhea Seahorn as one of a handful of people not overwhelmingly happy. Now that the first two episodes are out and people know what it’s about, some have wondered if this is all a metaphor for artificial intelligence.
Creator Vince Gilligan recently told Variety he thought up and wrote the show before AI and large language models like ChatGPT really gained prominence in recent years. That said, he won’t fight anyone who’s made those connections, just as he isn’t planning to explain things to the degree he did with Breaking Bad. “One thing I did wrong [there] was telling people, ‘This is what that meant!’ I look back and it was so tiresome,” he recalled. Going forward, he’s following advice once given to him by Michael Mann in 2002: “Just tell a good story, let the audience figure out the theme. That’s their job.”
Lest you think he’s secretly an AI booster, that’s not the case at all: after previously telling Polygon he’d never use it, Gilligan used Variety to further affirm his stance. “I hate AI. It’s the world’s most expensive and energy-intensive plagiarism machine. I think there’s a very high possibility that this is all a bunch of horseshit. It’s basically a bunch of centibillionaires whose greatest life goal is to become the world’s first trillionaires. I think they’re selling a bag of vapor.”
Gilligan’s beef with the technology primarily concerns “Silicon Valley assholes” who’ve put all their eggs in the AI basket. Because should it develop “a true singularity that has its own soul, and therefore its own identity,” does that mean companies like Meta and OpenAI have created digital slaves to monetize? He certainly seems to think so, and warns audiences to not get impressed by Silicon Valley’s latest shiny toy.
Like Heretic, the Pluribus credits declares it as a show “made by humans.” Whatever else you take away from it in the coming weeks, know that it was all done with a personal touch.
The Pluribus creator, whose new show premiered the first two episodes Friday on Apple TV+, made sure to note in the credits of the post-apocalyptic sci-fi series that the production did not rely on AI.
“This show was made by humans,” reads the credits, following a list of acknowledgments from the producers.
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In Pluribus, Rhea Seehorn plays Albuquerque author Carol Sturka, one of 12 people on Earth who is immune to an extraterrestrial virus that transforms everyone in the world into a relentlessly optimistic hive mind.
Gilligan previously slammed AI as he discussed the series. “I have not used ChatGPT, because as of yet, no one has held a shotgun to my head and made me do it,” he told Polygon.
“I will never use it. No offense to anyone who does,” added Gilligan. “I really wasn’t thinking about AI [when I wrote Pluribus], because this was about eight or 10 years ago.”
Meanwhile, Coca-Cola has faced backlash this week for another AI-generated holiday campaign, and the entertainment industry has expressed concern over AI creations like Tilly Norwood replacing human actors and other crew members.
What if the biggest problems plaguing humanity vanished overnight—and there was no more violence, crime, discrimination, or conflict? But what if the tradeoff for all that positivity and bland happiness was outrageously intrusive and creepy? That’s the launchpad that Pluribus, Apple TV’s newest sci-fi series, blasts off from, with a wonderfully complex main character at its core.
Pluribus is the latest series from Vince Gilligan, who got his start writing on The X-Files and went on to become a producer and director on that show, then created two award-winning series of his own: Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul. The inaugural season of Pluribus runs nine episodes (io9 watched the first seven for the purposes of this review), with the first two streaming today and a weekly rollout thereafter.
Pluribus takes cues from each of those well-loved Gilligan titles. The setup is propelled by science fiction in that thought-provoking, surprisingly emotional X-Files way, but there’s also Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul’s anarchic, subvert-the-system energy, with Gillian’s signature sense of humor (wry, dry, clever, and observational) underpinning everything.
A fantastic Rhea Seehorn (Better Call Saul) stars as Carol Sturka, a successful author of “speculative historical romance literature” (think Outlander, but with pirates) who secretly loathes her books and is embarrassed by her fans. Carol’s able to stomach writing “mindless crap,” as she calls it, mostly because it funds the comfortable lifestyle she shares with Helen (Miriam Shor), her partner in life and business.
As we’re learning about Carol, Pluribus is also alerting us to another group of characters: scientists who’ve discovered something very unusual. The show periodically uses an on-screen timer to let you know exactly where we are in relation to the event that changes the world.
If you want to go in completely blind, here’s a warning (however, note that we don’t discuss any spoilers beyond the inciting event, hinted at in the show’s existing marketing, that propels everything that follows).
That world-changing event: a mysterious-in-origin phenomenon that links almost the entire population of the world into a single hive mind.
Think Unity from Rick and Morty, except in live-action, and Pluribus takes an astonishingly believable approach to what such a scenario might look like to an outsider—namely Carol, who’s unaffected by the outbreak. As humanity’s overhaul takes hold, it’s not unlike the opening scenes of a zombie movie, and Carol is left confused, terrified, and heartbroken.
There’s widespread death and destruction at first, but the chaos soon dies down and a placid new normal emerges. The affected, or “Others,” as Carol comes to call them, awaken with serene, irritatingly upbeat attitudes. They refer to themselves as “we” (the first episode is titled “We Is Us”), and since they share a single consciousness, everyone knows everything about everything. Any person, even a little kid, can perform open-heart surgery or pilot an airplane. And they know absolutely every little thing about Carol, thanks to their access to Helen’s mind and memories, as well as the surveillance drone they launch to keep tabs on her at all times.
The Others assure Carol they mean her no harm, though they are actively trying to figure out how to convert her. Dripping with benevolence, they place themselves at her beck and call. Carol, who was already a salty soul before being hit with this nightmare—and who has, she’ll have the Others know, seen many sci-fi movies that follow this exact plot, and it never ends well—responds with sarcasm and fury.
While Pluribus’ first two episodes necessarily front-load a lot of exposition, once we move past the initial shock of what’s happened, the show finds its true groove. We meet Carol’s “chaperone,” the elegant and accommodating Zosia (Karolina Wydra), who’s been hand-picked for hilarious reasons we won’t reveal here. Carol’s quest for allies doesn’t help much, including the flamboyant Diabaté (Our Flag Means Death’s Samba Schutte). He’s actually pleased as punch with the new status quo, especially the part about suddenly having beautiful women attending to his every need.
There’s also the remote Manousos (Carlos-Manuel Vesga), who’s even more unwilling to engage with the Others than Carol is. Carol, at least, will pick up the phone when she needs groceries restocked or help flipping on the power in her hometown of Albuquerque—a favorite Gilligan setting and an ideal backdrop for Carol’s personal post-apocalypse, where surreal horrors and deep loneliness play out against stunning natural beauty.
As Carol vacillates between boozy despair, bursts of anger, inconveniences galore, and an investigative quest to dig up information on the Others—the latter a coping mechanism more than anything—we dig deeper into Pluribus’ exquisitely balanced existential crisis. Carol’s life is messy. She is miserable. Things weren’t awesome before, but they’ve definitely taken an extreme downturn in the aftermath. It would be so easy to just give in and join the Others’ collective crusade; it’s an option that Carol has, unlike the billions of others across Earth who became part of this without any choice or warning.
But she also knows that giving up everything that makes her an individual, even her many unpleasant qualities, means she’ll no longer be human. And that’s something she’s prepared to keep a death grip on—even if sometimes being a human really, really sucks.
Pluribus already has a second season in the works, so there’s no telling what kind of resolve we’ll get when this batch of episodes is over. But no matter what happens, it’s clear Carol is a new hero for our times: stubborn, impulsive, cranky, and short-tempered, yet also intelligent, funny, resourceful, and easy to root for. Not to mention, she’s determined to save a world that might seem superficially improved—but she knows is steadily spiraling into a dystopia even more disastrous than the one it left behind.
Carol gets an unlikely companion and struggles to connect with her fellow non-conforming humans. Photo: Apple TV
Despite the Albuquerque setting and Rhea Seehorn’s presence in the lead role, there hasn’t been much obvious crossover between Vince Gilligan’s previous series, the crime drama Better Call Saul, and Pluribus, which perhaps links up more firmly with his past as a writer on The X-Files. But it’s worth noting a couple of places in the thrillingly expansive second episode, “Pirate Lady,” that draw the two shows together.
First, there’s the classic WTF cold open, which may not be as cryptic as the pre-title sequences in Better Call Saul or Breaking Bad, but it introduces us to characters and a scenario that are wholly disconnected from what we’ve seen so far. (Think, say, the “Madrigal” episode of Breaking Bad, which opens with a desultory German CEO dipping chicken tenders into a variety of sauces.) In “Pirate Lady,” an unnamed woman in a burlap robe strides toward an overturned vehicle in a Middle Eastern city, wrenches a charred-up dead body from the driver’s seat, and drags it through an open window. With help from a nearby truck driver, she wraps up the body and drags it uphill to the bus, where we can see other bodies are being collected. From there, she drives a waiting moped to the airport, climbs into the cockpit of a cargo plane, and pilots it to Albuquerque, where minions await with coffee, a hot shower, and a change of identity.
While we can certainly guess who she might be visiting in New Mexico, the open is an opportunity for the show to broaden its scope and suggest the true global scale of this alien operation. It’s one thing to look at the smoking, chaotic city of Albuquerque and imagine scenes like it happening elsewhere, but another thing entirely to see the disquieting sequence where this unnamed being is zipping around dead bodies and burning buildings halfway around the world. And other details count, too, like the importance the aliens have placed on cleaning up the mess they’ve made. They don’t want the earth to be an apocalypse of rotting corpses and smoking wreckage, but something closer to the utopia these seemingly gentle visitors want to promote. Plus, a hierarchy has been introduced around this one character who many others are serving — and who will later emerge as an ambassador of their values.
The second connection is that for as much as Kim Wexler would have in common with Carol Struka, Carol at this moment seems even closer to Everett Acker, the cranky old coot who refused to leave his home in Better Call Saul. On that show, Kim represents a bank that’s seeking to evict the final resident from a piece of property where it intends to build a call center. But Acker won’t leave, and he greets anyone who asks with nasty invective, including Kim, who initially tries to bully him out before deciding that she’s in his corner. Carol is Acker: Unpleasant but righteous and willing to stand on principle. She assumes she’ll get dragged away at some point, but until that happens, no amount of enticement will get her to leave her spot.
“Pluribus” crackles with terrific comic tension as Carol wakes up next to her dead partner, filled with grief yet spoiling for a fight. Her stubborn side comes out in her quixotic effort to dig a grave for Helen in their backyard — we certainly know from past Gillian shows that holes in New Mexico are not easily dug — but she’s devoted, too, and tender in picking out the right quilt in which to lay Helen to rest. The timing isn’t great for an unnamed visitor to stop in with a bottle of water and some advice on how better to penetrate the volcanic rock in her yard. Carol is not impressed to learn that “Jarmell Gurky,” the line supervisor at the Aquafina bottling plant, says the water is okay to drink. She cracks it open and pours it into the ground — very Everett Acker-esque.
Yet Carol does need help, loathe though she might be to get it. And she does actually care deeply about her fellow man, despite the unkind things she’s said in the past about “HoustonMom” and the other dimwits who like her books. After her fury results in the unnamed visitor falling into a spell and shaking — which, she learns, causes every other being to do likewise — news that it results in fatalities worldwide literally sickens her. She is an inadvertent mass murderer, just like the aliens who have taken over her planet. Among the important things she learns in this episode is that she’ll have to control her temper or people will die, which bothers her immensely, even as the beings rush to reassure her. (Maybe because they’ve killed infinitely more people, but we’ll get to that in a bit.)
Though it pointedly takes Carol longer than anyone to ask the name of the important visitor from the opening sequence, we eventually learn it’s Zosia (Karolina Wydra), who looks familiar to her because of her resemblance to Raban, the hunky space pirate of her fantasy series. That Raban was originally written as a woman freaks Carol out, because only she and Helen knew about that, which means that the alien has absorbed all her dead partner’s memories and is now using them to ingratiate herself with Carol. That’s an awful thing to do. But Carol is naturally curious to understand why she’s among 12 people who were not susceptible to “joining” the invaders. Where are the others? Can they meet?
The get-together of English-speaking humans at an airport in Bilbao takes the episode to another level of comedy and philosophy. First, there’s the surreality of Carol huddling up with the first four non-conforming humans — Otgonbayer (Amaraa Sanjid), Xiu Mei (Sharon Gee), Kusimayu (Darinka Arones), and Laxmi (Menik Gooneratne) — as their “joined” family members stand around pleasantly in the background. (“We’re very pleased to meet you, Carol,” they say in unison.) Then there’s the arrival of the fifth, Koumba Diabaté (Samba Schutte), in Air Force One, which the aliens have fetched at his request, along with the phalanx of sexy stewardesses who tend to him. Koumba has picked up on the aliens’ eagerness to please the non-conformists quicker than the rest, and he’s exploiting his power like an amiable Nero.
Once all of them gather for a meeting, the argument against Carol’s skepticism becomes obvious: Why is any of this bad? Joining the aliens seems like a path to eternal contentedness, and, in the meantime, they can have anything they desire, from a tour of the Guggenheim to food service on par with Judgment City in the film Defending Your Life. Carol isn’t having it. She doesn’t like that nearly everyone on earth has been turned into an anesthetized pod person and doesn’t understand why the others can’t see how sinister it is. “It does not matter how nice they are to us or how many supermodels they send to peel our grapes and jerk us off,” she says. “It does not change the fact that this is not right.”
Carol may be correct, but she’s incapable of being diplomatic about it. When Laxmi pushes back against her, Carol is so annoyed by Laxmi treating her adorable son, Ravi, like a real child that she quizzes the boy on the gynecological expertise he now possesses. Ultimately, only the easy-going Koumba continues to speak with her, but it’s Carol’s deepening relationship with Zosia that seems most crucial to the show going forward. The peace-loving utopia that Zosia and the aliens, who we learn are called Celtiberians, are promoting has some ethical holes that Carol is smart enough to expose. Chiefly, if the Celtiberians are so committed to peace that they won’t kill a living thing deliberately, then how can they justify the 886,477,591 humans who have died so far in their mission on Earth? (“I guess you gotta break a few eggs, huh?”, snipes Carol, channeling George C. Scott in Dr. Strangelove.)
The final moments of the episode are more poignant, however, and suggest an important shift in the Carol-Celtiberian divide. Koumba has decided that he likes Zosia and wants her to be his companion, an arrangement that Carol is told requires her blessing. Carol is repulsed by how regressive this sounds and nearly loses her temper for an alien-shaking third time in the episode. “That’s your idea of paradise?,” she asks Zosia. “Being used like some sex doll?” But in the final moments, when Carol is back in her coach seat on the plane, something nags at her. She’s lonely, but she can see as plainly as we can that Zosia is affected by what she’s said. Maybe this is how the revolution starts. Or maybe, like another ending that unfolds on an airport tarmac, this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
• Maybe the connection was unintentional, but the sight of humanoid aliens loading humans into trucks and zipping away on two-wheelers calls to mind Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin. (Though the Celtiberians are much, much, much gentler to mankind than ScarJo and her kind in that film.)
• A seeming amateur stepping into a cockpit and piloting a decommissioned plane across the sea? Who does Zosia think she is, Nathan Fielder?
• Jarmell Gurky is an A+ funny movie name.
• The power to recall any information or communicate mentally to anyone is, admittedly, extremely cool. Witness that slight pause when Zosia inquires about the five English-speakers being willing to meet with Carol before she says, “All five say yes.”
• “Who’s flying this thing? That gal from TGI Friday’s?”
• Amusing to hear everyone discussing the finer points of the movie Air Force One on the plane: “Actually, if you’ll recall, Harrison Ford never rode in the escape pod, which I thought was a clever gambit. He stayed behind in the cargo hold.”
• Carol’s various descriptions of Ravi to his mother are devastatingly funny: “The one who can perform open-heart surgery and fly the space shuttle,” who is also “your prime minister, some guy you dated in high school, your gynecologist.”
• From the Department of Things Are Not So Bad, Koumba makes the counterargument to Carol: “As we speak, no one is being robbed or murdered. No one is in prison. The color of one’s skin, by all accounts, now meaningless. All zoos are empty. All dogs are off their chains. Peace on Earth.” Then there’s the counter-counterargument from Xiu Mei, who’s annoyed that a freed Beijing giraffe is eating the leaves off her tree.
• Kudos to Carol for resisting the temptation of the pepper bacon she ate in 1998 and the crispy brioche the aliens have flown in for her. I’d personally sell out humanity for the food thing alone. I’m weak.
• An important philosophical exchange to monitor in the future: Zosia telling Carol that her people can’t choose and Carol responding, “Yes, you can. If you can do square roots in your head, you can make choices.” We all make choices. Some of those choices are inevitably hurtful or even destructive. Celtiberians are not immune.
Fight for your right to feel crappy. Photo: Apple TV/YouTube
Have you ever been depressed at karaoke? Unable to feel the love at a wedding? Ever been to a party and thought, Oh, my vibes are so off — and everyone knows? Inthe new show from Vince Gilligan, starring Better Call Saul’s Rhea Seehorn, one lady is tanking the energy of the entire world. Here, everything you need to know about Pluribus, the new show breaking the S curse for Apple TV.
You can’t get this guy out of New Mexico. He loves it! Like Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul before it, Pluribus is set in Albuquerque. Entertainment Weeklysays Seehorn plays Carol, a historical-romance author who wants to “save humanity from happiness.” Some time before the series’ start, a virus swept the globe and made everyone content and placid. And based on the trailer, it seems the world isn’t cool with Carol being left out.
No one likes a spoilsport, apparently. In the trailer for Pluribus, we see everyone from a shipping-company worker to the president trying to turn Carol’s frown upside down. The guy from the shipping company would give her a hand grenade if it would make her happy. But why is Carol’s local Sprouts abandoned? Do the happy no longer need to eat? We’ll find out more in November.
Seehorn will be joined/opposed by Karolina Wydra (True Blood)and telenovela star Carlos Manuel Vesga. Miriam Shor, Samba Schutte, and Peter Bergman guest-star.
Besides the location and the star? It’s possible. Gilligan told EW that there are little nods to his past work in the show. “There might be a couple if you keep your eyes and ears peeled,” he said. “Fans of Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, if they pay close attention, they might come upon an Easter egg or two.”
Catch the fever when the first two episodes of Pluribus come to Apple TV (without the +) on November 7. New episodes will drop every Friday until December 26. And there’s already an order for a second season.
Everything we’ve seen from the new show from Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul mastermind Vince Gilligan has been a mystery—from cryptic teasers to an ominous conversation with the President himself, all we’ve really gotten a flavor of so far is that something has gone very, very wrong with the world, save for one woman (Carol, played by longtime Gilligan collaborator Rhea Seehorn). Now, we know a little more, and it’s only getting creepier.
Ahead of its launch in a few weeks, Apple TV has launched the first full trailer for Pluribus, giving us a slightly better picture of its strange world where everyone in the world is blissfully happy, save for seemingly just author Carol Sturka. Carol is rightfully freaked out, and not just because of the rest of humanity’s sudden positivity, but because humanity is seemingly ardent in figuring out how she can join the rest of them at any cost.
It’s not just the blindingly optimistic, almost zombified happy people that are giving the creep factor, though. This new trailer gives us a better look at the wider world around Carol, and it seems like whatever’s happened in the world to turn the rest of humanity this way, there was a major disaster beforehand—ambulances everywhere, cities and vehicles on fire, dead bodies; they’re all slowly but surely being cleaned up by cheerily marching hordes of people. People who then still stop at nothing but to acknowledge Carol and her difference the second she’s in public.
It’s a great vibe, and even with showing us much more of the show than we’ve seen already, it still barely gives anything away—and has us dying to see more of what Gilligan has cooking.
Pluribus hits Apple TV from November 7, kicking off with a two-episode premiere.
