For some reason—or perhaps for a lot of reasons—science-fiction writers in the 1950s became preoccupied with the idea of space aliens living among us, taking human form while rapidly, ruthlessly converting us into soulless, mindless drones. The “body snatcher” story has been popular ever since, in part because it has such a flexible metaphor at its center. Want to comment on communism? Middle-class conformity? Hippie-dippy woo-woo? The military? Rigid political factionalism? Just throw a little alien parasitism into your plot and you can make your point while terrifying your audience.
Vince Gilligan’s new Apple TV series Pluribus offers a curious but captivating spin on the body-snatcher premise: more farce, less chilling. The Pluribus aliens work in an especially sneaky way, beaming a message from the cosmos that contains a formula. The Earth scientists working on that formula are eventually transformed into good-natured comrades, who share one consciousness. They spread this infectious optimism to others, until nearly everyone on Earth is either in their collective or dead. Only a handful of people remain unconverted, including Carol Sturka (Rhea Seehorn), a cranky writer who intends to keep resisting being absorbed—even though all of these “Joined” humans seem very happy with their new lives.
Gilligan, as telephiles know, created Breaking Bad and co-created Better Call Saul. But his career as a writer and producer (and occasional director) really took off with The X-Files, where he became known for episodes that wove dark, deadpan comedy into the show’s usual mix of mysterious monsters and conspiratorial mythology. Unsurprisingly, he brings that same vibe to Pluribus. What if Invasion Of The Body Snatchers were reframed as absurdist theater? What if a global cabal was actually pretty laid-back, and the main person fighting against it was kind of a jerk sometimes?
The series premiere, “We Is Us,” introduces our imperfect human protagonist: a best-selling author of romantic fantasy novels, set in a version of the past filled with swashbuckling pirates. Carol is a hardcore sourpuss with a drinking problem, who considers her own work “mindless crap.” And yet…for all her bitterness and flaws, Carol feels it’s her duty to stand up for her own kind when the aliens invade, even though “We Is Us” and Pluribus’s second episode, “Pirate Lady,” quickly make clear that the odds are stacked heavily against her—like: billions to one.
Gilligan has said he wrote the role of Carol specifically for Seehorn, who was one of Better Call Saul’s breakout stars: a virtual unknown who was so good on that show that the writers kept giving her more to do, until her character Kim Wexler effectively became the co-lead. Seehorn has an unusual ability to express steely certainty and raw vulnerability within the same scene—or even the same shot. Her Kim had a strong moral center and a kind of cynical pragmatism that kept her grounded, even as she was tempted to play Robin Hood, breaking the law for a greater good. As for her Carol? Her motivations, so far, are harder to parse. But that’s not a knock against this show. A TV drama’s main character should still have a lot of depth to plumb after only two episodes.
True to Gilligan’s form, he takes his time setting up the action, trusting that his audience will be as fascinated as he is by all the steps along the way to a big payoff. It takes a while for Carol to enter the picture in the premiere, as the episode spends time with the enthusiastic scientists receiving, decoding, and acting on the message from deep space. (“Maybe this is their version of ‘Johnny B. Goode,’” one says, referencing the golden record that humanity sent out with Voyager 1 and 2 in 1977.) The story begins 439 days before the worldwide transformation. It’s not until 29 days before the big change that the scientists have their breakthrough, at which point the episode turns briefly from science-fiction to horror, as each of the transformed people in the facility stalks and converts another.
These scenes are so strange, creepy, and funny that they’re entertaining even when it’s not clear right away exactly what’s going on. Similarly, “Pirate Lady” begins with a wonderfully odd sequence that could stand up to any of the quirky cold opens in Breaking Bad or Better Call Saul. We see a grubby woman in tattered clothes, joining others in some unspecified Middle Eastern country to drag a charred body out of an overturned car. She then hops on a motorbike and zips to an airport, where she gets on a cargo plane and pilots it to Albuquerque. There, she takes a shower while a muzak version of Earth, Wind & Fire’s “That’s The Way Of The World” plays.
That woman’s name is Zosia (Karolina Wydra). I’ll get back to her in a moment. First we should talk about Albuquerque.
As with Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, Gilligan makes Albuquerque his home base for Pluribus’s production. It’s also where Carol lives, with her business manager and romantic partner Helen (Miriam Shor). After a brief introduction to the two of them about five minutes into “We Is Us”—in which we see Carol moping her way through a book tour—we catch up with them in Albuquerque on the day the world radically changes. Gilligan knows how to use this city and its surroundings, contrasting placid suburban normalcy with stark, forbidding desert landscapes. This place is ideal for someone like Carol—a mistrustful misanthrope—to isolate herself.
I’d break Carol’s journey through these two episodes into four magnificently mounted sequences, each of which functions like a little short film or playlet.
Sequence One: The Collapse
Carol and Helen are at a bar when “The Joining” begins. We later learn that the aliens’ human minions had intended a more gradual rollout of their takeover, but that when the U.S. military was alerted to the plan, the minions had to move more quickly, trying to convert everyone on Earth in an instant. More than 800 million people died in the process. The rest—minus about a dozen, including Carol—zoned out for a minute or two, then reawakened as happy, productive participants in the collective.
Gilligan stages this sequence like a zombie thriller, with Carol watching in panic as everyone in her immediate vicinity freezes or falls. (There was a band playing at the bar, and the guitarist is still strumming a little, in a stupor.) When the masses jolt back awake, some of them start coming after our hero. We get long shots of Carol winding through tableaus of mayhem. Meanwhile Helen, who was among the collapsed, never returns to any form of life.
Sequence Two: The Call
In what is easily the silliest and funniest stretch of episode one—despite its tragic undertones—the collective uses Carol’s television to reach out to her, asking her to give them a call. Eventually, they draft Davis Taffler (Peter Bergman), the U.S. Undersecretary Of Agriculture—and the only person nearby who happened to be wearing a suit—to talk to Carol via C-SPAN. He lets her know that she can reach out anytime, 24/7, and he gives her a quick explanation of what just happened. He says they aren’t really aliens, but rather humans transformed by the alien technology; and he says they don’t intend to harm or hassle Carol…although they do want to figure out why she didn’t “Join,” so they can fix it.
Seehorn is terrific in these scenes, playing at once Carol’s shock over the sudden change, her grief over Helen’s death, and her indignation at the idea that these interlopers want to rob her of her humanity. And Gilligan is quite puckish during the Taffler speech, putting typical cable news chyrons at the bottom of the TV screen, such as: “YOUR LIFE IS YOUR OWN” and “WE CAN’T READ MINDS.”
Sequence Three: The Burial
The title of episode two, “Pirate Lady,” refers to one of the characters in Carol’s Winds Of Wycaro book series. All of the books’ female fans love Raban, a rakish buccaneer reportedly inspired by George Clooney. But actually, Raban was originally intended to be a woman, matching Carol’s own experiences and desires. The reason Zosia was sent from halfway around the world to Albuquerque is that she resembles the version of Raban in Carol’s head—and that the collective pulled from in Helen’s consciousness during The Joining, before she died.
Zosia comes to see Carol while she’s struggling to dig a grave for Helen, and their quietly prickly conversation offers a poignant contrast to the previous episode’s Davis Taffler scene. Zosia’s attempts to speak on behalf of the group are still amusing. (When she urges Carol to stay hydrated, Zosia adds, “That’s the opinion of every medical doctor on Earth.”) But her officiousness also causes Carol to snap and start screaming obscenities…which is how she learns that whenever she yells at someone in the collective, all of them freeze for a few minutes, just like they did on the day of The Joining. The results can be catastrophic. Carol later learns that 11 million more people died after she hollered at Zosia.
Sequence Four: The Meeting
Next to The Collapse, the middle section of “Pirate Lady” is easily the most complex and ambitious stretch of these two episodes. The ever-helpful Zosia agrees to put Carol in touch with other people like her—the ones who speak English, anyway—at a gathering in Bilbao. We see lines of jets flying in, topped by the arrival of Air Force One, as requested by the happy-go-lucky Mauritanian playboy Kumba Diabaté (Samba Schutte), the only attendee besides Carol who isn’t accompanied by “family.” (I put that word in quotation marks because, as Carol snippily points out to her fellow unjoined, these people who look like aunts, spouses, and children don’t have their own personalities anymore.)
Carol assumes the unjoined will rally to her cause, because that’s what happens in these kinds of stories. But they don’t see the point. They’re hoping the collective can find a cure for their stubborn humanness. In the meantime, Diabaté in particular is enjoying being catered to by the drones, who don’t seem to mind having sex with him or whisking him off to Las Vegas. Everyone’s also pretty impressed with how at peace the world now is; and they believe it when the Joined say they’re happy. (Carol is unconvinced: “I’m smart enough to know you don’t ask a drug dealer to describe their heroin.”)
After the big, contentious meetup—during which Carol finds that a lot of the attendees are angry with her for yelling at the Joined and freezing everybody—the last few scenes of “Pirate Lady” wind the episode more softly to a close. A frustrated Carol tries to get through to Zosia, telling her she should use her now-superhuman intelligence to reclaim some personal agency. Then Carol more or less gives up…until something changes her mind again, and she blocks Air Force One from flying away. Roll credits.
I mentioned up top that body-snatcher stories usually function as a metaphor of some kind, and on the surface at least, Gilligan definitely seems to have a point to make with Pluribus: that humanity, as messy as it can be, is still preferable to the loss of individual will. But through the show’s first two episodes, there’s also an elusiveness to Gilligan’s message that adds an exciting intellectual tension. For example: How are we supposed to feel that the aliens’ methodology involves tinkering with human RNA, in a manner similar to the creation of the COVID vaccine? Does Carol’s resistance make her akin to an anti-vaxxer? If so, are we supposed to think that’s heroic?
I look forward to seeing where these trains of thought lead in the weeks ahead. More importantly, I look forward to seeing where Gilligan will take this story. I reached the end of each of the first two episodes thinking, “I have no idea where this can go next.” That’s not common at all with this science-fiction sub-genre, which has its own formulas and rules. It’s possible Pluribus will break with those usual patterns. It looks to be one of a kind.
Stray observations
- • There is no moment in these two episodes (at least not that I can recall) in which Carol’s drinking problem is directly addressed, but the way she gives a cocktail inventory to Helen (“I had one Titos in Salt Lake two hours ago!”), the way she has to blow into a breathalyzer to start her car, and the way she goes back and forth on whether or not to drink after the invasion sure looks like the behavior of someone who has struggled with the bottle.
- • I know she’s only around for about three-quarters of an episode, but I’m going to miss Helen, who offers a perspective check whenever Carol starts whining too much about having to tour the country, meeting all the people who buy her books. “If you make even one person happy, maybe it’s not art, but it’s something,” Helen says. RIP.
- • A potential sign of trouble ahead: The alien-controlled collective doesn’t believe in killing of any kind, which means that as soon as the world’s supply of fresh meat runs out, Carol and company are going to have to take a crash course in vegetarianism.
- • A small detail I found hilarious: Carol turning on her smart TV and briefly seeing that familiar “No HDMI Signal. Is It On?” message.
- • Vince Gilligan directed (and wrote) these first two episodes, and let me tell you, no one working in television does blocking, staging, and framing quite like him. He plays around a lot with planes of distance, as seen in multiple scenes in these episodes where someone’s head fills up most of the frame while someone else is seen at a distance. Sometimes, the person in the foreground will then lift up a hand or an object, occupying the extreme foreground. Gilligan uses reflections to make images seem more spectral and surreal. And he loves to squeeze humor out of an outsized sense of scale, as in the shot in “Pirate Lady” that winds all the way through an empty luxury jumbo jet to find Carol obstinately sitting in one of the cheap seats, in the back.
