In the imaginative mind of Vince Gilligan, the end of the world does not arrive with flaming alien spacecraft or pulverized monuments, but with the unsettling cheer of a Walmart greeter. His new series, Pluribus, eschews the bombast of traditional science fiction tropes in favor of something far more disquieting: a world saved from war, famine, and conflict at the cost of individuality itself.
When an RNA sequence beamed from light-years away manifests as a mysterious alien virus — an event known as “the Joining” — nearly all of humanity is absorbed into a single, smiling collective consciousness. Borders dissolve. Nations vanish. Poverty, violence, and discord evaporate overnight. What remains is a pacified, contented hive mind, incapable of deception, cruelty, or dissent. There are no Americans or Russians or Chinese anymore — no hierarchies, no hegemonies. Individual minds are subsumed into a shared intelligence so total that a former homeless drug addict can pilot a commercial airliner or perform lifesaving heart surgery. Humanity survives (technically), but only as a lobotomized mass.
Among the 12 people worldwide immune to the virus is Carol (Rhea Seehorn), an accomplished fantasy novelist whose romantic partner, Helen, dies during the chaotic onset of the Joining. Carol is spared assimilation, but not grief. She becomes, by default, one of the last custodians of individual consciousness on Earth. The question Pluribus (at least in its first season) poses is not whether humanity can be saved, but whether it should be — and whether the burden of saving it is bearable.
There is an unmistakable Ayn Randian undercurrent to Gilligan’s premise. The hive mind’s advocates insist that the virus has achieved in one stroke what centuries of politics and posturing failed to accomplish: universal peace. And yet, what is left behind feels eerily hollow. Though hive members retain human form, they lack whatever animating spark — call it conscience, soul, or individuality — that once distinguished the species from mere biological life. Humanity may no longer be violent, but it is no longer human in any meaningful sense.
Gilligan’s hive mind is not malevolent. It smiles, speaks gently, and eagerly indulges any request from the immune individuals, no matter the resources (or raunchiness) required. It also abides by a rigid moral code that forbids lying or intentional harm. Its pacifism is so absolute that it cannot even harvest fruit, perceiving the act as killing — an absurdity that nudges humanity toward extinction by starvation and, without giving anything away, toward unthinkable and macabre workarounds (one of which is rationalized in a darkly comic cameo by John Cena).
When Carol presses the hive with difficult questions — can the virus be reversed? — it evades, sulks, or simply refuses to answer. In another revealing scene, she asks what it thinks of her fantasy novels. Despite her commercial success, Carol privately regards her work as disposable pulp and her fandom with thinly veiled contempt. The hive responds with the breathless enthusiasm of ChatGPT, offering uncritical praise and placing her books alongside Shakespeare. The exchange further underscores the hollowness of the hive: Without judgment, there can be no meaning.
As a storyteller, Vince Gilligan has long excelled at placing flawed people under impossible moral strain and letting the consequences unfold mercilessly. In Breaking Bad, Walter White begins as a meek chemistry teacher facing terminal cancer and financial ruin, making decisions that feel defensible — until they no longer are.
Carol, conversely, does not discover a hunger for power but slowly discovers the limits of endurance. Initially, Carol views reversing the virus as her singular moral obligation. But isolation and grief wear her down. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, she begins to indulge: commandeering a Rolls-Royce abandoned in a driveway; hanging an original Georgia O’Keeffe on her wall; entering a romantic relationship with a hive-afflicted victim whose presence offers companionship. These are undeniably selfish choices, but they are also recognizably human.
The series wisely resists framing Carol as either savior or villain. Instead, it treats her compromises with tragic empathy. Watching her, one cannot help but wonder how any person would behave under such conditions. Who among us would refuse a private recital of Mahler’s “Resurrection” by the Berlin Philharmonic, performed on demand for an audience of one?
Pluribus is not about apocalypse in the conventional sense. There are no heroic battles for survival. It is, rather, a study of how different people metabolize the same catastrophe. This becomes especially clear through Manousos (Carlos Manuel Vesga), a fiercely anti-communist Paraguayan who rejects the hive mind with near-religious fervor. He barricades himself in his hut, eats canned dog food rather than accept the caviar offered by the hive, and fills notebooks with observations, searching obsessively for a weakness. In a pivotal exchange, he asks Carol, “Isn’t it evil to value a human the same as an ant?” — cutting to the philosophical core of the series.
One of the show’s most effective sequences follows Manousos’s arduous, five-week journey from Paraguay to Albuquerque to meet with Carol. Refusing any assistance from the hive, he treks across continents, learns English from cassette tapes, and repeats his mantra like a prayer: “I am not one of them. I want to save the world.” It is a stark counterpoint to Carol’s trajectory.
If Manousos represents one extreme, then Koumba (Samba Schutte), another immune, is the other. Regarding himself as a victim of circumstance, resigned to making the best of an irreparably bad situation, he dubs himself the dean of Las Vegas, travels aboard Air Force One, and recruits a fleet of afflicted women as his personal paramours. For some, moral surrender is instantaneous; for others, it happens more gradually.
READING SELF-HELP AS THE SCIENCE FICTION IT IS
The series unfolds over nine episodes, and its pacing will test viewers expecting a propulsive sci-fi thriller. After a brisk setup, the narrative slows to a deliberate crawl. There are extended, seemingly indulgent sequences — such as a minute-long scene of Manousos fishing Carol’s phone out of a drain after discarding it for fear of surveillance — that appear, on the surface, to stall momentum. Manousos’s paranoia recalls a Soviet dissident during Josef Stalin’s Great Purge, forever anticipating microphones and spies. Yet, these moments are essential. They create space to think, to sit with unease, and to understand not just what the characters are doing, but why.
Gilligan has made a career out of resisting narrative shortcuts, and Pluribus may be his most restrained work yet. It is not a sci-fi spectacle in the vein of Independence Day or War of the Worlds. It is a coldly intelligent character study about individualism and the cost of remaining human when the apocalypse arrives with a smile — and the rest of humanity greets it with a warm embrace.
Harry Khachatrian (@Harry1T6) is a film critic for the Washington Examiner‘s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a software engineer, holds a master’s degree from the University of Toronto, and writes about wine at BetweenBottles.com.