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selenakPluribus is the new show Vince Gilligan created, and whose first two episodes premiered on Apple TV, with Rhea Seahorn as the main character. After her stunning performance as Kim Wexler in Better Call Saul, it seems Gilligan felt inspired, and no wonder. I still think her not winning any awards of what she did with Kim is one of the great injustices of tv world. Anyway: While the show is set in Albuquerque like Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, it belongs to a quite different genre and in a way has Gilligan go back to his X-Files roots. With the stunning cinematography of BB/BCS, and some (based on those first two eps) great twists on the whole invasion/hive mind/zombie tropes and genre. Also, Gilligan's and his fellow artists ability to quickly create three dimensional feeling side characters with just a few minutes of screen time shines, and the way he can connect visceral emotion and horror on the one hand and black humour otoh.
The pilot episode leans on the horror side of things as we start with the arrival of an articially created virus on Earth which quickly spreads and basically results in everyone infected being psychically linked and sharing the same mind - so far, so traditional for the genre - while simultanously our heroine, successful but grumpy Romantasy novelist Carol, returns from a reading tour with her lover Helen. Carol is basically Paul Sheldon at the start of Miisery; she is incredibly successful with series of books she secretly considers crappy and annoyed by its poopularity because what she really wants to finish is her Serious Literature (tm) book she's been working on for years. Unlike Paul, she doesn't run into her Number One Fan, she runs into a complete take-over of humanity by the happiness virus. Carol's disdain for her own books, like Paul's, isn't sympathetic, but when she sees a car crash into another because the driver has seemingly passed out and runs towards the car to help without a thought we see that she has good instincts and compassion in addition to the grumpiness and genre dislike. She and Helen are also devoted to each other, which makes it doubly tragic when Helen turns out to be one of those humans who are neither immune to the virus (like Carol and only twelve other people on Earth) or safely reworked by it but one of those woh die due to the circumstance in which she gets infected. Having lost her lover, Carol is then faced with mostly everyone else who has temporarily passed out around her reviving in a hive mind state, and it's incredibly creepy and gets ever creepier the more cheerfully helpful those people are.
Episode 2 changes gear from horror to sci fi philosophy as we get a better look on how this particular hive mind works and operates, and how Carol (and the few other immunes) deal with what's going on (quite differently from each other). This is also where the twists come in, because the hive mind people aren't doing zombie-like or vampire things as is often the case (no brain eating or blood drinking) in movies and tv shows using that trope; they also (as far as we know after two episodes) aren't lying to Carol in their assurances of helpfulness and promises that her life is her own (until they can figure out why she's immune and "fix" that, anyway). Which is why when she finally meets fellow immunes, it turns out they are so far basically on board with this Brave New World. Racism has gone (eveyone is the same now), war has stopped, animals are freed (because the hive people say they cannot kill any living being), everyone works together - yay? Also the wishes of the immune people are treated as gospel, which one of them promptly exploits to get himself flown around in Airforce 1 and having pretty young girls as his harem. (A disgusted Carol compares this to sex with brain damaged people who cannot possibly consent.) Not to mention that everyone but Carol and the skeevy guy shows up with their family members - who are all hive mind members, but at least (unlike Helen) are physically there. (And Carol's little demonstration that Lakshmi's little son is now also her first date and her Prime Minister and her gynocologist because of the hive mind makes that point efficiently but does her no favouris in winning over Lakshmi.)
There are, of course, the millions of people who died during the original global spread of the virus (because the infection and transformation process comes with a violent shaking and passing out, and you can imagine what happens if this is someone driving a car, let alone an air plane). And the way the hive mind keeps using Helen's memories (which they accessed when Helen got infected shortly before her death) of private moments with Carol in order to "make her happy", which she finds and which is incredibly invasive. But by making the hive (so far) non-malicious and delivering on the promised world peace, unity etc. instead of just using it as a front for another sinister purpose, we get an actual discussion about whether the erasure of individuality outweighs all these demonstrated gains. Plus Carol becomes additionally guilt ridden when realising every time her simmering angerat the hive boils over and becomes too intense, many of them keel over and die. Because this is not, after all, a zombie show, this means for her that human beings die at a massive scale which she cannot and does not want. (Not being a villain or an antiheroine, but rather a reluctant heroine who has to rise to an incredibly difficult occasion against all the odds.
Rhea Seahorn is fantastic, that goes without saying, and I really appreciate the way the first two eps make it clear there are no easy answers, and while skeevy guy is skeevy for basically using this to live out his personal power and sex fantasies, he's not alone when pointing out to Carol that the world controlled by hive mind looks not like a Dystopia but an Utopia, with all that everyone ever says they want suddenly achieved. And does the freedom of choice of an idividual really justify bringing back the rather horrible state the world was in before? (I mean, Carol is the heroine of the show, so I don't expect the answer being "no", but Gilligan doesn't make it self evidently easy for her to plead invidiuality's cause, not least because Helen was basically her sole good human connection pre outbreak, and, well, materially, she had a good life - people who were exploited and starving might not root for a return to individulality if it comes with that baggage.
But, als Carol counters, none of them were originally given a choice. No person infected right now volunteered for the infection. Whatever they say now, they say as part of a hive mind, not as their original selves. And of course it's part of my beliefs as it is of most of us that freedom of choice is essential, and a state in which you cannot have it, not even in your own mind, is slavery. But I am also a privileged person, not someone on the run from a warlord.
I'm really looking forward to seeing more of how the show continues to deal with those questions. Well done, Gilligan, I'm hooked!
****
In other news, having recently made a trip to Vienna, I posted a gigantic historically themed pic spam here!
The pilot episode leans on the horror side of things as we start with the arrival of an articially created virus on Earth which quickly spreads and basically results in everyone infected being psychically linked and sharing the same mind - so far, so traditional for the genre - while simultanously our heroine, successful but grumpy Romantasy novelist Carol, returns from a reading tour with her lover Helen. Carol is basically Paul Sheldon at the start of Miisery; she is incredibly successful with series of books she secretly considers crappy and annoyed by its poopularity because what she really wants to finish is her Serious Literature (tm) book she's been working on for years. Unlike Paul, she doesn't run into her Number One Fan, she runs into a complete take-over of humanity by the happiness virus. Carol's disdain for her own books, like Paul's, isn't sympathetic, but when she sees a car crash into another because the driver has seemingly passed out and runs towards the car to help without a thought we see that she has good instincts and compassion in addition to the grumpiness and genre dislike. She and Helen are also devoted to each other, which makes it doubly tragic when Helen turns out to be one of those humans who are neither immune to the virus (like Carol and only twelve other people on Earth) or safely reworked by it but one of those woh die due to the circumstance in which she gets infected. Having lost her lover, Carol is then faced with mostly everyone else who has temporarily passed out around her reviving in a hive mind state, and it's incredibly creepy and gets ever creepier the more cheerfully helpful those people are.
Episode 2 changes gear from horror to sci fi philosophy as we get a better look on how this particular hive mind works and operates, and how Carol (and the few other immunes) deal with what's going on (quite differently from each other). This is also where the twists come in, because the hive mind people aren't doing zombie-like or vampire things as is often the case (no brain eating or blood drinking) in movies and tv shows using that trope; they also (as far as we know after two episodes) aren't lying to Carol in their assurances of helpfulness and promises that her life is her own (until they can figure out why she's immune and "fix" that, anyway). Which is why when she finally meets fellow immunes, it turns out they are so far basically on board with this Brave New World. Racism has gone (eveyone is the same now), war has stopped, animals are freed (because the hive people say they cannot kill any living being), everyone works together - yay? Also the wishes of the immune people are treated as gospel, which one of them promptly exploits to get himself flown around in Airforce 1 and having pretty young girls as his harem. (A disgusted Carol compares this to sex with brain damaged people who cannot possibly consent.) Not to mention that everyone but Carol and the skeevy guy shows up with their family members - who are all hive mind members, but at least (unlike Helen) are physically there. (And Carol's little demonstration that Lakshmi's little son is now also her first date and her Prime Minister and her gynocologist because of the hive mind makes that point efficiently but does her no favouris in winning over Lakshmi.)
There are, of course, the millions of people who died during the original global spread of the virus (because the infection and transformation process comes with a violent shaking and passing out, and you can imagine what happens if this is someone driving a car, let alone an air plane). And the way the hive mind keeps using Helen's memories (which they accessed when Helen got infected shortly before her death) of private moments with Carol in order to "make her happy", which she finds and which is incredibly invasive. But by making the hive (so far) non-malicious and delivering on the promised world peace, unity etc. instead of just using it as a front for another sinister purpose, we get an actual discussion about whether the erasure of individuality outweighs all these demonstrated gains. Plus Carol becomes additionally guilt ridden when realising every time her simmering angerat the hive boils over and becomes too intense, many of them keel over and die. Because this is not, after all, a zombie show, this means for her that human beings die at a massive scale which she cannot and does not want. (Not being a villain or an antiheroine, but rather a reluctant heroine who has to rise to an incredibly difficult occasion against all the odds.
Rhea Seahorn is fantastic, that goes without saying, and I really appreciate the way the first two eps make it clear there are no easy answers, and while skeevy guy is skeevy for basically using this to live out his personal power and sex fantasies, he's not alone when pointing out to Carol that the world controlled by hive mind looks not like a Dystopia but an Utopia, with all that everyone ever says they want suddenly achieved. And does the freedom of choice of an idividual really justify bringing back the rather horrible state the world was in before? (I mean, Carol is the heroine of the show, so I don't expect the answer being "no", but Gilligan doesn't make it self evidently easy for her to plead invidiuality's cause, not least because Helen was basically her sole good human connection pre outbreak, and, well, materially, she had a good life - people who were exploited and starving might not root for a return to individulality if it comes with that baggage.
But, als Carol counters, none of them were originally given a choice. No person infected right now volunteered for the infection. Whatever they say now, they say as part of a hive mind, not as their original selves. And of course it's part of my beliefs as it is of most of us that freedom of choice is essential, and a state in which you cannot have it, not even in your own mind, is slavery. But I am also a privileged person, not someone on the run from a warlord.
I'm really looking forward to seeing more of how the show continues to deal with those questions. Well done, Gilligan, I'm hooked!
****
In other news, having recently made a trip to Vienna, I posted a gigantic historically themed pic spam here!
no subject
Date: 2025-11-09 08:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-11-10 09:41 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-11-09 11:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-11-10 09:41 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-11-10 04:58 am (UTC)As such, I'm with Carol here. Viruses keep going until they kill the host.
no subject
Date: 2025-11-10 09:40 am (UTC)