Pluribus – Image by Apple TV 🔊 Listen to this Vince Gilligan has finally stepped away from meth labs and strip-mall law offices. In Pluribus, his new Apple TV+ drama, the big bad isn’t the cartel or corporate greed. It’s… happiness. Or at least a sort of weaponised happiness. Pluribus feels like someone threw a grief drama and a Black Mirror episode into a blender. It’s funny, bleak, and already moving in a kind of unsettling way. It’s also very Vince Gilligan. The “Happiness Virus” And A Very Reluctant Hero Pluribus opens with a classic Gilligan cold-open. Two astronomers pick up a mysterious radio signal from 600 light-years away. Once decoded, it turns out to be an RNA recipe. Because humans can’t leave alone, scientists convert it to DNA and a deus-ex-lab-accident creates Patient Zero. The “virus” spreads like any other outbreak at first. We know the drill well. Bites…fluids…panic. But instead of turning people into shambling corpses, it turns them into the nicest neighbours you’ve ever met. The hive mind calls itself “we”. Everyone suddenly wants to help. Everyone suddenly knows everything. Rhea Seehorn’s Carol Sturka is one of the tiny handful of people who don’t join the party. Carol is a sharp-tongued and wildly successful romance-fantasy author who’d rather fight with a hotel toilet than look at the Northern Lights. She’s also the person Gilligan calls “the most miserable person on Earth” who has to “save the world from happiness.” In episode 1 we watch Carol’s life explode in real time. When The Joining hits Albuquerque, her wife Helen collapses in a bar. The city catches fire. Carol races her to hospital only to realise she’s already gone. Minutes later, the same hospital staff and patients re-animate, smiling and eerily serene. “We just want to help, Carol,” they say in unison. The tone is what we’ve come to expect from Gilligan. An absolute horror on paper, weirdly funny on screen. The doctors aren’t evil. They’re fine. Too fine. The true nightmare isn’t monsters in the streets. It’s that almost everyone seems totally happy with what’s happened. Episode 2: The Most Miserable Woman in the New Utopia By episode 2, the world has settled into its new hive-mind normal. Society runs smoother than ever. No crime. No racism. No money. No arguments. Humans run on shared knowledge via some sort of cosmic group chat. And the hive really wants Carol to join them. Their emissary is Zosia (Karolina Wydra), a former human turned perfectly pleasant handler. She shows up on Carol’s doorstep like a cosmic butler. She’s making breakfast and doing odd-jobs while quoting Carol’s own memories back at her. She speaks in press-release jargon and constantly reassures her that “we” only want what’s best. Gilligan leans hard into the unease. Zosia feels like a customer service bot in a human body. She can’t lie. She doesn’t get sarcasm. She carries the thoughts of billions but has no real inner life of her own. When Carol lashes out, Zosia flinches and politely asks what she can do better next time. The real gut punch of the episode comes when Carol discovers that her anger literally kills people. Every time she gets overwhelmed and screams at the collective, the entire hive seizes. Around 11 million people die in one emotional outburst. As another immune survivor gently reminds her, that makes Carol “the biggest mass murderer since Stalin.” So now she isn’t just the last sane woman in a brainwashed world. She’s also a walking WMD. Carol demands to meet the other immune survivors. In her head, this is the resistance. In reality, it’s a depressing little summit of people who have mostly decided the new world is just fine. One wants to pretend her infected child is still truly herself. Another, Koumba, has turned Air Force One into a flying bachelor pad and sees the post-hive world as the ultimate consent-free dating app. He even asks if he can add Zosia to his rotation of “romantic partners”. Rhea Seehorn in Pluribus – Image by Apple TV Carol is horrified. She accuses him of exploiting the infected, of taking their enforced agreeableness for granted. She’s not wrong. But her rage triggers another lethal seizure in the collective. More people die. Carol’s belief that she’s some sort of “antidote” to this utopia starts to look a lot more complicated. The episode ends on a tiny but crucial crack in the hive’s façade. When offered the chance to leave with Koumba, Zosia appears to make an actual choice. She considers it. She chooses. That suggests the hive mind isn’t total. Somewhere inside all that enforced bliss, slivers of individual will might remain. Carol seems to clock that at the last moment and stops the plane. It’s the first hint that this isn’t just a story about resisting assimilation. It might also be about rescuing something human from inside it. Episode 3: AI Vibes and a Hand Grenade Episode 3 opens with a flashback that seems to sum up Carol and Helen perfectly. They’re in an ice hotel to see the Northern Lights. Helen is in awe. Carol complains that it looks like a “screensaver” and worries her “ass will stick to the toilet seat.” That seems to be Pluribus in a nutshell. One person sees magic while the other sees inconvenience. Same skies. Same moment. Totally different experience. Back in the present, Carol is alone in Albuquerque, trying to live like the old world still exists. She drives to the supermarket. It’s empty. The hive has centralised all food and logistics in the name of efficiency. Nobody lives in private homes any more. Carol orders them to put everything back the way it was. And they do. In one of the show’s funniest sequences so far, fleets of trucks roll up and carefully restock every shelf exactly as Carol remembers it. It’s pure competency porn. The hive will “move heaven and Earth to make you happy, Carol,” as one member later puts it. If that means deploying global logistics to restore her local Safeway then it seems that is what they’ll do. The longer Carol spends with Zosia, the more the hive starts to look like a flesh-and-blood version of generative AI. Zosia talks to her like a chatbot trying to keep a user engaged. She can serve up facts on command. She can mimic jokes and laughter she’s pulled from other people’s memories. But nothing is truly hers. “It may feel like living in a postcard,” Carol says at one point. Or a coffee commercial. Everything is smooth and bright and curated. Every emotion is second-hand. Gilligan insists he didn’t write Pluribus as an AI metaphor. He came up with the idea long before ChatGPT took over the discourse. But the parallels are hard to ignore. He’s also been very open about his real-world views: “AI is the world’s most expensive and energy-intensive plagiarism machine,” he said. Whatever the original intention, Zosia feels like that idea turned into a person. The episode’s key scene is a long, uneasy heart-to-heart between Carol and Zosia over vodka. Carol finally asks a big question: how long until they figure out how to pull her into the hive? Zosia doesn’t know. She calls it a “biological imperative”. Then she lays out their worldview in one chilling analogy. “If you were walking by a lake and you saw somebody drowning, would you throw them a life preserver? Of course you would. You wouldn’t think. You wouldn’t wait. You’d just throw it. To us, you’re drowning, Carol. You just don’t know it.” From the hive’s perspective, Carol’s misery isn’t authenticity. It’s suffering they’re morally obliged to end. That distinction is at the heart of the show. Is imposed bliss an act of kindness…or violence? Carol, being Carol, responds by joking that “there is nothing wrong with me that a fucking hand grenade wouldn’t fix.” So the hive gives her a hand grenade. They’re not sure if she was joking. They don’t want to take the chance. They just want to make her happy in a way that feels very sad. Carol accidentally pulls the pin, Zosia hurls it out of the window, and half the living room disappears. Carol rushes her to hospital and presses the hive’s logic as far as it will go. If she asked for another grenade, would they give her one? Yes. A rocket launcher? Yes. A tank? Yes. An atom bomb? After a little mental buffering… yes. They “wouldn’t necessarily feel good about it,” the hive drone insists, but pleasing Carol wins every time. By the end of episode 3, Carol hasn’t cracked the system yet. But she has learned two vital things. The hive can’t refuse her and the hive can’t think creatively. For someone who once wrote pirate romance novels for a living, that’s a powerful combination. Is Pluribus a Departure From Breaking Bad? On the surface, yes. There are no meth cook-outs and no elaborate cons in Pluribus. The palette is brighter. The violence is mostly offscreen. But Gilligan is really playing his greatest hits in a new key. You still get the meticulous plotting and slow reveals. The strange cold opens that only make sense three episodes later. The black comedy. The way the universe seems to set up elaborate moral tests for deeply flawed people. Carol has a lot in common with Walter White and even Saul Goodman. She’s stubborn and proud. She’s convinced she’s the only one who really sees how bad things are. Her flaws make everything worse, even when she’s right. She’s also backed into a role she never wanted. The big difference is that Gilligan has said he wanted a true hero this time. After years in antihero land, he felt “at this point in humanity and in world history, I think we need more good guys again. We need more heroes.” Carol is not exactly a beacon of hope. She is an “emotional hot mess” who “can’t control her anger”. But she’s trying to do the right thing, even when it wrecks her. That’s new. The show also shares DNA with near-future shows like Black Mirror and Station Eleven. The hive mind could easily be the villain of a Charlie Brooker episode. The quiet grief of the post-apocalypse, the small rituals of normality (shopping, making breakfast, watching old DVDs) feel very Station Eleven. But Gilligan’s voice keeps it from feeling derivative. Three episodes in, Pluribus is doing something tricky in building a big sci-fi mystery without losing sight of the human at the centre of it. Rhea Seehorn holds all of it together. She can flip from deadpan to heartbreak in a line. Her scenes with Wydra’s Zosia are already the core of the show. It feels like Gilligan is using all his storytelling muscle on something stranger and maybe more hopeful than his previous work. Last updated: 15th Nov 2025 Published by Ben Jacklin Ben is a writer from the UK with an interest in all things technology. His love of science and all things interstellar originated in a passion for science fiction. These days, he writes in a more journalistic way, you might call science fact. This ties nicely with a willingness to promote and celebrate progress in British enterprise. Along with the British space industry, Ben has a fascination with emerging technologies in spaceflight and aerospace, as well as speculative technologies in the field of astrobiology. Source: https://orbitaltoday.com/2025/11/15/vince-gilligan-has-embraced-sci-fi-pluribus-is-already-audacious-after-3-episodes/