Promotional material for Pluribus. By Skye Anderson
Note: This article contains spoilers for the first season of “Pluribus.”
In November and December 2025, Apple TV aired Vince Gilligan’s first series to take place outside of the “Breaking Bad” and “Better Call Saul” universe. “Pluribus” stars Rhea Seehorn as fantasy author Carol Sturka, one of only 13 survivors immune to a virus that links everyone else in the world as a collective hivemind.
As Carol faces severe emotional trauma in the aftermath of the hivemind’s “joining,” she becomes a reluctant hero determined to reverse it before the hive can turn her into one of them.
To coax her out of her mission, the hive sends her Zosia, a member of the hivemind who unmistakably resembles a female version of Carol’s heartthrob book character Raban: Carol had originally written Raban as a woman but made him a man to conceal her lesbian identity.
Carol and Zosia’s relationship is one of the most exciting and complex to come out of television recently — Carol knows she is being manipulated by a hivemind who knows every intimate detail about her, every way to charm and persuade her, every secret and all trust she has ever shared with another human being. Yet in her loneliness, her grief, her numbness, she gives in anyway. Even as an illusion, she chooses companionship: it is easier to accept an entity that will provide everything you could ever dream of than it is to save the world.
“Pluribus” is a question of human nature and decision-making: not only the show itself, but the way audiences interact with it. Is sacrificing individuality worth it if it means no more human violence or pain? Carol, a white woman from Western society, fights for originality and does not understand how her fellow survivors — who come from different cultures, different parts of the world — can possibly prefer what humanity has become.
That said, there are issues with how characters are represented. Some have pointed out that Laxmi’s yelling in Hindi is nearly unintelligible to native speakers and played as a joke merely to portray her as the angry Indian woman. Gilligan received similar criticism for feeding into stereotypes with “Breaking Bad,” such as scenes in Mexico having the harsh yellow filter long overused in film and television to exaggerate lower-income countries.
Audiences’ criticism of Carol’s character in and of itself speaks to the nuance of the series and the moral standards we hold in real life. Diehard “Breaking Bad” and “Better Call Saul” fans love the leading men of their favorite Gilligan shows — a corrupt, criminal lawyer and a drug-lord-slash-murderer who poisons a child — but say Carol is too unlikable of a main character because she is not perfectly rational and agreeable in the midst of an apocalypse.
When a reporter told Seehorn her character is “infuriating,” Seehorn said “good… she has a little bit of a fit… I think it’s fair,” a response that speaks to the endless empathy and compassion given to male characters who do wrong while female characters are hated simply for reacting.
In the first episode the hivemind utters to Carol the chilling words “we will figure out what makes you different… so we can fix it… so you can join us.” It is not until the fourth episode, though, that we learn what part of Carol’s past makes this line hit especially hard: she was sent to a conversion camp as a teenager.
Carol continues to be haunted by her trauma: “If you loved me, you wouldn’t do this,” she says to Zosia when she learns they now have her stem cells required to turn her into one of the hive. Zosia tells her, “We have to do this because we love you.”
Another common criticism of “Pluribus” is that it is too slow, with many viewers calling it boring. It is undoubtedly slow: functionally, there are only three main characters, one of whom is absent for three consecutive episodes and another we only see glimpses of until the final episode. The fittingly titled seventh episode “The Gap” hardly features any dialogue.
Moments like driving through the desert, digging through a trashcan, or watching “The Golden Girls” on DVD alone are given the same intricate attention and care as any other show’s more action-packed counterparts. The impending demise of humanity, sometimes, is mundane.
In an age when Netflix writers are told to write exposition into their dialogue so viewers can still follow while scrolling their phones, it is refreshing to see a show that takes its time and allows audiences to exist in its world without being told what to think of it.
With artistic storytelling — subtlety in characterization, intentional use of color and framing as symbolism, narrative techniques that work to do more than just drive the plot — television thrives. And “Pluribus” season one achieves that.
