Contains light spoilers for “Pluribus” Season 1
Vince Gilligan’s newest project, the Apple TV sci-fi puzzler “Pluribus,” is a major hit for the streamer — and there are some pretty odd questions we’re hoping the show will answer by the time it wraps up its debut season.
You’ll definitely want to check out Looper’s video above for the full details, but here’s some context: “Pluribus” stars Gilligan’s “Better Call Saul” standout Rhea Seehorn as Carol Sturka, a popular novelist who unexpectedly finds herself the only “survivor” of a massive event where the rest of humanity becomes one shared hive mind. Left to save the world from blissful happiness, Carol is stranded in a world where children know secrets she once shared exclusively with her lover and every single person is capable of flying an airplane thanks to pilots in the hive mind, and somehow, Carol is the only person who appreciates the terrors and dangers of a worldwide hive mind.
Okay, so what about those weird questions? Let’s get started, and don’t say we didn’t warn you — they’re weird! First of all, what happened to household pets during the mass infection event — the hive mind was created using saliva, specifically — that brought all of Earth’s humans, save for Carol, into the hive mind? Are they controlled? Also, where did they go? Carol and the show’s other characters certainly do wander around a lot, but there aren’t any abandoned dogs or cats to be seen anywhere. Where did Fido and Fluffy land in this whole thing? That’s just the tip of the iceberg, too.
There are so many weird questions Pluribus needs to answer before Season 1 ends
Okay, maybe the pets question isn’t all that weird, so how about this — how does intimacy work within the hive mind? Can every human on earth experience another’s carnal pleasure? This becomes an issue early in “Pluribus” when one of the few other unaffected humans, Samba Schutte’s Koumba Diabaté, elects to live a debaucherous life alongside the hive mind and asks Carol’s permission to take hive mind representative Zosia (Karolina Wydra) as his lover. Because the hive mind does seem to experience many of the same things together — like how groups of them collapse when Carol gets too angry at just one of them — this is a particularly odd issue!
This is a truly unsettling follow-up question, but seriously: what’s it like being a kid as a part of the hive mind? Instead of growing up and learning things in a “normal” way, are you simply plagued with the knowledge of all of humanity the second you’re born? How do the concepts of learning and art co-exist with a hive mind that all experience the same things? Can art ever truly be subjective again, or does everybody just love all the same stuff now? What is dreaming like when you’re part of a hive mind?!
There are plenty of bizarre questions to ask about “Pluribus,” and the Looper video above explains even more of them — and this all speaks to Vince Gilligan’s talent at world-building, ultimately. “Pluribus” airs new episodes on Fridays and concludes Season 1 on December 26.