Final review of ‘Pluribus’: slow, not boring

SPOILER ALERT: The following piece details the plot of “La Chica o El Mundo,” the season 1 finale of “Pluribus,” now streaming on Apple TV.

I have a confession to make: I love Carol Sturka.

In that respect, I’m a lot like the hive mind that has absorbed most of humanity in “Pluribus,” the Apple TV drama of which Carol is the star. I like Carol’s aggressiveness. I love how she responds to the end of the world, not with high-minded heroism, but with a self-centered defiance rooted in grief—a solipsism encouraged by the way the hive mind responds to every request. I love how Carol is strong enough to spend over a month alone when the hive mind abandons Albuquerque rather than put up with Carol’s attempts to undo their joining, but human enough to give in and attempt resignation in the season finale. (Humanity and its attendant flaws are in short supply in “Pluribus.”) I believe that Carol is a truly great TV character, brought to life by a truly great TV actor in Rhea Seehorn.

Not everyone seems to agree. “Pluribus” is the third series from Vince Gilligan, the showrunner who earned himself a permanent place in his chosen medium’s Mount Rushmore with the back-to-back wins of “Breaking Bad” and “Better Call Saul.” Both series focused on rising figures in New Mexico’s drug trade, a thrilling hook that belied Gilligan’s obvious fascination with the detailed snarls between violent confrontations. I always think of Jonathan Banks’ Mike Ehrmantraut quietly disassembling his car, part by part, looking for a tracker for a few minutes of screen time in an early season of “Saul.”

Thanks to Apple’s generosity, “Pluribus” will be able to expand Gilligan’s reach to Las Vegas, South America and other remote areas, as well as practice his favorite way of working with increased focus. “Breaking Bad” and “Better Call Saul” — especially the latter — could be rigorous, but they also distributed that rigor across a broad ensemble. In her Gilligan-verse debut, Seehorn’s Kim Wexler was just one of many picky obsessives in and around Albuquerque’s underworld, joining kindred spirits like Mike and chicken-slash-meth queen Gus Fring (Giancarlo Esposito). In “Pluribus,” Carol and the hive mind are pretty much all we have, aside from a few fellow survivors like the cheerful hedonist Mr. Diabaté (Samba Schutte) and Manousos Oviedo (Carlos-Manuel Vesga), who spends much of Season 1 in a Paraguayan storage facility.

This puts pressure on both Carol and the audience surrogate, asking the viewer to focus their attention on one person’s response to a global catastrophe. Long scenes show Carol doggedly investigating the hive’s power source (Human Derived Protein, which is exactly what it sounds like), or Manousos studying radio frequencies and recording his findings by hand. Especially when the hive is absent, ‘Pluribus’ is quiet, deliberate and patient – ​​and for some, those qualities cross over into ‘boring’. Critic Philip Maciak writes for The New Republic said the performance “a bit of a nap,” echoing many complaints on social media about the noisy, chaotic genesis of the hive giving way to the calm of a status quo in which almost everyone literally has one opinion.

Obviously I don’t agree with that. I can point to certain objective factors in Gilligan’s defense: “Pluribus” balances the indulgence of languid scene-to-scene pacing with a sub-50-minute runtime and a nine-episode season; The show’s visual panache counters a sense of monotony, such as a dumpster dive sequence directed by frequent Gilligan collaborator Gordon Smith, who lends eerie color and symmetry to the crudest tasks. (Cinematographers Marshall Adams and Paul Donachie seem to be basking in the desert sun.) But I think your feelings about “Pluribus” mostly come down to how you feel about Carol, and your investment in her journey from closeted, self-loathing novelist to airlifting a nuclear bomb to Manousos’ doorstep.

The premise of ‘Pluribus’ is abstract and allegorical in design, and Gilligan has said in interviews that he prefers to leave the interpretation to his audience. Although the hive’s parallels to AI are uncanny: they even respond to cues! — I like the most literal readings. Millions of people do not survive the process of assimilation into the hive, and Carol’s wife Helen (Miriam Shor) is among the victims. Carol is in mourning, and many of her most extreme, impulsive, or just plain unsavory actions stem from that fact. So does our empathy for her.

By losing Helen, Carol has lost the only person on earth who saw and accepted her for who she really was: her grumpy qualities, but also the basic fact of her sexuality, which Carol hid from the public by making the romantic lead in her popular Wycaro series a man. Part of what makes the hive mind so creepy is how it is able to provide a hollow facsimile of such intimacy. The hive absorbed Helen’s memories before she died, and uses this knowledge in alternately serious and manipulative ways. (Much of “Pluribus” operates from a place of ambiguity about The Joining and its consequences. That human-derived protein? It’s a last resort because the hive can’t kill what’s currently living, and so must make use of the dead for nourishment – ​​regardless of species). Zosia (Karolina Wydra), the person deployed by the hive as Carol’s emissary, is chosen because she looks exactly like the romantic lead in Carol’s novels, before the character was gendered into a man to reach a wider audience.

Although “Pluribus” is a science fiction show, it eschews the mysterious box structure employed by so many of its genre peers. Questions remain about the hive, its motives, and its mechanisms, but they are secondary to how Carol thinks about the Joining and how she responds to it. For every new detail we learn about the Beehive, there’s a Carol-centric revelation, like her painful history with anti-gay conversion therapy, that tells us everything we need to know about her near-allergic reaction to the prospect of being forcibly assimilated into a dominant majority group. The hive’s unconscious natural instinct is to absorb everyone it can, and when Carol writes this fact on her whiteboard, she puts it in understandable, personal terms: “Want to change me” – the last two words are underlined. Carol’s precious safe haven has been transformed into her worst fear, an abstract fear that ‘Pluribus’ makes concrete in the way only great horror and horror-related character studies can.

In the final few episodes of “Pluribus,” Carol’s resolve is tested, as it should be for any hero. She experiments with using the hive, as Diabaté has done, to manifest her deepest desires. Carol sleeps with Zosia, asks her to use “I” pronouns instead of the hive’s preferred “we” and generally performs coupled domesticity. (Carol and Helen went to an ice hotel; Carol and Zosia go skiing.) This results in a funny reversal in which Manousos, who has traveled thousands of miles in search of another skeptic, is as shocked by Carol’s willing self-deception as Carol once was by the likes of Laxmi (Menik Gooneratne), who refuses to acknowledge the obvious change in her own son. Carol is only shocked by her complacency when she learns that the Hive obtained her stem cells without her consent – from frozen eggs so she could have a child with Helen – and absorbed her within a month.

The big change in the finale of “Pluribus” does not lie in our understanding of the hive, whose intentions were already shared. It’s in Carol, who chooses to ally herself with a fellow misanthrope in Manousos as humanity’s unlikely saviors. I think there is something beautiful in Gilligan deploying such abundant resources track down and cast a Quechua speaker Unpleasant shooting in the Canary Islandsserving the internal evolution of one person. I also understand why this doesn’t apply to everyone, although in my less generous moments I’ve been frustrated that a queer woman story seems to have a shorter run than Gilligan’s previous work about men committing crimes. But for me, enjoying “Pluribus” doesn’t mean eating your cultural vegetables. It’s about enjoying a strange, absurd, uncategorizable show that is also thoughtful and understated. And it is about Carol Sturka, a very specific person whose discomfort with others is nevertheless widely accessible. I would never trade her prickly, pushy personality for permanent affability, and I understand why she wouldn’t either.