This article contains spoilers for episode 2 of “More”.
I’m as guilty of this as anyone: I sometimes realize I’m looking at a big screen while holding a smaller screen and I feel like I’m going crazy. I’ve been making an effort recently to put my phone away while I watch stuff (and frankly, that’s why I’ll never give up going to the movies, even though streamers continue to undermine their own success by releasing movies for a few weeks before releasing them on Netflix). That said, there’s some hubbub on the Internet about the second episode of “Pluribus” and its unsettling cold open, and the confusion might be due to multitasking.
In the near-silent opening of “Pirate Lady,” the second episode of Vince Gilligan’s new sci-fi drama on Apple TV starring “Better Call Saul” star Rhea Seehorn, we see a woman covered in dirt and grime making her way through an empty town that appears to be somewhere in the Middle East. As she boards a moped and drives past virus survivors loading corpses into trucks and makeshift morgues, she commandeers an abandoned cargo plane (who does she think she is, Nathan Fielder?!) and takes it to Albuquerque, where Seehorn’s Carol Sturka is one of the few people unaffected by the sudden virus.
Apparently, on social media, some users didn’t know that the woman in the open was Zosia, a representative of the world’s newly formed hive mind played by Karolina Wydra, who appears throughout the rest of “Pirate Lady” (and, incidentally, gives the episode its name). “I just saw some people in a ‘Pluribus’ group saying they just realized it was Zosia… like people really don’t pay attention when they watch TV huh,” @shortnsevered wrote on social media platform X.
Some people on social media said that even though they were giving Pluribus their full attention, they were still missing this big detail.
In responses to this post, some “Pluribus” fans who have been paying close attention to the series still said they didn’t realize that the disheveled woman at the beginning of “Pirate Lady” is the same clean-cut, impeccably presented Zosia we see for the rest of the episode. “Well I don’t blame them,” wrote @luffyfootball before saying they thought she was, like Carol, someone unaffected by the mysterious virus likely transmitted by aliens. “A lot of people initially thought she might be one of the 13 people who were unaffected. That being said, I just found out thanks to this tweet. User @OurTwoone42058 made a good point, pointing out the kind of “makeover” sequence Zosia undergoes before meeting Carol and the other unaffected inhabitants of Earth: “That was kind of the point. The whole transformation. Corpses. Body language. Real language. She wasn’t American. They made her into someone Carol wanted. They were not meant to be considered the same person. »
User @Gtwy was pretty blunt: “So they were looking at their phones during the whole scene where she’s traveling. I hate that that’s how people watch TV now.” To be fair, a few people admitted that they felt disturbed that they didn’t understand this, and Zosia’s transformation East dramatic, but I think there is a larger issue at play here. Like I said, we’re all guilty of realizing we’ve just sat through half an episode of dreadful scrolling TV on our phones. There’s so much going on all the time that it seems impossible to completely tune out, even for a show that’s only an hour long. Additionally, some streamers have started to capitalize on this exact phenomenon.
Some streamers create content that encourages multitasking, but creators like Vince Gilligan still demand our attention.
When Apple TV released its feature film “Fountain of Youth” last May, I wrote here on /Film about how the streamer made its first “Netflix Movie,” which is not a compliment. In short, this term doesn’t literally refer to a Netflix exclusive movie, but to a broader movement among movie executives to make it easier for people to scroll on their phones while watching content; reports have revealed that these executives want the writers to explain everything the characters do and repeat the information frequently so you can essentially half-watch their product. I don’t need to explain why this approach is, quite simply, bad for the medium. There is no artistic value to a project meant to be watched while you also browse TikTok.
Elsewhere on Apple TV, however, its plans TO DO demand your attention. “Pluribus” is yet another example of this, as Vince Gilligan’s series, which has only aired two episodes as of this writing, clearly sets up a thrilling and exciting mystery box story. The same is certainly true, however, for “Severance,” Dan Erickson’s extremely messy workplace drama that absolutely forces you to watch every second of it. As the second season of “Severance” aired in early 2025, I went to great lengths to put away my smartwatch, put my whole face down and fully experience each episode of “Severance,” and I’m doing my best to do the same with “Pluribus,” Gilligan’s long-awaited next project. Still, even if you lock your phone in a safe and miss a detail like Zosia’s, don’t worry.
“Pluribus” airs new episodes on Apple TV every Friday.
