SPOILER ALERT: The following article contains plot details for “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 this way, I’m a lot like the hive mind that absorbed most of humanity in “Pluribus,” the Apple TV series starring Carol. I love Carol’s abrasiveness. I love the way she reacts to the end of the world, not with noble heroism, but with a self-centered defiance rooted in grief—a solipsism encouraged by the way the hive mind responds to her every demand. I like how Carol is tough enough to spend over a month alone when the hive mind abandons Albuquerque rather than put up with Carol’s efforts to undo their membership, but human enough to give in and try acquiescence in the season finale. (Humanity and its flaws are rare in “Pluribus.”) I believe Carol is a very great television character, played by a very great television actor in Rhea Seehorn.
Not everyone seems to agree. “Pluribus” is the third series from Vince Gilligan, the showrunner who earned a permanent place on his chosen medium’s Mount Rushmore with the back-to-back triumphs of “Breaking Bad” and “Better Call Saul.” Both of these series focused on ascendant figures in New Mexico’s narcotics trade, a thrilling hook that belied Gilligan’s obvious fascination with detailed work between violent confrontations. I always think of Jonathan Banks’ Mike Ehrmantraut silently dismantling his car, piece by piece, in search of a tracker for several minutes of screen time early in the season of “Saul.”
Apple’s largesse allows “Pluribus” to expand Gilligan’s scope to Las Vegas, South America and other far-flung locations, but also to practice his preferred modus operandi 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 his early days in the Gilligan-verse, Seehorn’s Kim Wexler was just one of many tedious obsessions in and around the Albuquerque underworld, joining kindred spirits like Mike and slash-meth chicken baron Gus Fring (Giancarlo Esposito). In “Pluribus,” Carol and the hive mind are about all we have, save for a few other survivors like the cheerful hedonist Mr. Diabaté (Samba Schutte) and Manousos Oviedo (Carlos-Manuel Vesga), who spends much of Season 1 locked in a Paraguayan warehouse.
This puts pressure both on Carol as an audience surrogate and on the viewer asked to focus their attention on a single person’s response to a global cataclysm. Long scenes show Carol doggedly investigating the hive’s source of nutrition (human-derived protein, which is exactly what that sounds like), or Manousos studying radio frequencies and writing down her findings by hand. Especially in the absence of the hive, “Pluribus” is calm, thoughtful, patient – and for some, these qualities cross the line into “boring.” Writing for The New Republic, critic Philip Maciak called the show “a bit of a snooze,” echoing many complaints on social media about the noisy, chaotic genesis of the hive giving way to the placidity of a status quo where almost everyone is literally of one mind.
Clearly, I don’t agree. I can point to some objective factors in Gilligan’s defense: “Pluribus” balances the indulgence of a languid, scene-to-scene pace with running times under 50 minutes and a nine-episode season; the show’s visual panache works against a sense of monotony, like a dumpster-diving sequence directed by Gordon Smith, a frequent Gilligan collaborator, that gives the crudest tasks an odd color and symmetry. (Cinematographers Marshall Adams and Paul Donachie appear to be basking in the desert sun.) But mostly, I think how you feel about “Pluribus” depends on how you feel about Carol and how invested you are in the trajectory she takes from closeted, self-loathing romance author to airlifting an atomic bomb to Manousos’ doorstep.
The premise of “Pluribus” is abstract and allegorical by design, and Gilligan has said in interviews that he prefers to leave the interpretation to his audience. Although the parallels between the hive and AI are uncanny, they even respond to prompts! — I have a weakness for the most literal readings. Millions of people do not survive the assimilation process into the hive, and Carol’s wife, Helen (Miriam Shor), is one of the victims. Carol is grieving, and many of her more extreme, impulsive, or just plain unsavory actions stem from that fact. Our empathy for her too.
In losing Helen, Carol lost the only person on Earth who saw and accepted her for who she truly was: her grumpy qualities, but also the basic fact of her sexuality, which Carol hid from the public by making the romantic lead character of her popular series Wycaro a man. Part of what makes the hive mind so strange is the way it is able to provide a hollow facsimile of such intimacy. The hive absorbed Helen’s memories before her death and deploys this knowledge in alternately serious and manipulative ways. (Much of “Pluribus” operates from a place of ambiguity regarding membership and its consequences. This human-derived protein? It’s a last resort because the hive can’t kill what’s currently alive, so it must use the dead for food – regardless of species). Zosia (Karolina Wydra), the individual the Hive deploys as an emissary to Carol, is chosen because she looks exactly like the romantic protagonist of Carol’s novels, before the character transformed into a man to reach a wider audience.
Although “Pluribus” is a science fiction series, it avoids the mystery box structure deployed by so many of its peers in the genre. Questions remain about the hive, its motivations, and its mechanics, but they are secondary to how Carol feels about membership and how she reacts to it. For every new detail we learn about the Hive, there’s a Carol-centered revelation, like her painful history of 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 natural unconscious instinct of the hive is to absorb whoever it can, and when Carol notes this fact on her whiteboard, she expresses it in very personal terms: “Wants to CHANGE me” — the last two words underlined. Carol’s precious refuge has been inverted into her worst fear, an abstract anxiety that “Pluribus” makes concrete as only great horror and horror-adjacent character studies can.
In the last two episodes of “Pluribus”, Carol’s determination is tested, as that of any hero must be. She experiments with the use of the hive, like Diabaté, 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 leads to an amusing reversal in which Manousos, who has traveled thousands of miles in search of a fellow skeptic, is just as appalled by Carol’s willful self-deception as Carol once was by people like Laxmi (Menik Gooneratne), who refuses to recognize the change evident in her own son. Carol is only shocked by his complacency after learning that the hive obtained her stem cells without her consent – from frozen eggs, so she could have a child with Helen – and could absorb her within the 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 fellow misanthrope Manousos as unlikely saviors of humanity. I think there’s something beautiful about Gilligan employing such abundant resources, from finding and casting a Quechua speaker to filming in the Canary Islands, in service of a person’s internal evolution. I also understand why it’s not for everyone – although, in my less generous moments, I’m frustrated that a story centered around a queer woman seems to have a shorter leash than Gilligan’s previous work about men committing crimes. But for me, enjoying “Pluribus” isn’t about eating its cultural vegetables. It’s about enjoying a strange, absurd, unclassifiable spectacle, but also thoughtful and restrained. And this is Carol Sturka, a very specific person whose discomfort with others is nevertheless widely accessible. I would never trade her sharp, pushy personality for constant affability, and I understand why she wouldn’t either.
