Vince Gilligan’s Series of the Year Challenges the Idea of Individualism

While many of the intellectuals shaping today’s streaming platforms are preoccupied with fashionable twenty-first-century themes—from the role of capital to gender tensions—Gilligan turns to questions that have remained urgent for centuries. His previous work, “Better Call Saul,” disguised itself as a crime drama but ultimately unfolded as a modern variation on “Oedipus Rex.” The new “Pluribus” challenges one of the pillars of the Western world—the primacy of individualism. Even its title underscores the point, invoking the Latin motto on the Great Seal of the United States: “E pluribus unum,” “Out of many, one.”

The show’s marketing campaign revealed its secrets sparingly. At first, all that was known was that Gilligan—who once worked on “The X-Files”—was returning to science fiction, and that the lead role would go to Rhea Seehorn, famed for “Better Call Saul.” The cryptic teasers offered little clarity. Later came an official synopsis, yet it, too, skirted the central twist: Apple TV merely described the story of a deeply unhappy writer named Carol who must “save the world from happiness.” Nothing suggested that the series would centre on a collective mind.

Science-fiction writers have explored the idea of collective intelligence for nearly a century: one of the earliest examples is the British author Olaf Stapledon’s novel “Last and First Men,” in which Martians act as a single consciousness. In recent years, only the creators of “Rick and Morty” have approached the theme—and then mostly in parody, though the episode about the “hive planet” unexpectedly echoes parts of “Pluribus.”

Gilligan is, in many ways, the kind of author capable of treating this idea with genuine seriousness. Since the success of “Breaking Bad,” one of his stylistic signatures has been the extended wordless sequence in which characters concentrate on crafting something—whether an ingenious trap or the dismantling of a car in search of a bug. In “Pluribus,” he pushes this device to its limit: such sequences can now involve eight billion extras—meaning the entire human population, fused into a single consciousness. Only a tiny fraction appears on screen, of course, yet even that is enough to give the action an almost choreographic quality. In Gilligan’s interpretation, the collective mind behaves like an omnipotent god of logistics.

“Pluribus” echoes “The Three-Body Problem” in many ways—another large-scale science-fiction project, this one led by David Benioff and D. B. Weiss, the creators of “Game of Thrones.” In that story, a young Chinese researcher, Ye Wenjie, the daughter of a persecuted scientist, decides amid the Cold War and the Cultural Revolution to reach out to extraterrestrials: in her view, humanity has lost its ability to govern itself and needs an external custodian. The creators do not justify her choice, yet they show clearly why it appeared to her as the only viable path.

Yet “The Three-Body Problem” rather quickly returns to the familiar “us versus the invaders” framework. It gradually becomes clear that the aliens are ordinary racist colonisers, while their supporters on Earth—the followers of Ye Wenjie—are “foreign agents” with brainwashed loyalties. In the end, the viewer is steered toward sympathising with national security services, however questionable their methods may be.

Gilligan, however, goes much further in rethinking the genre. The opening of “Pluribus” almost mirrors the setup of “The Three-Body Problem”: a radio telescope detects a signal from space. But the atmosphere is far more grounded, in keeping with Gilligan’s other work: no ominous mountain bunker—just an unremarkable office; no brilliant researcher—only ordinary sweater-clad drudges who struggle to discern the structure of a message written in no language known on Earth. The crucial difference lies in the motives of the mysterious visitors: they are not conquerors but benefactors.

Once the alien civilisation learned of humanity’s existence, it sent to Earth the genetic code of a virus-like organism capable of granting its hosts the ability to merge into a collective mind. The signal travelled for centuries, but once it reached the planet, utopia emerged almost instantly. Scientists, driven by pure curiosity, reconstructed the “virus” in a lab, infected themselves—and the process became irreversible. At least COVID did not persuade the infected that sharing it with a friend was an excellent idea.

The only person in the United States whom the pandemic did not touch is Carol Sturka, a well-known novelist who openly despises her own erotic romances. Raised on the same films as the audience, Carol initially assumes she is witnessing an alien invasion. “No,” corrects an infected man on her television screen (before the pandemic he held a senior government post), “only the technology is extraterrestrial. No one has enslaved us, erased our memories or taken over our bodies.” Now every human being has access to the knowledge and experience of everyone else. Everyone can fly a plane or perform heart surgery. Poverty and luxury have vanished, as have genders and races, armies and presidents. Everyone is happy.

The “virus” carriers also behave as friends to all living things: they no longer kill for food and are willing—likely out of compassion—to grant any request from the few remaining uninfected, whether it is a night in Elvis Presley’s suite or a ride on Air Force One. At least until they find a way to assimilate those who remain. The collective mind does not yet know how to do that, but it has at its disposal the knowledge of every scientist on the planet.

Yet this paradise came at a steep price. Millions died: some bodies simply could not withstand the “virus,” while others happened to be driving or in dangerous situations when the convulsions accompanying infection began. But no one could have foreseen that.

The genre seems to demand it: a grim, world-weary writer must somehow, against all odds, save humanity. Carol is convinced that this is her purpose. But the merged human species sees it differently: it is the few remaining solitary, unhappy individuals—people like Carol—who need saving. And the viewer has no firm grounds to believe the truth lies entirely with her. Suppose she does manage to restore the status quo—then what? How will she live after hearing news of another war or walking past a homeless person on the street? All of that would inevitably return with the old world.

Western popular culture has long enshrined the notion that nothing is more valuable than the existing order. Almost every story about an alien invasion or a zombie apocalypse ultimately resolves into a plea to cherish what already exists. Even “The Three-Body Problem” follows that logic, albeit with caveats. Gilligan is one of the few who dares to ask: does the world, as it is, merit saving at all?

One of the most striking scenes in the first two episodes is a gathering of the “holdouts,” arranged for them by the infected. There are only twelve such people on the entire planet (yes, the reference to the apostles is deliberate), but Carol invites only six English speakers, pointedly refusing the collective mind’s offer to translate. And then comes the twist: aside from Carol herself, everyone who arrives is from the densely populated Global South. It turns out the old order is prized only by a white American woman. The others do not object to a world where passport, language and skin colour no longer determine anything—and they await their promised assimilation with palpable eagerness.

Of course, Gilligan could at any moment pivot and turn “Pluribus” into a familiar tale about defending normality. Perhaps the true purpose of the “virus” is to prepare a compliant labour force for extraterrestrials. Perhaps the infected will eventually choose to forcibly assimilate the few who remain. But that raises the question: why tell a standard science-fiction story at all? It would be far simpler to make yet another “Breaking Bad” spin-off.

For now, “Pluribus” plays like a captivating thought experiment—almost a philosophical puzzle in the vein of the trolley problem. The power and capabilities of a collective mind are awe-inspiring, yet it is impossible not to sympathise with Carol—and not only because of Rhea Seehorn’s superb performance. The arguments for the new world are entirely rational, while accepting it emotionally is far more difficult.

In conflicts such as “the individual versus the crowd,” “humans versus machines” or “humans versus God”—and a unified consciousness of eight billion people embodies the last two at once—we are almost instinctively drawn to the side of the lone human being. No one has yet devised a utopia worth surrendering one’s own “self.” That is how our cultural instincts work. Whether audiences are willing to transcend them—and, more importantly, whether they should—is a question streaming platforms almost never ask. Gilligan is a rare exception.