Pluribus
1. Pluribus, as my wife pointed out two or three episodes in, is about large language models and AI chatbots. Trivially omniscient, endlessly affirming, your number-one biggest fan—yet undiscriminating about truth or beauty, and finally empty on the inside.
2. Pluribus is about collectivism, and not only its downsides but also its very real appeal to people who feel isolated, alone, and lonely.
3. Pluribus is about Covid lockdowns.
4. Pluribus is about globalism and the way that the tentacles of capitalism eventually reach everywhere and everyone. No one and nothing is untouched. “Choice” is superficially valued but ultimately weak and powerless. And the result is absolute sameness, no matter where you happen to visit while jet-setting around the world.
5. Pluribus is about asymmetrical multiculturalism: local and particular for thee but not for me. The beautiful village, with its unique language, location, song, dress, and festivity, all of it falls away the moment the young girl “chooses” to join the Others. She smiles, the songs stop at once, and everyone walks away. It was a show. It was a sham. It was a Potemkin village.
6. Pluribus is about popular art—romantasy and erotic fan fiction—versus real art, enduring art, the kind of work produced by a singular artist following her vision rather than her patrons, i.e. “fandom.”
7. Pluribus is about extremes of notional peace. Pacifism and veganism are subtly transformed by taking the unwillingness to kill to its logical conclusion: the willingness to die rather than to make another living being of any kind suffer. (Which makes the absence of birth and babies all the more telling. Will the next season reveal whether the Others are willing to procreate?)
8. Pluribus is about postlapsarian life and whether it is worth preserving if it cannot be reverted to its (actual or merely imagined) prelapsarian form. It is also, therefore, about suicide.
9. Pluribus is about the ethics and epistemology of evangelism. If you possessed the best news in the whole universe, the secret to invincible happiness, what would you be willing to do to give it to others? And if, by contrast, you thought this news was bad, not good, what would you do about it? And how could either group, insulated from the other, know who was right?
10. Pluribus is about what makes life worth living. Which means in the final accounting that Pluribus is about God.
11. Pluribus is a horror movie whose horror is entirely moral, psychological, and emotional. Nobody wants to hurt you. Nobody wants you to be unhappy. On the contrary. And just that is the essence of the horror.
12. Pluribus is a lost X-Files bottle episode, an unfilmed script for the Twilight Zone, an unwritten what-if B-movie idea from the 1970s stretched out into a multi-season prestige series. It’s anti-prestige TV.
13. Pluribus is about the worst person you know being the last person on earth. It’s Matheson’s I Am Legend, only the vampires want your soul, not your flesh. If the future of the human race came down to this woman, this maddening, selfish, ungrateful, unhappy person, could you cheer for her? Would you want her to win? What if you were her? What would it take? Is she capable of change? Are you?
14. Pluribus is about Scarface becoming Mr. Chips. It’s Vince Gilligan’s sci-fi epic about a bad woman breaking good.
