ANOTHER SIDE OF PARADISE, PART 1: PLUR1BUS (2025)

Author's Note: This is a part one of a three-part hybrid review and prognostication. Yes, I'll be revealing details from the first two episodes of Pluribus, but the story is so opaque at present that it would be hard to spoil much. Most of what follows is speculation about where the story is going, informed by my knowledge of science fiction and my philosophy degree. I expect to write more as the story unfolds.

There’s a Star Trek episode from the original series called This Side of Paradise. In it, the crew encounters a small colony of Earthlings on a distant planet who are unusually happy. No anger. No conflict. They spend their days loving, being loved, doing a bit of farming, and wistfully staring at clouds. We sometimes imagine a world like this (either here or in the hereafter) with people living side by side in total peace and harmony. It turns out, however, that the colonists have inhaled an alien spore that, in return for inhabiting human bodies, provides the chemistry of bliss. Sounds like we should just start handing out the spores and transport our violent species into nirvana. But, as with all good stories, not so fast.

Pluribus treads very similar ground. Instead of spores, humans are “infected” by a concoction of amino acids, the formula for which is transmitted from hundreds of light-years away. The series takes pains to tell us this “pathogen” isn’t even a virus—which is about as close to non-living life as we’ve found. Naturally, I want to know what exactly it is, though I half-expect to be disappointed. Saying it’s not a virus feels like a writer’s escape hatch to avoid wading into messy scientific detail.

And that’s not really what Pluribus is about, I suspect—just as This Side of Paradise wasn’t about the nature of alien spores. At least, that’s not what it’s really about, as they say in Hollywood.

My guess, at this point, is that Pluribus is a parable about the technological singularity that seems fast approaching. But, let's put a pin in that for now. There is much ground to cover before we get there, and I'll be writing about it separately.

There’s another Star Trek parallel worth noting. In This Side of Paradise, intense anger kills the infecting spores—and with them, the bliss they create. Spock, while infected, feels happy for the first time in his life and even falls in love. But the spores inside him die after he’s provoked to anger by Kirk, and he promptly returns to his unhappy self. In Pluribus, anger has a similar effect, though with grimmer consequences. Intense rage directed toward the “infected” makes them sputter and freeze—killing those who happen to be, say, piloting an aircraft at the time. Goodbye to the unlucky passengers as well. Yell at one of the infected, and you could end up killing millions.

Pluribus takes the philosophical questions raised by This Side of Paradise and doubles down on them. In Pluribus, people who are infected aren’t merely blissfully happy—although they seem that way—they are downright Buddhist. Gone are the individual egos. Humans are now a big, happy collective, a peaceful (and possibly less ambitious) version of Star Trek's Borg. They share all knowledge, including memories that were once private, and follow a path of total nonviolence, trying to avoid even stepping on an insect. The Borg, in contrast, want to assimilate essentially all intelligent life into a similar, all-knowing collective being, although they've become decidedly less peaceful in their approach. Why bother, after all, with the pesky uncertainty of giving an intelligent being the option of opting out?

If the pluribus of Pluribus is a metaphor for a Buddhist nirvana, it (they?) seem awfully attached to pulling in the twelve stragglers, working hard to give them a pathway to collective bliss. That's not quite how enlightenment is supposed to work. There shouldn't be a non-virus virus, or anything else, that is an easy path to such elevation. The journey to enlightenment is supposed to be solitary and require great discipline. It's hard work to break free of our context.

Once part of the universal mind, do individual humans have desires? So far, it doesn’t seem so. What drives the story, at least so far, are the desires of the few—twelve at the latest count—who are resistant to infection. These twelve find themselves served hand, foot, and more by the equanimous members of the hive mind. The infected want nothing but to please the uninfected, or at least not disappoint them. Meanwhile, the collective works tirelessly to bring the twelve resisters into the fold. Why would anyone object?

But, just as in This Side of Paradise, where Captain Kirk plays the role of objector, Pluribus gives us its own: Carol Sturka, played by Rhea Seehorn, whom you may recall as Saul Goodman’s partner in Better Call Saul.

Kirk’s objection was clear and stated early—handing “happiness” to human beings meant death to mankind’s curiosity and, ultimately, its vitality. Striving for, and maybe someday finding, happiness was, to Kirk, an essential part of being human. It drove us to explore ourselves and the universe, to solve its great mysteries. Without it, we would have remained primitive agrarians, trapped like the colonists infected by the spores. Humanity, he warned, would stagnate in its own bliss.

In many ways, Kirk is the perfect figure to raise this question. He’s the archetypal individualist explorer—driven by emotion, passion, ego, and curiosity. Dosing him with spores seems cruel, like neutering a pet. But, as with all great science fiction, This Side of Paradise refuses to answer the question of whether Kirk is right. It deliberately leaves that tension unresolved.

So far, Carol Sturka seems ill-equipped, storywise, to present the counterpoint to the bliss of the collective. In the first two episodes, she seems unable to articulate the opposing view, leaving us to wonder whether one even exists. After all, what the writers have created is a nirvana infection—and it’s hard to escape the conclusion that a transcendent state in which the self is dissolved might be the most effective medicine yet for the pain, suffering, and unending desire that haunts humanity.

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Heaven Heaven is a place A place where nothing Nothing ever happens ―Talking Heads, Heaven

“When for you in the seen is only the seen, … then, Bāhiya, there is no you in the seen. When, Bāhiya, there is no you in the seen, there is no you in the heard, …, then you are neither here nor there nor between the two. This is the end of suffering.” ―The Buddha, Udāna 1.10