IN RETROSPECT: PLUR1BUS SEASON ONE

I had high hopes for Pluribus. You can probably tell that from the number of posts I dedicated to it. I had good reason to be optimistic. After all, this was from the man who gave us Breaking Bad. That pedigree carries a promise. And once the premise emerged, with echoes of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Outer Limits, and more than a few Star Trek episodes, old and new. I let my imagination sprint ahead of the show itself.

For a while I resisted what was becoming obvious. But with each episode, the odds of disappointment climbed. Not the mild, forgivable kind of disappointment, but the catastrophic kind. It’s rare for my expectations to fall this far. I found myself feeling almost sympathetic toward everyone involved, in much the same way I felt sympathetic watching M. Night Shyamalan follow The Sixth Sense with The Happening. The Happening was aggressively stupid. Pluribus, by contrast, is aggressively inert. Episode by episode, my mind kept drifting to George Costanza: a show about nothing, or at least nothing in the least bit interesting. A precise yet fuzzy origin story, an incurious and dull main character, a lot of boring weirdness quickly explained away, a trove of uninteresting supporting characters: all ingredients of a very bland meal. They even made a Soylent Green-like cliffhanger lead to a big, fat, and rather contrived "never mind" moment you could see seconds into the follow up episode. I suppose the power to make just about anything blasé could be significant if part of some broader intrigue. But it isn't.

Pluribus wants the prestige of ambiguity without doing the hard work that makes ambiguity meaningful.

Who describes something as virus-like, but insists it isn’t a virus? That kind of faux profundity was the first red flag. If it behaves like a virus, spreads like a virus, and overwrites its hosts like a virus, then refusing the word isn’t insight — it’s evasion.

This is freshman-seminar thinking: it’s not really X, it’s more like X-plus. Nothing is gained. Nothing is clarified. The language exists solely to gesture at depth while avoiding commitment. Better writers don’t hedge. They choose their metaphors and accept the consequences.

In the conversation between Gilligan and Seehorn, everything is treated as newly discovered when it fact it's been interrogated more ruthlessly and imaginatively for at least sixty years. It was the kind of conversation you remember from high school or college, where ideas feel momentous only because no one in the room has encountered them before.

What finally sealed it was listening to part of a conversation between Vince Gilligan and Rhea Seehorn, until the disappointment became too much:

• "It's about connection -- but also loss of self." Oh really? They talk as though naming the tension is the insight, rather than the starting point.

• "We didn't want a villain -- we wanted something morally complicated." The problem is that moral complication without moral pressure is inert. By stripping off antagonism, they've removed urgency, conflict, and the need for judgment.

• "We wanted it to feel ambiguous and open-ended." They frame ambiguity as a virtue in itself, letting the audience "sit with questions," avoiding answers, resisting explaining. But ambiguity isn't depth by default. It only works when the underlying premises are precise, the stakes are legible, and the audience can feel what's being withheld. In Pluribus, ambiguity functions as a conceptual cover. It's refusing answers because they're obviously underdeveloped.

• "It's not a virus ... it's more of a metaphor." The result is the rhetorical equivalent of saying "it's complicated" and stopping there. Contrast that with classic genre writing, which asks, "What does this system want? What does it destroy? What does it require from us?"

Where do things go from here? Well, I'm going to write about stories that do well all the things that Pluribus does poorly. That should keep me very busy.

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The Return of the Archons

About those other stories. If you haven't already, I urge you to watch The Return of the Archons (Star Trek, original air date February 2, 1967). In that episode, the inhabitants of a distant world—and even visiting Federation personnel—are “absorbed into the Body,” their individuality erased, all under the control of Landru, a powerful computer.

We later learn this was the solution devised by an ancient civilization seeking to eliminate the persistent problems caused by free individuals: war, conflict, and ultimately self-annihilation. What The Return of the Archons makes equally clear is the cost of this solution. Once conflict, competition, and curiosity are stripped away, society stagnates. Life becomes placid, obedient, and empty. And yet something stubbornly human remains. Periodically, the non-individuals must erupt into Festival—a sanctioned descent into rape and other forms of extreme violence—apparently required as an outlet for irreducible instincts like aggression and sexual drive, a concept echoed later in The Purge (don't bother) and Rick & Morty.

Landru’s world is essentially Brave New World without soma: pacified citizens, ritualized release, and the quiet horror of a life without striving. The Festival functions as the grotesque substitute for suppressed instincts Huxley warned could never truly disappear. Archons also borrows the idea from Arthur C. Clarke's The City and the Stars that eternal peace is indistinguishable from death, especially when enforced by a closed system.

All in only 50 minutes.