When I first started watching Pluribus, I was a little underwhelmed by the end of the world. The horror of this world wasn’t creeping in on me like the other post-world-annihilation shows we know, like The Walking Dead, The Last of Us, or Fallout. In those worlds, the danger jumps right at you, lurks among other survivors, and makes you think you may lose some of your characters. Vince Gilligan creates a world that has ended, but feels completely safe; something I wasn’t quite sure about. As I fell into the show’s inertia, though, I watched an episode that completely flipped what I thought about a smiling apocalypse.
For context, Vince Gilligan is the mind behind Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, some of the best of TV. He created Pluribus, a darkly comedic post-apocalyptic series. The series follows Carol Sturka, a cynical author, who along with twelve other people survived being turned into a pacifistic hive mind. They assure our main character that her life is her own, and seem to live to fulfill her every whim. While the other ten survivors content themselves with this new regime, Carol is unable to accept the world as a collective conscience. I highly recommend checking out the show if you haven’t already as I get into some spoiler territory.
I’m going to skip ahead a bit to episode seven, where Carol has lost the energy to fight against her world. After a desperate bid to get answers goes wrong, she’s left completely alone by the hivemind. In the episode before, she makes a crucial discovery about the source of the hive’s food, but it leads to nothing. The hive was already three steps ahead with their placatives, and her attempts to spur the other survivors into action made her an outcast. This leads her into the state we find her in episode seven, where she leans into the nihilism and freedom this world can offer her. She drinks as she lights fireworks, takes art from museums, and goes on fancy dinner dates. This was kind of where I expected her to be as I had gotten into watching the show. From how Gilligan set up this world, I had a thought that there would be a point where she would take her foot off the pedal and coast, and I thought we had found that point. This was the end of my speculation, though, and I had no idea where the series would take this character arc. Now I was left to wonder what could possibly ignite the fight again in Carol after she’s made one of the most horrifying discoveries and still left with no support from her fellow survivors, or even herself anymore. That is, until we switched perspectives to Manousos Oviedo.
The show had been giving us vignettes showing two of the other survivors every so often. One showed a glimpse into the life of a survivor who thrived in the opportunity to be waited on hand and foot and every wish fulfilled. The other showed a man, Manousos, who completely shut himself away from the world, only testing the radio signals. He avoided the Hive to the point of refusing their food and choosing to go hungry. I knew we were watching a different kind of willpower when we saw him repeatedly knock over the mouth-watering food offerings the Hive left for him and decide to eat dog food instead. Compared to Carol’s psychological horrors, this was a different type of, albeit disgusting, rebellion that I was excited to see. Little did I know his next decisions would change the show for me.
Manousos received Carol’s plea for action, which ostracized her from the other survivors. Instead of turning her away, it was exactly what he needed to hear to get him out of hiding and on a journey to find her. He could’ve chosen a path of no resistance and gotten the help of the Hive to transport him from Paraguay to New Mexico. Instead, he chooses to gather his meager supplies and make the journey himself. And finally, I got a perspective that made me feel fear for the character. Seeing him face and reject the Hive version of his mom right before he set out? That had me leaning forward in my seat. Manousos travels miles and miles by car at first, siphoning gas and hunting along the way. I got how darkly comedic this show could be when I watched the scene of a hive member pulling up beside our dirty and beaten-down protagonist as he searches for gas, cheerfully offering him a ride and water. I could also finally see the Hive’s menace through his eyes as he ignored every word. The Hive had always been creepy, but seeing this made them seem so uncanny.
It really amps up when Manousos reaches the point where he can no longer drive and has to walk through thick rainforest. The Hive tries one more time to stop him in their peaceful and all-knowing way, but he fires back with an answer: “Nothing on this planet is yours. Nothing. You cannot give me anything, because all that you have is stolen. You don’t belong here.” At this, he lights the car on fire and continues on his way. Before this episode, I had found myself getting used to the Hive’s machinations right along with Carol. If anything was going to shock me out of getting used to the eeriness of the Hive, though, it was those lines and the way he delivered them.
We follow him as he travels into the forest, practicing his English along the way with one mantra: his name, that he’s not one of them, and that he wants to save the world. This was showing grit in this series I hadn’t expected, but definitely welcomed. He hacks through vines, makes campfires at night, and eventually injures himself badly on the spines of a plant. He continues doggedly on, even cauterizing the wounds with his machete. People, this is what I call TELEVISION. Suddenly, this world was entirely unwelcome and dangerous for our protagonist, and I felt myself genuinely worried for his fate. The episode stops following Manouso when his wounds are eventually too much for him to handle, and he passes out, only blearily seeing the rescue chopper coming for him.
I think this episode gave me exactly what I was missing in the narrative that only follows Carol. Don’t get me wrong, I was creeped out, I was saddened, and even grossed out at times, but I was never scared. This showed me that this world of peace can absolutely be brutal and unyielding to its characters. I had wanted to see something different from Carol’s initial avid, then complacent, suffering that we had been growing accustomed to. The show completely delivered with Manousos’s starkly different storyline. It was able to be two different shows in this episode, and I think the combination of these characters and their journeys will be so interesting to see.