I’m a long time fan of Vince Gilligan (Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul) and so I was very much looking forward to his new show Pluribus. It didn’t disappoint me! It was everything I enjoy about Gilligan’s work — slow paced, beautifully staged and photographed, light on exposition, depending heavily on an intelligent and diligent viewer. Every episode gave me plenty to think about, and an immediate re-watch of all nine episodes gave me even more. So many threads I could pursue in my own mind, possibilities raised but left implied. And in particular, paths forward to which the main characters are oblivious, to their disadvantage, due to their own flawed characters. I find myself yelling at them in my mind: don’t you see what’s going on? don’t you see how wrong you are? don’t you see what you could do? Together with the occasional: oops, sorry, I didn’t get it either. Only the best storytelling can take me there.
I love how both Carol and Manousos are brought up short time and again due to their complete confidence that they know what is going on. At one point Carol says “I’ve seen this movie!”, and that is exactly her problem — she’s seen enough movies about alien invasions to make a comprehensive snap judgment about the upside-down world she now finds herself in, not even stopping to see whether that time-worn narrative template matches up in the least with what is unfolding before her. A favorite early scene is Carol driving through the just-changed world, terrified, as people on the street suddenly begin behaving like zombies, walking towards her as she tries to escape … but no, it turns out they’re not paying attention to her at all, but moving to address damage and emergencies caused by the sudden change, grabbing fire extinguishers to put out fires, assisting people trapped in wrecked cars, and so on.
She’s in no danger. In fact, people are greeting her by name, pleasently, as she drives by. No matter, she’s still terrified, because she’s seen this movie and she knows how it turns out. Over the nine episodes I slowly found out that, whatever movie she is actually in, it isn’t any she’s seen before. Not that it’s a simple opposite. She may still be in danger. She may even be right about what needs to be done. But if so, it’ll be for the wrong reasons. The program shows time and again that snap judgments are unwarranted. But it doesn’t always show me what they should have been. Which leaves me with lots of room for thinking: how much do I actually know about this new world? and based on that, what can I reasonably infer about its inner workings, and how I should respond to it?