Pluribus full season discussion
The first ep. got its own thread on Tildes and a decent discussion, I figured I'd try to get one going for whole season. Since it finished airing like 2 weeks ago.
I binged S1 yesterday, and am very happy that I waited till all episodes were out, as the pace of the show is glacial and I would've likely lost interest were I not able to skip around a bit. That's one of my two major issues. The other being that I found Carol insufferable at moments in the show. I think it does a good job at humanizing her and explaining why she is the way she is. It's also important to note that a majority of the show plays out days after Carol's wife Helen dies and she's reeling from that loss, as well as losing everyone else too. For me this culminated in ep 6, when she has a conversation with another survivor after having uncovered that they process human corpses into protein powder, and she thinks it's a big reveal that everyone else already knows. She just wasn't told because she's made everyone not like her.
That being said, the premise of this show is excellent and I love the questions it makes me ask and think about. The way it's shot is also fantastic. Yes, all of humanity is in a blissful state, but most of us would also die due to starvation, but there's no murder, no robbings, but it's also clear that this blissful state is more akin to being happy because you're on drugs, not "true happiness". I think this was most evident in the scene when the Peruvian girl turned willingly. Just before she does, she's shown with a lamb on her lap, which she likes and pets. The moment she turns, she just walks off, leaving the lamb behind. Obviously also all expressions of individualism are gone, this means all art, plus the question hasn't been properly answered on what exactly the Others do when they don't have someone around to make happy. I guess work together as a collective on sending the signal onto the next planet.
I think the big answer is going to be when they hopefully break someone out of the hivemind in S2. I just hope that it won't be the season finale, but sooner. I dislike the trend of prestige television being at such a slow pace.
What do you guys think? Both the smart writing and the pacing issues seem to be the main two things i see mentioned online. Anything else you liked or disliked? Any theories on where it'll go?
Is that a trend? When most media is nothing but an over stimulating mess, a slower, more traditional approach is a warm welcome. Also very Vince Gilligan, so par for the course for this show really.
I also think slow is an incorrect characterization of the show. Thoughtful, perhaps. Methodical, maybe. Comprehensive?
It's a lot of "show don't tell", and manages to say quite a lot with its shots. When it does linger in a scene it's generally spent by giving us a look into a character's psyche (either improving or declining) or showing how difficult some task actually is on their mental health.
I like how the show takes time setting up scenarios without jumping from one plot point to the next. Being alone in the world is probably very boring too, as the viewer being pulled into seeing that is bound to be "slow", but it also serves to set up the motivations of the characters.
I see a lot of comments across the internet that nothing happens, but a deep character study isn't nothing. It's a character study. I loved Menousos' arduous (and beautifully shot) trek from South to North America. It tells a story all by itself and how determined this man is.
In short, slow? Perhaps in today's media landscape. But I find it misplaced.
It is very difficult to criticise art to any level of objectivity beyond talking about what works on the technical level, which on a production of this scale, things usually do unless the lead creative(s) make some batshit decisions like when Zack Snyder decided that every scene needed an extremely shallow depth of field in Army of the Dead.
Ultimately, what may work for one person, may not for another. I can enjoy a slow burn, my favorite director is Denis Villeneuve, and I'm definitely not part of the youtube shorts/tiktok generation with an average attention span of 30 seconds.
I think the prerequisite to being able to enjoy a character study is if you can watch a character for a long time. Pluribus tries to make this levy this up as much as it can, with scenes like the drone trash pick-up, but I do think that even as a slow-burn, it stretched out some scenes beyond a reasonable degree. Menousos' bottle episode was the point where the kettle boiled over for me. His determination is not something that needs to be shown anymore. He already spent days searching every single radio-frequency for minutes at a time, and he was shown eating dog food rather than accepting food from the Others. The only thing we learned in that episode was that he's so determined that he'd rather die than accept help from them, and that's a pattern that we had in every episode, except for episode 1.
Ultimately, neither Carol nor Menousos worked for me as likeable protagonists. They are not meant to be entirely likeable, and Carol is obviously constructed to be the exact opposite to the Others, it's the foundation of the show; but for a character study, too much time was spent on her by herself, which is not really something I enjoy. For someone trying to figure out how to reverse this thing, she was surprisingly non-inquisitive about how the Others work, which culminated in episode 6.
But to reiterate, Pluribus is still a good show in my eyes, not just for the unique premise, but also that it doesn't go for the obvious, cheap twist of the Others turning bad. It's set up two diametrically opposed sides and now explores wherever the trade-offs that each side has are worth it for the gains. That's really interesting.
Man is that the truth. One guy figured out more in like an hour of talking to them, then she did over months.
To be fair, I don't consider that to be a plot hole or a flaw of the show, but it's just one reason why Carol was frustrating to watch for me. S1 is mostly about her coming to terms with the death of her wife, and most of her actions are about that death, especially at the start. On the surface level she says she wants to reverse this and stop them, but what is really driving her is Helen's death. Sometimes people say one thing, but then do another.
At first I thought nice a Pluribus thread! Then I started reading and contrary to what I usually do when I like a show I don’t wanna read other people’s opinions and theories.
This show makes me feel something inside that I don’t want to ruin by overanalysing and talking it to death (besides with my wife). There’s a loneliness and melancholy in the story’s juxtaposition of the end of civilisation and this weird “better place” to be I feel drawn to. I don’t want the scenes or episodes to end and the drawn out mundane sequences relaxes me and feeds my everlasting hunger for authenticity. While my curiosity was peaking in the first couple of episodes about the who/what/how that’s slowly withering and it’s transforming into a true comfort show I don’t want to end or get solved. I just want to “follow along” and be there with Carol if that makes any sense. Rhea Seehorn is just absolutely amazing and luck will have it that I’m also watching Better Call Saul for the first time right now so I’m double dipping my favourite actor and loving both sides of it.
Your enjoyment of this show is completely valid and okay, and I do not want to take it away or mess with it in any way with my criticisms of the show. They are subjective opinions.
Art will appeal differently to different people, and the slice of life that you crave with such drawn out scenes is what makes it grating for me. We react differently to the same things.
It does! :] It means you care about the character and her journey. I'm happy you had a great time with it.
I had zero problems with the pace. I generally enjoy it when a show can take time to establish its world. You could level the same complaint at season 1 of Breaking Bad for it being too slow. I'm not defending it, it turns a lot of people off shows. I still can't get my wife to finish season 1 of BB.
I think a lot of Carol's actions are understandable having just watched Helen die, the world being taken over and all of the survivors seemingly having no interest in trying to save the world. I really liked her character and felt like she was a realistic depiction of how someone could act given the circumstances.
I loved the entire season. My only issue is how the season ended. Requesting a nuke and hiding felt like last writing. This is the same creator that had the amazing call back as we realize that Walter used the plant to poison the kid and the best we could do here was a reference to a throw away joke in an earlier episode? I'll still watch season 2, but the only moment of disappointment I had was right at the end.
I don't think that was intended as a throwaway joke. It firmly established that the Others are incapable of denying her requests up to and including nuclear annihilation if she so pleases. It's an important part of their collective psyche that the Old Schoolers can take advantage of.
It sets up that Carol is ready to fight tooth and nail again after learning she's in danger.
The fact that it's a nuke is twofold: Apple wanted a big finish, and it refers to the aforementioned scene. It's a big "stay the hell away from me" sign.
The only part that doesn't make sense to me is why didn't Carol ask for her eggs? Surely they couldn't deny her that, they are hers after all. And since they can't lie she could ask if she had all of them back and then ask if there was any other method they could use to turn her.
Maybe some part of them would refuse like they did when she asked how to reverse the hive mind but at least she could have asked for it or some information.
I wondered the same thing.
So far, Carol has been a bit dumb in general, which I think is fine as we're rife with Sherlocks in every other series, but that one puzzles me too. Perhaps she doesn't want to risk them? Yet. I don't know, we'll see in season 2.
I assumed it was too late for that to be useful. Whatever dna/rna information they needed, they have now.
I think its like the 3 laws of robotics.
Priority 1 is to not harm living things.
Priority 2 is spreading to uninfected people, unless it interferes with Priority 1.
Priority 3 is obeying uninfected intelligent life unless it interferes with Priority 1 or 2.
That's fine if that's the case, but we don't know that for sure. We would have had some idea if Carol had asked and they denied giving them to her or any info on where they were/where they were being worked on to make her joining gas
We do know that they have no problem infecting people without their consent. And we know they won't honor requests that endanger their ability to spread the infection.
Carol knows its a dead end to ask them not to use her eggs.
I don't think we know they won't honor requests about spreading the infection. All we have seen is they refuse to discuss how to reverse it.
Giving Carol an atom bomb that she likely would use as a last resort would be much more destructive than giving her her eggs back. The problem is we don't have enough data points/info on how their "rules" work. But if she had asked that would have provided more info and helped define those rules more clearly.
It would provide a lot of info on their reasons why if they denied her request.
Also there is a lot to learn about their logic and ethics in this discussion.
The topic of consent of joining has been brought up briefly but not thoroughly explored. The fact that they are her eggs and they have no right to use them is something that would be interesting to see their opinion on. As is if they deny returning them to her if she requests.
There's nothing to lose. If they deny the request, there's many questions to ask in regards to that to learn more about them, something she has been trying to do the whole show. And best case she gets them back, and crisis averted.
I don't think it's that complicated. They feel a compulsion to spread the infection, but can't hurt any living thing. So they'll infect her against her will in any way that doesn't involve directly harming her.
The only requests they've directly resisted are requests for information on how to undo the joining, and assurances that they won't infect her.
The atom bomb is I think unrelated enough that even if it's very likely to cause harm, they can still go through with it. Just a bigger version of putting a grenade in Carol's hand.
The other big version of this is spraying the virus in the first place. They had to know a lot of people would be hurt in the chaos. I'm not sure if it's also removed enough from the action to allow it. Or if they knew the alternative was an all out war, and thus they were allowed to take the path that let them spread with the least loss of life. Or possibly that the people who would die would be the recently infected and thus wouldn't qualify for needing special attention.
Not sure that's quite right.
It seems that only about 90% of victims survive the infection process (800+ million people died when they took over the world). Those people were obviously harmed, so they certainly consider spreading the infection to be worth inflicting some harm.
But then, they won't forcibly take a bone marrow sample from Carol? It's inconsistent, or at least nuanced in a way that hasn't been fully articulated.
I think the writers avoided the question of Carol requesting the return of her eggs in order to avoid having to spend screen time resolving this ambiguity.
They do seem to have the memories of anyone who died from the infection. So they're technically part of the collective on death even if only for a very short time.
I think the nuke might also end up being a Chekov’s gun later. Because we see Manousos was studying up on EM radiation, radio transmission, frequency modulation, etc.
Nuclear bombs emit an EM pulse when they’re set off that fries electronics and floods the entire radio spectrum. We know the hivemind works by linking everyone’s brains by transmitting along a specific radio frequency. It’s not crazy to imagine they can find a spot they can set it off to shut down the hivemind by overloading the radio band at the point of origin.
And the opening title card definitely implies there is a point of origin. The transmission originates from the P. All the other dots are harmonizing to it, it’s not as flat and non-hierarchical as you’d expect based on how the hivemind presents itself to the immune.
I actually loved the ending, I thought it was very funny that they would give her a nuke.
My wife was also frustrated with the ending; I'm not totally clear on her reasoning, other than she felt like Carol trying to be happy was bad and she doesn't like Menousos, because she doesn't feel like he's being totally reasonable, especially when trying to get around the darion gap. She insists he could have taken a boat from the eastern side of the continent.
Anyway, I disagree with her. I think Carol trying to be happy for a bit towards the end of the season is her trying to come to terms with Helen's death and moving towards that kind of false acceptance in the stages of grief, can't recall what it's termed at this point. But not only coming to grips with Helen's death, but also the fact that this is how the world is now and it necessarily need to be a bad thing, that she can still enjoy herself and try to form a (false) relationship with a supposed individual. Only to suddenly to have that ripped away from her when she realizes she's not as safe as she originally thought she might be.
As far as Menousos goes, he seems like a bit of an obnoxious dummy to me, but also yeah, I know people be like that. The insistence on going it alone to what is certain death is a little silly. Though also after they rescued him, why didn't they just fly him immediately to New Mexico? I suppose maybe he needed medical treatment immediately, but they could have likely setup a hospital plane to manage that while they fly him there.
At any rate, I enjoyed it. I love a good slow burn and I'm enjoying the pace.
I have many things to say about this show, but I have one question that has been on my mind the most. I find it surprising that the pluribus are not better communicators and listeners. If they wanted Carol to understand them and perhaps even join them, I don't think it would've taken that much? They did not address her grief in a meaningful/emphatical way, nor did they reflect her feelings back to her and instead adopted an awkward helicopter parenting stance.
With the knowledge and experience of pain (both physical, social and mental) of every human on the planet, I would've expected them to give more room and understanding to Carol. If this ties back to them wanting to give full agency to every living being then that begs the question of why would they want Carol to join them in this forceful way? It seems that the pluribus is experiencing some ambivalence in regards to how they want to act and how the should act?
They can no longer experience individual emotions and especially can't experience negative ones. They also seem to be only as emphatic as their morality allows, having no issues releasing domesticated animals into the wild that may or may not live.
Devil's advocate, but the pluribus are shown in various ways to draw on the individual experiences/expertises of former individuals. Even if they can't experience individual emotion anymore, there are huge numbers of members who would have been expert psychologists, psychiatrists, councillors, and communicators, and their collective knowledge could surely be intellectualised and applied in the absence of feeling emotions.
Jamfox's question is one I also had, though I ultimately felt I had to let go these lines of critique and go with the flow to enjoy the show.
It seems like they've become incapable of understanding emotion when it's displayed in front of them. I'm sure they can apply the theoretical when any of the humans explicitly mentions their emotion, but they've lost the ability to read it at an individual level. It's not even that they don't address her grief, they flat out disrespect it by using Helen's memories before being told to stop. They're very self serving.
So much so that they also display they are indeed capable of using feelings in the episode named "Charm Offensive" to get what they want. This indicates, to me, they do possess skills to manipulate emotions even if they find it difficult to read in the moment. They do not understand why Carol ends up leaving the situation.
On the other hand, they explicitly can no longer create. There is zero individualism, which probably means there's zero skill left required to read an individual.
I find it fun to pontificate because truthfully, I agree with you. It needs an explicit suspension of disbelief in certain areas to make the show even work. The Others would be too effective otherwise because they should be able to do everything any human ever could.
Actually I didn't see it as a flaw to critique per se, but rather I am intrigued how such a weird being would operate. Who am I as a mere individual mortal to say how a hivemind being with as many cells would or would not understand and use the individual knowledge in its new homogeneous collective form? It's interesting pondering such lifeforms, similar to God Emperor type characters
Aha, fair point! I was definitely sharing/projecting my own perception in that comment :)
Indeed they seem to move heaven and earth for the unaffected, but other life seems to be an afterthought. However emotions seem to still be a thing for the pluribus, in one way or another? Examples being them going in to shock from directed hateful communication and them having this weird apprehensive way of interacting with Carol.
But I can see your interpretation of the lack of emotions. I will keep it in mind on a second watch!
Emotion is a lot more nebulous when shared with 7 billion people. It almost can't be very explicit because that would affect the hivemind.
If a single individual got scared, it would infect the entire hivemind and interfere with their ability to function.
It has seemingly discarded most feelings, anger, hatred, envy, arousal, angst, disgust. And blunted the rest like happiness, excitement, and love. The only strong feeling they seem to have is the biological imperative to "procreate".
What seems to happen when they're disrupted(?), the negativity experienced overwhelms their collective capacity to feel anything stronger than a light smile.
It's still unclear what they're actually capable of though.
One plausible excuse is that it is just the worst parts of the wisdom of the crowds: instead of each expert speaking up when they have high confidence of knowing the answer it is just the average answer getting the most weight similar to early large-language models.
This still allows for everyone to reach easy consensus on the degrees Celsius or flying an aircraft but for questions of communication? A lot more mouths have opinions and so the consensus becomes averaged down by a wider bell curve.
But really, all the miscommunication is a plot device that provides conflict so that the show isn't just a bunch of pages of exposition.
I also suspect that it's not impossible for them to lie--just that lying doesn't make sense within the hivemind because others will instantly know that they are lying--and it's at the advantage of the hivemind that Carol believes that they can lie. It's only useful to lie after someone trusts you. Given that Carol repeats "they can't lie" so many times in season 1 I suspect this learned "truth" may be called into question at a climactic point in season 2.
I suspect that in season 2 they'll use the nuke as leverage while trying to find a way to broadcast at a specific frequency. The fact that cell phones don't work is probably because it is within the same frequency range and they'll reuse cell towers to jam the hivemind wavelength.
I find the morality of the hivemind interesting. I'd be curious to understand what the writer intended with that. Obviously a lot of it is plot expedience, it'd be a very different story if it didn't have the extreme apprehension to cause physical harm of any sort. But if you took every person and averaged them together, you wouldn't end up with a person who's unwilling to cause harm to plants. Were they trying for the idea that the hivemind is "enlightened"? There's of course no singular answer to what that would be like, but I feel like few people would argue that it's enlightened to place 0 value in consent/personal autonomy for sapient creatures but to be feel farming non-sentient organisms is unethical. The only plausible explanation I see is that the "virus" itself is having a much larger impact than it truly being just a hivemind.
I wonder if at some point they'll address the human vs animal issue. The disease started in a mouse, who showed super-mouse intelligence (was it even part of a collective at that point?) so it could infect a human. But after that animals seem to be totally uninfected. Obviously there's practical reasons for the show (animal actors are such primadonnas), but in the canon of the show, if the virus has an implicit need to propagate, why wouldn't it also spread to all animals?
I found myself stuck on existential issues often while watching this. Like what's the point of existence once you're a hivemind like that? They did establish the whole "super telescope to broadcast the signal to space" thing, is that it? Like obviously there's the basic practicalities of foraging and distributing food and water, but that would only take a small portion of total resources. The hivemind is shown as being so ascetic--but without any spirituality/religion--that it seems like, in absence of Carol, they'd just be sitting around 99.9% of the time. I struggle to understand what motivates them to keep existing beyond pure inertia (of course given how indifferent they are to their individuals dying, maybe there isn't much). But I suppose this aspect does help reinforce the alien-ness of the collective. It would feel like the hivemind would want there to be immune individuals like Carol around for entertainment's sake if nothing else.
I think they're just infected by a really smart virus. A normal virus makes us cough and sneeze to spread itself, and this one is doing the same thing. Except instead of hijacking a physical biological process it's gotten right into the brain.
The survivors only care about 2 things:
It's possible the virus was just a random mutation, but my assumption is that the virus was created by some advanced alien race. Some alien civilization is sitting comfy and doesn't want any upstart planets giving them trouble. So the broadcast is a trap. Any planet in range that hits a tech level where they might become a problem soon, will hear the broadcast first. If they get infected, they then devote themselves to spreading the virus even further.
If the creators even travel out that far, they'll find a perfectly efficient, organized workforce willing to spend 100% of it's resources on whatever they tell it to.
I think they mentioned that what keeps them going is the want to spread this unity across all living beings on earth and potentially even other species in space. That, in my mind, tracks with the idea put forward that this unity is the next major step in human evolution (the "biological imperative" as it were). After all, what keeps humans going now? Probably the same thing, the need to pass the seed and our life's stories and legacy.
In a world where second-hand screen watching or whatever the term is called is a thing, Pluribus' existence is such a good thing. I find no issues with the pace whatsoever, every scene has meaning and I'm so looking forward to next season.
Shame that in this day and age it takes 2-3 years to produce one season of television. Just another thing streaming has ruined.
Yep this is my biggest gripe with the series. BrBa was, as far as I remember, on a yearly release at least, hearing that Pluribus will take like 2-3 year or so is a bit discouraging. But other than that I agree that the slower pace was a very welcome change on my part too.
I didn't see it at all as being "drug happiness" but rather a general contentment/satisfaction which is something I consider more of a "true happiness" state than plain happiness which is a temporary mood and emotion. And it seems that the pluribus owes a lot of its "bliss" to letting things go their own way, giving the universe and all its actors their agency.
It's like getting a flight cancelled and going forward with calmness and the knowledge that there were reasons for it and the people working to get the planes up are not at fault and in the end you'll get where you wanted to go sooner or later. It's not "happiness" but there can be satisfaction in not fighting the outcome if that makes sense?
Or! Someone once described parenting as instructing a child through a glass wall: you can instruct, suggest, lead as much as you want but you are still dealing with a human being with it's own thoughts and ideas. Even if their choices may seem bad or wrong, there is immense satisfaction in letting them figure things out by themselves instead of trying to break the glass in denial and/or panic.
You're right, the Others being truly or falsely happy can't be stated with certainty. It's just my personal take. I think for that we'd need to see more interaction between the Others without a survivor present. We haven't had many scenes where we see the Others without the influence of a survivor, and in every scene where they interact, the Others are trying to fulfill their every single wish and whim. I presume in places where they do not, every single individual is working towards spreading the virus towards the next planet or upkeeping Earth.
I think the reason that I see it as a false happiness is also that there is just a lot of miserable people on the planet. Their misery evaporates in this big whole that the Others are, and they only feel bad when someone is mad at them, where they go into shock, or when they are forced to act against their biological imperative like when Carol almost made Zosla tell her how to reverse the process.
I simply cannot believe that reason would win, given how many deeply unreasonable people we have on the planet. So the virus does more than just connect people, it also forces extreme pacificism even towards plants, and it creates this blissful state, which is why I'm calling it "false".
EDIT: I think this connects nicely with @jamfox's comment: The Others are incapable of properly addressing Carol's grief because the only thing they can do is execute her commands. They can't really challenge her in the ways she needs to be challenged because of their extreme pacifism. This to me indicates that along with that pacifism, the virus induces a blissful "false" happy state, like a drug.
I just don't think it needed another season, let alone a cliffhanger. It's a kind of neat idea, but questions like "would you rather keep your individuality or be in a blissful hivemind" are actually pretty rudimentary. I don't think the idea is strong enough to carry a whole ass show and certainly not for several seasons. I think it's more of miniseries material. Or maybe a movie. Certainly there wasn't enough substance there to justify the length in my opinion.
I kept waiting for it to become full-blow sci-fi but the reality is that Pluribus is relationship drama first, sci-fi second. If you like drama than it's interesting and unique. If you're looking for sci-fi you may find it pretty basic.
My thoughts:
I found the voicemail recording to be super annoying. I couldn't believe how many times they made us listen to that whole thing, often multiple times in a row. It felt like they were doing it to make up for the otherwise near total lack of dialogue (and they probably were), but that was an incredibly annoying way to do it.
I probably could've done with about an hour less of montages.
When I first watched the finale, I didn't realize it was the finale. I didn't think it felt very finale-like. It felt like a good lead up to a finale, though.
After realizing I had watched the finale, my initial thoughts were that the show was overall just way too boring. Since then, however, I've read more fan theories, read about things I missed, etc, and have come around a bit. All my criticisms above still stand, but my initial reaction to the show overall has improved somewhat.
I think part of the reason I missed some details in watching it is that it felt so boring at times that my attention drifted.
Yes, it was too slow. No, I don't use TikTok and I'm 43 years old.
And no, I do not think it should be super fast. I think it could use some adjustment to reduce overly long self indulgent shots by two to five secom. It would still be a slow burn, meditative experience.
The pacing is really, really too slow. I finally got around to watching Utopia (UK), between episodes of Pluribus, and trying to come back from that relative masterpiece of pacing to Pluribus was brutal.
It is slow. But I'm scared to say that because on Reddit people will basically call you a dumb TikTok teenager if you say that.
I’ve never used TikTok and am old enough to have a child in their teens if I’d been less lucky as a teen.
Pluribus is too slow. It’s not bad, it’s just too slow.
if you watch Too Old to Die Young then go back to Pluribus, Pluribus will feel like a rollercoaster.
Even this trailer is way faster than the actual show. it’s weird at first, but once you’re used to it, it seems normal. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=O0KO8My-90g
excellent series, though. Refn’s aesthetic is unmatched.
I like the show very much. The questions that it poses are very interesting and it makes one think about our modern world. For example, maybe the hivemind is the media, and especially social media, which allows you to know about everything but not really feel it properly because there is too much.
With a show like this, I often like listening to a podcast too. There was a lot of interesting commentary on The Prestige TV Podcast. I listened to the first episode of the official podcast too which had some interesting information about the original idea of the show and some of the difficulty making it.
I'm sometimes distracted a bit by technical aspects of a plot. I know it isn't the point of the show, but I think about how things could work and sometimes it doesn't make sense. For example, I don't think the hivemind makes sense and would basically require magic to work. They try to explain it as sort of a wifi signal, but nobody's finite brain could really hold all the information, it would need to be moved around as needed locally and certain knowledge would need to be swapped out to make room. It would have to keep syncing specialized data from somewhere else on the network and that would be slow.
From the perspective of the hivemind, I don't understand why they would be in a rush to convert the "indies" (people who are immune from the virus). Seems like you would like to keep them around because they could do things that the hivemind can't, like create new art or solve problems in different ways than a hivemind could.
I felt similarly around the pacing and likeability of characters (not for lack of acting!). I often enjoy fairly slow shows/movies, so I don't think it was either characteristic alone but both in combination. I watched each episode as they came out and felt like it was a character study of peopleI wouldn't really want to be around.
That said, I liked the questions it poses (even if I felt like it sometimes took too many liberties in the assumptions it makes), the acting is great, and the finale was probably my favourite of all the episodes, so I'm intrigued by what a second season brings.
I thought the first episode was fantastic, but it wasn't long before I decided that the show wasn't for me. Some stories are more character driven, and others are driven by external events. This feels like the latter, but to me it also feels like the writers are using the show to try to drive some sort of philosophical debate about individualism vs collectivism. The theme strikes me as so heavy handed that the story and the characters become mere tools to express the theme, and the whole thing feels... fake? Like it's not a story, but a lecture.
That's just my reaction though. I'm glad people are enjoying it. :)
It seems like a big plot hole to not have the hivemind synthesizing food from inanimate sources. Surely they could start producing amino acids, sugars, vitamins, etc. from air, water and dirt. Not at billion-person scale right away but they could eventually have a sustaining food source.
Just finished watching episode nine and I'm happy with a lot of the ideas that were explored but also feel like a lot of the interesting exploration of this hivemind culture was side-stepped to get through all of the plot development that needs to happen to situate characters into their context.
There were several scenes that seemed to predict my plotline cynicism like "what are they going to show once he hits the Darién Gap?" and then they actually show Menousos going through the Darién Gap. Or when Carol lights up a bunch of fireworks and I think "that looks dangerous" are they trying to get both characters to end up in a hospital together? and then my prediction is subverted but the scene actually works out really well to show how the different characters are feeling in the moment.
The dystopia that the hivemind would rather starve millions of people than hurt a fly but it would also go completely out of its way to keep the city lights on for a non-hivemind individual seems a bit too forced.
I hope in season 2 we see more of an exploration of the pluribus culture and their quirks. I don't think the show is slow... but it does feel somewhat shallow. The show has a lot of interesting details but at the same time it's missing a lot of meat?
You could say it's a show about an alien invasion and a woman that wants her Sprouts back! The lack of existential conflict is due in large part to the asymmetric imbalance in resources between the pluribus and Carol. Instead of a detective thriller that has a lot of cunning intrigue following along the same thought as finding "the perfect wish to outsmart a genie", we get a much more grounded, slow?, and boring? (but much more real) story about a romance novelist vs. the world.
It would be interesting to see what the pluribus does once it is done building the big antennae... does it just kill off all the humans?
I doubt it will go this way, unless successfully spreading the virus unlocks some new stage that causes destruction. I think it would be anti-thetical to the show though and cheapen the premise if the others become evil by achieving their goal. How would they even know? The signal they received travelled for 600 lightyears. Given that anyone affected cannot harm living things under any circumstance including plants, there's a solid chance that no one is around anymore on that originating planet due to everyone having starved.
This is smart writing that mirrors how viruses work in reality. Their main purpose is to spread, and this trumps their ability to harm. This is why, as diseases spread, they tend to become less harmful rather than more, because killing your host before they can spread you to other creatures is not how you succeed in evolution. I doubt they will discover some kill switch. Rather most people will die building the antenna and then presumably all of earth's resources will be dedicated to aligning it with planets we believe are most probable to have intelligent life, which will cause even more people to die until we reach some critical point the amount of people on the planet is so small that even with their pluribus hivemind, their individuality will return, or presumably, Carol and Menousos will figure out how to break individuals out of the hivemind first.
Right. That's essentially what I mean. Starve off. I wasn't thinking of multiple stages but I guess that is possible too.
It would make sense for such a virus to put more pressure on its host species to maximize its reproduction time but in the long-term it wouldn't make a big difference. But our technology stack is pretty brittle even on the industrial side.
Solar panels in environments which require little day-to-day maintenance would lose about 0.5% efficiency per year and completely stop working after a few hundred years (at most). Betavoltaics might last a few thousand years but eventually things stop working. So they definitely need to keep humans alive and happy to maximize the time the antennae can be blastin'.
I hope that in the next season they break someone out of it successfully so that we can actually get an account of what it's like to be inside the hivemind. Since they all work towards a particular goal, it would also be interesting to see what their longterm thinking is, plus what happens when their goal is achieved.
I like the show very much despite the fact i really do not like Carol as a character (this sentiment has gone over the roof during the last episode when she interact with Menousos, but... anyway....).
It poses some interesting questions and I really enjoyed to make hypothesis here and there on how things were going behind the scenes. How are the other 11 guys doing? A part from the girl of the last season did they decide to join the Pluribus? Is Diabaté bored now or is he still enjoying the fake reality created by the Pluribus for him? At the end of the day is it really important that he doesn't want to join and how does this stance conflict with their biological imperative?
What i found interesting is a scene in one of the last episodes where the Pluribus via Zosia seems really interested in the emotions and experience Carol had... that they did not know about. Like it's one of the few moments I think the Pluribus shows a real interest and not a fake one to lure Carol to believe something. I guess that's something i'd like to be addressed in season 2 because the virus has somehow crystalized humanity. It seems like the way the Pluribus "live" has left no space for new experiences or art or anything. What is and what has been, is what will always be.
And talking emotions they seem incapable to feel them anymore a part for a vague sense of contentment? But they seem to have an hunger for new stuff despite their inability to generate new things.
I am wondering if they are able to discover new things too, despite the fact they are working on the staminal cells I am thinking if they can have novel ideas...
Said so.. 8,5 out of 10... expecially because every single human being is flawed in this show, the protagonist in particular :)
I think they can generate new things, theres just no point.
Like if Carol said, "man I really wish so and so finished that book he was working on," they'd pop it out overnight. Or an orginal book. They can do pretty much anything anyone on earth could do.
But unless someone specifically requests new art theres not really any reason to do it.
The way I took it is that while they could easily create new art, they could not experience that art as an audience. As a hive mind, they would all be the creator of that art, and an artist’s relationship with their own work is quite different from anyone else’s. They also know practically everything there is to know about pre-existing art. Therefore, the only way for them to now experience art as a naive recipient is if someone like Carol creates it.
For me, this was the strongest argument why I’d personally not want to join them.
This is what I thought... Once they have an idea... They already know everything about it. Why bother writing a book or paint or... They all know the ending, they already know every single word, every stroke of colour.
It looks like a very boring life, with no sadness but no excitement either.
The series has a lot of things that are kind of wrong and unrealistic, but so did Breaking Bad. Pluribus was the best TV season I've watched since Severance.
Such a great time for great sci-fi.
There was discussion around the first episodes in here where people said they thought the others were a metaphor for fascism or (like I thought) collectivism. But now I think it might be a metaphor for LLMs. LLMs currently don't communicate with each other, but in a lot of ways they contain similar enough data that talking to "them" feels like talking to a single, extremely knowledgeable and slightly alien entity. And I found it interesting how excited the others were about the idea that Carol is going to create something new, even if it's just her rather low-brow romance fantasy novels. I guess they (like LLMs are said to) cannot really create anything new.
I think somebody wrote an entire article on this idea, I'll try to find it and post it.
The LLM idea was something that the showrunner was asked about in an interview and shot down, but acknowledged that it's unlikely that anyone will believe it given how perfect it is. The pilot was written before LLMs were a big thing (I miss that time).
There were some pretty clear faults with it but I still liked it a lot. 8/10. Also very happy I decided to wait until it had finished airing so that I could binge it - I highly doubt I would have enjoyed it as much as I did if I watched it week to week. Yes there is something to be said for slower stuff and just vibing with it, and no it doesn't have to be action packed and dramatic all the time. Actually my favourite Breaking Bad episode is probably The Fly. And my favourite episode of this show was the one where she was by herself and driving around. Soaking the vibes of this show was great. However.. waiting a full week to week to week to see new reveals? Abiding by cliffhangers? Hell no. I am totally over that formula. Almost every show I watch, I will only watch once the whole season is out. This way it also allows me to immerse into it more. And if it's a less than great show, it'll be like oh it's over soon, I'll find out where the story went in no time - this prevents me from dropping shows too. Like Peacemaker season 2 I would probably have not finished were it not for being able to just watch the whole thing when I wanted. That shoddy story week by week? Just not good enough quality for that. Pluribus was good though, but yeah, definitely made better by being able to binge it: in my opinion, all shows are. The structures are so much like movies anyway.
You're totally right about how similar series are to movies now. Before we had the ability to binge them, almost every show had a status quo of some kind they returned to at the end of every episode. Now they are just long movies. I get it, but I also miss the status quo structure sometimes.
That said, I watched pluribus on a weekly basis and enjoyed it anyway, but that's probably because I really liked it.
I'm a bit conflicted on the pacing. I felt much the same way about Pluribus and Severance, though I liked Pluribus a lot more. They're both shows that have very interesting setting, but are focused on the story of the characters and their emotions. I find I end up frustrated because my interest in finding out more about the setting—"us" in Pluribus, the company in Severance—ends up distracting me from the character focused storytelling. I'm not sure it's fair, but I got to the end of both shows feeling like story hadn't actually gone anywhere.