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.
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 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 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.
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 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.
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.
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's 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.
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 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. :)
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.