Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul are two of the best television shows ever made. Both created by Vince Gilligan, the latter with Peter Gould, they use crime-drama frameworks for lengthy, thoughtful, ultimately melancholy examinations of the way humans choose expediency over morality. At least that’s how we critics tend to think and talk about them.
Equally important to their success and well-deserved reputation: they were scary as shit! That whole multi-episode Breaking Bad arc pitting Walter White against Gus Fring in a lethal stand-off? The white-knuckle scene in which Nacho Varga must either poison his boss or die trying? Todd Alquist? Lalo Salamanca? Breathtaking suspense and thrilling action involving best-in-class TV psychopaths was as big a part of the BB/BCS appeal as the slow spiritual deaths of Heisenberg and Saul Goodman.
So when Pluribus, Gilligan’s new show for Apple TV, starts off with a harrowing depiction of the apocalypse, localized in Albuquerque, New Mexico, maybe I shouldn’t be as surprised as I am. In addition to his own two stone-cold masterpieces, Gilligan also worked on The X-Files, so this nucleotide was within him all along, just waiting to be activated.
Rhea Seehorn stars as Carol Sturko, a novelist whose romantasy series about a female buccaneer sailing the purple slipsands in search of her proud, haughty corsair lover Raban has made her a huge success. It’s also made her hate herself.
Sure, she has legions of adoring fans who buy every book and hang on every word. Most of them are women, and most of the women are middle-aged or older; the one male fan is a cosplayer who mansplains nautical terminology to her. But Carol thinks the work itself is lowest-common-denominator crap—a bad ripoff of genre work she doesn’t much like anyway.
This does raise the question of how she found herself in this mess in the first place, not that her wife and manager Helen (Miriam Shor) sees it this way. The books have made her rich, famous, and beloved. What more could she want?
Well, what she wants is to write a serious novel, one of which has been in the works for over four years. Helen promises her she’ll clear a space in the publication schedule to enable her to complete and publish this passion project before she has to crank out another purple-prose-on-the-purple-sand stinker.
It’s funny how life gets in the way sometimes, isn’t it? You might aspire to literary greatness but find yourself typecast as a writer of glorified bodice-rippers. Or you might wind up getting dosed by an alien-designed mind virus that causes you to seize uncontrollably for several minutes, only to reawaken as a placid pod person. You never know!
Because long before we encounter Carol and Helen, we find ourselves on a research base in the desert near a massive satellite array, listening for extraterrestrial transmissions. Nerdy, nebbishy, excited scientists flip out when they finally find one, and determine its apparent coded message is in fact a recipe for a semi-organic self-replicating virus-esque nucleotide. (All of this gets explained with a helpful infographic later in the episode.)
For months, the military scientists involved test the thing on a variety of animals, to no avail—until one rat succumbs, reawakens, bites a researcher, and ignites the end of the world as we know it.
The virus, or whatever it is, rewrites the victim’s brain after that initial seizure passes. They then become a sort of automaton, a vessel of a collective consciousness shared by every infected person. Every infected person then works with military efficiency to spread the virus as far and wide as possible.
It’s not long before the initial contamination breach that Air Force jet fighters are spraying chemtrails of the stuff across the United States, and the entire world. With a speed that is frankly improbable but damned exciting to watch, the mind virus takes hold—not just in Albuquerque but around the globe.
Carol, who for some reason is immune, watches in horror as cars crash, buildings burn, hospitals are paralyzed, TV goes off the air and, worst of all, Helen dies from the brain injury she incurs when the seizure causes her to collapse to the concrete where she was standing outside when it happened.
Her attempt to revive Helen only to be forced to say goodbye to her forever while sparks from a broken electrical transformer shower down behind them is the episode’s emotional and visual high point.
Eerily, distressingly, maddeningly, all the virus’s victims seem to know this. They know Carol’s name, they know she’s lost her wife, they know where she lives, they know where her spare key is hidden. They know enough to program the one still existing television broadcast to call her out by name and provide her a number to call for answers.
That number is answered by Davis Taffler (Peter Bergman), a grinning undersecretary of Agriculture or some such. (He openly tells her he was given the gig because he worked in government, he was “intact,” and he was “wearing a suit.”)
Taffler explains the whole extraterrestrial transmission thing and repeats the claims of other zombified people that Carol is in no danger from anyone bound by this “psychic glue.” It now unites all of humanity, with a grand total of eleven exceptions worldwide, one of whom is Carol.
The reason why this could be is one of the few things “we/us” don’t actually know. But they’re working on it, rest assured! And just as soon as they figure out what’s wrong with Carol, they’ll fix it. Until then, her life is completely her own. Have fun with it, Carol!
Clearly, Pluribus is not a show that’s interested in hiding its influences. George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead. Zack Snyder’s remake of Romero’s sequel, Dawn of the Dead. Danny Boyle’s genre-reinventing 28 Days Later and its rage virus. David Cronenberg’s Shivers and its parasite-triggered nymphomania. Phillip Kaufman’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers and its mandatory chill vibes. Hideaki Anno’s Neon Genesis Evangelion and its hush-hush Human Instrumentality Project. Stephen King’s The Stand and the spread of Captain Trips.
David Benioff and Dan Weiss’s 3 Body Problem came out too recently to serve as a direct influence, I’d imagine, but Liu Cixin’s source novels didn’t. The whole thing reads like a big-budget reimagining of TV’s dystopian ur-text, Patrick McGoohan’s The Prisoner.
But did any of the above stare Rhea Seehorn as a depressed Diana Gabaldon, wearing yellow in her personal life because it’s directly opposite her own trademark purple on the color wheel? Were any of them written and directed by Vince Gilligan, a filmmaker whose eye works as well along the temporal axis—stretching out takes to diabolical lengths and immersing the viewer in the chaos—as it does along the spatial axes frequently framing Carol to look either trapped or dwarfed by the events surrounding her?
No and no!
Apple TV has invested more deeply in science fiction as a genre than any network or streamer I can think of has invested in anything since the CW went all-in on teen soaps 20-odd years ago. They aren’t all winners, but the disparate strengths and selling points of Severance, Silo, and Foundation, to name just three, prove that enough of them are to make any new SF offering worth checking out.
Unsurprisingly, Vince goddamn Gilligan’s reentry into the genre does not disappoint. Anchored by Rhea Seehorn reborn as an unlikely scream queen, Pluribus is scary and unsettling enough to make you wonder why the streamer didn’t drop it Halloween weekend instead.
https://decider.com/2025/11/07/pluribus-episode-1-recap/
