Bad Pluribus Discourse Made Me Like Pluribus

 

I literally cannot escape wrestling help.

This isn’t exactly a response to Lilly’s blog post about how she ultimately didn’t like Pluribus. I was gonna leave a comment on her post, but I ended up thinking of a bunch of stuff that would be too long for a comment, so here’s its own post!

SPOILERS FOR THE ENTIRETY OF PLURIBUS

Not long after episode 2 of Pluribus aired, I made a post on Tumblr that I was a bit uncomfortable with the way Carol, as the only white woman among the other survivors, was the only person who actually saw that the world was worse off now that the Hivemind has taken over. I found it ridiculous that Laxmi would not be furious at her son’s entire personality being yanked from him in an instant, and it was completely cartoonish to me that Koumba’s first thought was “aw hell yeah I can have sex with so many hot women now.”

 At the end of the season, this is still a criticism I hold to be true; even with the introduction of Manousos, I find it extremely silly that that entire plane of non-white people stared dumbly at Carol when she insisted that hey, this might be a bad situation. Vince Gilligan is a great showrunner, but it’s unarguable that his track record when it comes to writing non-white people is… iffy at best.

I got a reply to that post that floored me, and I’m gonna quote it to you now.

“why is it bad though? I understand, losing (biiiiiig question mark here) individuality is scary. The art situation is going to be. weird. (Does a hivemind even need art? Like, I don't need to write a story or draw a picture for myself because I have already imagined them perfectly.) I fail to come up with more downsides. (Unless we take into consideration their weird attitude towards animals and its consequences but that will be cleared up later I assume.) Yes, it will be the end of humanity as we know it, but overall humanity will be in better shape than it's been for a century, I think. I think this is one of the topics we are invited to think over by the writers, and throwing out the concept of the hivemind without even asking "what is it like?" and acting like Carol is the only one with the Correct opinion is short-sighted.

Also we (can) approach this from an individual's point of view. Is that young girl "stupid" for wanting to join her family? The takeover has already happened, and no matter how "bad" the hivemind might be, the og humans' state of isolation from the ENTIRE humanity most likely seems to them less preferable than letting go of their individuality. It doesn't make them somehow inferior to Carol.”

When I read this I think my brain short-circuited. Like, what do you mean. What do you MEAN.

It turns out a lot of people on Tumblr are Hivemind Apologists, even by the end of the season. And not in a jokey, “I’d join the Hivemind if Zosia asked me to because she’s so hot” way, in a genuine, thoughtful way. Which felt so alien to me on a gut level. Which got me wondering why that was. Which then sent my brain into overdrive.

And when that happened, I thought, “Wait. I think I might like this show.”

I'm not trying to say that people who don't like Pluribus were just not thinking about it hard enough. It's just that watching Pluribus week to week and taking the time in between to scroll through the Tumblr tag to find the most baffling takes I could possibly imagine was super, super fun. Reading black-and-white statements about how the Hivemind is good or bad, or if Carol is more justified in sleeping with Zosia's body than Koumba sleeping with all those hot ladies, if the Hivemind is explicitly a metaphor for AI chatbots or colonization or socialism or etc, made me more inclined to analyze Pluribus in a way I might not have if I didn't feel the need to counter some opinions that came off to me as extremely strange.

In the end, I'd give Pluribus season 1 a 7/10, and I'm pretty happy about the set up for next season. I'm looking forward to Carol and Manousos maximizing their joint hater slay. I really, really hope we get more time dedicated to the other survivors. I need to know everything about that little girl in Lesotho. I hope she's asking the Hivemind to get her a unicorn or something. To me, Pluribus is not the best TV show of the year (it's The Chair Company, but I might expand on that in another post), but I like it! 

 Also, the actual main reason Carol sucks is because she's wasting those SD cards. Those things are expensive and you're out here flushing them down the toilet? Do you not know how to format those things? I think Carol might need a computer literacy class because she's out here directly hooking up her camcorder to TVs with an HDMI cable. Carol we know you have a laptop. What are you doing girl.