Not A Review Of “Pluribus”

So this week we finished watching the first season of Pluribus, on Apple TV, and by “we finished” I mean “I finished”, because my wife checked out of Pluribus almost immediately. In fact she checked out before she even started, when I tried and failed to lure her in with the trailer:

Wife: “What’s this?”
Me: “This is Pluribus, the new show from the Breaking Bad guy.¹“
Wife (eyeing trailer dubiously): “This reminds me of that other show.”
Me (beat): “I need a little more to go on.”
Wife: “The one where they’re dead and everyone is trying to make them happy?”
Me: “You mean The Good Place?”
Wife: “Yeah, that one. I didn’t like that one.”

My wife had at least tried to watch The Good Place for a while, but it never succeeded in catching her interest, so I ended up finishing it on my own². The aftertaste of that show apparently was so strong that she didn’t even want to try this one, despite its pedigree; just because you made one of her favorite shows of all time doesn’t mean she’s going to cut you any slack with your new show.³

Anyway, from that trailer, I had immediately picked up that everybody on Earth had become telepathic and/or possibly part of a hive mind, except for Carol, which immediately put me in mind of this classic Onion story:

Of course, I didn’t know the exact mechanism by which it happened (we’ll get into that in a minute) or exactly how it was all going to work, but one thing that was quickly established during the show was that the hive mind ― the term that the Internet seems to have adopted for them is “Plurbs”⁴ so I will use that here ― does not like to see animals confined, so they immediately open all the zoos, labs, preserves, etc., and they also “release”⁵ all the pets, which leads to a scene where … Oh, hang on, wait a minute:

Now where was I? Oh right. Yeah, so the Plurbs don’t keep or care for domestic animals, and in this one scene towards the end of the series, one of the few remaining non-Plurbed humans ― there are believed to be twelve of them at first, a number which I am sure is not accidental⁶, although a thirteenth is later revealed ― becomes joined to the Hive, and so of course the first thing she does is “free” abandon a baby goat she had been caring for. The baby goat does not take this well.

I decided my wife just had to see this scene, because if I was going to be sad about an abandoned baby goat then by God so was she.

Me: “Come here and watch this. This is like the saddest thing ever.”⁷
Wife (unsure of why she would want to do such a thing): “What is it?”
Me: (explains all about how the Plurbs don’t keep animals, as described above, then starts playing the above scene)
Wife: “Is something going to happen to the goat?”
Me: “Not exactly, but the goat is central to it.”

So she watched the scene with me and, uh, had a different reaction than I did.

Me: “Poor baby goat.”
Wife: “Poor baby goat?”
Me: “Look how sad it is.”
Wife: “It’s not sad. It’s very well-trained. It stopped right on its target and knows it’s going to get a treat. Whoever worked with that goat did a great job.”

So there you have it. The saddest scene in Pluribus, possibly in existence, starring the world’s best-trained goat.

Okay, remember that earlier spoiler warning? Here come some more, and these are bigger, so let’s trot out River Song again so you have another chance to change your mind and go watch the show instead.

Still here? Okay, don’t say I didn’t warn you.

As I mentioned that from the trailer I immediately twigged to the fact that Pluribus would be some kind of mass-telepathy or hive mind scenario (not that this was particularly difficult to figure out), but I didn’t know what the exact mechanism was going to be. Puppeteering aliens? Technology gone awry? Cosmic radiation? Well as it turned out the answer is, all of the above. Kind of. What actually happens (this is all in the first episode, so while it’s a spoiler, it’s not a major one) is that one of our many radio telescopes finally picks up an identifiably alien transmission, which appears to be encoded in some way; and we, being clever monkeys, eventually figure out that it’s describing a lysogenic RNA virus, so of course that means we have to genetically engineer it and find out what it does.⁸ Unfortunately we are not that clever of monkeys and it ends up getting loose, first accidentally, then deliberately, until, bam! Everybody has it, except for Carol and her vanishingly small number of fellow immunes. Cue seven billion people holding hands and singing kumbaya around a virtual communal campfire.

Now, season one of the show ends without explaining the exact the origins of the virus but, having read plenty of SF, I’ve gone straight to the hypothesis that it’s a Dark Forest strike being broadcast randomly in the hopes of taking down any species with sufficiently advanced technology that it might be a threat. Let’s look at the facts presented so far:

1. Only a civilization that can (a) receive radio transmissions and (b) genetically engineer viruses could possibly be affected by it, which is something only a species that likes to investigate things and has the technology to do so⁹ is going to do; and
2. The effect of the virus is to create a worldwide hive mind that erases individuality and, seemingly, ambition or curiosity, which would certainly stifle any future technological advancements, if for no other reason than
3. Those affected will not kill or harm any other living thing, to the extent that they won’t even harvest crops, meaning that, as the Plurbs themselves admit, almost everyone on Earth is going to starve to death over the next decade or so; but before that happens
4. The Plurbs want to transmit the virus’s blueprint out from Earth so that they can bestow the “gift” on yet more deserving civiliations.

So, yeah, what you’ve got there is a cosmic chain-letter-cum-suicide pact whereby all the recipients are going to self-terminate, but not before they propagate the chain letter themselves. If this isn’t textbook high efficiency, low effort, natural-resource-preserving¹⁰, fire-and-forget Dark Forest weaponry, nothing is. But I guess we’ll have to wait and see before we find out for sure if the virus is intended as a gift or a curse.

All I know is, anything that makes you abandon your bleating baby goat isn’t something I would want infecting my planet. And neither does my lap cat.

1. Also known as Vince Gilligan. But not by my wife, who would have no idea who that was if I said his name, even though Breaking Bad is one of her favorite shows of all time. ↩︎
2. I liked it, but of course, I like everything. Almost. ↩︎
3. “What have you done for me lately?” ― My wife to Vince Gilligan, probably. ↩︎
4. Not to be confused with “plebes”. ↩︎
5. If that’s what you want to call it. ↩︎
6. I’m not the only one thinking this way. ↩︎
7. Obviously one sad abandoned baby goat is going to upset me more than the roughly one billion humans who reacted badly to the virus and died instead of joining the hive mind. ↩︎
8. Because why not. ↩︎
9. I.E., one that has “I am a threat” written all over it. ↩︎
10. Not that I expect aliens to actually show up in Pluribus, a la Three-Body Problem, but if they did, they would certainly be able to help themselves to all our stuff. ↩︎