I am a Pluribus Hater

Okay, I made a post about Pluribus a few days ago after watching the first episode. I thought it was effectively scary and I loved the 'romantasy author who despises her audience' angle. I was pumped up to see how frightening and disorientating the plurb (what I like to call the subsumed mass of infected, unified humanity) might be. But on that front, I was highly disappointed. So let me tell you why I'm kind of a Pluribus hater. Spoilers coming at you.

So, immediately on viewing the second episode I felt that the tone had been lost. The first episode works really well because it is a fantastically paced, frantic unfolding of the key concept. We see the slow and then lightning fast spread of this disease. We see our protagonist, the most misanthropic and bored woman in the world, suddenly have to scrabble around like a ferret to try and save her wife while everything is crumbling around her in the freakiest way possible. That electric feeling is abandoned promptly for a kind of awkward goofiness that didn't work for me.

Carol meets the other survivors, who still have their own individual minds, but they are all brainlessly accepting of the plurb. And you might think, oh, cool, this is making an interesting parallel between literal mindless dronism and people who have little interest in questioning the things around them. Except, no, it doesn't. Most of the survivors are seen almost exclusively in this one episode, and we're pretty much not interested in their inner worlds, what they think about the plurb, or how they feel about what's happening. We barely see them interacting with their now-amalgamated family members, they hardly express any emotion whatsoever, and those that do have any real presence are distinctly unlikeable. And so the series is left, unfortunately, close to characterless.

It doesn't help that Carol has very little to say or do for vast swathes of the show. She throws out a few sarcastic lines, sneers a bit, and that's largely the extent of it. Which is tough when much of the show is spent following just Carol, occasionally accompanied by the Stepford Wife plurb woman. And I gotta be real with you, the plurb itself is unbearably dull. I thought, above all, that this show was going to have some interesting character fun with the plurb. This is a character which is at once its own weird mass, and also every individual on Earth. It's the centrepiece of the show. So why is it just the exact empty non-personality you imagine when you think of a generic robot? It just spends all of its time gazing at Carol and saying "hey Carol, love you Carol".

The show has, I will admit, some glittering moments. The scene where the plurb reluctantly reveals that her wife didn't like her books (even the 'good' one!) is wonderful. For a moment we get some real insight into this character and her (seemingly somewhat fraught) relationship with her wife. It's a moment that really lets you feel the sting of this knowledge, a moment that expands upon Carol's feelings of failure. She's pathetic, and this is how.

I also loved the sheer beauty of Manousos' journey from Paraguay. He is allowed some genuinely moving moments, and feels like an exciting and weird and cool antithesis to the doomer anti-hero thing we're getting from Carol. That said, his character too is pretty thin on the ground. He spends most of his time in the shadows, the mysterious, lurking, muttering Spanish-speaker. I wanted more of him, I wanted to feel like I knew him. I wanted him to be allowed to kill.

In the end, the moments of introspection, world-building, and thoughtful characterisation across this series were far too weak for me, the pacing struggled to cope with a dearth of material (9 episodes? try 5 imo), the tone felt unsatisfying, and the show just felt... empty.

What we're left with is just the lonely, vast beauty of Albuquerque. And I will, at the very least, take that.

One Wycaro book out of five.