More Thoughts on Pluribus

Last week I posted a video about my frustrations with Pluribus, and some of the responses have been interesting.

Lately when I post a video I get a wave of sticky anxiety that stays with me for a few days. There is something frightening about dropping the video over the cliff and into the deep, dark ocean of viewers - a distinctly unusual feeling, so different from posting here to a small, usually very chill audience of blog enthusiasts.

It makes one shudder. 

Many of the comments on this video, though, were reasonably similar to the comments on the Pluribus-hating post I made here a while ago. Yes, some agree, the plot meanders and the season stretches out its episodes in a sometimes unsatisfying way. Maybe, some say, Carol isn't that interesting when left alone for long stretches of episode time.

But some of the ways people disagree with me (and they sure do!) are fascinating. Maybe most baffling of all is the stalwart conviction that I can't be right about the season's position on the plurb, because they (the commenter) think the plurb is morally excellent. Regardless of your own philosophical wrestlings with the plurb as a force of good or evil (which, I have to admit to you, I do find deranged), the season makes it clear by the finale that this is a sinister force with absolutely no concern for preserving any facet of humanity beyond an encyclopedic pilfering of its knowledge. Those humans aren't in there! Not really!

Yes, the season wants to play with our moral view of the plurb, make us ask questions about whether there could be a net positive in such a complete takeover of human life, or at the very least if it could rock ass to be the lucky individual who gets to interface with the plurb as if it's a personal sex butler, but why is Manousos rushing to the action if not to be our vector for rooting for the plurb's reckoning and destruction? That's the arc, baby!!

Not that I begrudge rooting for a villain - I said I'd love a more evil Carol in this very video - but let's call a plurb a plurb here.

Another related thing I'm seeing is impassioned defense of the non-Carol individuals who love that plurb. No Lilly, people are saying. You don't get it - they accept the plurb because their family members are plurbed, and because to them, this collective mass is not such a nightmare. They come from more community-minded cultures, you see, and quite frankly they're right and I love the plurb and I wanna get plurbed myself.

And to that I say, okay plurb-lover, I get that you love the plurb and that you wanna for real get plurbed. However, there's a few reasons I'm not into this one. The first is that, as I said in my video, the season doesn't explore why these people think the plurb is fine. We don't see a single meaningful interaction between one of these individuals and a plurbed family member of theirs. We categorically don't explore what their reasons are for deciding they're cool with it, and I don't buy that coming from a culture which values community over the inidividual would mean you'd see a big alien thing that absorbs all of the humans you know and love as equivalent to said community. I think one could see that as a threat to community! I mean, community is a thing comprised of individuals, not a hivemind. They're not the same. Couldn't it even be reductive and insulting to reduce community-focus to this extreme erasure of the individual? Individuals can exist without community, after all, but community can't exist without individuals.

I would love to see a more complex view of these characters within the show. I'm not saying these characters are simply 'bad people' for having no problem with their apocalypse, just that the show gives us no reason to understand them. We don't spend time with them, and we don't gain any perspective on what their views are. Koumba is the only real mouthpiece for pro-plurb sentiment within the show, and he both doesn't offer a convincing argument (unless you love the no crime thing), and seeks to primarily use the plurb to have all the young women of the world service him indiscriminately. The plurb-lovers, then, come across as idiots and dweebs. I can't relate to them. And I don't think I have to, but it would be nice to feel that they weren't so much like cardboard cut-outs.

Finally, if these characters are so happy with the situation - with their family and friends being enplurbened - because of their alleged cultural predeliction for community, then why do all of them (with the exception of Darling Kusimayu) refuse to join the plurb themselves? You'd think if this was such a culturally defined moral good in their eyes that they would join too, but no - they're happy for their families to be sucked up into the plurb without consent, but when they have the choice: it's a no. That's pretty interesting. It's almost as if the show is categorically characterising them as a hypocritical group of thoughtless rubes who are willing to destroy the world and throw other people away for the benefits afforded to them in a mass-death event. Hmm...

But perhaps my favourite viewer response was one commenter's claim that reviewing the first season of a TV show, that judging an entire hypothetical show by its baby season, is like judging a movie based on its first ten minutes. A very silly one, but yes, perhaps. Let's all be quiet until father Gilligan feeds us a scrumptious fourth season. Then, some say, I may be permitted to judge.