‘Pluribus’ Isn’t the Show We Thought We Were Watching

This story contains spoilers for Pluribus up to and including episode 7, “The Gap.”

The first thing that a writer gets out into the world carries the germ of their whole career.

Vince Gilligan’s first script for The X-Files was “Soft Light,” a haunting, broken-man-on-the-run story. Tony Shalhoub plays a physicist, the victim of an experiment gone wrong that has left his shadow a literal black hole that eradicates anyone who wanders into it. Cops hunting him, good Samaritans—they all get gobbled up into subatomic particles as Shalhoub begs for them to stay away. “Soft Light” is one of the early-season gems that made The X-Files a phenomenon, the Twilight Zone–Twin-Peaks-conspiracy-theory feast that did for network TV what Enter the Wu-Tang did for ‘90s rap.

Gilligan wrote plenty more excellent scripts for X-Files and would helm the eventual The Lone Gunmen spin-off. And, if you haven’t been watching TV for the past fifteen years, he’d also go on to remake the American crime drama twice. But I’d argue that “Soft Light” is the skeleton key to Gilligan: Lonely people who can’t help but hurt others. Or, maybe, people who really do think that they exist best alone.

The formalities: his new show Pluribus is outstanding. One of the shows of the year, urgent and rich and thrilling in ways that only Andor and The Pitt could match. The sleight-of-hand shuffle among genres is exquisite: from sci-fi to noir to one-woman-play to farce to tragedy. The cold open of episode two, “Pirate Lady,” in which a woman we’ll come to know as Zosia (Karolina Wydra) traverses a Tangiers literally still smoldering from the alien hive-mind takeover hits like a wordless, balletic Bourne-movie set piece. Chisel star Rhea Seehorn’s name onto any and all TV acting awards for the foreseeable. Everyone else should just stay home. Her performance as Carol—very successful, existentially peeved Romantasy author left one of the last dozen non-hive-minded souls on earth—dances through absurdity, rage, confusion, resolve, horniness, trolling, devotion.

Each episode of Pluribus has at least one Seehorn masterclass. In “Pirate Lady,” you get two. Carol desperately wants to bury her partner, killed during the hive-mind takeover, in their backyard. Carol fails, her shovel hitting rock again and again. The rust-colored New Mexican earth will not give. Then she asks Zosia, her assigned ambassador from the hive mind, for help and the team—everyone on planet earth—helicopters in an excavator to dig the grave for her. What begins as Carol’s total commitment becomes failure becomes the kind of pissy resignation that you’d see on a gearhead uncle’s countenance when they have to call AAA.

In that same episode, Carol asks to be flown to meet the other dozen unconverted (there’s a religious metaphor inside Pluribus as rich as the body-snatching one). They stick Carol with a T.G.I. Friday’s server as the pilot—each individual member of the hive mind having access to all knowledge on earth, after all—and she squawks about how uncomfortable she feels having a twenty-something in wacky suspenders fly the plane. The next episode, “Grenade” starts on Carol’s return flight. The hive mind has now staffed the flight with two middle-aged, Ed-Harris-in-The–Right–Stuff types, actual pilots before the great joining. When she asks the dudes if they were allocated to her because of her anxiety on the last flight, they reply “That’s an affirmative, Carol.” Seehorn twitches from shame and then settles into momentary contentment—at least the cloud mind of alien DNA read her correctly. Absurdity is tragedy holding on for a minute longer. Seehorn is doing a one-woman Samuel Beckett play right here on Apple TV.