I just finished the first two episodes of Vince Gilligan’s Pluribus, and I’m sitting here in the kind of unsettled silence that only truly great television can create. This isn’t your typical alien invasion story—it’s something far more insidious, more thought-provoking, and honestly, more terrifying than any CGI monster could ever be.
A Different Kind of Invasion
The first episode hooked me immediately, but not in the way I expected. The series follows author Carol Sturka, who is one of only eleven people in the world immune to an unexplained virus that transforms the world’s population into content and optimistic citizens. What starts as a mysterious countdown in a deep space communications facility quickly spirals into something that turns the alien invasion genre completely on its head. This isn’t Independence Day. This isn’t War of the Worlds. This is something infinitely stranger.
Carol is a romance novelist and the most miserable woman on earth who must save the world from happiness. Yes, you read that right. The apocalypse in Pluribus comes wrapped in smiles, efficiency, and an eerily placid contentment that spreads like wildfire across the globe.
The Mastermind Returns to Sci-Fi
Vince Gilligan conceived the series’s premise after becoming “weary of writing bad guys” while working on Better Call Saul. After spending over a decade crafting some of television’s most complex antiheroes—Walter White, Saul Goodman—Gilligan wanted to write a hero. But this being Gilligan, that hero is Carol Sturka: misanthropic, creatively dissatisfied, and utterly magnificent in her misery.
Gilligan wrote the role specifically for Rhea Seehorn after being so impressed by her performance as Kim Wexler in Better Call Saul that he and co-creator Peter Gould pivoted the show midstream from a fraternal feud to a doomed romance. And what a choice that was. Seehorn doesn’t just carry this show—she becomes its beating, angry, grieving heart.
The production itself is massive. Portions of the nine-episode season were shot in the Canary Islands and northern Spain, with scenes set at a Norwegian ice hotel and in the hills of Tangier, Morocco, while the production built Carol’s entire neighborhood in the desert outside Albuquerque. This is Gilligan operating on a canvas bigger than anything he’s attempted before, and the scale shows.
Carol Sturka: The Miserable Hero We Need
Carol is a contradiction wrapped in rage. She’s a bestselling author of “speculative historical romance” novels that she secretly despises, writing what she calls “mindless crap” for readers she barely tolerates. Carol is described as “the most miserable person in the world who decides she needs to save Earth from happiness,” and Gilligan drew inspiration from Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the Borg from Star Trek: The Next Generation, and The Twilight Zone.
When everyone around her transforms into eerily cheerful, synchronized beings connected by a hive mind called “the Joining,” Carol’s cynicism becomes her superpower. Her partner Helen (Miriam Shor) succumbs to the virus, leaving Carol alone in a world where conflict, anger, and individuality have been erased. The hive mind created by the Joining has no name, prefacing many introductions with “this individual is known as…”; when Carol asks who they mean by “we,” they respond: “We is us. Just ‘us.’”
What makes Carol fascinating is that she’s genuinely unpleasant at times. She’s self-destructive, petty, and mean-spirited. But she’s also deeply human, and in this new world of forced harmony, that humanity—flaws and all—becomes precious.
Zosia: The Beautiful Face of the Collective
Enter Zosia, played with unsettling warmth by Karolina Wydra. The hive mind sends an emissary named Zosia who looks exactly like the inspiration for the romantic hero in Carol’s novels, having gleaned all of Helen’s memories and knowledge before she died. It’s a choice that’s both manipulative and deeply intimate—the collective using Carol’s own creative fantasies against her.
But Zosia isn’t a simple antagonist. Wydra takes what could be a flat character tasked with offering exposition and turns Zosia into someone Carol might not be able to live without (although Carol would never admit that). Their dynamic crackles with tension—intellectual, emotional, and yes, sexual. Carol is simultaneously repelled by and attracted to Zosia, creating one of the most complex relationships I’ve seen in recent sci-fi television.
Episode 2: When Questions Multiply
If the first episode is the seduction—the slow, creeping dread of watching your world transform—then episode 2 is where things get morally complicated. In episode 2, Carol meets some of the other unassimilated individuals and discovers that 886,477,591 people died as this “peace” scaled up. Nearly a billion people dead for world peace. How do you even process that math?
The episode expands the scope, showing us this new world order in action. The Joined are ruthlessly efficient, collecting bodies with care, pooling humanity’s collective knowledge so that anyone can pilot a plane or perform surgery. They’ve achieved what we’ve always dreamed of: no war, no violence, perfect cooperation. Humanity instantly achieves world peace, while “the Joined” seem to be ruthlessly ethical in their approach to life, no longer slaughtering animals for food and switching all non-emergency power off at night to reduce energy consumption.
So why does it feel so wrong? Why does Carol’s resistance feel righteous even when the alternative is literally hell on Earth? Episode 2 left me with more questions than answers, and I suspect that’s exactly the point.
The Themes That Haunt
The series invites questions about whether the Joining is a metaphor for how AI and the algorithms are eroding our sense of self with comforting convenience, or whether it’s a pure philosophical debate between the risks of freedom and the reassurance of belonging. In our current moment—post-pandemic, drowning in social media’s dopamine hits, watching AI reshape our world—Pluribus feels almost painfully relevant.
This might be the best pandemic-related art we’ve gotten yet, because it comes at those themes from the most unexpected of angles, prying open the lingering trauma from those years to explore the deeper ways that time hurt us all. The show asks: What if the cure is worse than the disease? What if perfect harmony requires the death of the self? What if happiness without choice is just anesthesia?
The title itself is loaded. Pluribus comes from “E pluribus unum”—out of many, one. But what happens when that oneness is forced? When the “many” lose everything that makes them individuals?
The Visual Language
Gilligan hasn’t lost his touch for creating visceral, memorable imagery. The synchronized movements of the Joined are terrifying in their precision. Gilligan has learned to use Albuquerque to his full advantage in Pluribus, with skies that go on forever, creating stark images of cosmic wonder that work equally well in day and night, while faceless cul-de-sacs provide a sense of suburban eeriness.
The show maintains Gilligan’s signature pacing—those long, patient shots that force you to sit with the discomfort. This isn’t television you can scroll through on your phone. It demands your full attention and rewards you for it.
What Makes It Different
Unlike typical post-apocalyptic stories, Pluribus doesn’t give us clear villains. The show examines the concept in an even-handed way, with the Joined being friendly and seemingly blissfully happy, while consent becomes a pressing issue as they seem willing to go to any length to make Carol and the few other individuals happy.
This is body horror by way of The Twilight Zone—ordinary people caught up in extraordinary circumstances that force us to examine what we value most. Is individuality worth the cost of conflict? Is unhappiness the price we pay for authenticity? Can we even trust ourselves to answer these questions?
The Critical Consensus
On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the series holds a 100% approval rating based on 27 critic reviews. Critics are calling it everything from “one of 2025’s best US dramas” to “the best sci-fi mystery since Severance.” The series has already been picked up for a second season at Apple TV.
What’s clear is that Gilligan has created something genuinely original—a show that borrows elements from Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Twilight Zone, and even The Good Place, but synthesizes them into something entirely its own.
Where Do We Go From Here?
Seven more episodes await, and I genuinely have no idea where this story is heading. Will Carol find a way to “cure” humanity? Should she? What happens to the other immune individuals scattered across the globe? And most intriguingly—what makes Carol and the others immune in the first place?
The ending of episode 2 left me breathless. Carol, who seemed ready to flee back to Albuquerque, suddenly stops Air Force One from departing with Zosia aboard. Is it attachment? A theory about defeating the hive? Or something else entirely? I have no idea, and that uncertainty is exhilarating.
Final Thoughts
Pluribus is the kind of show that lodges itself in your brain and refuses to leave. It’s uncomfortable, darkly funny, occasionally heartbreaking, and always thought-provoking. Gilligan has taken everything he learned from Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul—the patient pacing, the complex moral questions, the faith in his audience’s intelligence—and applied it to a high-concept sci-fi premise that feels urgently relevant.
Rhea Seehorn delivers a masterclass in carrying a show almost single-handedly, playing every emotion from rage to grief to begrudging curiosity. If there’s any justice, this performance will finally earn her that Emmy.
Two episodes in, I’m completely hooked. This is event television in the truest sense—something to be discussed, debated, and obsessed over. Whether you’re a Gilligan devotee or just hungry for smart, challenging sci-fi, Pluribus demands your attention.
The first two episodes are streaming now on Apple TV+, with new episodes dropping every Friday through December 26. Trust me—you want to get in on this conversation early.
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