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PaperclipPerfector
2d ago
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So, has anyone else watched Vince Gilligan's new series Pluribus yet, and if so, what do you think of it?
Personally, I'm currently a bit lukewarm on it so far. It's still early days so I won't pass premature judgement on it, but a common complaint is that the show past episode 1 doesn't seem to have enough compelling material per episode to justify its runtime, and frankly I agree. Episodes are long and drawn-out, with much of the second and third episode being focused around a core repeated cycle of "Zosia (or some other stand-in for the hive) tries to do things for Carol" - "Carol gets aggressively angry at Zosia" - "[insert bad thing] happens" - "Carol feels bad" - repeat. The story beats are so repetitive.
I understand that this show is in part meant to be a tone piece and that the long extended shots are meant to build atmosphere, but the vibe isn't good enough to carry the show on its back alone (sometimes the show is so sterile and clean-looking that it comes off almost like stock footage to me), and there are plenty of shows which achieve a thoughtful pace while also moving the plot along in interesting and compelling ways. Severance, season 1 in particular, comes to mind as an example. The problem's not so much that it's slow and more that it's not intriguing, that the extended scenes don't achieve much for how long they are, and that there's a lack of economy in the writing. So many scenes exist to achieve only one goal; e.g. the extended scene where Carol tests the thiopental sodium on herself and watches the footage from it just accomplishes one very simple aim, and yet it takes so long.
My barometer for whether I like a show or not is whether I'm interested to see the next episode, and frankly I could drop this at any point and not really have much of an urge to see what happens next. There's a serious lack of compelling mysteries within the show to drive viewer interest, with the only question I can think of amounting to "How are they going to progress this?" which is a question that moves the focus from something within the story to something outside of it, namely the writers' intentions. In addition, there's so much philosophical ground you could explore (Does disconnecting a member from the hive amount to lobotomy or even murder? Is "de-integrating" the hive, like Carol wants to do, tantamount to killing a hyperconscious, hyperintelligent organism that might have more moral worth, strictly speaking, than any human in existence? And it does claim to be happy), but the show just doesn't engage with much of that. At least, not at the moment.
Carol as a protagonist is quite unagentic, which means that much of the series consists of long sections of her engaging in pointless filler like sleeping on the couch, getting impotently mad at the hivemind, wanting her Sprouts back, etc, while not probing the hive or asking questions that a more interesting protagonist would when placed in such a situation (Episode 4 features more of this, to be fair). A common defence is that her behaviour is realistic given the situation she's put in, but a more important question IMO is if she's a compelling protagonist to watch, and I don't think that's the case - her characterisation and behaviour is paper thin, and she doesn't particularly get up to anything that makes you hugely like her or root for her either. She is demonstrated to be an absolutely miserable person even before the soft apocalypse occurs, and it doesn't make her a particularly enjoyable or interesting character to follow when you're in her shoes all the time.
Yet another element that makes it worse is that she only has a bunch of eternally jovial yes-men to interact with the whole time, and this makes the premise wear thin very quickly. All the interactions feel as deep as a puddle, and this may be the point, but it also makes for a very shallow viewing experience. Most of the other human characters aren't much better either. I was fucking flabbergasted by how easy it was for them to accept life with the hivemind looming over them without thinking too much about what it implied, and in fact outright aggressively attacked anyone who suggested doing anything about it. They seemed almost like ridiculous caricatures, completely in denial, who had been set up just so the writers could knock them down.
I don't think it's a bad show, not yet at least. But the unending positivity towards this show makes me feel like I'm taking crazy pills, and I often see such criticisms of the writing being addressed with thin, condescending dismissals along the lines of "You only think the show is uninteresting because you have TikTok brain", or worse, "People don't like Carol because she's a woman" (which is the way the entire Gilligan fandom has been dismissing criticism of the writing of female characters ever since people had the temerity to dislike Skylar White). I'm not saying it's impossible to like the show for valid reasons, but any and all criticism has not been not treated well.
I was so powerfully underwhelmed by Breaking Bad that I have zero interest in watching anything else Gilligan is involved in. I was intrigued by a column suggesting the show can be read as a metaphor for the Great Awokening, but watching a show I don't enjoy just because I agree with the underlying politics is pretty antithetical to the way I consume media. Weird to think that the entire life cycle of this generation of wokeness – initiation, peak and recession – all took place since the Breaking Bad finale.
Sometimes I feel like I came from a timeline where affirmative action was already going strong for the better part of the second half of the 21st century, and the timeline got merged into one where it only ascended in the 2010s. Color blindness hasn't been "good" for decades; Bakke was in 1978.
Color blindness and affirmative action are incompatible. I remember wearing a t-shirt saying "Love Sees No Color" shortly after returning from Africa.* Affirmative action was as strong as ever. No one seemed to acknowledge the contradiction.
*around 1993
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