Vince Gilligan’s latest show, Pluribus, is a departure from his previous hits, Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul. Eschewing the crime drama and action associated with those earlier shows, Pluribus takes a premise that sounds like an episode of The Twilight Zone or Black Mirror and uses it as the backdrop for gorgeous cinematography and scenes of impressive performances from Rhea Seehorn, who often has the challenge of acting alone in a scene or with one or two other actors who are playing essentially brainwashed people with little personality.

It is also Gilligan’s first show to mention Finnegans Wake by name!

Read on for my thoughts about Pluribus, its relationship to the Wakean theme of the “Fortunate Fall,” and some musings on whether the show can be read as a criticism of Communism, Capitalism, Buddhism, Christianity, or something else.

In the first episode, Carol’s wife, Helen, references Joyce’s novel when she urges Carol to publish the book she’s been working on for years. At this point, the episode has already quickly established that Carol is a successful pop culture fantasy author who nevertheless regards her book series (whose titles sound vaguely Game of Thrones-esque) as mere slop for the masses, not real artistic achievements. Her masterpiece in progress is a serious novel called Bitter Chrysalis (a name that amusingly sort of sounds like Better Call Saul if you squint your ears at it, so maybe Carol is a Vince Gilligan stand-in). Helen tells her to take the time to polish it and get it out.

Helen: I think people will love it. You ever read, um, Finnegans Wake?

Carol: No. I tried to. In grad school.

Helen: It’s probably great. I don’t know. [sighs] All I know is it made me miserable trying to get through it. I figure… you make even one person happy, maybe that’s not art. But it’s something.…

I’m sure readers of this blog can relate to this feeling about Finnegans Wake. We likely all went through a phase in our relationship to the book during which we could say similar things.

This brief exchange is fascinating, especially in the context of the theme of happiness in Pluribus. We later learn in the series that Helen actually thought Bitter Chrysalis was mediocre at best — and, in fact, stopped reading it halfway through — so she seems to be encouraging the publication mostly to make Carol happy. And, of course, Carol’s fantasy novels make her fans happy, even if those novels are as middling as her work in progress. Heck, even Carol is later revealed to like her fantasy books more than she lets on, if her dramatic reading under the effects of sodium thiopental and her conversation with Zosia in Episode 8 are any indication.

Contrast those kinds of authentic happiness — created by even mediocre art — with both the frustration caused by the high art of Modernists like Joyce and the druggie bliss that the Hive Mind wishes to inflict on the entire universe.

Seen in this light, Pluribus is a celebration of everyday human happiness, the kind you get from geeking out about a piece of trashy pop culture that may not be “good” (according to whom, some egghead high-culture weirdo?) but it sure is fun. You don’t need to puzzle out Joyce or meld your mind with billions of other people. Regular, everyday happiness is superior to those things. It’s something, alright.

Okay, so let’s get into the premise of this show. Earth receives a transmission from a distant planet, and the transmission turns out to be instructions to create a virus, which of course humans immediately try to do. It escapes from a lab and infects first a handful of people and then spreads to the entire human race. The virus causes essentially a mind meld, a “psychic glue” that unites all humans on earth. The show isn’t clear about exactly what these “Plurbs,” as I call them, experience, but presumably they somehow continue to be individuals but also understand each other so intimately that it completely changes who they were before assimilating. Now everyone is smiley and blissed out and acts in unison to work for what they all agree (?) is the greater good. Each Plurb’s experiences remain their own, but all of their memories and knowledge are shared across the Hive Mind with apparently perfect recall of everything. For example, a cleaning woman saw the inside of Carol’s refrigerator a few days before the series began, and now the Hive Mind knows exactly how much milk Carol had. The Hive knows precisely what Carol was served for dinner in a restaurant ten years ago, on exactly which date. Etc.

There’s some debate among fans as to whether individual people really still exist inside the Hive Mind or whether the individuals joining the Hive have functionally been killed and taken over by a new entity, which has only one mind, and which uses the individual joined bodies as appendages, basically.

It’s unclear what the truth is, because the show is frustratingly vague about the details of the mind meld, and the show overall doesn’t seem interested in really exploring the possibilities and philosophical questions raised by the joining. I think what the show is trying to go for is that individuals are still “in there,” inside the Hive, as individuals, but they are so intricately connected to everyone else that they have been utterly transformed beyond recognition. For example, imagine the worst person you know and then imagine that person being immediately endowed with intimate knowledge of how everyone else on earth feels about him and feels about his actions. Further, he instantly gains the knowledge, memories, and training of every psychologist on earth, and he immediately is able to diagnose his own maladapted behavior as defense mechanisms. There’s no way that a sudden influx of that sort of knowledge wouldn’t drastically change the person. Someone who was, for example, routinely rude and condescending would probably no longer feel like being that way.

At least, I think that’s what the show is going for. Everyone instantly becomes the best version of themselves and wants to work in perfect cooperation with everyone else, and authentically wants to do it of their own free will, and is able to cooperate perfectly because of the mind meld.

Of course, this raises the question of how transforming each person into this “perfect Plurb” is functionally different from killing each person and/or depriving him or her of free will.

Carol is among a baker’s dozen people on earth who are somehow immune to this virus. The Hive wants to infect them to make them join the mind meld, and is working on a scientific means to do so, but only because the Hive is convinced it will make the immune happy. While they’re working on this, the Plurbs continually insist that they want happiness for the immune, and they do absolutely everything in their power to satisfy any whims the immune have until such time as they can be assimilated.

Carol is upset at the Hive and suspicious of it — not least because the spread of the virus resulted in the death of her wife — and she wants to reverse the joining, but her fellow immune seem varying degrees of complacent about this new world — some even greatly enjoy it. A major part of the conflict, then, is between individuality and the functional erasure of it in the name of (what the Plurbs call) “happiness.”

I’ve called Pluribus a “critique of Paradise” because the Plurbs are building Heaven on earth. Everyone works together, everyone’s happy, no one’s sad; there’s no more war, there’s no more poverty, there’s no more injustice; gone are racism, sexism, every -ism you could rage against. Gone, all gone. Nothing but Plurby joy is left.

This is an image of the “Heaven” promised by many religions, or of some conceptions of the “enlightenment” promised by some Eastern religions: a perfect world, a world populated by humans who have become the best selves they’re capable of being.

And man, does it suck.

It’s an empty world full of nothing. No more creation of art. No jokes. No complex emotions. No difficult relationships to navigate in ways that reward you or help you grow. No struggle, nothing to strive for.

Just marching in perfect lock step with blissed-out weirdos.

The premise of this show is really a stunning illustration of the fact that it is humanity’s flaws that make life worth living. I’ll put it bluntly: if you take away humanity’s ability to fuck up, you take away everything that gives meaning to life.

It’s the message that’s central to Finnegans Wake: the Fortunate Fall, the “felix culpa” or “happy fault,” the idea that the Fall is ultimately a good thing — in both its religious/mystical sense of the Fall from the Garden of Eden (the Fall out of Paradise and into a messed up world, or the Fall out of cosmic unity into individuality, where we can suffer) and the secular sense of the Fall as our individual screw-ups and mistakes.

The Fall is a good thing because it leads to the possibility of the greater good of redemption, forgiveness, personal growth, and meaning. As Joyce puts it,

O foenix culprit! Ex nickylow malo comes mickelmassed bonum. 

Out of fault/misdeeds comes the fallen world of contraries, the foes Shem (Nick) and Shaun (Mick), and the greater good/bonum. There are shades of the phrase creatio ex nihilo (creation from nothing) and ex malo bonum fit (out of evil comes good) [and apparently, according to the annotations, the phrase “Many a little makes a mickle [makes a lot],” twisted into “Many a mickle makes a muckle,” in which both “mickle” and “muckle” mean a “large amount”; lots of littles and manys make a great many]

The idea of a Felix Culpa is a tough sell for a lot of people, who live in a thoroughly fucked up world. This “Fortunate Fall” stuff does sound, on first blush, like a philosophy made for privileged people in their ivory tower. Try telling a drug addict living on the streets, or an abused single mother living in abject poverty, that the bad stuff in life is ultimately good because struggle gives life meaning. I imagine it sounds pretty damn heartless to their ears.

For me, the lesson of the Fortunate Fall is not that we should cease to try to improve life — and certainly not that we should tell suffering people to “suck it up” and be rugged individualists or whatever — but that we recognize that perfection is both impossible and, in the final analysis, undesirable. That realization can help us let go of our striving for perfection and can enable us to deal better with the messy reality in front of us on its own terms, encouraging us that it can be enough just to nudge the world along in positive ways as best we can.

Of course, I’m frustrated that Pluribus doesn’t really do all that much to engage with these ideas, at least not directly. Take the character Diabete, for example. I assume the direction his character is going in is akin to the old Twilight Zone episode “A Nice Place to Visit,” where a career criminal dies and is sent to a paradisal afterlife where he gets everything he wants. He wins every card game, eats whatever he wants, sleeps with all the “dames” he’d like, has whatever experiences he can think of, and never feels pain or discomfort…and in a very short time, he can’t stand it. The twist, of course, is that he’s not in Heaven; he’s in Hell. A world truly without suffering — without any failure or struggle — would be an intolerable Hell.

I have to assume this is where Diabete’s story is going because nothing much happens with him in Season 1. In the two or three scenes in which he appears, we see him in the “having fun” stage of exploring this playground heaven…and that’s it. Maybe I’ll feel different in a decade, when all of Pluribus is complete and I can go back and watch the entire show in one go and appreciate his full character arc, but as it stands, Season 1 ends up feeling incomplete and hollow in some ways because it doesn’t dig in to many of the interesting ideas its premise sets up. And sure, it’s one season of presumably many, but a season of a TV show still ought to feel like a dramatic unity.

But anyway, I digress. While some viewers see the Hivemind as a version of Finnegans Wake — with all the many characters interconnected, like the aspects of the dreamer in Joyce’s novel — I see it as a kind of anti-Finnegans Wake. The Plurbs are humanity stripped of all its foibles and flaws and raucous battles and etc., all the things that make history, and the Wake, so interesting. If all humanity ever did was cooperate in utter bliss, Shem and Shaun would have nothing to do in the damn novel. If conflict is the essence of drama, it is also the essence of what makes us human, the story of Here Comes Everybody.

Listen to Shem and Shaun — in their guises as Juva and Muta at the end of the novel — celebrate the vital role of the “instinct of comabt”:

Juva: Sec! Wartar wartar! Wett.

Muta: Ad Piabelle et Purabelle?

Juva: At Winne, Woermann og Sengs.

Muta: So that when we shall have acquired unification we shall pass on to diversity and when we shall have passed on to diversity we shall have acquired the instinct of combat and when we shall have acquired the instinct of combat we shall pass back to the spirit of appeasement?

Juva: By the light of the bright reason which daysends to us from the high.

“Pura et pia bella,” referenced above by Muta, and sounding like (Anna Livia) Plurabelle, means “pure and pious wars.”

I want to close by considering two other positions some viewers have advanced about the Plurbs that I disagree with. First, that the Plurbs represent Communism; and second, that the Plurbs show us a world without desire, as encouraged by religions like Buddhism.

First, I could see how someone would read the Plurbs as Communist. They seem to embody the spirit of collectivism, along with the motto of “From each according to his ability and to each according to his need.” But to the extent that this is true, the Plurbs read to me less like a thoughtful execution of Marx’s ideas and more like a strawman constructed by a teenage member of the John Birch Society. The key point is that the Hive eliminates individuality and personal property, which is not part of Marx’s ideas. As the old adage runs, Communism does not mean you have to share your toothbrush. Marxist philosophy does not call for the elimination of personal property but the elimination of private ownership of the means of production. People remain individuals but simply share in the value created by their collective labor. You can criticize this idea as impractical — and you can certainly criticize governments that have tried to implement some form of this idea through totalitarian means — but you can’t honestly engage with the idea by pretending it means a surrender of individual identity.

No, if anything, the ruthless efficiency of the Plurbs and their nonexistent work/life balance (that is, their complete lack of privacy, recreation, or even personal life outside of productive labor) reminds me more of Capitalism’s alienation of the individual. Marx argues that by decoupling a worker from the objects and value of his labor, Capitalism leads to a kind of loss of self, which includes a feeling of distance from others. To compensate, Capitalist societies urge the creation of a “false consciousness,” where people feel kinship with others based not on real, shared material conditions in community, but on concepts like identities (Example: “It doesn’t matter if you’re rich or poor…we’re all Americans! Celebrate how we share a love of freedom!”). To me, the Hive reads like an allegory for false consciousness inducing a feeling of unity and a state of compliance while eradicating real individuality and demanding constant labor from its Plurbs. You might say that the Hive Mind is the opiate of the masses (and indeed, early on, Carol compares being Plurbed to being on heroin).

The other idea I’ve heard is that the Plurbs are an embodiment of Buddhist philosophy: they utterly lack individual desire, which seems threatening from our individualist, Western perspective, but is ultimately the goal of enlightenment. Indeed, the Plurbs are so self-effacing, and so committed to pacifist ideals that seek to minimize suffering, that they go so far as not to pick apples off trees.

Again, this strikes me as a strawman. I’ve always though the word “desire” was a bit of a misnomer when talking about Buddhism, in the same way that “suffering” is. The First Noble Truth of Buddhism — often translated as “All life is suffering” — is more accurately rendered “All life is unsatisfying,” in the sense that any satisfaction we achieve quickly fades and we find ourselves restlessly unhappy with what we have. It’s “A Nice Place to Visit” again: merely getting what we want actually doesn’t satisfy us because things, achievements, objects, possessions…all of it is fleeting and is never fulfilling for very long. What does fulfill people? The process of striving for goals, not the goals themselves. And that process demands an imperfect world that entails struggle.

Usually, it is said that Buddhism reveals that desire is the root of this dissatisfaction/suffering. But I think it’s more accurate to say that the root is attachment to outcomes, not the mere desiring of them in the usual sense of that word. It’s the false belief that any one thing or goal will be the source of an enduring satisfaction or happiness. “If only I got that new car, I’d be happy,” we tell ourselves. Or that perfect relationship. Or if only we move to that new city. The mind is constantly inventing stories that it believes will be our “if only.” That sort of story is the attachment that causes suffering: the mere striving for the goal in and of itself isn’t the cause. No, we need goals in our lives, and enlightenment isn’t about giving up on goals. Enlightenment is about shedding the belief that any of our achievements will result in permanent or enduring joy — such beliefs cannot be true because everything is impermanent, all things are in flux, everything is one vast riverrun of Becoming. When we let go of our attachments, we can go with that flow and enjoy the process of our lives. From that point of view, actually attaining the goal or not is secondary at best.

I read an interesting article recently that uses Lacanian theory to analyze the Plurbs in terms of desire. Before sharing the article, I have to give a short introduction to one of the key ideas of this psychoanalytic theory. To put it briefly, Lacan believed that subjectivity is built on a “gap.” We can think of this as the gap that emerges between the infant and the mother; we could also use Lacan’s idea of the “mirror stage” to conceptualize it: at a certain point, a child becomes aware of its image in the mirror and identifies with that image, even as there is always a division between, on the one hand, our conception of ourselves as whole and cohesive and, on the other, our fragmentary experience. Out of that gap comes our need for language and imagination, to try to close that gap: this is also, for Lacan, the root of desire, propelling us toward objects that we imagine will close this gap. Of course, we are never satisfied by any of those objects — because they don’t actually close the gap — so desire becomes a chain of signifiers in which we substitute one goal for the next, without reaching a final satisfaction (this idea of desire as a “chain of signifiers” is reminiscent of Jacques Derrida’s ideas about the constant “slippage” of meaning in our language, always suggesting a “surplus” of meanings but never closing into a “final” meaning). The image in the mirror with which we are tempted to identify becomes an “ideal ego” (what I have called on this blog Selfhood, or “getting lost in a story about the self,” or “taking the self to be an essence”), a concept of self that leads us to strive for a state of satisfaction.

The article suggests basically that the Plurbs have closed up the gap that Lacan diagnoses. They are all in constant communication with each other; hence, language is unnecessary, and hence they have no desires, in the way that humans do. In the terms of the article, and they operate in the realm of “demand” rather than desire: they fulfill functions that the immune people prompt them to do, in a way analogous to how AI programs fulfill prompts. But the Plurbs themselves have no desire in the normal sense of the word. They are just driven by an imperative to convert the immune and share their Hivemind with the universe.

To me, Lacanian theory suggests that we ought to relinquish our ideal egos and embrace the fragmentation of our experience, giving up our attachments. I’m not sure if the Plurbs have given up an ideal ego, though. They seem to me to be attached to the ideas of “happiness” and “avoiding suffering.” They may not have “desire” in the ways that this word normally suggests, but they do seem attached to various goals or ideals in unhelpful ways (including ways that will result in most of them starving to death). From my perspective, the Plurbs aren’t an example of Buddhist enlightenment (or if they are, they’re an example of a kind of enlightenment that would be Hell to achieve, another kind of “Nice Place to Visit”). They’re another version of Selfhood, its dark mirror image. Between normal human selfishness and Plurby dystopia lies actual enlightenment.

So where does Manousos fit into all this? The only one of the immune other than Carol to detest the Plurby world order, he goes on a lengthy odyssey to seek out Carol and work with her to restore our regular, fallen world, in all of its glorious flaws. The irony is that he arrives just after Carol has given up on saving the world.

Is he the hero of the piece? His name derives from the same root as “Emmanuel,” a title of the savior in Christianity. This seems like more irony. While his integrity and resilience are admirable in some ways, he also strikes me as virtuous to a fault, a “Lawful Stupid” character whose insistence on sticking to his principles (and his ideal ego) above all else creates needless problems for him, much as the Hive’s attachment to its ideals do the same for them.

Oh, speaking of Lacan, it was called to my attention the other day that Slavoj Zizek, the famous Lacanian philosopher, apparently watches the show and made a Substack post about it! I am not a subscriber to his Substack, however, so I cannot weigh in on his thoughts. From the free excerpt, he seems to consider Carol an “hysteric” and Manousos an “obsessive.” More food for thought.

Unfortunately, it’s been announced that the next season of Pluribus will take some time to make, perhaps up to two years. As someone who remembers television shows with yearly seasons consisting of over twenty episodes each, I find it hard to stomach waiting such a length of time for a measly nine or ten episodes, even ones of high quality. I seem to remember those yearly shows being of pretty high quality as well. Oh well. I think I’m getting grumpy and impatient in my old age.