Here’s a flawless triple death with a genre change reinvented or to be reinvented. Of drugs noir or brilliant—essential—, from the desperate and existential legal drama, Vince Gilligan, the ever-successful creator of breaking Bad AND Better call Saulothat pair of series-like novels that are at the same time nineteenth-century and postmodern, to an existentially desperate and necessary science fiction. Necessary in the sense that Raymond Carver’s stories were necessary exactly as they appeared: with the punch added by the clipping of their publisher, Gordon Lish, who gave them the flight ahead of their time that set a new peak in North American and world fiction – and when they did. The feeling is that Gilligan has taken a step back to redefine science fiction from the place that will always make it indispensable. He who forgets any kind of progress to fix what we are and what we could become. Something like that, and much more, it is Pluribus (Apple TV).
The premise, it would seem, is simple, but no one but Gilligan could see it. And it’s been there since the beginning. Or you don’t remember it Invasion of the Body Snatchersalready that old, not overproduced terror that was responsible for what truly terrifies, ignores us? Let’s not forget that such an acclaimed creator was trained in the writers’ room of The X-Files and he did it with incredible style. Run if you haven’t seen episode 21 of the seventh season yet, Je Souhaitewhich he signed and directed. It’s brilliant. But let’s go back to the premise of Pluribus. A bestselling writer of paranormal historical fiction, Carol Sturka (the incomparable Rhea Seehorn in many ways) is immune to the virus that, painstakingly developed in a military laboratory, destroyed the self. Massively and cerebrally connected, humanity has become a majestic, happy and peaceful us. A creature made up of billions of individuals who have stopped being themselves to be that other thing.
Another thing that terrifies, obviously, is Carol, who first lost his wife, who he is obsessed with bringing home dead, and who he finds himself faced with when the United States Undersecretary of Agriculture (the president is dead) invites her to call him on the phone and speaks to her from the television screen, in a moment both comical and sinister in which the titles that are overwritten on the screen are titles addressed to you, because you, that is, Carol, are his only ones. viewer, and then lost the rest of his peers. Because there’s no one there with her anymore. They are all part of a whole that aims only to help.
But help, for what? Carol doesn’t know it, but the virus thing came like a message from another planet. The fact is that it only has itself. His memories, his disjointed brain and his desire not to die, that is, his existential survival instinct, which is above all an intellectual survival instinct. And isn’t he talking in an exaggerated and charming way about something that is already happening? Not being connected means not existing, or vice versa?
It is inevitable to guess behind the ingenious staging: they are all important moments, and a kind of absurdity, because on Earth there are others like Carol, but none of them seem to care that there are no unique consciousnesses, they feel equally accompanied, or even powerful, like the guy who asks to travel on Air Force One and have a harem of women – a scathing criticism of what the algorithm – and social networks – and, hell, artificial intelligence, are doing to us. Creating a single thought that seems like an atomic thought, that is, that seems to belong to us, but is nothing more than a shared current.
If every dystopia—and Pluribus It’s a very fun dystopia, an instant classic: it’s a red pilot warning humanity of the dark place it may be headed, for once it seems it doesn’t fear dehumanization so much as the end of the self. The fear of death of what each of us has been or could become. Doesn’t it terrify you? Look at it.
