PLUR1BUS, for those who do not know, is a sci-fi series create by the same person who created Better Call Saul. The premise is Invasion of the Body Snatchers, but the body snatchers are nice. An alien virus converts almost all of humanity into a peaceful hive mind that respects the wishes of the dozen or so people who were naturally immune to the virus. Our main viewpoint character is Carol, a romantasy writer who hates, as far as we can tell, pretty much everything. It is six episodes into it’s first season and is arguably already among the best science fiction shows of all time. I have enjoyed what I have seen of the show so far, and since I am a giant nerd, I cannot resist talking about the show. Needless to say, I am going to spoil the fsck out of the first six episodes.
Seriously, people: spoilers for a running show are coming.
I’m not kidding.
You are gonna get spoiled.
Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
Okay. You’re televised funeral.
Carol is a bad person, but not necessarily because of the way she treats the joined. Carol is a bad person — the show make that perfectly clear. She treats her fans with barely disguised contempt to their faces before the joining. She mocks them cruelly when alone with her wife/agent. She shows little to no appreciation for the things her wife does for her. She sends her wife into an airport bookshop to take another author’s books off the top display shelf and put her books there instead. But when it comes to the joined, I am not sure she earns the label “bad”.
Yes, she did kill some of them, but it was unintentional. She had no way of knowing her justified anger and frustration with the joined would kill them. It is arguable how bad an action that is, of course, since we know that the joined contain the memories and skills of everyone who ever was a member. Carol’s wife did not survive the joining process, along with about a million others. But the joined indisputably have her wife’s memories. So is the loss of individuals in this world a loss, or is it the same as us shedding cells? Complicating this question is that Carol wants to break apart the joining, to go back to the way things were before. If she does, a million or more people will not be alive in any sense because of her actions.
She does take one action that really does feel egregious. She drugs one of the joined in an attempt to get her to give up the secret of ending the joining and ends up severely harming her, and through her, making the rest of the joined emotionally miserable. So even if you want to argue that the loss of a person isn’t meaningful to the joined, the emotional distress over said loss is apparently real. It is to the show’s credit that they do not shy away from those consequences, and does not try to excuse Carol’s actions too easily. But overall, Carol’s contempt and fear of the joined don't make her a bad person, and her desperation is at least somewhat understandable.
I love how the show settles with moments. The show sits with moments in a way I don’t generally see on television. It took its time showing how Carol buried her wife, and later how she put heavy paving stones over the grave to protect it from wolves. We get to sit with the grief and pain, just as Carol must, and its very emotionally effective. Later, after the joined abandon the city she lives in due to Carol’s aforementioned drugging of one of the members, they leave a number for her to call, explaining that they need their space but that they will still provide her with what she needs. Every time she calls, she and we the audience are forced to listen to the entire message. We get to marinate in Carol’s impatience along with her, helping to put us in her head. It is a small choice, but it has an outsized effect on connecting us to the characters.
Koumba is probably treating the joined worse than Carol. I know that on the surface he is nicer to them, rightly calling Carol out for not even knowing the name of the joined who has spent all her time trying to help Carol. But Koumba takes advantage of the joined’s desire to make the unaffected happy to order them about like players in a bad high school play. He uses them sexually and makes them act out scenes from movies for his amusement. You could argue that the joined are happy to do so, but it still feels creepy. There is little evidence that the joined enjoy sex or art for their own sake, so it feels as if he is just taking advantage of someone desperate to please him. I do not think he has formed a deep emotional attachment to the joined as a being. I think he is treating the members of the joined as toys, and that is a terrible thing to do.
The joined can lie. The show, through Carol, makes a point to show us that the joined cannot tell lies to the survivors even when it would be in the joined’s best interest to do so, even when lying would spare the feelings of the survivors. But they don’t tell Carol everything. They do not provide her with the secret to reversing the process, and they do not proactively tell her about the fact that they eat deceased humans. In most cases, they will provide information when asked, but they do not go out of their way to tell Carol, or anyone else, information that they do not request. And, of course, they refuse to allow themselves to be un-joined. So there are limits to their truthfulness, and I suspect this will be a more important point as the show goes on.
I do not see this as much of a parable about AI. Imitative AI, what we generally mean when e call something AI, is sort of homogenizing. And maybe, if you squint, you can argue that the lack of fresh art since the joining is analogous to the way imitative AI stole art. But it stole art in the service of creating copies or knock offs of said art, not really eliminating it (though, again, imitative AI smearing all art into probabilistic pixels might be the same thing). And imitative AI is a liar, and a destructive force bent on ruining people, not creating the kind of peaceful society we see in the show. I don’t think the show is really commenting on imitative AI. If it is, its doing so in a really superficial fashion, and the show seems much more deliberate in its choices than that.
The show is not making the strongest argument for the joined. Or for the non-joined. Before you finish reading this, several children will be raped. Several will be murdered. Several will die of preventable diseases and other reasons related to lack of health care that they could have received if anyone cared enough to provide it to them. None of that happens in the world of the show, but the show makes surprisingly little use of this fact. Koumba does mention— once — that racism, war, violence, and sexism are no longer part of the joined’s experience. But Carol never has to confront the fact that going back means going back to all of the death and violence and bigotry of the old world. None of the survivors we have met have lived through that kind of experience, and none of the joined who have bring that up as a consequence of un-joining. Carol is a rich American — the life she will get back will be substantially better than the life she will take from at lest some of the joined. That implication of what she is attempting is not really even mentioned except in the most bloodless of ways.
Bloodless also describe Carol’s reasoning. We see that there is no art anymore, and it is implied that there is no more real science (but we do see the joined innovate around the food supply, for example) but we aren’t given any real arguments other than “you aren’t people any more” for why Carol should be cheered on. The premise of the show makes it impossible to avoid the core argument about whether or not human art, personality, and scientific advancement is worth the cost in human suffering, but the show seems almost aggressively uninterested in making those arguments, leaving them more as subtext than text. It feels, honestly, like the show is more interested in issues of grief and control.
Carol is obviously destroyed by her grief over the loss of her wife. How much of her cruelty towards the joined is driven by that grief? How much of her desire to go back to the way things were is driven by her career? She wrote romantasy — heterosexual romantasy, it should be pointed out, not the gay books she started out with — books not because she wanted to but because that was what the market wanted. She obviously resented that life and rebelled against it in little ways. How much of her desire to be free of the joined is a reflection of her desire to be free of the control of the reading public? Is the damage she does to the joined with her emotional outbursts a comment on people who try to turn legitimate anger back on the people they are abusing, and ho much of it is a comment on how hurt people lash out and harm those around them? Are the joined a commentary on people being forced to accept things that are good for them? How much of Koumba’s behavior is tied to having control of his life for perhaps the first time? Is the reluctance of mother who was not joined to refuse to see the changes in her joined son a manifestation of the denial stage of grief?
The show is focused on just a handful of people, joined and not. It seems this tight focus on the world after the joining is a signal. The show seems much more interested in these person-sized questions, and its primary focus on individuals rather than the more world-wide impacts reinforces that interest. By drawing our attention to Carol and the handful of people closest to her, the show seems to be asking us to consider what the event is doing to people, and thus to reflect on how these people are dealing — or not dealing — with problems that we all encounter. The show is person-sized in its presentation because it is most interested in the person-sized problems.
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