Pluribus

 

What makes Apple TV's Pluribus so compelling?

I think it's the essential question at its core:

What do we do when peace, love and understanding are obtainable but at the risk of individual free will?

The story's central character -- a bestselling author of sci-fi / fantasy fiction -- finds herself one of about a dozen people on the planet who have not been assimilated into a collective that was spawned by an alien transmission.

The audience's assumption is a race of beings light years away thought the Earth could use a communitarian boost and sent the formula. Once absorbed, the assimilated person becomes one with all life on the planet, which means nothing is killed or harvested, which, as one might expect, leads to complications other than the agency matter mentioned earlier.

The dyspeptic novelist Carol Sturka is played by a tireless and committed Rhea Seehorn, the recent Globe winner for her performance. The calculus in creator Vince Gilligan's series has viewers being both drawn to and repulsed by Carol's crankiness and the easy peace the rest of the world seems to have found through "Joining."

Most interesting is recently widowed Sturka's relationship with her "chaperone," Zosia (Karolina Wydra), and the evolution of their platonic and romantic dance. Through this element and a host of others, Pluribus probes perhaps in ways never done before, the human conundrum of uniting heart and mind -- not from person to person -- but in each of us, individually.

Pluribus invites us to search for certainty in existence, make our own choices, avoid the temptation to exploit those who would allow such abuse, and accept that sometimes "love" and "kindness" are NOT the same thing.