I haven’t see any discussion for this show on Lemmy so I thought I’d be the first!
Pluribus is the new show from Vince Gilligan, creator of Breaking Bad/Better Call Saul. The marketing on this show was so vague that it was intended to be watched completely blind, with nobody knowing what it was even about.
I just finished watching the first two episodes and thought it was excellent. It’s been a while since a show hooked me from the very start.
Episode 2 theory
After finishing episode 2, I now have a theory on where this is going. When the hivemind says that it can’t hurt anything, I think they mean it literally. They are not allowed to hurt any living thing and are completely docile.
The reason they have a seizure when shouted it is that they want to hurt Carol back but aren’t allowed to, so they deadlock. They also seem to do 100% of everything they’re told to do. Nobody noticed this yet in the show but potentially this could mean someone could order around everybody on earth to try and rule it, which could be wild. Curious to see where this goes and whether I’m right.
They, I think as the US Agriculture guy, did say it wasn’t an alien invasion. I guess technically they might not know that, but to me that was a clear indicator that there isn’t a ruling outside force.
Also while they are doing whatever they are told, it’s just some light babysitting from their perspective. There are 12 (?) people worldwide who aren’t part of the hive, we met the half that can speak English. Each of them has a chaperone and that one guy has a small harem. The other 99.9% of Earth is doing… Something. We’ve seen them cleaning up. They know how many months away they are from improving the infection rate (based on the guess of all the best scientists in the world).
So what do “they” want?
:::spoiler
I’m also wondering if that is just to placate the immune until “They” figure out the fix. Assuming “they” truly cannot intentionally cause harm to another living thing (and nothing so far has indicated that to be untrue), then the immune population (no matter how tiny) could be considered a threat and acting like a doormat is just “their” way of dealing with that.
Since they don’t consider assimilation to be harm, once “they” figure out how to infect the immune, I think things could turn quite a bit darker after that (but still with the creepy cheerful demeanor).
Edit/addition: While “they” seemingly cannot cause harm to people, they don’t seem to be limited such that they’re forced to prevent harm from occurring.
Evidence:
Between that and the “biological imperative to spread” loopholes, I’m definitely curious where those go.
:::
I’m genuinely excited to see where this goes.
Something to consider is that they did say “Your life is your own” and Pirate Lady refused to choose between Carol and Air Force One man. Hurting someone emotionally isn’t something they want to do willingly. So unless they’re lying I don’t think they’ll force joining the hive mind on anyone.
Similarly when they saw they were causing Carol distress they acknowledged it backed away from the interaction.
Forcing Carol to drink water would have been distressing for Carol, so they could also be why they didn’t force her to drink.
HOWEVER we saw during the initial infection that people were activated and joined more or less one by one. But as we saw when the countdown reached zero, the majority of the world was held back from activation and instead activated all at once. We also know the global activation was rushed as the military was catching on.
Now they may not have known the activation process would kill some people, but they must have known a global seizure would cause some number of deaths and harm.
So they have a sense of self preservation and that sense does allow them to cause harm.