“La Chica o El Mundo” — Josh Reviews Pluribus!

In the weeks and months leading up to the launch of Pluribus, creator and show-runner Vince Gilligan and his team seemed remarkably insistent on revealing as little as possible about the show.  There was a brief teaser clip of a woman licking a donut that I frankly found extremely unpleasant.  (That teaser actually made me hesitant about watching this show!  I question the wisdom of putting that specific clip out there when trying to promote this new series…)  I decided to watch Pluribus because I have been a huge fan of Mr. Gilligan’s since his days on The X-Files, and of course I loved Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul.

I’m so glad I did, because Pluribus is a masterpiece!  (I ranked it very high on my list of my favorite TV shows of 2025!)

I do think it’s best that we follow Mr. Gilligan’s lead, so if you haven’t seen this show, I don’t want to tell you too much about it.  I can say that it starts with a sci-fi twist, but while that sets the story in motion, this is not really a sci-fi show.  It’s a richly-textured character study, one that manages to be both serious and, at times, very funny.  The tone is very similar to that of Better Call Saul (a show which I enjoyed even more than the acclaimed Breaking Bad!).

The series is anchored around Rhea Seehorn.  Ms. Seehorn wound up basically becoming a co-lead on Better Call Saul, so incredible was her performance as Kim Wexler.  Here, she plays Carol Sturka.  When the series opens, Carol seems to have a pretty good life.  She’s a successful fantasy/romance author, worshipped by legions of fans.  She has a committed partner and seems to be doing pretty well financially.  But Carol is deeply unhappy.  What’s clever and hilarious about Pluribus is that they have created in Carol possibly the worst person possible to be called upon to save the world after the sci-fi incident that sets the show’s story in motion.  This is an incredible character, and Ms. Seehorn is astoundingly great in the role.  Those of us who watched Better Call Saul already loved Ms. Seehorn.  I hope this show sends her career into the stratosphere she deserves.  (Maybe it has, because just a few days ago she won a well-deserved Golden Globe for her performance!)

The show looks amazing.  There are quite a number of sequences that impressed me with their scale (and made me think, wow, that must have taken a lot of money, time and effort to pull off!!).  I’m not sure how the production team pulled off everything we see in these nine episodes; it’s quite an achievement.  I didn’t detect any cut corners or cheats.

At only nine episodes, the season zips along.  Mr. Gilligan and his team allowed the story to unfold at the perfect pace.  Things weren’t rushed.  We had time to explore the ramifications of the set-up, both in terms of plot and what the world was like now, and in terms of character and the arc of Carol’s reaction and response.  The ending of episode nine is perfect.  It’s deeply satisfying — that last line is amazing — and also fills me with excitement to see a second season.

I’m eager to dig deeper into this incredible first season, but SPOILERS are ahead so please STOP HERE if you haven’t watched this show.

Go watch it!!  This was absolutely one of my favorite new shows in recent memory.  I loved it.

Seriously, SPOILERS from this point on.

One of my favorite aspects of Better Call Saul was how the show demonstrated the patience to explore process.  I’m thinking specifically of the many great sequences in which we followed Mike Ehmantraut’s superhuman patience in working on a project or executing a plan.  Mr. Gilligan and his team brought that approach to Pluribus, and I found it to be unendingly pleasurable.  Many of my favorite moments from this first season involve the show’s taking the time to allow us to see all the steps in a process that a lesser show might have skipped right over.  It starts right away in the first episode, in the incredibly tense sequence after Carol finds Helen down on the ground, and we watch her figure out all the steps of finding a vehicle, getting Helen into the truck, driving to the hospital, then leaving the hospital.  That sequence also was elevated by the incredible performance Ms. Seehorn gave in that long unbroken take once she was in the car, as we see the horror unfold over her face as she drives up to, and then away from, the hospital, the enormity of what’s happened slowly dawning on her.  (This reminded me of Ms. Seehorn’s show-stopping silent scene riding a tram towards the end of Better Call Saul’s final season.)  Similarly, when we first meet Manousos in the fourth episode, I loved that we get to watch his insanely patient process of scanning radio frequencies, one by one.  Or how about when we see the Others restock an entire supermarket for Carol in episode five?  Amazing!

Another wonderful hallmark of both Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul were the cold open sequences that often dropped the viewers into what would at first seem like a bizarrely random place or event.  I was thrilled to see that continue here, kicking off in episode two as we follow all the steps of one woman moving from cleaning up dead bodies to piloting an airplane.  I loved all the openings, from that crazy frozen hotel in Norway in episode three (which is apparently fictional but based on real ice hotels!), to the opening with Monousos in episode four, and onwards.

I loved Kim Wexler in Better Call Saul, but Carol Sturka has instantly catapulted onto my mental list of my all-time favorite TV show characters.  Carol is a wonderful creation, beautifully conceived and written by Vince Gilligan & co. and wonderfully portrayed by Rhea Seehorn.  I love how the show focuses so deeply on Carol and her story (before sliding into more of a two-hander at the end of episode six, when we start following Manousos and his perilous journey from Paraguay to Albuquerque).  (By the way, I love that Vince Gilligan has decided to once again set his show in Albuquerque!  It made me smile, watching the first episode, when we eventually discover that Carol lives in Albuquerque.)  Time and again over the course of this season, Ms. Seehorn blew me away with her acting, such as in the quiet moment in episode six in which Diabete spills that the other unaffected people have been getting together on Zoom without Carol; we can see on her face how hurt Carol is by that revelation, though she’s too stubborn to admit it.  Magnificent acting by Ms. Seehorn.

I thought Mr. Gilligan and his team did a great job charting Carol’s arc through the season.  She starts off stubbornly refusing to give an inch to the Others.  Then, by episode seven, as her 40 days in isolation wears on, it was fun but also a little sad to see Carol’s finally letting loose and allowing herself to enjoy this new world, letting the Others make her fancy food, wandering through whatever museums she wanted to, and of course stealing the O’Keeffe to hang in her home.  Those moments of joy were balanced by her increasing loneliness and despair, and her near suicide by firecracker was tough to watch.  It felt like both a defeat and a step forward in episode eight to see Carol begin a relationship with Zosia.  I was sad to see her give up on trying to fight the Others and restore the human race, but happy to see her finding her way back to joy.  And then, of course, the final minutes of the finale set her back on a course of fighting the Others.  I loved it.

I was surprised, but pleasantly so, that Manousos became almost a co-lead in the final episodes of the show!  Carlos-Manuel Vesga was terrific as this guy who was even more stubborn than Carol.  Manousos represents Carol’s stubbornness taken to a far extreme.  I respected his patience in taking the time to investigate his enemy by carefully charting the radio frequencies they might be using for their hive-mind.  And that he was able to make the journey from Paraguay all the way to New Mexico, almost entirely on his own, was an incredible feat of ingenuity and perseverance!  But right from when we first met him, I questioned his insistence on eating dog-food rather than accepting anything from the Others, and then watching him nearly kill himself in the jungle seemed self-destructive, rather than noble.  And watching himself drag his bloody body off of the hospital bed (rather than allow the Others to treat him for one second longer) was tough to watch.  This is an interesting character, and watching him and Carol butt heads when they finally met in the finale was just as much fun as I’d hoped!

I also enjoyed Karolina Wydra as Zosia, who is the main face of the Others on the show.  Zosia is the chaperone assigned to Carol because she resembles the female version of a character from Carol’s fantasy series, the way Carol had always imagined her.  Ms. Wydra allows Zosia to be someone we can be empathetic for — as she is endlessly patient and kind in the face of Carol’s wild swings in mood (and also when Carol nearly kills her in the hospital parking lot) — and also frustrating in her inability to see the evil of what the Others have perpetrated on the human race.  When we learn in the finale that the Others are close to succeeding in finding a way to forcibly convert Carol, meaning Zosia has been stringing Carol along in an effort to buy time, it’s an intriguing re-centering of her as a villain.  I’m eager to see where this all goes in season two!

This is a serious show, but I also valued the humor that was woven into this depiction of this unbelievable situation.  There was a lot of wonderfully droll comedy in this season!  Episode five in particular stuck out to me as a very funny episode.  I loved the moment in which, after the Others had all abandoned Albuquerque, Carol was waiting on her lawn for someone to come pick up the memory cartridge with her video that she left on the curb, only for them to send a drone.  And then, of course I laughed every time we had to listen to the whole long voice message about the Others needing their space.  I doff my cap to the makers of this show for sticking to their guns and making us (and Carol) listen to that entire long message, over and over again in the back half of this season.  It just got funnier and funnier to me.  (And I love that the voice on the message was Patrick Fabian — Howard Hamlin from Better Call Saul!)

Other (no pun intended) thoughts:

• I was happy to see Karan Soni (Deadpool, Office Christmas Party, The People We Hate at the Wedding) pop up briefly in the premiere.  I like Mr. Soni and would love to see more of him in other projects.
• I enjoyed following the process of Carol’s white-board notes on her investigations into the Others.  While this show wasn’t too focused on the sci-fi aspects of this situation, I appreciated the attention to world-building and to making some efforts to explaining to the audience how the Others’ hive-mind works and how the world works now (with details from what they eat, to where they sleep, etc.).  Just when i was wondering if animals would start reclaiming territory from the humans, we see in episode five that Carol gets scared by coyotes rummaging through her trash.  I appreciated those touches that helped this situation feel real to me.
• The revelation at the start of episode six that the Others eat dead people felt like a huge plot twist; so I was amused that the show undercut that development about 20 minutes later in that same episode, with the friendly John Cena video.  I love that this really isn’t a plot-driven show.  It’s not a J. J. Abrams-style “mystery box”.  This show is strongly focused on character — how Carol in specific responds to each twist and turn of her situation.  I love it for that.
• I was absolutely delighted by Diabate’s James Bond fantasy in episode six, complete with a guy in an eyepatch! (That sequence was a very cool “oner”!)
• It was fascinating to see in episode seven how both of our strong-willed protagonists, Carol and Manousos, needed the Others to survive in the end.  Carol couldn’t handle the loneliness and painted the street with a message asking them to come back, while Manousos would have died in the jungle without being airlifted out.  It was interesting how this led Carol to stop fighting them (at least until the end of the finale), while Manousos only doubled down on his stubborn resistance.  (I laughed when he insists they calculate how much money he owes for his hospital stay.)
• The finale had a very creepy opening that reminded us of what’s at stake, as we see one of the final independent human beings becoming an Other.  It was tragic seeing how, the second she’s one of them, the Others all fall silent, and the beautiful village dissolves as they all release the animals and walk away.
• What an ending to the season, with the atom bomb!  I loved it!  I can’t wait to see what’s next.

What a show!  Bravo to Vince Gilligan and his team for crafting yet another TV masterpiece.  Pluribus was a delight.  I am so glad a second season is in the works.

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