Why do bad things happen to good people? How can life still have meaning even in the midst of great suffering? What is human life for, anyway? This kind of question defies easy answers. There is a certain beauty in the clear, durable answers of the Catechism (“to know him and to love him and to serve him”), but deeper understanding is really the work of a lifetime. Catholics can use tradition to make sense of life experiences, and experience to help to understand that tradition more deeply. Not everyone today is grounded in that kind of tradition, and those who are not often approach expansive questions in a more à la carte fashion, seeking wisdom where they can find it and experimenting with possible answers. The television series Pluribus, Vince Gilligan’s latest creation, shows us a typically modern protagonist wrestling with life’s defining questions, using the limited spiritual resources available to her. Most fascinating of all, it contrasts that character’s efforts with those of a devout Catholic. It’s a gripping story that may also contain some clues as to what modern people want from Catholics.
The primary protagonist, Carol Sturka, is a hackneyed romance novelist who is tired of her life and disgusted with her own mediocre work. When we first meet Carol, she is at a bookstore being feted by her fans as she wraps up her latest tour. Dragging herself at last from the clutches of fawning middle-aged women, she escapes into a cab, where the driver wonders who she is and whether he might have read her. “I don’t know,” Carol responds tartly, “You a big fan of mindless crap?”
She’s a hack, and she knows it. A little later, drowning her sorrows on a barstool, she expresses bitter disappointment in what her life has become, as Helen, her agent and lesbian partner, suggests she take a break from the “mindless crap” to work a more serious novel that has been languishing on her desk. Carol seems persuadable, but these reflections all become far less pressing a few minutes later, when nearly the entire human race (with just a handful of lonely holdouts) is subsumed in “the Joining,” an event wherein an alien virus melds all human minds together into a kind of benevolent Borg collective.
Only thirteen unjoined individuals remain across the entire Earth. As the only such person in her region, Carol is at first understandably terrified, watching everyone around her collapse simultaneously in a seizure-like state. When they revive, though, they all seem to know who Carol is. Indeed, they know all about her and are overflowing with goodwill and eagerness to serve. She finds herself in a strange world in which everyone seems to be her butler or concierge. Cloches show up on her doorstep with favorite meals; every request she makes is granted immediately and without judgment. People smile and greet her by name every time she steps out on the street.
In a television broadcast addressed to her personally on the night of the Joining, a maddeningly calm man explains that this is all the result of an alien RNA blueprint received in a message from deep space and decoded by Earth’s scientists. Unleashing the virus on the human race was an accident, but there’s no reason to think the aliens intended to harm anyone, nor do the Joined feel like victims. They insist that they are immersed in a blissful ocean of love and empathy. They don’t know why Carol and this handful of others are strangely immune to this blessing, but they ominously promise her that they will “fix it,” and in the meanwhile, “her life is her own” and she need only ask for anything she desires.
It’s a brilliant thought experiment, which feels disturbingly relevant to our contemporary situation. The incorporated “Others” are like ChatGPT made flesh (which is especially interesting given that the show began production before LLMs were released). Endlessly knowledgeable but devoid of taste, judgment, or personality, they bustle through life with moronic grins on their faces. In the fourth episode, Carol drags a random person off the street and into her dining room so she can interrogate him. His pre-Joining name happened to be Jeff Hiller, though that doesn’t much matter since every individual person is now a mouthpiece for the collective consciousness of all of humanity. She asks him about Winds of Wycaro, her trashy book series, and he assures her that the entire human race absolutely loves it. He can’t offer much by way of critical feedback, but when Carol asks him to compare her to William Shakespeare, he earnestly assures her that they are entirely on par. It’s perfectly preposterous, and yet, haven’t many of us had these kinds of conversations with our computer screens of late?
What is the virtuous response to this situation? How can one live well under these circumstances? On one level, the unjoined minority can live out their wildest dreams, unimpeded by competition, resource constraints, or the negative judgments of others. The Joined are willing to appease and accommodate them to a preposterous degree, rebuilding whole cities according to their whims and assigning legions of people to role-play their fantasies. At one point, Carol asks whether they would supply her with an atomic bomb on request. They reluctantly admit that they would. So the unjoined lack for nothing, except real love, real friendship, and authentic human community.
Ten of the thirteen decide, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, to make the best of it, with some living out hedonistic fantasies and others pathetically trying to pretend that their loved ones haven’t really changed all that much. (The Joined are willing to accommodate this to some extent by playacting their former selves, but the charade is sadly farcical.) One leaps at the first opportunity to join the Joined, and her incorporation is depicted in a gut-wrenching scene in the season finale. (She is blanketed in support from all the villagers in her Peruvian Andes home, up until the precise moment when she is incorporated, at which point everyone matter-of-factly starts packing up to relocate to a major population center. Mountain villages aren’t an efficient use of resources, you see.)
Only two of the thirteen think they ought to try to reverse the mind virus process. One is Carol Sturka. The other is a Colombian man named Manousos Oviedo, who is living in Paraguay at the time of the Joining. Manousos is initially presented as a kind of dangerous fanatic, walling himself off in a dingy compound, scorning all company and refusing all assistance from the Joined, even when his very survival is threatened. Viewers are made to understand, through multiple visual cues, that he is a traditional Catholic. He wears a brown scapular and is sometimes seen clutching a wooden Rosary. A prayer card of St. Jude is affixed to his monitor, while Our Lady of Guadalupe graces his car’s dashboard.
Once he finally leaves his compound, in an effort to find Carol, we see Manousos sleeping in (otherwise empty) churches that he passes along the way. To him these are consecrated ground, and the only place that remains safe and comforting. Where the other twelve unjoined humans (even Carol) are deeply absorbed by the question of how they now wish to live, Manuosos is largely indifferent to his own well-being. He has a burning sense of mission, and absolute clarity on the appalling tragedy that the Joining represents. Individual persons are precious souls made in God’s image. The alien mind virus has stolen them, and this unholy invasion must be opposed.
The contrast between Carol and Manousos is at the core of the show’s dramatic tension. Carol shows us the plight of the alienated modern with painful clarity. Exhibiting a panoply of unseemly vices (rudeness, impulsiveness, self-centeredness, rage, alcoholism), she is nevertheless more grounded than most of the unjoined humans (Manousos excepted), mainly because she already knows, from personal experience, the soul-destroying hollowness of shallow dreams. She’s spent years as an empty influencer, reading her own cringeworthy work to glassy-eyed fangirls with vapid smiles. Adding the rest of the human race to her fan base is appalling, not appealing. Carol’s most heroic impulses come not from real virtue but from the hard lessons she’s learned in the misery of modern “success.”
Translating those lessons into constructive action is difficult, however. Selfishness is a reflex for Carol; unlike Manousos, she can’t easily make sense of a life devoted mainly to the good of other people. Even if she wanted to devote herself to others’ good, she doesn’t have a clear sense of what that is. In many ways, it’s the loss of real art and beauty that offends her the most, not the loss of real friendship, community, or personhood. In her pre-Joining life, her one meaningful human connection was to Helen, who dies in the initial Joining. Carol never shows any interest in checking up on anyone else. Lacking direction, she dabbles in the options on offer (hedonism and the pseudo relationship with a designated member of the Joined) before finally, reluctantly, being drawn back toward Manousos’s better-defined view.
At the conclusion of the first season, we see that view only in outline. It’s clear that Manousos cares about individuals as precious persons with souls. It’s clear that he feels a serious obligation to repel the alien mind virus and recover what has been lost. The theological foundations of that view are not revealed in much depth, but as the first season ends, the stage is set for a deeper foray into moral and metaphysical themes.
Unfortunately, we’ll have to be a bit patient, since Gilligan has indicated that the next season is unlikely to be released before 2027. In the meanwhile though, Pluribus has already opened windows to fascinating discussion and debate. All viewers can find rich food for thought in this narrative, but Catholics in particular can appreciate how the show probes the limits of modern forms of fulfillment, and ultimately shows why secular people are already inclined to look to the Church as a source of protection and wisdom. When the entire world is swept away in a tidal wave of artifice and euphoric feeling, someone has to remember that individual souls matter. Someone has to keep the lights on in the churches and shrines, eschewing efficiency for the sake of real love. Manousos’s character certainly isn’t appealing in every respect; he’s unkept, antisocial, and prone to an obsessive moral scrupulosity. But he sees right through the gauzy, therapeutic exterior of the hive mind’s empty existence, and ultimately, he is the moral compass that gives humanity a chance.
Is Pluribus the modern world’s cry for help? If so, how can we answer?