Pluribus: Season 1

The entire world has changed. Every human being has become joined into a hive mind, the result of an alien signal received from a distant star system. Almost every human being. Thirteen people have found themselves naturally immune to the process, including Carol Sturka, a Romantasy author living in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The joined seem to be happy with their lot: every war in the world has ended and a lot of pain and hardship has gone with it. But this is at the cost of individuality and freedom. Aware that the joined are trying to find a way to convert her and the remaining immune, Carol sets out on an ambitious plan: to find a way of reversing the process and saving humanity. She just doesn't know where to start.

Back the 1990s, Vince Gilligan was a staff writer on The X-Files, writing many of that show's best and most-acclaimed episodes. In 2008 he created Breaking Bad, the story of a chemistry teacher turned drug kingpin by oppressive American healthcare costs. He followed that up with Better Call Saul, a prequel/interquel/sequel, that expanded on the character of Jimmy McGill, who became noted criminal lawyer Saul Goodman, which many critics rated as being even better than its parent show. That project also introduced Gilligan to actress Rhea Seehorn, whose quiet but powerful performance as Kim Wexler was astounding. Seehorn and Gilligan have now re-teamed for Pluribus, a distinctly different kind of show.

The genre here is science fiction: an alien message from 600 light years away has been decoded by secret government researchers and found to include the ingredients for genetic material. This material is basically a virus that rewires humans into a single entity, a hive mind formed by the life experience of all almost-eight billion people on the planet. The logical ramifications of this idea are entertainingly explored: any single person on the planet can do anything that any other human being can do, instantly. A fast food server can fly the most complex aircraft on the planet, a school gym teacher can perform brain surgery at the very highest level achievable. Gilligan is a master of detail, the slow burn and thinking through the logical ramifications of situations, and employs that here to impressive effect.

Carol's continuing immunity to the alien virus is basically a chaos grenade that the hive mind struggles to deal with. The thirteen immune people can still impact the infected: displays of anger or physical violence towards the infected can send them into a fit, so the infected cannot themselves use violence or force to cajole the immune into cooperation, though they claim not to be able to do so anyway due to inherent pacificism. Testing the limits of what the infected can and cannot do becomes an interest of Carol's, as she looks for a way of freeing people from the virus, or even if the individuals still exist on that level.

It's richly interesting stuff, but it feels like the sort of premise you can explore in a novel better than in a TV show. The first episode, depicting the total chaos of the virus taking over and Carol's bewilderment at not knowing what the hell is going on, is dynamic and action-driven, with phenomenal performances and setpieces. The next couple of episodes, which explore the ramifications of both the hive mind's arrival and how Carol can coexist with it, as well as the identities of the other dozen uninfected and what their stories are (and how some have a radically different view of what the joined are than Carol does, with some subtle nods at the American mindset versus that of other cultures), keep up the pace.

Things flag somewhat mid-season and one detects a note of wheel-spinning as the show indulges in flashbacks and plot misdirections: one massive "gotcha!" plot revelation turns out to not be a big deal after all. Things ramp up towards the end as we make more discoveries about the hive mind and what its ultimate goal might now be (it turns out that Carol's ability to strike a good deal with every single lawyer on Earth on the opposite side might be a tad optimistic), and Carol discovers that one of the other uninfected might be even more driven and ruthless in freeing the people than she is. These are strong story elements but seemingly exist only to ramp up to an inevitable cliffhanger ending.

Pluribus's reception has thus been divisive due to its love of the slow burn. In an age of "second screen" viewing, seeing a show happy to take its foot off the gas and just vibe at times with some great cinematography of the New Mexico desert or the jungles of the Darien Gap can be refreshing. But sometimes you feel maybe the show needs to get a move on. When Breaking Bad decided to have a slow episode, it could still use its time to explore character or the details of Walter's drug operation or something else. One of the best-rated episodes of the show is a budget-saving piece of filler featuring Walter and Jesse battling a persistent fly. Pluribus can't quite do this because there are effectively now only fourteen characters alive (the thirteen unjoined plus the hive mind), so you can't bring in a guest character or some newcomers to the regular cast to keep things fresh.

Still, the problem can be a little overblown. The season is only nine episodes long (it might have been even better at seven or eight, a rare thing to say these days), the episodes aren't hugely long (many clock in at around the 40-minute mark) and the show does have superb cinematography, location filming and acting. Rhea Seehorn is absolutely nuclear-hot and we can hope this show gets her the awards she inexplicably missed out on for Better Call Saul, and the rest of the cast is excellent, especially those playing the infected, who all effectively have to play the exact same character expressing itself through different bodies. The show also works well on a thematic level by not lingering on any theme like a TED Talk. There are ideas swirling around here about interconnectedness, loneliness and the morality of enforcing any one ideology on anyone else. So far the show has presented being joined as a bad thing, forced on people against their will, and the desire of the hive mind to add Carol is wrong, but we so far haven't had the other side of the argument: are the people in the hive mind genuinely happier and better off, and would suffer at being separated? Is Pluribus a four-season exploration of the ideas presented in the Star Trek: Voyager episode Tuvix? This remains to be seen.

The first season of Pluribus (****) is beautifully-shot, written and acted, with phenomenal acting, attention to detail and a logical exploration of the premise. Midseason, it definitely slows down so much that the show risks losing the audience's full attention, but it does rally and come back strong for an interesting ending. Whether Season 2 can up the ante to make a longer-form story out of this limited premise viable remains to be seen. The season can be seen worldwide at the moment on Apple TV+. A second season was commissioned at the same time as the first but, slightly inexplicably, is still to enter production.

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Wertzone Classics: Better Call Saul - The Complete Series

Jimmy McGill is a lawyer, struggling financially whilst working as a public defender. His brother Chuck co-runs one of the most prestigious law firms in Albuquerque, but Chuck is sceptical of Jimmy's legal abilities. Jimmy's attempts to win his brother's approval and improve his standing lead him to cut corners and take up dubious cases, bringing him into the orbit of of former police officer Mike Ehrmantraut and a local drugs gang, represented by Nacho Varga. As Jimmy tries to get by, his antics lead him towards his ultimate fate, of taking up the name "Saul" and meeting one Walter White.

The spin-off series is an interesting proposition. Take an element from a successful show and try to spin that element into its own vehicle. Most of the time, these ideas crash and burn without success. But on occasion, they succeed and do well. On even rarer occasions they are stronger and better (or at least more consistent) than their progenitor show: Frasier, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Angel and Xena: Warrior Princess immediately come to mind (and The Simpsons, arguably). Heck, Vince Gilligan once before flirted with a spin-off show of his own, helming The Lone Gunmen as an ancillary appendage of The X-Files. It did not do well.

When the progenitor show is Breaking Bad, widely-acclaimed as one of the best TV shows of all time, the idea of doing a spin-off is a dubious one to start with, especially given that one of the greatest accomplishments of the show is its outrageously good ending. Messing with that mojo seems fraught with peril. But Vince Gilligan didn't get the memo (twice, as he also built the TV movie El Camino onto the end of the original show). Better Call Saul is a spin-off to Breaking Bad which acts as a prequel and sequel simultaneously, expanding on a side-character from the original show developed originally for comedy value: Saul Goodman, played by Bob Odenkirk.

The central brilliance of Better Call Saul is that it is the story of three men, but they're all the same person: Jimmy McGill, the younger man whom we join trying to make a relatively honest living and win the approval of his demanding older brother; Saul Goodman, the snake oil salesman lawyer we met in the original show; and Gene Takavic, the alias Saul is living under in Nebraska as he tries to lay low, several months after the blood-soaked events at the end of Breaking Bad. The show doesn't flip between them too much, with Gene's appearances isolated to vignettes at the start of each season and a closing arc later on, and Jimmy's evolution into Saul becoming the main focus of the series. It's an evolution which is also gradual: Jimmy doesn't start using the Saul alias regularly until the last two seasons and it takes a while for him to kick into the character we met on the mothership show.

For most of its length, then, Better Call Saul is a prequel and that can be even more limiting than most spin-offs. We know Jimmy/Saul will make it to the series finale, we know Mike is going to survive and when other Breaking Bad characters show up, we know they can't eat a bullet. More than once Vince Gilligan and his co-showrunner Peter Gould joked about setting the show in a parallel timeline and just killing Breaking Bad characters without warning, but sanity prevailed. The show then has to put the legwork in to make these stories about characters whose fates you already know more interesting.

It succeeds. Saul in Breaking Bad was a great character, funny with a hint of pathos, ably delivered by Odenkirk. Jimmy is a much richer, more three-dimensional character, with real reasons for being the person he is. But the show never excuses him. It explains him, but asks for no forgiveness for him. Other characters have bad breaks, awful luck or tough upbringings and improve on them and become better people. Jimmy, as we know from the very start, does not, and watching his decline and fall and how much of his later corruption was built into him from the start is fascinating.

Jimmy is the heart of the show, but it spends almost as much time expanding on Mike. When we met Mike on the earlier show, he was already a cool professional with a moral code but one that had clearly been compromised. Surprisingly, at the start of Better Call Saul he's almost already in the same same position, but the show teases out depths from the character and Jonathan Banks' performance that were not hinted at in the original run. Mike makes for an interesting counterpoint to Jimmy, as Jimmy walks into his situations with a total lack of awareness for the consequences, whilst Mike is always thinking five steps ahead, which means when he realises what he's becoming, he has to confront it with his eyes wide open.

Better Call Saul brings in new characters as well. Michael Mando is a fantastic actor with a powerful screen presence (exemplified in the video game Far Cry 3 and his two-season arc on Orphan Black) who's been looking for a role to make the most of his gifts. Nacho Varga is certainly that role, a drug dealer and criminal who seems dissatisfied with his lot, trying to keep in touch with his family and find an outlet for his ambitions. Nacho might be the most honest character on the show, the one whose humanity grows over the course of the show rather than erodes, and definitely the most underused. Although Nacho's arc spans all six seasons, he appears in barely half of the episodes. But that doesn't detract from Mando's excellent performance or his brilliantly-performed storyline in Season 6. Tony Dalton also joins the show late to deliver an outstanding performance as Lalo, a villain with bags of charm and a vicious streak a mile wide.

Veteran actor Michael McKean is also outstanding as Jimmy's older brother, Chuck, an accomplished and skilled lawyer who is dealing with complicated health issues as well as a lifelong suspicion of his little brother's antics. The relationship between Chuck and Jimmy defines at least half of the runtime of the show and their constant wary circling around one another, switching from loathing to sympathy to contempt to love, is a constantly challenging balancing act for both writers and actors, and a challenge they rise to. Also outstanding is Patrick Fabian as Chuck's partner, Howard, whom is presented initially as an antagonist, but again is fleshed out beyond that to become a more interesting, complex character, moving from an unlikable arsehole to one of the most sympathetic characters on the show over the course of his evolution.

If the cast has one absolute standout - and in this cast that's a very hard call - it's the Emmy-nominated but not winning (so far!) Rhea Seehorn as Kim Wexler, Jimmy's ally on the inside at his brother's law firm, a tough but fair lawyer with a keen legal mind and a high sense of integrity, who indulges Jimmy's antics up to a point. Her evolution over the course of the series is as good as anyone's, and Seehorn's performance continuously ups the ante, delivering ever more riches of character.

Of course, any character who appears in Saul and doesn't appear in Breaking Bad may have the sword of Damocles hanging over them, and the show is mostly fair in not indulging in this too much, and the question of who lives and who dies becomes far less interesting than what they do, and why they do it.

Better Call Saul is a less-obviously immediate show than its forebear. Breaking Bad has that much pithier premise ("a high school teacher can't afford cancer treatment, turns into a meth dealer crime lord,") and delivers more obvious dramatic twists every few episodes. Better Call Saul is subtler and more restrained. Breaking Bad signalled its season finales with major character deaths and sometimes actual massive explosions; Better Call Saul's often twist on a single line of dialogue between two characters. That's not to say that Better Call Saul is completely bereft of action, especially as the cartel storyline becomes prominent in its second half, but it's more strategic in how it deploys mayhem and murder, and makes those moments count so much more powerfully by building up to them with almost forensic foreshadowing and scene-setting. More than once the show feels like it's spinning its wheels mid-season, only for later episodes to take these widely-scattered plot threads and tie them together in the impressive ways.

Are there more substantial criticisms? Well, it inherits one issue from Breaking Bad, which is severely underusing the excellent Laura Fraser as Lydia (who gets even less screen time this time around). A few times you might wonder if a story beat could have been delivered faster with less buildup. But in most respects Better Call Saul improves on its forebear, such as having the same number of episodes but splitting the action across six shorter seasons rather than five longer ones gives the show more focus.

Better Call Saul (*****) is fantastically acted, beautifully written and peerlessly constructed. It stands by itself as a fantastic slice of television drama but also builds on and enhances its predecessor show as well. The series is available to watch in full via AMC in the US and Netflix in most of the rest of the world.

Thank you for reading The Wertzone. To help me provide better content, please consider contributing to my Patreon page and other funding methods.