In the poem that gives Nikki Giovanni's 1978 poetry collection Cotton Candy on a Rainy Day its title, she wrote: "They have asked the psychiatrists psychologists politicians and social workers / What this decade will be known for / There is no doubt it is loneliness."
This decade, too, might be known for loneliness, driven by everything from social media to political disempowerment, collapsing public health to prejudice, poverty, land use, media consolidation and the willful undermining of community ties. If loneliness turns out to be our legacy, Vince Gilligan's haunting new show Pluribus might be one of the era's most relevant works.
Both Gilligan and Apple TV have been cagey about revealing what Pluribus is actually about, although if you stare at that title for long enough (and if you look at how it's sometimes styled as Plur1bus), you'll get clues. What feels fair to reveal is that Rhea Seehorn, so brilliant as Kim in Gilligan's Better Call Saul, stars as Carol Sturka, a defiant misanthrope plagued by bristly self-loathing who suddenly finds herself feeling very much alone in the world. Like Burgess Meredith in The Twilight Zone episode "Time Enough At Last," Carol gets a brutal glimpse at a world without annoyances, and she is immediately desperate to get back what she's lost.
How this happens: remember that long before Vince Gilligan created Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, he wrote for The X-Files, where he was responsible for some of the show's weirdest and funniest episodes, as well as some of its most moving and sad. He worked on "Small Potatoes" (babies with tails) and "Bad Blood" (a vampire story played for laughs); "Memento Mori" and "Paper Hearts" (both from the show's melancholy arcs about grief). Gilligan loves science fiction at least as much as he loves drug dealers and petty sleazeballs, and Pluribus is indeed not confined to the surly bonds of Earth. One of the show's first visuals is of enormous satellite dishes tracking the skies, and one of its first settings is an Army installation.
You should discover the details for yourself, but roughly halfway through the first episode, there is an event — no, let's say there's an Event — and Carol is soon confronted by a crowd of people who blankly announce, "We just want to help, Carol" in unison. (This does not help Carol.) By the end of that episode, she is at home, alone, devastated and terrified. A man in a suit talks to her through her TV, saying she's going to be fine and she shouldn't worry (which does not help her not worry) because soon enough, "you can join us." Who is "us"? Well ... again, the show is called Pluribus.
Vince Gilligan's genius is in the deft way he marbles brutality, humanity and humor into a single creation in which each element retains its punch, but the whole still makes sense. After all, what makes Breaking Bad a brutal watch in the early going is how quickly you get to things like dissolving bodies in acid and being left to contend with the muck that remains. But what makes it delightful is the absurd sight of Walt in his underpants and a gas mask, tearing down a dusty road in an RV while bodies slide around in the back.
Pluribus, too, is a brutal watch as Carol finds herself deep in grief, walking through empty buildings, driving deserted neighborhoods, experiencing the arid desolation of a frictionless life. But the collaboration between Gilligan and Seehorn also is built on how funny she is, how perfectly suited to both his willingness to plumb deep wells of sadness and the playfulness that made him an ideal collaborator with Bob Odenkirk, even back when Saul was mostly Breaking Bad comic relief. Carol may be experiencing existential despair, but boy, does Seehorn manage some deeply entertaining side-eye directed at the man talking to her from the TV and the two neighborhood kids who seem uncomfortably The Shining-inflected as they offer her help finding her spare key. Without its humor, Pluribus might be too sad and too lonely to enjoy, but while Carol is isolated inside her own strange new world, her reactions are so funny and so human that she's easy to attach to as a character.
And still, it is so, so sad. The loneliness here is not physical the way that, for instance, Mark Watney's loneliness is physical in The Martian. Carol is alone even in crowds. She is alone even when mobbed by ingratiating drones who care only for her happiness. Carol's problem post-Event is not that she doesn't see people at all, but that she sees them drained of their particularities. Everyone else has become so compliant, so blankly happy, that Carol cannot feel her own humanity, because she cannot feel it pushing up against theirs. Loneliness, after all, is not just the loss of the company of others; it's the loss of self in their absence.
Even beyond loneliness, Pluribus has a philosophical frankness that is more refreshing than didactic. After all, whatever this force is that's now occupying the space where every person Carol has ever known used to be, it is so pacifying and so cooperative that it offers her whatever she wants. Food? Whatever she needs can be brought to her door. A car? She can take any one she wants. A plane, a mansion, a gas station pump turned on, a shuttered business reopened, some help with a grueling physical task? Of course, of course. Pick up the phone, and we'll do it. We just want to help, Carol. In a way that's both literal and literary, Carol is being presented with the tension between "freedom" in the sense of self-determination and "freedom" in the sense of getting whatever you want all the time.
Is your humanity too high a price to pay for a life of ease? Do we resolve conflict best by obliterating or ignoring competing wants and priorities, or by the messy work of making our way through those things?
If these deeper questions are not enough, and if the comedy is not enough, and if Rhea Seehorn's extraordinary work is not enough, Gilligan remains one of the best visual stylists in television. Much of Pluribus takes place in his now-signature location of Albuquerque, and his reverence for its skies, its mountains, and its red dust has not changed. For all that television is a writers' medium, it feels impossible to imagine Carol based in Chicago or Florida or the Pacific Northwest. There's a poignancy in the hugeness of her physical world, the breadth of the open sky and the roads that stretch endlessly toward the horizon, contrasted with the shrinking of her emotional life down to a single "relationship" with this force she does not understand.
It's a crushingly sad show at times, but it can be marvelously whimsical, too. (It's so clever to cast soap opera icon Peter Bergman as the smiling man in Carol's TV, who is somehow menacing, strange, silly and empty-headed all at once.) It's bracing and hard to watch, but in the end, it is a story about the preciousness of individuals, and in that sense, it may just be substantially less bleak than it initially appears.
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