Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Tori Preston | TV | November 11, 2025
By now, you probably know what Vince Gilligan’s mysterious new series Pluribus is all about (and if you don’t, Dustin wrote a handy explainer yesterday). In a nutshell, an alien virus infects the entire population of Earth, linking everyone’s consciousness into a hive mind, save for 12 people who remain inexplicably unaffected. Part pandemic, part Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the show takes a lot of familiar influences and mixes them into an apocalypse with one compelling twist: the infected are not a threat. Instead, the hive mind is kinda … nice? Too nice, as it turns out - but I’ll get to that.
The first episode dispenses with the outbreak, and once the dust has cleared, the new world order is almost immediately stable. The 12 “survivors” - if you can call them that - are immune, so there is no immediate threat of infection, and although the Hive is investigating how these holdouts might be able to become infected and join the Hive in the future, it claims the choice will be up to them. In fact, that’s kind of their M.O. - doing whatever will make the survivors happy, or at least not doing anything to upset them. Still, decades of science fiction have taught us about the dangers of joining such a collective at the expense of individual free will, so the choice should be a bit of a no-brainer, right?
Certainly, that’s what our protagonist, Carol (Rhea Seehorn), seems to think. In the second episode, Carol requests a meeting with some of the other survivors, so they can strategize how to save the world - only they’re not convinced it needs saving at all. Sure, the world is now full of pod people who share the same mind, but that means all those people still exist! They just exist everywhere, inside everyone, all together. The side effect of all that harmony is that there’s no murder or racism or even zoos anymore. “Peace on Earth,” as one survivor, Mr. Diabaté (Samba Schutte), describes it. Carol knows in her gut that it’s all wrong, but she can’t articulate it in a way that convinces anyone else she’s right, and even if she could, it wouldn’t matter. It took a team of astrophysicists and geneticists to bring this virus to Earth. A handful of randos led by a romantasy author probably don’t have the skills to reverse it.
If the second episode was largely about confronting Carol’s, and our own, assumptions as to whether this infection is indeed dangerous, then the conclusion it came to was perhaps a surprising one. The danger the Hive presents isn’t necessarily to the uninfected or to the world at large. Sure, when the outbreak hit, hundreds of millions of people died in the conversion. But then again, any time Carol gets angry, she causes the infected to have seizures, leading to tens of millions of deaths. Both sides have accidental-genocide blood on their hands here.
No, the real danger the hive mind presents is to itself, precisely because it can’t say no. The Hive may be running things, but it will cater to the whims of the dozen holdouts, no matter what those whims are. Its whole schtick is to do no harm (again, ignore the eight hundred million or so oopsie-deaths), which includes hurt feelings. Carol realizes the uncomfortable extent of this just as she’s given up on rallying some allies to her whole save-the-world cause. Mr. Diabaté asks Carol for permission to take her Hive chaperone, the so-called “Pirate Lady” named Zosia, with him when he leaves. He got to know her and feels they “made a connection,” which he’d like to deepen (sexually, obvs).
Now, setting aside the fact that having a connection to any one Hive person is the same as having a connection to them all, which is to say meaningless, Carol doesn’t particularly care. But she also knows it shouldn’t be her decision to make. Free will, right? So let Zosia choose who she wants to go with!
Oh wait. “We can’t choose,” Zosia explains. “If we were to choose, it would hurt one of you. We can’t do that.” It’s up to Carol and Diabaté to decide for her.
When we talk about abuses of power and sexual assault, we usually are talking about lack of consent, but the other side of that coin is coercion. What happens when a person technically consents, but only because they don’t feel they can decline? What the show presented was a simple but familiar scenario to anyone who has engaged in unwanted sexual activity simply because the other person wanted to, and they didn’t want to hurt their feelings. Zosia, and all Hive members, are open to any form of affection, not so much because they want it, but because they coexist with a handful of free immune people who might, and their feelings matter. In this apocalypse, the uninfected have a surprising amount of power, and the infected, by their very nature, have no choice but to do their bidding.
The question of free will in Pluribus isn’t so much about the human race being infected without their consent. I mean, that’s a thing that happened, but the Hive seems happy. Whether that’s just the virus talking, or whether every single consciousness in the collective is satisfied, we may never know - but it’s over and done with now. Carol may not be able to save the world the way she wanted to, by eliminating the virus and freeing all the individuals trapped in the hive mind, but she may have stumbled upon another way to make the world better. She initially lets Diabaté take Zosia, but later changes her mind - running out in front of Air Force One to stop him and get her girl back. If all of humanity is in this Hive, maybe fighting them isn’t the path forward that Carol needs to take. Maybe her job is to protect them from the (free) will of the people like herself who are actually in control.
