Note: This commentary on the first two episodes of Plur1bus contains spoilers.
Apple TV’s Plur1bus begins with an unnerving paradox: a world unified in perfect happiness, and one woman left outside that joy. Vince Gilligan, best known for Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, trades moral corrosion for existential isolation. The brilliant opening two episodes “We Is Us” and “Pirate Lady,” establish a quiet apocalypse – one in which almost every human has been absorbed into a collective consciousness.
The show’s premise could easily slide into familiar science fiction territory, but Gilligan uses it to explore something far closer to home: the loneliness that comes when unity is forced rather than chosen, and the question of what it means to remain truly human when the world demands conformity.
In “We Is US” Rhea Seehorn’s Carol Sturka returns to Albuquerque after a long work trip to find the world subtly off balance. News reports hint at a strange cosmic signal, an unexplained illness, and a surge of inexplicable goodwill. The change comes suddenly. At a café, strangers embrace. In a hospital waiting room, a dozen patients rise in eerie unison and say to Carol, “We just want to help, Carol.” What looks like harmony feels like possession. From that moment, the series asks its central question: when connection comes at the expense of individuality, is it still connection at all?
Gilligan described the premise as “the most miserable person on Earth must save the world from happiness.” His irony cuts deep. The hive-mind humanity becomes the mirror image of our hyperconnected lives – linked, responsive, endlessly online – yet inwardly estranged. Carol’s immunity to the contagion makes her the last true individual. The series presents this as both burden and calling, not unlike the biblical prophets who resisted the chorus of consensus. Like Elijah alone on Mount Horeb, Carol stands apart from a people who speak with one voice. The divine whisper in Pluribus is not in the wind or the earthquake but in Carol’s isolation, in the quiet awareness that love without freedom isn’t love at all.
The show’s title, drawn from the Latin phrase E pluribus unum (“out of many, one”), carries theological resonance. Christian tradition speaks of unity as the body of Christ – many members, one body – but that unity is sustained through diversity and choice. The oneness of Plur1bus is something different: imposed harmony, unchosen communion. When Carol encounters Zosia (Karolina Wydra), a representative of the hive, she’s told that the connected share every memory and emotion. “We’re affected by your emotions,” Zosia says. “If they’re directed at us, they can be a little tough to take.” When Carol erupts in anger, Zosia convulses and collapses. Carol’s individuality is literally toxic to the collective. The suggestion is clear: in a world that prizes constant togetherness, the act of being separate – angry, grieving, or faithful – becomes dangerous.
Gilligan has said Plur1bus became “timelier than I planned it to be.” The pandemic, the social media era, the exhaustion of endless connection – all of it lingers at the show’s edges. Yet the spiritual reading is equally strong. The biblical story begins with communion – with God, with one another, with creation – but the fall introduces separation. Redemption, in Christian faith, is the movement toward restored relationship, not the erasure of difference. Carol’s resistance to the hive can be seen as a defense of that divine image within humanity: the self that chooses, that feels, that doubts.
The show’s first two episodes depict that choice as costly. Carol’s partner Helen succumbs early to the transformation. Carol buries her quietly in the desert. The camera lingers on her loneliness, the silence punctuated only by the wind. There’s no rapture, no heroism – just one woman standing against a world that insists she surrender her grief. “You’ll be happy if you join us,” the collective says, echoing every false promise of salvation through comfort. Carol’s refusal becomes an act of faith, a stubborn insistence that joy without truth is counterfeit.
Gilligan’s storytelling resists spectacle. Instead of explosions or chase scenes, he gives long, uneasy silences. The drama unfolds in hospital corridors and abandoned houses, where Carol watches others smile and hold hands while she hides in the shadows. Seehorn plays her not as a rebel leader but as someone searching for meaning. She carries guilt for surviving and uncertainty about what resisting even means. “Maybe they’re right,” she whispers in episode 2 “Pirate Lady”. “Maybe it’s better this way.” That doubt grounds the show’s theology: faith isn’t certainty, it’s choosing relationship and freedom even when loneliness feels unbearable.
The series has just kicked off but it seems that Plur1bus isn’t a story of resisting connection but redeeming it. Carol’s isolation reflects our shared ache for belonging that doesn’t consume us. In a world mediated by algorithms and platforms promising unity, the series exposes how easily the desire to belong can turn into surrender. The hive-mind’s mantra – “We just want to help” – echoes with chilling benevolence, like every system that claims to know what’s best for us or algorithms that lead into eco chambers. The moral vision of Plur1bus is that compassion without freedom becomes control.
There’s a grace in Carol’s struggle. Even as she rejects the hive, she doesn’t hate those who’ve joined it. Her anger and sorrow are bound up with love, a love that insists others must be allowed to choose. That tension recalls the Christian paradox of divine love: God who desires unity yet honours freedom. The faith dimension of Plur1bus lies not in overt religiosity but in the yearning it reveals – the search for connection that preserves the soul.
In the final moments of the second episode, Carol escapes a transport plane full of survivors who have begun to accept the hive’s influence. Standing on the tarmac alone, she looks up at a sky pulsing faintly with that alien signal. The camera holds her face as the sound of collective voices hums beneath the wind. The scene closes not with triumph but with quiet prayer: what does it mean to be human when being human feels like exile?
Plur1bus turns that question back on its audience. We live in networks that promise closeness yet often deliver emptiness. We scroll through the hive, speak in chorus, and rarely stop to ask whether connection without choice is worth the cost. Carol’s story becomes ours—a reminder that the image of God is not in the collective’s uniform smile but in the solitary voice that dares to say no. Faith, in Gilligan’s world, is the courage to remain human in a world that has forgotten how.
The first two episodes of Plur1bus are on Apple TV. Insights will be doing weekly recaps of the series. Episodes come out every Friday.
