This review contains spoilers for the first two episodes of Pluribus, a show that is highly spoilable but also so odd and compelling that even if you’ve been spoiled unintentionally, it’s absolutely still worth watching.
Pluribus appears to be a zombie story. Or an alien-invasion story. Or an apocalypse-survival story. And it is all those things, but it is also something uniquely itself. Hundreds of millions of people die when a virus from outer space spreads across the world, and those that remain are transformed by the Joining, a telepathic connection that wipes all individual identities and replaces them with a global hive mind. Only 13 people around the world have survived as individuals, and in Pluribus’s second episode, the cynical and pragmatic Carol Sturka finally meets with several of them, hoping the last remnants of humanity can come together to save it. “It is up to us to put the world right,” she tells them in her best attempt at a stirring, motivational speech. There’s a long pause, and then Diabaté, one of the six people sitting around the table, finally responds, “Why?”
