Pluribus

 The pod people are coming.  In Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Don Siegel, 1956 based on a 1955 Jack Finney novel) human beings are replaced by muted, robotic collectivist aliens.  The film has been generally interpreted as reflecting Cold War anxieties about Communism and communist infiltration of American institutions.  In 1978's remake, Phil Kauffman imagines the pod people as Nixon's minions, ultra-disciplined henchmen for a regime that seeks to abolish human individuality -- the movie is set in San Francisco and features Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead.  The Communists are stopped in the '56 movie; Nixon's goons win in the '78 film.  These pictures focus on the initial onslaught of the collective hive-mind aliens on the human race.  Vince Gilligan's Pluribus, at its core a remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, is more audacious and intellectually challenging -- in Pluribus, the initial subjugation of the human race to the "hive-mind", occurs before the credits.  The nine episodes, all about 50 minutes long, of the show are devoted to the implications of a world-wide regime of soul-less hive-mind collectivists.  After a brisk prelude, Pluribus explores a reality in which everyone on earth, save a dozen or so outliers, are psychologically fused into one vast entity -- every man, woman, and child share exactly the same sensations, memories, expertise, and knowledge.  With the exception of the remnant, inexplicably not affected by the worldwide "joining", everyone knows everyone elses' experiences and all human knowledge is shared by the collective hive mind.  (The situation seems to some extent to be an allegory of the internet and world wide web -- everyone on-line knows potentially everything that can be known).  Furthermore, the collective mind's unitary personality is exceptionally gentle and benign.  The hive mind is a sort of Buddhist super-entity that is peaceable, kind, and devoted to the enlightenment of all sentient beings.  The pod-people in this iteration of The Bodysnatchers cannot lie or deceive, can not act with malice or cruelty and, indeed, are so pacifist that they are unable to even pick fruit, let alone, eat animal tissue -- as we learn, they subside on a milky fluid that is derived from human cadavers, people who have naturally died are converted to edible protein.  The pod-people seem wholly passive - if one of the stand-alone outliers challenges them, they have a tendency to collapse into seizures which have the effect of paralyzing the whole world, and, further, slaughtering anyone who is driving or flying or working with power machinery.  The premises of the hive-mind intelligence are convincingly developed, thought-through, and demonstrated -- the show is logical enough to satisfy its viewers with the notion that the nightmarish scenario (which may, in fact, be paradisical) is plausible enough to sustain both belief and interest.

The series is a star-vehicle for Rhea Seehorn, the actress who played against (and as love-interest) for Bob Odenkirk in the brilliant Better Call Saul series, also a Gilligan program.  Seehorn is inspiring as Carol Sturka, a fantasy novelist in the Anne Rice, bodice-ripping genre.  Sturka is fantastically successful and travels around promoting her books, which she secretly considers dreck, with her spouse -- she's one of TV's newly visible, normalized, and proud lesbians.  When the "joining" occurs, Carol is excluded for some reason that's never explained.  (Her wife dies, knocking Carol, who has alcoholic tendencies into heavy drinking and, even, drug use.)  The hive-mind sends a guardian angel to her in the form of Zosia, an attractive woman who looks like one of the "thirst-trap" characters in Sturka's novels.  Carol is adamant that she will not join the others in the hive-mind although everyone provides her with testimonials as to how beautiful and serene life will be for her as a member of the collective.  In fact, she violently resists being annexed by the collective.  Her aggression, in fact, causes world-wide spasms when the objects of her fury collapse into seizures bringing everyone and everything to its knees for a few minutes.  The first three or so episodes are broadly comical -- Carol connects with the other persons resistant to the hive-mind:  they are a motley group, mostly yearning to join with the others, although one of them, a hedonist African has figured out how to exploit the situation -- he jets around in Air Force One with a bevy of sex-slaves, travels from one lavish destination to another:  the Caribbean or Las Vegas or the French Rivera.  This amusing character is no help to Carol whose ambitions are to save the world by figuring out a way to reverse the universal utopian peace prevailing everywhere.  As it happens, Carol has a stubborn soul-mate, a Paraguayan man named Manousas who absolutely refuses to accept any of the perquisites offered to him by the pod-people -- he calls them "weirdos."  The hive-mind lets Carol do anything that pleases with her and she communicates with the belligerent Paraguayan -- after a number of misunderstandings, principally due to language problems, the Paraguayan sets forth by automobile driving all the way from Asuncion to Bernalillo, New Mexico where Carol lives.  Manousas is the proverbial righteous man who acts in accord with his ethics even when no one is watching.  (For instance, he pays for gas by leaving money in envelopes or slipped under windshield wipers as he siphons fuel out of stranded cars).  Ultimately, the bloody-minded Manousas reaches New Mexico, more than a little the worse for wear -- he's been impaled on some kind of thorn bush in the Darien Gap. Carol has been deteriorating -- after her confrontations with the pod-people have induced world-wide paroxysms, the people in her city have simply moved en masse to get away from her; when she calls them by phone, they answer:  "Our feelings for you Carol haven't changed, but we think its best to take some time off from you.  But we will still deliver anything you want--"  Carol has been asking for things like weapons and booze and one gets the sense that she is near suicide.  Robinson Crusoe-style isolation is disastrous for her and she is deteriorating psychologically.  After pleading with the pod people to come back to her, Zosia re-appears and embarks on a sexual relationship with Carol.  They jetset around the world skiing, lounging in Japanese hot baths, and engaging in the most sybaritic luxuries.  Zosia professes to love Carol and persuades her to consider joining the hive mind.  (We've just seen one of the last hold-outs, a teenager in a very remote valley in Peru, agree to a ritual in which she joins the hive-mind.)  Carol loves Zosia as well and seems about to succumb to her blandishments -- she's tempted to give up her individuality and be submerged in the pluribus of the hive-mind.  But, Manousas arrives and tells her succinctly:  "You have to make a choice:  either you save the world or you get the girl."  After some agonized deliberation, Carol decides to save the world from the beneficent but soul-less pod people.  And that's where the first series ends.

The show is wonderfully shot in a combination of extreme long shots of the Peruvian mountains or the New Mexico desert and close-ups showing the protagonists.  The New Mexico settings are stark and beautiful and the atmospheric touches are great -- Carol invades the Georgia O'Keefe museum in Santa Fe and takes one of the pictures to hang on her wall, an interior decorating decision applauded by the pod people.  Small details create the sense of reality and fascination that characterizes the show:  there are coyotes who try to unearth Carol's spouse buried in a shallow grave in the backyard of her suburban McMansion.  Translation problems with a cell-phone app provide interesting complications.  The pod-people are not really eerily blank and ill-formed but to the contrary wonderfully gentle, kind, ministering angels.  In one scene, in which Carol beds down with the pod people in a public high school gymnasium,  the film all but dissolves in tenderness -- the weirdos aren't human but they are certainly not less than human; indeed, they may represent a better, more perfect form of consciousness.  Carol skeptically says to Zosia as they are going to bed on the gymnasium floor:  "What is this? Some kind of sex-orgy?" where upon Zosia says "Not unless you want it to be Carol."  Pluribus is widely acclaimed as one of the best shows ever produced and it lives up to its hype.