Vince Gilligan stands as one of the brightest individuals working in modern television. After his work on The X-Files, Breaking Bad, and Better Call Saul, no one can seriously debate that. After all, Breaking Bad probably ranks as the greatest television series ever made. Gilligan masters the art of peeling back the layers of the onion that is human nature and giving us an unsettling look at what lies beneath, especially when wrong ideas masquerade as right actions.
For example, Walter White, the main character in Breaking Bad, starts out as a poorly paid but extremely brilliant chemistry teacher who, after discovering he’s dying of cancer, decides to apply his knowledge to the “art and craft” of cooking meth so he can ensure his family has plenty of money after he dies.
Later, we discover that White should have been on the ground floor of an amazing new company, but things went sideways and the folks involved never gave him the props — or the pay — he deserved for his ideas. Over the course of his career in the drug trade, we watch his once “good intentions” twist into greed and violence as his soul decays bit by bit.
Gilligan’s latest offering, Pluribus, shows us what happens when the whole human race chooses to trade the dignity of the human soul for the false comfort of collectivism. It’s honestly shocking that someone who, as far as I know, leans liberal would create a show that so thoroughly dismantles his own side’s approach to life. After all, the left insists that the only way to achieve heaven on earth is to force everyone to believe and act the same way. Dare to stray even a baby step from the approved dogma and they brand you anathema.
Pluribus shows us an America in the not-so-distant future that an alien virus overruns. The virus joins nearly every single person—minus a few immune outliers—into one massive living organism. Yes, they keep their bodies, but everyone becomes telepathically connected. The virus, a living being, promises to transform human society into paradise through unity, equity, fairness, and a “shared purpose.”
However, the people the virus infects lose all individuality and autonomy. But hey, that’s the price you supposedly pay for the common good. Sound familiar? It should. That’s basically modern-day cancel culture. Only, in real life, unlike in the series, if you reject the hive mind, the mob publicly hunts you down and metaphorically shoots you for trying to express ideas freely on a college campus.
While the left would love nothing more than to go full Hitler and send radical jackboots down city streets to beat the population into submission to their collectivist ideas, Pluribus depicts something far more disturbing: some people willingly sacrifice their freedom for the illusion of safety and complete unity because the culture trained them to believe unity stands as the highest moral good.
The alien virus aims its message at the few—only 11 out of billions—who remain resistant. It tells them that thinking for yourself is a tremendous burden. It urges them to give that up and let the collective think for them. The “more advanced” lifeforms claim they can fix everything. They are the elite. They have it all figured out. Just let them take control, wipe out individuality, and drift into bliss.
The true way to obliterate a human soul doesn’t come through crushing it but through convincing it to stop fighting. When you strip away a person’s responsibility to grow and evolve, morality flushes straight down the toilet. No one gets the chance to disagree. No more metaphorical fighting on the battlefield of ideas to discover unvarnished truth. Independent thought, after all, breeds conflict and disunity. And that, of course, violates the supposed higher moral good of “togetherness.” Can’t have that.
What Pluribus teaches viewers, at least so far in its first season, is that human beings don’t exist as cogs in a machine. God made us in His image. He gave us a conscience and designed it for us to freely use so we can choose to love Him and our neighbors. He did not create us for groupthink.
Unfortunately, liberals remain so blinded by their own ideology that I’m not sure they’ll see the actual point. Or they’ll agree that collectivist thinking is bad news but fail to recognize they’re the ones guilty of it.
Regardless, the show delivers a sharp critique of collectivism and surprisingly mixes in a good amount of humor. Despite some wokeness — the main character is a lesbian — the premise is strong enough to make the series entertaining and worth checking out.
