The Pluribus Episode 1 Line That Tells Us What The Show Is Really About

Contains spoilers for "Pluribus" Season 1, Episode 1 — "We Is Us"

Vince Gilligan wisely ended the "Breaking Bad" universe to focus on something completely different, a new Apple TV+ series called "Pluribus." The show follows romance author Carol Sturka (Rhea Seehorn), one of the few people left on Earth who hasn't been affected by a strange virus that makes people optimistic. As such, she's miserable while everyone around her is far too happy. It's a fascinating setup, but what does it mean? Well, there's a line in the first episode that hints at what the show may actually be a metaphor for.

At one point, Davis Taffler (Peter Bergman) talks Carol through this new reality, and when she asks how the hive mind works, he says, "We don't know exactly. It just does." On one hand, this is an easy cop-out to avoid getting bogged down in sci-fi mumbo jumbo, but it eerily echoes sentiments from experts in the field of artificial intelligence on how current AI systems operate. Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, posted an essay to his website in which he states, "When a generative AI system does something, like summarize a financial document, we have no idea, at a specific or precise level, why it makes the choices it does."

Gilligan definitely isn't a fan of artificial intelligence. When he teased "Pluribus" during an interview with Variety in 2023, he made it clear that he sees AI as the end of creativity as we know it. "I think it's a lot of horses***," he said. "It's a giant plagiarism machine, in its current form. I think ChatGPT knows what it's writing like a toaster knows that it's making toast." As such, "Pluribus" could be viewed as a metaphor for the masses blindly adopting a new thing without stopping to consider the consequences.

"Pluribus" follows in the vein of classic hive mind movies like "Invasion of the Body Snatchers," which has one of the most horrific movie outcomes ever. A good chunk of the pilot plays like a zombie outbreak, with Carol trying to figure out what's ailing everyone and why they're acting so overly friendly. It's ultimately a show about the need for individuality against a landscape that advocates for conformity, and it's easy to see how that applies to the AI boom.

The argument from those in favor of AI is that it's already here, and ignoring it won't make it go away. They will tell you that you might as well use it despite the fact that it will never be able to create true art with intention, meaning, and passion behind it. However, people like Carol in "Pluribus" (and, by extension, Vince Gilligan) would argue that the world needs art created by humans, even if it's messy and isn't always great, because being messy and flawed is vital to humanity.

This could also apply to social media at large, where people tend to present an image of joy and contentment. People often post about their triumphs but hide any darkness. Carol struggles with this duality at the start of "Pluribus" Episode 1: She gets through a meet-and-greet for a new book she's not excited about, only to drop the act once she's out of view in a car. While it's a sci-fi show on the surface, it's clear that "Pluribus" is concerned with very real issues.