Apple TV’s new prestige drama from Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan genuinely proposes a provocative concept that targets the current AI boom and its potential infringement on human autonomy. Over nine episodes, we follow Carol Sturka, a miserable romantasy author whose life turns upside down when she becomes one of the few people immune to a ‘virus’ that connects humanity to a hivemind—making everyone happy, compliant, and identical.
The infected draw uncomfortable parallels to our dystopian future anxieties: everyone absorbed into the cloud, individuality dissolved. Carol, mourning her lost partner, fights against this homogenization while grappling with isolation and grief. Meanwhile, other uninfected characters embrace this new world order, complicating her mission to ‘save’ humanity.
The show’s philosophical core questions whether safety and cooperation achieved through uniformity actually constitutes progress. If suffering disappears but so does individual choice, have we truly created a better world? Pluribus suggests our autonomy—messy, painful, and unpredictable—might be essential to our humanity.