PLUR1BUS

Pluribus is generational television. Here's why I'm calling it at Episode 6.

I am greeted roughly this morning by yesterday morning’s draft on the strength of Apple Television’s Pluribus, the brainchild of Vince Gilligan, creator of Breaking Bad.

My Left-Brain Editing Mind is now confronting yesterday’s Right-Brain Enthusiasm Mind’s gushing output after watching Episode 6. The one half is thinking the writer who typed the following opinion should be in a twelve-step program. The other half is sticking with yesterday morning’s grenade blast of unadulterated enthusiasm.

“Let me start at the end. Six seasons from now, naming your child Carol will be the equivalent of naming a child Hermione.

Paraguay Manousos and Air Force One Mr. Diabaté will be popular reference points of the same water-cooler-jug caliber as Breaking Bad’s Jesse Pinkman, Mike the Enforcer, and Gustavo the Kingpin.

For the next six years, viewers of this show are going to lean forward on their couches like they are reporting on hurricanes. Hands are going to lift to mouths in slow-motion. Everyone else is going to hear shouts and sobbing from the family room.

We are in the land of tour-de-force storytelling with one of television’s great premises and a team that knows how to do it justice.”

Here is what my long-suffering internal editor salvaged from the right-brain blast radius this morning.

Many scenes and references assume you’ve seen the episode or that you are comfortable with spoilers.

CARAMEL TIME

Generally speaking, writing advice is worth what you pay for it, and even that isn’t true. Witness Substack. But at some point over the last couple years I learned that in fiction, the more tightly you focus on a specific sensory detail, the more you pump the brakes on time. There is an inverse relationship.

We live in a moment of breathless video cuts and sensory hyperactivity. Images flash and scroll on our phones, our work computers, at our dinner tables, in our cars. I can barely read a novel, my attention is so restless.

But on Friday night, key scenes in Pluribus unfolded like dissected origami: the slow-burn gem of a scene at the casino table, Carol’s meltdown in the luxury suite bathroom, the Hitchcockian egg sandwich breakfast at the hotel room countertop, and every last crossed-out journal line and spin of the ham radio dial. Then Manousos watching Carol’s video. The last scene a master class in slow, and less is more, and the suspense of watching facial muscles for clues.

Feelings and thought appearing like Polaroids. Exquisite human detail.

Then high-speed 2x doors slamming, cityscape panoramas, Tunisia.

Caramel time, all of it. In and out, slow and fast. This is counter to everything right now. It is neurologically brain-altering.

And somehow, each of these tiny, specific moments are becoming load-bearing for a story as epic as the entire planet.

PHILOSOPHY

Most importantly, the show matters.

Who are we together and alone? What does it mean to be an individual, a point of consciousness apart from all other points of consciousness? What does it mean to be a point and not a line? The show is framing this beyond ethics.

“Do you seriously believe the world is a better place now just because it is peaceful?” I might tattoo that quote on my arm.

And how do our principles constrain our relationships? The principled turmoil in both Carol and Manousos speaks to profound questions of integrity.

Isn’t our desire to be included in groups in constant opposition to our desire to be true to our principles? Don’t groups demand a self-destructive mind-meld and an inevitable ethical and behavioral conformity? So what is it that stirs our humanity in these two principled loners standing against the world? Why do they resonate?

Could the set piece rejection of Carol by everyone on the entire planet speak any more powerfully to this? Carol is all of us in that luxury suite bathroom in Vegas. She is, bless her, everyone who has ever been stuck with the weary burden of their principles and the personality life has foisted on them, by whom I mean everyone.

And then, wait!

A few scenes later we suddenly have two principled loners who must rely on each other! What a beautiful paradox for the characters and for the viewer. You and me against the world.

Isn’t this connection between isolated points of consciousness what Love is? Can you even have love without separateness? Can the Collective “Us” in the story truly love? Or is their kindness always a “smile through a veil?” Who do they love? And how?

I get that they don’t pick apples, and they are ethical to a fault, but who do they love?

Undoubtedly, we’ll learn more. Roller-coaster psychological story jolts seem to be a given here. For me one of the jolts on Friday was a line of dialog from Mr. Diabaté:

“Ultimately, this is not about you, [Carol].”

Now the group is having its say. We are torn between all of them. As we all are. What does it mean to care for others? For groups that need our help?

It may take six more seasons to work through all this, the dramatic waves growing in each of them.

This is a world.

MR. DIABATÉ

Mr. Diabaté’s character has snuck up on us, no?

It couldn’t be any more gripping—not to mention the contribution of the actor himself and the art department. What a sound stage of spa bubbles and self-portraits they have surrounded him in.

There is an obvious structural weakness in his soulless, hedonist heaven. But not so fast on the facile dismissal. His actions hold a tantalizing logic. Because he’s more than a hedonist. Much more. He is growing more three-dimensional by the episode.

And in the depths of Carol’s global social exile and despair, Mr. Diabaté tucked her in and made her breakfast. The relief! Thank God for others. It was like eleven billion people tucked her.

And it’s like he’s watching her, considering her case, weighing her up as an ally while managing a growing unease.

But thank God he’s a hedonist in the meantime!

Think of what he is constructing for himself at the gambling table! It is a self-evident hell—I think, hope— but it is a deeply alluring hell. He has surrounded himself by the trappings and satisfactions of the flesh.

What makes him interesting, though, isn’t the harem of ladies, it’s the theater of poker table confidence he has constructed for himself. The cosplay of the soul. It is the rigging of effortless social interaction and gracious dominance in his favor. He has found the genie’s bottle, and he wants his chance to rub it.

Look at Diabaté’s smile at that poker table. It is a real human who has gifted himself a James Bond smile.

The Devil is at that table, and the Devil’s got game.

“All of this shall be yours, Mr. Diabaté.”

Yes, this is landmark television.