Warning: This episode contains spoilers for the first two episodes of Pluribus.
Forget egomaniacal meth kingpins and sleazy con-artist attorneys. In Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul creator Vince Gilligan’s new post-apocalyptic sci-fi drama Pluribus, the star of the show is Rhea Seehorn’s Carol Sturka, the curmudgeonly best-selling author of an uber-popular series of pirate-themed speculative historical romance novels. Oh, and she also turns out to be one of only 13 people in the world immune to a hive-mind style alien virus that takes control of Earth’s population.
Pluribus, the first two episodes of which are now streaming on Apple TV, opens with two astronomers discovering an extraterrestrial radio signal coming from 600 light-years away that, once decoded, is revealed to be composed of four tones that correspond to the nucleotide bases that make up RNA: guanine, uracil, adenine, and cytosine. Scientists subsequently recreate this sequence in a lab and begin testing it on animals, a process that eventually leads to a rat bite that creates patient zero of a highly contagious infection that acts as “psychic glue,” binding the minds of nearly every person on the planet into a compulsively cheerful collective consciousness.
“Pluribus is my twist on a post-apocalyptic zombie tale. The big difference is these people are not zombies. They’re really, really happy people who still have all their faculties. They’re not robots, and they’re not aliens,” Gilligan told Men’s Health of the impetus for the series. “When you watch The Walking Dead, as riveting as that show is, I don’t know if there’s anybody ever in the history of [watching] that show, who said, ‘Man, I wish I could be a zombie.’ You don’t want to be a zombie. You want to be Daryl Dixon. I want people who watch Pluribus to be able to say, ‘I kind of would want to be another [happy person].'”
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