Pluribus begins with a premise so sharp it feels inevitable.
A signal from space is decoded into a formula that promises unity.
Scientists test it, and the world dissolves into harmony.
A happiness virus sweeps the planet, linking every mind into one collective
consciousness. Fires are put out, planes land safely, strangers move as one. Only twelve people remain unjoined.
One of them, Carol Sturka, a romance novelist who despises her own success, becomes the last real human voice in a world that has stopped disagreeing.
The first episode, We Is Us', unfolds like a slow-motion disaster film stripped of panic, more terrifying because everyone’s smiling.
The hour opens with discovery, not despair. A lab decodes an alien message with cheerful excitement, turning scientific curiosity into catastrophe. The transformation is quiet, bloodless, and wrong.
The newly joined aren’t monsters; they’re helpful, calm, and obedient. Gilligan directs these scenes like a waltz, letting unease grow out of rhythm, not chaos. Then comes the gut punch: Carol and her wife, Helen, at a bar, mid-tour. The world freezes. The guitarist keeps strumming through the silence.
When everyone reanimates, Helen is gone. Carol is still herself, and that makes her a problem.
The world moves on without her. The infected become a hive that wants to fix the few who didn’t join. They choose a spokesperson, a mid-level official in a suit who looks authoritative enough to represent all of humanity.
He appears on C-SPAN from the White House press room, addressing Carol directly. News crawls roll across the bottom of the screen: “YOUR LIFE IS YOUR OWN” and “WE CAN’T READ MINDS.”
They beg her to call.
It’s absurd, funny, and quietly menacing. When she finally dials the number, a voice greets her like an old friend. Later, viewers who try the same thing in real life hear the same unnerving message:
“Hi, Carol. We can’t wait for you to join us.”
That joke doubles as a thesis.
If a system must tell you you’re free, you aren’t.
The pilot plays this idea straight, without sermonizing. The collective insists it means no harm, that happiness is the natural state of an evolved species. Carol’s refusal makes her the planet’s last dissident. The show doesn’t paint her as noble. She’s bitter, scared, and angry. But her fury feels earned. The right to grief, to self-destruction, to be alone—those are the last scraps of autonomy she has.
When the hive insists on curing her, she hears the soft tyranny of good intentions.
Visually, the episode is meticulous. Faces dominate the frame while action unfolds at a distance, as if the world is already turning away from individuality. Light cuts through the New Mexico haze like antiseptic. Reflections repeat figures until they look like echoes of the same mind.
Even the captions, colored yellow instead of white, underline the show’s fixation with communication and translation. Everything looks designed by the collective. Nothing feels accidental.
Gilligan’s writing has the same dry irony that fueled his earlier work. The humor lands in small, human beats - the blank stares of the newly joined, the deadpan lines on the news crawl, the bureaucrat’s stilted calm as he tells Carol she has nothing to fear. The laughs only make the dread sharper.
The script moves with deliberate patience, confident enough to explain the rules in full rather than hide behind mystery-box tricks. The question isn’t what happened; it’s whether this peace is worth surviving.
As a lead, Carol carries the contradiction at the heart of the show. She’s immune to the infection because she’s miserable, and misery, it turns out, is resistance. She drinks too much, resents her readers, and mocks her own art. Yet that bitterness becomes a shield against assimilation.
The collective sees her unhappiness as a malfunction.
She sees their bliss as lobotomy.
Her loneliness is the last form of freedom left.
The pilot’s centerpiece, the C-SPAN conversation, captures everything that makes Pluribus work. The collective’s spokesperson beams benevolence, while Carol’s face crumples between disbelief and defiance. The dialogue is brisk and chilling. The world’s new order explains itself with the tone of a call center, polite and unstoppable. It’s the apocalypse conducted over customer service.
The show’s themes play like a warped hymn to individuality.
Is peace worth the price of dissent?
Can empathy survive without friction?
Is a mind still human when it feels only happiness?
Gilligan doesn’t answer.
He lets the tension hang. Carol isn’t fighting to save humanity so much as to preserve the right to hurt. That’s the spark in the dark: the conviction that sadness, anger, and grief still mean something.
Technically, the pilot is stunning. The camera drifts with the detachment of surveillance footage, watching Carol shrink against wide desert landscapes. The editing lingers on silence until a single sound feels like rebellion.
There’s clever connective tissue here too.
The return to Albuquerque recalls Gilligan’s earlier worlds of Better Call Saul and BB, but this time the desert’s isolation isn’t moral - it’s existential. The premise echoes classic body-snatcher stories, but the tone is weirder and funnier. The monsters aren’t other. They’re better versions of us, and that’s the joke.
The pilot plays fair with its influences - The X-Files (no surprise there, if you know, you know), The Leftovers, Invasion of the Body Snatchers - but builds its own moral gravity.
Trimmed of any fat, the recap runs clean.
Scientists crack the alien code. Humanity merges into bliss. Carol and Helen watch the shift hit in real time; Helen dies, Carol doesn’t. The collective reaches out with polite urgency. The voice on television promises comfort. The number flashes. The call connects.
Carol listens, refuses, drinks, grieves, and understands she’s not just immune to the virus - she’s immune to contentment itself.
What makes the episode extraordinary is its refusal to mock either side. The hive mind isn’t cruel; it’s convinced. Carol isn’t heroic; she’s stubborn. The apocalypse is not fire or plague but agreement. It’s the end of argument, of contrast, of self. The show treats that idea like a slow-motion tragedy, beautiful and suffocating at once.
By the final scene, the scale feels enormous yet intimate. The collective keeps calling. Carol keeps saying no. Her resistance is small and human, but it hits like thunder in a world where every other voice speaks in chorus.
We is Us is a rare pilot that feels complete and wide open at once. It revives classic science fiction themes - identity, conformity, empathy - without leaning on nostalgia.
It’s funny, terrifying, and meticulously built. It’s a show about the apocalypse as customer service, about kindness as control, and about the last woman on Earth still capable of being unhappy...
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