Here are some more or less random reflections on the TV show Pluribus. This isn't a review. And I'll assume you've seen the show. So I won't be summarizing much.
Spoilers follow below the fold for the show and two other shows, Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul.
The acting is strong
The actors who play Carol and Manousos each have a lot of solo scenes. They handle it well with little (pretty much no) dialogue
The ambiguity is good
There are a lot of unknowns that the audience has to figure out. And that's a good thing. It's not clear, even at the end of season 1, what exactly is happening. Is (almost) the entire population of earth infected with an alien virus? Is it something more like aliens somehow taking over people's minds? Are the "infected" people really as happy as they seem?
We don't know. And while we--or at least I--would like to know the answers, it would be a mistake for the show to answer or resolve all the ambiguities, especially if it does so in a "all your questions answered episode."
The aliens deceive, and probably do lie
Some evidence in the show suggests that the aliens (as I'll call them) probably do lie, even though Carol (and possibly Manousos?) believes they cannot. The evidence isn't convincing, and I have to stretch the meaning of "lie" to include "deception by oversimplification" and "deception by omission." Here are some examples:
Example 1
Zosia (I believe) says the aliens prefer to be vegetarians, which most of the normies (as I'll call the non-alien/non-infected characters) take to mean that they are vegetarians. (They're not. They're reluctant omnivores who "prefer" to be vegetarians.) If the aliens are as knowledgeable as they seem to be, they have to know that "we prefer to be vegetarians" will be interpreted as "we are vegetarians."
Example 2
The aliens are using Carol's (frozen) eggs to try to manufacture stem cells so that they can "infect" her. Zosia admits it when Carol realizes and asks. But they have to know that what they're doing goes against the spirit of the promise they made never to extract stem cells against her will.
Example 3
The aliens claim not to kill, or at least not to kill willingly. And yet we learn that they somehow sped up the process by which people were infected/possessed, and that speedup ended up killing over 800 million people.
What bothers me about these examples of deception is not really that the aliens might not be what they seem. That ambiguity is part of the fun of watching the show. No, what bothers me is that I'm not sure the show's creators realize this is an ambiguity. I'm not confident that they see any problem with the moments of deception potentially complicating the notion that the aliens are all truth tellers. Maybe the answer is as simple as, "the aliens never explicitly state things that aren't true, but they can and do choose to deceive, at least sometimes." But I'm not confident the show's creators know that.
The season 1 finale makes me nervous for the show
At the end of the last episode of season 1, the aliens had deliver an atomic bomb to Carol's house at her request. That makes me nervous that the show may be already jumping the shark. I don't know if the show's creators know where the show is going with that atomic bomb. And if the creators do know, I fear that they envision some master plan that Carol has in mind to destroy the aliens once and for all. Carol, in other words, might indeed have it all figured out, and what we'll be seeing from now on is just the unfolding of that plan.
I suppose that could be good. Breaking Bad (also created by Vince Gilligan) ended with a master plan by Walter White to resolve everything, and I think that show ended quite successfully and not in spite, but because, of that plan. Still, that master plan came at a later season. I don't think he had that final plan at the end of season 1. He didn't even know all the principal characters at that time. And Better Call Saul's ending left, in my opinion, much to be desired, in part because of his master plan.
But I'm nervous that it would work here. It didn't, in my opinion, seem to work in Better Call Saul, though you could argue that McGill's grand plan unraveled in the end. More to the point, it doesn't seem that the right solution for Carol will be using the bomb. But we'll see, at any rate.
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