Pluribus has landed: Vince Gilligan’s thoughtful new science-fiction series — his follow-up to the Breaking Bad universe — debuted its first two episodes on Apple TV, and there’s a great deal to unpack.
The series opens on an arresting premise: a repeating extraterrestrial signal captured by radio telescopes at the Very Large Array in Socorro, New Mexico is decoded into a molecular sequence — an RNA-like recipe that behaves less like a pathogen and more like a psychic adhesive. When applied, it knits human minds into a single, shared consciousness: a hivemind.
We meet Carol (Rhea Seehorn), a commercially successful but emotionally guarded romantasy novelist who, unlike most of humanity, resists the joining. She’s one of only a small number of people who remain separate, and that immunity places her at the center of the story: she can either accept absorption into collective bliss or push back and search for a way to undo what’s happened.
Image: AppleCarol’s predicament is moral and personal: the hivemind pampers and adores her, supplying comforts and the flattering certainty of universal approval, while other immune survivors appear surprisingly at ease with their isolation. Carol, however, insists on resisting — not necessarily because she hates the hivemind, but because she believes people should retain autonomy.
Rather than handing viewers tidy solutions, Pluribus provokes questions about consent, identity, and whether uniform contentment is ethically preferable to messy individuality. Gilligan treats the show’s speculative mechanics lightly; he’s more interested in the human consequences than in making the science bulletproof.
To illuminate those effects, Polygon spoke with Gilligan and Karolina Wydra — who portrays Zosia, a pivotal member of the hivemind — about the show’s genesis and the creative choices behind the joining.
How Vince Gilligan conceived the hivemind
Image: AppleGilligan has said the idea germinated years ago as an image of a universally beloved person. While working on Better Call Saul, that figure evolved — gender-swapped and expanded into a story about collective consciousness. For narrative economy, he placed the origin of the phenomenon offstage: a precise, repeating extraterrestrial transmission that, once decoded, yields a four-part frequency pattern interpretable as a genetic-like formula.
The show leans on plausibility rather than dense exposition: the signal is deliberate and measured — a long, repeating pulse that provokes debate among the scientists who first detect it. Gilligan enjoys the invention’s quasi-scientific feel more than its literal mechanics; the drama lives in the human responses to the joining.
Karolina Wydra on portraying the joined: “pure goodness”
Image: AppleWydra — known for work on shows like House and True Blood — did not expect to return to television so soon after stepping back to raise a family. Her character, Zosia, is plucked from anonymity to act as Carol’s assigned companion inside the hivemind; the choice is deliberate because Zosia resembles a recurring romantic-hero figure from Carol’s novels.
Because the hivemind operates as a single voice, many scenes require Seehorn to interact with numerous extras who speak and move as one. Wydra had the particular challenge of embodying a person who represents a distributed intelligence: serene, present, and almost indulgently affectionate toward Carol.
Unflappable and serenely present.
Wydra described long conversations with Gilligan about the hivemind’s psychology: its members are content, calm, and free of the darker emotions that drive so much of human drama. That absence of negativity explains their fervor to convert others; they remember suffering but no longer experience it, and they genuinely believe the joining is a benevolent gift.
To prepare, Wydra practiced meditative techniques and “dream work” to access an internal quiet. She also studied emotional intelligence and learned to listen rather than perform — the hivemind’s gestures are patient, undemonstrative, and deeply present. One recurring descriptor from the creative team was “Indulgent Mother,” capturing the hivemind’s tender, nonjudgmental care for Carol.
Movement and choreography: walking like a hivemind
Image: AppleOne of the show’s most hypnotic elements is how the joined move: synchronized, economical, and eerily graceful. Stunt coordinator Nito Larioza staged those sequences, teaching hundreds of performers to behave as a single organism. Gilligan also cites an old memory of watching a school of fish — an image of instantaneous, collective turns — as creative fuel for the choreography.
Even with expert training, human bodies can’t perfectly replicate aquatic cohesion. Still, the choreography achieves an uncanny balance, feeling both familiar and alien: people behaving with the seamless coordination of a different evolutionary impulse.
Pluribus episodes 1 and 2 are streaming now on Apple TV. New episodes are released weekly on Fridays.
Source: Polygon
