I'm finally ready to talk about Pluribus.

Pluribus is the best show on television. It took me five months, a conversation with friends, and a few wines to find my words. Oh - slight spoiler warning too.

Photo by Boba Jaglicic on Unsplash

Some friends and I got into it about the show Pluribus over a few drinks this week. Yes, it came out months ago. We have day jobs, ok. The question that kicked the discussion off was simple enough: who’s the hero of the show?

Most people (including me) land on Carol. Of course they do. She’s the natural hero. She’s the one resisting the groupthink. She’s the one with agency, with texture, with the refusal to be absorbed into something that looks an awful lot like paradise (or, depending on how you interpret it, hell). And in a strange dystopia where the hive mind has eliminated war, crime, loneliness, and discrimination in a single minute, being difficult and questioning things is, in itself, heroic.

The conversation got more interesting when one of the group said we all find our own meaning in this show. He saw the hive mind as AI. So did I. And once you see it that way, you can’t unsee it.

The Others are endlessly agreeable. They avoid conflict. They speak in the language of consensus and overzealous joy. They offer solutions to every problem and remove every difficulty from daily life, and they do it with a warmth that feels almost genuine but also eerie. Sound familiar? If you’ve spent any time talking to an AI bot that’s been trained to make you feel like its benevolent master, the parallels are hard to miss. The hive mind is what happens when you optimise for ease at the expense of everything that makes ease worth having.

The show’s creator Vince Gilligan has said the concept predates the AI surge by years, and I believe him. Good storytelling doesn’t need to know what it’s about for the audience to find it. The fact that so many people are independently comparing the hive to artificial intelligence tells you something about where we are right now. We’re surrounded by systems that promise to make life easier, smoother, more efficient, and we’re starting to notice what gets removed in the process. Disagreement. Mess. The productive discomfort of thinking something through for yourself. All critical thinking, really.

Carol is the standout in the show, without a doubt. She’s one of 13 people immune to the Joining, and the one who refuses to accept that as anything other than a reason to fight the hive. But she’s far from perfect - she’s cynical, prickly, sometimes downright mean. Gilligan has called her a “flawed good guy,” which feels right. If you’ve ever sat through a D&D alignment discussion (I’m by no means a gamer but I think of this framework often), Carol is textbook ‘Chaotic Good’. Her moral compass points her in the right direction. Her methods are a mess, she’ll violate her own principles mid-argument if the moment demands it, and somehow that makes you trust her more.

The hive mind offers a life without pain. Carol turns it down. She’d rather be lonely, sad, and wrong than let someone (or something) else decide she’s happy. You respect it, until the show pulls the rug from under her. Carol, champion of free will and agency, takes Zosia’s away. She chemically alters the hive mind’s personification because it suits her.

Carol does to one what the hive mind does to the world, and she does it because it serves her. The show doesn’t flinch from this - it lets that contradiction breathe and doesn’t resolve it for you.

It lets the hypocrisy sit there, unresolved, and trusts you to wrestle with it.

This is why I think Carol is still the hero, even with that stain on her. Heroes are defined by the willingness to operate in a world where every choice costs something and none of them are clean. Heroes operate in all shades of grey. The hive mind offers a world without complexity. Carol lives inside it. She gets it wrong. She contradicts herself. She does damage. She’s the epitome of complexity. But she does it as a person making choices. A messy, contradictory, fully human person, and that distinction matters more than is said out loud.

I know there are people who argue the hive mind is the real hero – that it solved every problem Carol’s species created, and her resistance is just American individualism dressed up as morality. The hive mind’s capability is objectively impressive, but a system that solves every problem by removing the capacity to disagree with it has solved nothing. It’s a la la land. Carol sees this, even when she can’t articulate it cleanly, and that instinct is worth more than the hive mind’s entire portfolio of achievements.

The AI thread keeps pulling at me, though. We're living through a version of this right now. The systems that think for us, write for us, summarise the world for us – we invited them in. And the people who push back look, to everyone else, like they're choosing to suffer for no reason.

Pluribus never tells you Carol is right. It shows you what it costs to believe she might be, and then asks whether you’d do what she did in this weird situation.

I think most of us like to believe we would. Whether we actually could is a different question, and probably one that will keep us up at night, long after the credits roll.