PLURIBUS is a Fresh Take on INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS and a Warning for Today
When one of television’s most respected storytellers turns his gaze to sci-fi, you lean in. Vince Gilligan, whose résumé includes Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, now brings us Pluribus, a nine-episode journey that pumps new air into the pod-people mythos while reflecting modern fears and desires.
The idea is familiar as the story centers on a signal from deep space that alters life, and individuals are subsumed into a collective. Yet Pluribus shifts the focus.
Rather than an alien-cult takeover in the style of the 1956 film of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the series re-imagines the threat as compliance, cheerfulness, a forced contentment.
In Episode 1, “We Is Us”, scientists receive a signal from planet Kepler 22b; later a virus spreads, binding humanity into a hive mind. The protagonist, Carol Sturka, a romance novelist living in Albuquerque, is among the few immune. She asks why the hive wants her, why she resists their “kindness.”
Unlike classic pod-people who mimic human behaviour but devoid of emotion, the hive here preaches connection and devotion. As Carol describes them in Episode 2, “Pirate Lady”, she calls them “Pod People”, which is a direct wink to the earlier incarnations of the Body Snatchers myth.
In the original 1956 film, the transformation is pitched as “Reborn into an untroubled world… Love, desire, ambition, faith, without them life’s so simple.”
In the 1978 remake, Dr. David Kibner (played by Leonard Nimoy) offers a similar pitch: “You’ll be born again into an untroubled world, free of anxiety, fear, hate… There’s no need for hate now, or love.”
In Pluribus, the hive doesn’t kill flies, promotes unity, kindness, but suppresses differentiation, dissent, mess.
Where classic pod-people are emotionless, silent, and deadly serious, the hive in Pluribus is perky, polite, relentlessly benevolent, and that benevolence masks its erasure of choice.
The opening scenes of “Pirate Lady” show the drones in motion are they are efficient, wordless, and the lack of individual expression is eerie. That imagery echoes the ending of the ’78 film where the entire population moves in lock-step, silent drones ruling San Francisco.
Carol stands in sharp contrast to the collective. She fights for individuality, for mess, for those edges of humanity the hive has smoothed away. When she talks to the other remaining nonjoined individuals she accuses them of being “traitors to the human race” because of their acceptence of it.
The hive insists they are not aliens. They’re still people, just connected. The difference is subtle. The pod-people of old were invaders and here the threat is internal. The hive is us, redefined, and It’s “out of many, one” taken literally.
The original Body Snatchers story has often been read as a Red Scare allegory, fear of communism erasing the self, stamping out free thought. But, there’s a flexibility here as the invaders could represent conformity, authoritarianism, consumer culture, military-industrial entanglement.
Pluribus carries that flexibility forward and shifts focus to a modern worry… What if the world gets along so well it forgets to be itself?
The hive’s promise is seductive… no hate, no fear, no anxiety. Like Carol says, the hive insists it just wants her to join. But at what cost? When the world is homogeneous, predictably kind, what gets lost?
In a world divided, where we’re repeatedly asked to sacrifice difference for unity, the show asks us if harmony is worth surrendering our edges? Pluribus doesn’t give an easy answer. Instead it asks if you would you fight to remain flawed if everyone else choses perfection?
If you’ve seen the first two episodes, you’ll have noticed how the show blends horror, thriller, sci-fi, and dark comedy. The vibe is unsettling with the cheerful apocalypse and how it’s harder to fight than the obvious one.
I also just have to say that Rhea Seehorn is great in the series as she brings Carol’s frustration, exhaustion, and reluctant heroism to life.
For fans of the Body Snatchers story, Pluribus gives you those roots. It also gives you something new, a tale of connection, control, resistance. It asks more of its audience. It turns the mirror on us.