With All of Your Pluribussy

It feels wonderful to trust an artist or artists. I watched Breaking Bad and that was great and then I watched Better Call Saul and that was even better. Now I get to watch Pluribus with the earned expectation that Vince Gilligan, Rhea Seehorn and all of the writers, directors, editors, actors, etc. aren't going to waste my time. The Breaking Bad/Better Call Saul saga lasted eleven seasons, one movie and some webisodes because this was the early 2010s and there really wasn't any point in there where I lost faith in what those teams were creating.

It's possible the new show Gilligan's created, Pluribus, won't have anything as revelatory as the Jimmy/Chuck relationship, that its premise won't allow the new Rhea Seehorn character to reveal the depth her last big character, Kim Wexler, had, but we're three episodes into a two-season commitment and I believe that the worst thing these people could put together would still make me excited for time to pass. I'm writing this on Tuesday and I get to watch a new episode on Friday. I am lucky.

Part of the joy of the show has been going in cold (as its creators intended– none of the ads revealed any plot details), but I'm going to talk about the stuff that's happened. If you haven't watched Pluribus and think you might, put me away for a little while. Whatever I have to say will be dramatically less fulfilling than the experience of Pluribus.

If you haven't seen Pluribus and for some reason 1) deeply don't want to but 2) still want to read something about it, the basic plot so far: Carol Sturka (Rhea Seehorn) is a bestselling but unfulfilled writer who churns out books in a romantasy series but thinks her own work is crap and would like to revisit a more literary idea she's been working on here and there. She's finishing a book tour with her manager, Helen Umstead (Miriam Shor). Privately, Carol and Helen are in a long-term relationship. As the tour winds down, an unrelated lab somewhere has translated some kind of alien message, unwittingly setting off The Joining, which unites almost all of humanity in a cheery hivemind. When The Joining gets triggered on a mass scale, everybody effected has something like a seizure, which means cars crash and planes go down. Helen hits her head and dies shortly after joining the hivemind. Carol is one of a dozen or so people mysteriously unaffected. The hivemind informs Carol they're working to figure out how to join her into the hivemind, but that could take months or years. In the meantime, they'll tend to whatever need she has. Carol wants to reverse The Joining and give everybody back their free will. The other unaffected people don't see The Joining as apocalyptically as Carol does and think she's being kind of an asshole for resisting the hivemind's help. One other unaffected person, who doesn't speak English, just wants to be left alone. Carol's primary liaison with the hivemind is Zosia (Karolina Wydra), a woman who looks sort of like the dashing male love interest in Carol's books. Zosia's been selected to appeal to Carol and, like almost everybody else in the world, will do anything Carol says with a smile. End of summary.

Pluribus has, so far, spent most of its time deliberately exploring Carol's reactions as she adjusts to this frightening world. The hivemind, which retains the memories and skills of everybody it's absorbed, is a brilliant storytelling device because it allows Carol to directly ask Zosia things and for Zosia to deliver exposition without everything feeling too stilted. The hivemind wants to please but doesn't have much personality, so the things it says are supposed to be blunt and direct. When Carol has a question, she (and we) get a thorough answer.

While the show is funny and creepy and everything else, it's the feelings around the edges of that exploration that are sticking with me most. I'm curious where the mysteries will go and how a plot this contained will span at least twenty episodes of TV, but it's Carol's grief over Helen that I really love. The other free-minded survivors of The Joining aren't super upset by the big change because their loved ones are still around physically and they can pretend everything's cool, that The Joining only really ended crime and bigotry, not free will. But Carol lost her partner and the show doesn't seem like it's going to magic Helen back to life. She's gone gone.

I realized, thinking about this, that Gilligan's last two shows are also about people whose lives definitively pivot to wild new places. Walter White is one guy and then he gives himself permission to become another, worse guy, even if he was always kind of a prick. Jimmy McGill is a con artist who goes straight and then gets murkier. This is most narrative art: a thing happens to a person and they change. I'm not outlining anything miraculous. But Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul never allow for the chance their primary characters can return to the people they were originally. They aren't fighting to get back to good old stability. There's who they were then and who they are now and there's a thick wall between the two, even if the past informs the present. Even when Jimmy goes home and meets up with his old buddy later in Better Call Saul, he's too changed to fit back into that life.

Carol doesn't change, or at least she hasn't yet. She doesn't have the luxury of living in a static world like Walter and Jimmy did. That makes the big before and after of Pluribus so much harder to deal with than the ones in Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul. Walter and Jimmy could have, if granted more self-awareness, realized exactly what they were doing and fixed it. Saul Goodman could have reverted to the Jimmy McGill who took correspondence courses from the University of American Samoa, but Carol can't bring Helen back. That person just isn't around anymore.

I've been thinking more about Seattle recently, primarily because of a post I wrote a week or two ago about The Jesus Lizard. Here's a June 2008 Google Street View shot of Cellophane Square, the record store near the University of Washington where I bought Jesus Lizard CDs:

I found out Cellophane Square was closing a month or so before I left Seattle. This would have been April or May 2009. I tried to get them to order a CD for me and the person behind the counter told me they weren't ordering things anymore because the store would soon be closing. "People just aren't buying CDs anymore." When I went to UW, there were four record stores within walking distance of the school (and thus where I lived– I was in a dorm freshman year and then a barely off-campus thing sophomore year) and Cellophane Square was the one that felt like home. I went a couple times a week. I was sad when I learned it was closing, even though I wouldn't have been around to buy things from it or talk to the people who worked there past June 2009. I don't like good independent businesses to go away. I don't really like bad independent businesses to go away, either.

Here's what that same store looks like now:

The space has been divided into Cloudz, a vape shop, and some kind of all you can eat restaurant called All You Can Eat.

This is the Thai place I ordered takeout from every Friday:

I didn't have to type the name into Google Street View, I just clicked over. I haven't been there since 2009 but I could walk there with my eyes closed. Now it's a different Thai place, called Jai Thai, which has itself been shuttered:

The building behind this tree is Zanadu Comics, which I frequented as often as I did Cellophane Square:

Now it's some kind of occult bookstore, which is, admittedly, rad:

I'm sure you, like me, noticed the theater marquee advertising Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, as clear a timestamp as an actual date, in the Zanadu Comics picture. I did not see Indiana Jones 4 there. But I did see the Michel Gondry movie Be Kind Rewind at The Neptune. I saw the Gene Kelly musical An American in Paris in that theater, too. Both times, I went with the same person. Both times, unsure if she would consider what was happening a date. I don't think so anymore.

Be Kind Rewind didn't fully work for me at the time, largely because of the way it ended. In the movie, Jack Black and Yasiin Bey try to save the video store where they work. They fail, but bring the community together in what I remember as a very touching sequence. I liked plenty of depressing movies– actually depressing, not just "the kids don't save the rec center" disappointing— but that was too much for me. Maybe it was too much because the end was so well done and I wanted it be a little crappy so I'd be able to write the whole thing off. I wanted my bully to be stupider than I was, to have his fly down so I could think "you may have got me there, but at least my dick was in my pants." And maybe it didn't work for me in part because I watched it with somebody I had a confusing relationship with and the hurt from that made the whole night, movie and all, too sad. Regardless, Be Kind Rewind ends with a treasured small business closing forever. That was 2007. The movie would have to be a period piece if you made it today. Blockbuster destroyed video stores and streaming destroyed Blockbuster. There are no video stores left to be torn down by greedy developers (except Scarecrow, in Seattle, introduced to me by the person I saw Be Kind Rewind with).

When I think about Seattle, it's not that I never want to revisit this stuff, it's that I can't. There's no option to. This was over 15 years ago and so much of it is gone. And when it was there, I didn't do a good enough job appreciating it. I mean, I loved the hell out of Cellophane Square and Zanadu and Thai65, but I also spent plenty of time in my room, alone, being 18 years old, blaming the weather and whatever else.

The third episode of Pluribus opens in a Norwegian ice hotel that Carol and Helen are visiting. The walls, the bed, the glasses are made of ice. Helen thinks it's exciting while Carol nitpicks the how much they're spending, how hard it'll be to sleep on a bed made of ice, everything. She makes all all these little quips that aren't really funny because she's trying to be bitter. This is a funny show, it could make Carol's complaints funny if that was the point and we were supposed to agree with her that this ice hotel is an impractical house of doofuses. Helen tells her to stop and they watch the aurora borealis.

Wherever Pluribus goes, and, again, I'm writing this after the release of episode three of twenty-plus, that's the feeling I imagine I'll be stuck to. Carol didn't let herself fully appreciate what she had when she had it and then her partner died and the world went away. Later in the episode, Carol sits on her couch watching Golden Girls DVDs. She's stridently denied any help from the hivemind, so we can assume these are DVDs she already owned and had in her house. It's comfortable as several kinds of nostalgia. It's what she used to do with her partner, it's a sitcom from thirty years ago, it's a sitcom at all, and nobody's ever going to make another TV show again. I'm a deeply nostalgic person, but I recognize that, like all nostalgia, watching these episodes of Golden Girls won't improve anything for Carol. She already complained about the ice hotel. She isn't going to get a new chance to appreciate it.

I'm 36 right now. That's twice the age I was when I moved to Seattle. I'm more capable now than ever of appreciating the good things in my life. That also means I'm more capable of knowing what I'm going to miss later. I can still be snarky like Carol, but I recognize pretty quickly after that the problem was me, rather than whatever I was making a little comment about.

Pluribus is the grief of things leaving. It's more than that, it will become much more than that, but it's the wall between what we had and what we have. At its smallest scale, it's June 2008 and August 2025 in Google Street View.

Thank you for reading.