In Defense of the Hive Mind
In the second episode of Pluribus, Apple TV+’s horror/science fiction/social theory thriller about a brain virus from outer space, Carol (Rhea Seehorn) references a familiar premise. After mentioning “pod people,” a term first used in Jack Finney’s 1955 novel, The Body Snatchers, Carol barks, “I’ve seen this movie. We’ve all seen this movie. And we know it does not end well.”
Finney’s pod people premise, understood as anti-Soviet messaging, was that parasitic aliens were replacing individual humans with bodies grown in pods sprouted from alien seeds. The aliens looked and sounded just like humans, but behaved as mindless, docile automatons, with no individuality and a hive mind. There have been four official Hollywood adaptations of Finney’s work (I enthusiastically recommend the 1978 version, Invasion of the Body Snatchers; it’s the best of the bunch) and the trope has been modified for various zombie and undead pictures, as well as on Star Trek.
In the second episode of Pluribus, Apple TV+’s horror/science fiction/social theory thriller about a brain virus from outer space, Carol (Rhea Seehorn) references a familiar premise. After mentioning “pod people,” a term first used in Jack Finney’s 1955 novel, The Body Snatchers, Carol barks, “I’ve seen this movie. We’ve all seen this movie. And we know it does not end well.”
Finney’s pod people premise, understood as anti-Soviet messaging, was that parasitic aliens were replacing individual humans with bodies grown in pods sprouted from alien seeds. The aliens looked and sounded just like humans, but behaved as mindless, docile automatons, with no individuality and a hive mind. There have been four official Hollywood adaptations of Finney’s work (I enthusiastically recommend the 1978 version, Invasion of the Body Snatchers; it’s the best of the bunch) and the trope has been modified for various zombie and undead pictures, as well as on Star Trek.
What makes the conceit’s permutation in Pluribus so devious, and so pertinent to the times, is that succumbing to the virus—pooling your consciousness into a benign collective—might actually be leveling up. The show is daring enough to suggest that maybe our natural defensive instincts against such a radical transformation are incorrect, more akin to a zealous luddite viewing any technology they don’t understand as evil. It may at first seem to be a COVID tale, but Pluribus is most interesting when it becomes a kind of prediction model for an AI-led society. It even dares to question if a world run by machine learning and automated decision-making might be the only panacea for modern life.
A still from the TV show Pluribus.Apple TV
Pluribus comes to us from Vince Gilligan, whose big break was writing for The X-Files and whose later creations include Breaking Bad (which has tremendous Star Trek cred) and Better Call Saul. Both shows are about how corrupted institutions (health care and the legal system, respectively) can trigger a moral decay in someone, slowly turning a hero into a villain.
Though set in New Mexico like his previous two shows, Pluribus reverses the established Gilligan arc. Carol is not exactly evil when we meet her, but she’s hardly warm and fuzzy; she is an author of fantasy fiction who loathes the fans that gobble up her work, which she considers junk. She’s kind of mean to her wife and is quick to use alcohol as a crutch (a court-ordered breathalyzer lock on her car deftly adds tension during one suspenseful scene). What she doesn’t know is that astronomers have recently detected strange radio patterns, which they soon discover is an RNA sequence.
These dummkopfs then create the strain in a lab and, well, there’s a leak. Gilligan recreating what many, including those in , feel certain is COVID’s origin is just one example of poking the bear; the disease is then later spread via that old war horse conspiracy theory: chemtrails. Carol, just back with her manager-wife from a book tour, watches as everyone around her in an Albuquerque bar has a seizure and collapses. (Her wife bashes her head and dies.) A news broadcast directed solely at her reveals she is one of the very few (only 13 worldwide) who are naturally immune to the virus. Everyone else still living is now part of the “We”—they have total shared consciousness and knowledge, with no leadership. There is no one steering the ship, just group euphoria and a drive to spread the word to other planets for what the We sees—knows—is the betterment of all, the true righteous evolution.
This is a reversal of the familiar trope of a malevolent entity tempting heroes to their doom. The most striking example for me is the fifth Halloween-themed Simpsons special, “Treehouse of Horror V” (1994), one of the annual episodes where horror, science fiction, and fantasy cliches are tossed in a blender. In this one, Ned Flanders is evil and rules the world thanks to mass lobotomization (it’s called “re-Neducation”). Homer, ironically, is the only one left with his mind intact. Bart and Lisa approach him with their brains in jars and, in a sing-song tone, plead, “Join us, Faaaaaaather.” Marge then appears with a truly bonkers look in her eyes and declares, “.” (For over 30 years, I’ve been oddly disturbed by this image and I’m glad to know I’m not the only one.)
But what if it wasn’t a gravelly voiced lunatic Marge Simpson, but someone sent across the globe because she most resembles your dream woman, backed up by nearly everyone on the planet urging you to take just one puff of an opiate that will grant you eternal happiness? In such a scenario, one would eventually begin to have doubts. This is the situation our hero, Carol, finds herself in, and the series is so richly written and nuanced that I did find myself questioning just how well I’d stand up to a pod people menace—or whether it’s even such a menace at all.
What happens when the house of cards collapses?
Many of these filmmakers have found themselves scrutinized by government censors, leading to arrests and imprisonment.
Naturally, as the hero of any sci-fi television show should be, Carol is resistant. The Others, as they are called, can grant her any wish, so she organizes a summit of all the English-speaking immune. She is shocked to learn that they do not want to fight back. One dude is having a blast sleeping around and living in great wealth. What’s more, some, especially those with families, wish to be cured of their immunity and hope they can be included in “the Joining.”
And this is where that old Marge Simpson moment kicks in. Despite Carol’s hard front, which lasts several episodes, there are twists and turns to the narrative that lead her to see the wisdom of the old saw, “If you can’t beat them, join them.” Life for Carol, especially with her handler Zosia (Karolina Wydra), with whom she begins a physical relationship, has its definite perks. Anything she wants, she can have in no time. Zosia is the collected memory of everyone Carol has ever encountered, including her late wife whose consciousness was uploaded into the hive mind before she died. Seehorn’s tough-as-nails Carol starts to weaken. This is very much like those sad stories you hear about people who fall in love with ChatGPT and their lives crumble. (Less sad: Stan Marsh’s idiot dad on South Park becoming addicted to the program and annoying his family with it.)
In an interview with Polygon, Gilligan ducked a direct question about ChatGPT’s influence on the show. “I have not used ChatGPT, because as of yet, no one has held a shotgun to my head and made me do it,” he said. “I will never use it. No offense to anyone who does.” That’s a great quote from a marvelous writer, but someone as intelligent as Gilligan has read up on the technology even if they reject it.
The Others constantly behave in ways reminiscent of a ChatGPT conversation. All interactions are affirming and complimentary. They are proactive with helpful suggestions, “yes, and”-ing in creative ways to make things better. In life, ChatGPT will take your verbal vomit and spiff it up into something resembling a business letter. On the show, the hive-minded Others will quickly assemble and restock a supermarket or fix a house from fire damage.
The trouble comes when the entity misunderstands human cues. The Others give Carol a live grenade that nearly kills her, because a jokey remark slipped through the cracks. Scenes like that play into larger existential fears about AI, like the ones found in the blockbuster book with the Samuel Z. Arkoff-style title If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies. What’s so fresh about Carol’s interactions with the Others is how, following growth and adjustments on her side (as well as theirs, following this and other violent near-misses), everyone begins to get on with a new way of living. Pluribus seems to be on board with the prophecies that say AI will take over, but offers an alternative vision—beyond the sky falling—of what it may look like.
Seehorn (right) and Karolina Wydra as Zosia in Pluribus.Apple TV
I think, however, Pluribus is so effective because the forthcoming AI apocalypse that keeps many of us up at night is just one of several catastrophes happening in the world right now. (Close your eyes and click on any Foreign Policy link on this page to learn more!) If ever there were a time for a threat from a distant star, it’s now, and many of us would shrug and say, “Sure, what’s one more thing?” Gilligan’s show debuted in November 2025. None of us were alive during the Civil War, but even those who were around in 1968 will agree that right now is particularly bananas. And I think a lot of us would do anything to just get everyone to chill out.
To give a personal example, I occasionally look at my town’s Facebook page to ask if, say, a newly opened restaurant has good wonton soup. Within 60 seconds, I see the most vicious hate speech imaginable. I happen to live in a county that leans red in a blue state, making everyone ready for an online fight. Outside in the real world, this is a fine place to live, but on my computer screen it’s bad impulses, bad faith, and bad vibes. Is this what my neighbors are actually like, and, with just a slight nudge, they’d all turn into monsters?
This direct look at the intense polarization asphyxiating U.S. society is the primary subject of one of the finest movies of last year, something that works as an antithesis to the calm, if disease-born, harmony in Pluribus: Ari Aster’s Eddington.
Like Pluribus, the film happens to be set in New Mexico (in a fictional town called Eddington), in my mind cementing these two works as being in dialogue with one another. Not that any characters in Eddington understand the concept of dialogue. It stars Joaquin Phoenix as a small-town sheriff and Pedro Pascal as its mayor. It’s 2020, during the days of mandatory masking and other COVID-era protections. Phoenix is skeptical of the lockdown rules, Pascal wants them enforced. Things escalate, residents joins sides, the Black Lives Matter movement comes to town, some join just to look cool, everyone is posting everything to Facebook, and eventually the whole place dissolves into madness. It is a deeply nihilistic yarn, but you shouldn’t fear that it’s the movie equivalent of attending a No Kings march or Turning Point USA rally. It’s actually a sharp and extremely witty social satire, a frenzied 2025 version of Robert Altman’s Nashville, with more jokes. It divided critics and received not a single Oscar nomination, but it’s the movie from 2025 I probably think about the most (along with Marty Supreme), even though it gave me a stomachache from stress.
Everyone has their own way of dealing with vibes as catastrophic as the ones we’ve got humming around us right now. I find it helpful to occasionally take a deep soak in them, but with fantasy premises. Strategic foresight never suffered from a little entertainment value. Neither Pluribus nor Eddington are what you’d call happy. Yet they offer vastly different perspectives on the problem of intense polarization. Pluribus’ big stick of AI bringing unity at any cost may not be the solution, but it sure seems a little more pleasant.
This post appeared in the FP Weekend newsletter, a weekly showcase of book reviews, deep dives, and features. Sign up here.
Jordan Hoffman is a film critic and entertainment journalist living in central New Jersey. He also publishes at Vanity Fair, Entertainment Weekly, and the Times of Israel. He is a member of the New York Film Critics Circle and has co-authored a book about Star Trek. X: @jhoffman
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