Pluribus, An Uncomfortable Way of Being Around Happiness [First Two Episodes REVIEW]
Pushing play on the first two episodes of Pluribus felt like stepping into a room where everyone has learned how to perform joy while the wiring behind the lights is burning. I watched Carol Sturka with the attention of someone who has followed an artist through many reinventions and recognised in Rhea Seehorn a particular steadiness that does not try to mesmerise but to interrogate. The premiere does not waste time on grand exposition. It gives a clear premise and then lets the small moments accumulate until they become unbearable. In those opening sequences there is a radio signal a stranger hears on the air, a hospital corridor that hums with an ill fitted cheer, and then a strange social choreography that takes hold of streets and kitchens. What I respond to most is Gilligan turning the camera toward the ordinary and making the ordinary feel foreign, forcing a choice between the comfort of enforced happiness and the discomfort of being fully oneself.
Somewhere in the second episode the pace changes and the show deepens its focus on character work. Carol is not an action hero who will solve the problem with a tool or a plan. She is a person whose craft is language and narrative and who now finds narrative failing her. That failure is what interests the series and what made me stay with it through long quiet takes and small humiliations. The scenes in the bar and in the emergency room are technical and terrifying in their mundanity because they show bodies under a different rule set. The production choices insist on realism in the choreography of those scenes and they pay off by making the contagion feel less like a device and more like an atmosphere. As a viewer I felt close to Carol in a way that is not sentimental. I felt that my patience with a slow reveal was rewarded by the precision of the performances and the intelligence of the staging.
Leaving the theatre of spectacle behind, Pluribus asks questions about community and consent with a dryness that is both unsettling and necessary. The second episode gives longer frames for people who are not infected and shows how thin the margin becomes between solidarity and absorption. I keep circling back to the image of someone smiling because they are compelled to do so and not because they feel it. For me this is where the show becomes unexpectedly political without ever feeling laboured. It is interested in the social architecture that can be built around a single emotion and in how that architecture flattens history and private grief. The writing allows me to sit with the contradiction of wanting peace and fearing its cost. That paradox is the engine the first two episodes rely on and it is what turns a science fiction premise into a human problem I recognise.
Responding as someone who reads and makes images, I find Gilligan and the showrunners attentive to texture. The camera lingers on the way light reverses on a cheek, on the specificity of a roadside motel, on gestures that betray more than any speech could. These choices remind me that a scene can hold its meaning in silence as much as in dialogue. The central performance gives those silences weight and sometimes a small gesture reveals more than a long argument. I appreciated that the series trusts its audience to feel the stakes without spelling out moral lessons. It trusts that the horror of losing the right to refuse joy is apparent when you watch a small town move in lockstep and see a funeral ritual flattened into a carnival. The first two episodes made me want to return not because I crave plot answers but because I want to see how the show will measure the cost of resistance.
Reading the critical reaction after watching did not change how I felt inside those episodes, but it confirmed that the show is doing something that provokes more than agreement or rejection. Critics and early audiences have noted the show as a bold reinvention for its creator and praised the central performance and the measured confidence of the premiere. I will watch the remaining episodes with that combination of curiosity and caution. For now I remain with an image that will not leave me: Carol in the back of a truck hauling a body across a road as the world smiles on, and me wondering whether survival is the same thing as victory. That hesitation is the honest space Pluribus has opened in its first two hours, and it is exactly the kind of unease I welcome in a show that asks me to reconsider the value of feeling awkward in the presence of other people.
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