I Watched Season 1 of Pluribus

The apocalypse is a little harder to hate this time

April 28th, 2026

Pluribus probably has one of the strongest opening episodes of any show I've seen in a while. I was completely hooked from the start. When I saw Vince Gilligan's name attached, I was intrigued - though at the time I still hadn't actually watched Breaking Bad or Better Call Saul. I'd always heard great things about his work, but I went in cautiously. It had the feel of a mystery box show, and I've been burned enough times by those to be wary. Shows that pile on questions without satisfying answers are a waste of time, and I almost didn't bother. But the first episode won me over immediately.

It's meticulously crafted and very well shot. The mystery unfolds in a way that feels genuinely earned - a scientist picks up a signal, that leads to lab work, and then slowly, almost imperceptibly, you start to see how it infects people and how they begin to operate together. One of Vince Gilligan's great strengths - something I've since come to appreciate in Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul as well - is his show-don't-tell approach. Scenes where characters say nothing, and you're just watching what they do, piecing together their goals and motivations entirely from behavior. Pluribus leans directly into that strength, and the result is often captivating. There are sequences with huge numbers of extras all moving and working in coordinated silence that are somehow both eerie and mesmerizing - like watching an ant colony. It suits the premise perfectly.

The alien parasite itself is fascinating to watch unfold over the season. The show does something interesting by actually raising the question of whether the apocalypse is even a bad thing - with virtually all crime and war gone, there's a case to be made that it's a kind of utopia. But there's a deeply unsettling moment when one of the characters accepts the infection and the others immediately drop the performance they'd been putting on for her benefit. That single beat does a lot of work. The show's real thesis seems to be that a huge source of human suffering is our competitive nature and our inability to communicate perfectly - and the parasite solves both, but at the cost of everything that makes us human.

Crucially, it never becomes a frustrating mystery box. Every episode feels like it's answering old questions while raising new ones, which makes the whole thing genuinely rewarding to watch from week to week. The immune characters are another highlight. There's one who essentially tries to recreate a Casino Royale fantasy by making the infected do whatever he wants, which is darkly funny. Then there's Manousos, who operates as his polar opposite - a man with a rigid moral code, particularly around stealing. Watching him commit to navigating from South America all the way to Arizona, crossing the Darién Gap alone, is compelling on its own. When he has to siphon gas, he leaves money behind. When the infected offer their help, he pays them anyway, even though they have no use for it. It's a fascinating, quietly heroic through-line.

Overall, Pluribus is probably the easiest Vince Gilligan show to recommend - the least dark of his work and genuinely accessible. It's a unique and really well-made sci-fi apocalypse story. The ending was a little disappointing, and knowing the next season is more than a year or two away is frustrating - though that's just the reality of modern television at this point. If you get into any show these days, you can expect to wait.