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........