The first season of Vince Gilligan’s excellent sci-fi series Pluribus concluded on Apple TV a few weeks ago, and with the ending settling in our collective minds, I thought now could be a good time for some analysis of concepts from the show. The series explores a lot of interesting questions about what it means to be human. (If you know you might be interested in watching, then please wait to read this post because it will contain spoilers for the entirety of the first season.)

The premise of the show is that a virus takes over humanity after scientists synthesize an RNA sequence based on a signal from space. The virus connects all humans together like a psychic glue into one hive mind, save for 13 immune individuals. This seems to remove everyone’s individual personalities and value for individual members’ lives, instead replacing them with one amalgamated sense of self containing everyone’s memories.

Members of the hive all report a general blissful state of being and describe their biological imperative to spread the virus, both to the remaining immune and to the next planet they can detect with complex life via a giant antenna. They can’t lie when asked a question, and can’t intentionally harm any living creature, but can and do deceive and harm the immune main character, Carol, by omission/lawyerly language and by placing her in an extended period of social solitary confinement.

I think the hive mind in Pluribus can be better understood by applying ideas from the Affect Management Framework (AMF; Haynes-LaMotte, 2025), an idea I developed. (You can find the original paper here........

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