Vince Gilligan’s Apple TV+ Original Series Pluribus has been a hot topic of conversation online since before it even premiered back in November of 2025. Everyone has been trying to determine who is good, who is bad, why there are 13 immune people, and what the show is really about and trying to say. I can’t claim to have any of the answers to any of these questions, but what I can do is offer you a general reading of the show through a critical Ideological lens.
Before I get into the analysis, I will try my best to summarize the premise of the show in such a way that this post will make enough sense to those who have not watched the show.
WARNING, SPOILERS AHEAD! If you have not seen the show yet, but you want to see it unspoiled, click off now.
Pluribus follows middle-aged romantasy author Carol Sturka, as the world gets suddenly overtaken by a mysterious virus by which she and 12 other individuals around the world are unafflicted. The virus has caused everyone on earth to merge consciousnesses, leaving 1 “person,” 1 mind spread out in the bodies of every person on Earth.
Carol’s wife passes away during the merge leaving her heartbroken and entirely alone. The Hive Mind, as I will refer to them collectively, decided to send Carol a “chaperone” (an individual that is a part of Them), Zosia, to keep her company and to assist her with any needs she may have as she adjusts to this entire reshaping of society.
It is of great importance to the Hive Mind that Carol and the other survivors join Them, so They are actively working out how to work around their alleged immunities to infect them. As Zosia says to Carol, They have a biological imperative to make everyone one with Them.
The Hive Mind contains the memories and knowledge and experiences of every individual who was alive at the time of the joining, even those who have passed in the process/since, including Carol’s wife, Helen.
They have a natural instinct to no longer commit any acts of violence and to work in order to maximize happiness and peace for everyone. They can not kill any animals or plants to produce new food. They can not act in a way that would hurt any of the unafflicted.
At first, They were under the impression that They would need to obtain Carol’s stem cells from her body in order to infect and forcibly join her. They would not be able to do this without her consent, however, due to their need to maximize happiness and it would be upsetting to Carol for them to do this. However, as the show progresses, They realize that They have access to Carol’s eggs that she had frozen years ago and would use be able to use these to obtain the stem cells. As They proceed with these scientific developments, They are choosing to keep Carol in the dark and They are using Zosia to actively prey on Carol’s loneliness as a means of manipulation.
There is only one other survivor, Manousos, who is as against the Hive Mind as Carol and who is as willing to do whatever it takes to figure out how to reverse the virus and save the world. Every other survivor, to Carol’s frustration, doesn’t really see an issue with the collective loss in autonomy and is for the most part willing to join the Hive Mind. In the season 1 finale, one of the survivors, Kusimayu, actually does “willingly” get infected so that she can join.
Obviously, the show is much more deeper and complex than the summary that I just laid out, but I think that does a good enough job at summing up the overall premise of the show with most of its key details.
Now, how can we understand the concept of Ideology and its effects? In Literary Theory: The Complete Guide by Mary Klages, she describes Ideology through a mostly economic lens, highlighting Karl Marx’s views on capitalism. The two following quote blocks will be a little longer, but I think they are very well-put. Klages best sums up the idea of Marxism and the concept of Ideology by saying:
(1) From these economic relations comes a crucially important concept in Marxist thought: the idea of alienation. There are two aspects to the Marxist idea of alienation. The first is that labor that produces surplus value is alienated labor. The labor put into an object becomes part of the capitalist’s profit, and thus no longer belongs to the laborer. In addition to alienating the laborer from his or her labor power, capitalism also forces the worker to become alienated from him or herself. When a worker has to sell her or his labor power, she or he becomes a commodity, something to be sold in the marketplace like a thing; the worker who is a commodity is thus not fully human, in the philosophical sense, since she or he cannot exercise free will to determine her or his actions.
(2) Ideology, or ideologies, are the ideas that exist in a culture[...] Ideology is how a society thinks about itself, the forms of social consciousness that exist at any particular moment; ideologies supply all the terms and assumptions and frameworks that individuals use to understand their culture, and ideologies supply all the things that people believe in, and then act on. For Marx, ideology, as part of the superstructure generated by an economic base, works to justify that base; the ideologies present in a capitalist society will explain, justify, and support the capitalist mode of production.
Basically, what is being said here is that we are conditioned to dissociate from reality as a means of self preservation under the hellacious reign of capitalism. We ourselves have become the commodity:we sell our labor with no real say in the matter as to whether or not we want to—we have no ability to consent to capitalism. To ignore this truth, we develop what is called a false consciousness, which essentially means we have to gaslight ourselves into believing that we are contributing to a great force larger than us for a good cause and we have to alienate ourselves from reality by ignoring the fact that we will never earn in wages what is deserved by the amount of labor we output.
How does all of this tie into Pluribus?
Pluribus works to emphasize how any sort of mass ideology can be exploitative and alienating. Just because the world in Pluribus does not operate underneath capitalism anymore, does not mean that there is no more exploitation of labor or alienation.
I didn’t tell you this earlier, but the virus that sparked the joining does not solely affect humans. It was sent to Earth through some sort of radio frequency and lab scientists were testing rats with the virus. When one of the rats bites one of the lab techs, she becomes infected. Like I said, those infected have the biological imperative to make everyone like this. The other lab tech in the room runs over to his coworker who is actively seizing as she is being infected. Once she recuperates, she kisses him as a means of spreading the virus. Then, They move throughout the lab infecting other people with other displays of affection and by infecting their food. After this, all of the infected lab workers work together (as They are now one person in many bodies) to mass reproduce the virus to infect everybody. It doesn’t take long before the whole world collapses.
The Hive Mind moves with one goal in mind: make everyone one of Them. We could consider this to be their ideology. Their economic base, which is essentially their means of production to fulfill their ideological goal, could be described as the Hive Mind working in every way possible to ensure that They can infect every living being with their virus so that they can join Them. They enact this production in a multitude of ways, for example, by using affection like in the lab scene I just described to you or by working to obtain stem cells from the survivors later on, to combat their immunity.
I think what is most sinister is that They use coercion and deception to achieve this goal, which in a way lines up with ideology. They have developed some sort of false consciousness of their own. Despite containing the consciousnesses of every person on Earth (minus the survivors, of course), the Hive Mind can not act outside of its biological imperative. One would think that a good chunk of the individuals’ consciousnesses inside of the Hive Mind would be entirely unwilling to participate in this had they been given the choice. For example, Carol and Manousos who still live outside of the Hive Mind are entirely unwilling to join and are seeking to actively reverse the effects of the virus. Surely those 2 weren’t the only people on Earth who would have felt that way outside of the Hive Mind, so why are they so okay with it from inside of the Hive Mind? Why don’t they fight back since they are still in there? This is where that false consciousness comes into play. The Hive Mind believes that the way They are feels so good and that They experience nothing but happiness. They use this as an excuse to justify Their contribution to the spreading of the virus, which actively harms people by stripping them of their autonomy, and, in some cases, by literally killing them.
In this scenario, the Hive Mind is both the Proletariat and the Bourgeoisie. They commodify themselves to achieve their goals (by deception—Them sending Zosia to cozy up with a lonely, grieving Carol, as just one example) and They have to alienate their individual consciousnesses to justify Their support of production, but They also are now the ones who are benefitting from the exploitation of the individual. They exploit the survivors’ loneliness in order to coerce them into joining.
At the end of the day, I don’t know where the show is headed or what will happen. I don’t know the ins and outs of the Hive Mind, the entire backstory of the virus, or the intention behind the way the show was written and set up. This is just one way of reading the contents of the show. There are a lot of other aspects of Ideology, like the dialectic, that I didn’t even delve into, because the concept of Ideology is so broad, and this post is already long enough, I think. But overall, in my opinion, Pluribus does a really good job at uniquely examining the effects of capitalism on society in a unique way, whether that was Vince Gilligan’s intention or not.
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