When Zosia refuses to confirm or deny whether ‘Joining’ the hive mind is reversible, Carol believes she may have found a chink in their collective armour.

Sitting down to the latest episode of Plur1bus, while it was still decently watchable, I found myself trying to pin down why I was struggling to engage with it. Listening to an interview with Vince Gilligan on BBC Radio 4 the penny dropped. He reminded us that the one-line pitch for Breaking Bad had been to describe Walter White’s journey as ‘going from Mr Chips to Scarface’, whereas the pitch for Plur1bus is: ‘The most miserable person on Earth must save the world from happiness’.

At the heart of Breaking Bad is a character in a constant state of evolution. Walt is in a battle with himself over who he wants to be and each episode marks an incremental change of some sort. The problem with Plur1bus is that Rhea Seahorn’s Carol is a miserable cynic at the start of episode 1 and by the end of episode 4 she is unchanged. The hive mind is/are equally immutable, as the events of episode four illustrate. In order for their behaviour to develop in any kind of character arc, Carol concludes that she will have to intervene with pharmaceuticals. While this may represent one of the show’s few plot points, it’s effectively a variant of deus ex machina, because for stories to truly resonate we need characters to go through a process of internal revelation and evolution. Zosia has no internal conflict (yet) so there’s no reason for her to change – and at just short of the series midpoint, Carol has only learnt one thing about herself that she didn’t know in episode 1, scene 1.

That’s not to say that a story based purely on a static situational conflict can’t work, but it’s usually better suited to something like an episode of The Twilight Zone (which Gilligan cited in his Radio 4 interview), or a one-off movie like Invasion of the Body Snatchers (also clearly an influence on Plur1bus), but extended over multiple parts, it feels repetitive.

Verdict: Bizarrely, as a dramatist with nearly four decades in the industry, I find myself more excited by whether Vince and the gang can write themselves out of this narrative dead end than whether Carol can defeat the happy-clappy zombies. I guess that means I’m on the edge of my seat. 6/10

Martin Jameson

www.ninjamarmoset.com