Carol attempts to befriend the hive mind, but comes to exactly the same conclusions she reached in episode 2.

Okay, Vince, if you’re just going to repeat yourself endlessly then I get to do it too. Here’s what I wrote about Plur1bus after watching the first three episodes:

‘The premise of the show, reads like the musings of a stoned teenager on a camping trip. ‘Hey, man, what if the world was perfect? What if there really was peace and love, and no conflict or unhappiness, wouldn’t that stop us from being human? Isn’t it the pain that makes us who we are, individuals capable of love and creativity and invention?’ […] It’s not an original question.

Therein lies the problem with Plur1bus. I already know the answer. After the set-up, where a signal from space is decoded as the blueprint for a viral DNA that turns humanity into eight billion happy zombies, the story engine stalls. What we are left with is Carol asking this same question again and again and again, and getting the same response every time.’

Five weeks later nothing has changed.

Although, on reflection, that’s not quite true. I went on to say: ‘For sure, each iteration of the central thesis is entertaining enough, but by the end of the third episode we are no further forward than we were about ten minutes into part two. Carol’s frustration doesn’t change, nor does her unflappable minder, Zosia.’

While the gist of this is still on point, the iterations of the same idea have stopped being entertaining. In Episode 8, Charm Offensive, the script becomes little more than Carol asking questions and Zosia answering her. There’s no discovery, or revelation, there are just statements. It’s a treatise, not a drama.

The concept so suffocates any potential for drama, that even when things ‘happen’ – there are perhaps three major plot points in this episode – somehow or other nothing actually changes, nor do the characters progress in any way. That’s quite an achievement. Ground breaking, even. Ground breaking because I am smashing my own head against the dry earth of this barren, pointless story.

Anyway, Manousos is incoming for episode 9, so I am already braced for next week’s indulgently disappointing shrug of a series finale.

Verdict: If the message of Plur1bus is ‘Abandon all hope, ye who enter here’ then I surrender. You’ve won, Vince, you’ve won. 3/10

Martin Jameson

www.ninjamarmoset.com