When an extra-terrestrial virus transforms humanity into a hivemind of immutable contentment, Carol Sturka, one of just thirteen immune people on the planet, must uncover what’s really going on in an attempt to save humanity from its own bliss…

Here’s the thing: I love Rhea Seahorn. There. I’ve said it. As a Better Call Saul super fan, like many in the audience, I was entranced by Seahorn’s complex portrayal of the excruciatingly conflicted Kim Wexler. I could happily watch Ms. Seahorn reading the telephone directory (if such things still exist). I’d go further. It would be an exquisite pleasure just to hear her recite the Dewey Decimal numbers of my local library – on repeat! No one does humour, charisma and pain like Rhea…

…which is for the best, because without this central performance, I’m not sure I would have made it past the second episode of Vince Gilligan’s new series, Pluribus (or rather, Plur-1-bus, if one is to take its stylised rendering literally).

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?’ Orson Welles’s Harry Lime pondered the same conundrum at the top of the Vienna Ferris wheel in The Third Man. 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 Ms. Seahorn’s Carol (a writer of romantic fiction) asking this same question again and again and again, and getting the same response every time. 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 (Karolina Wydra). There are only so many times even I can listen to Rhea Seahorn rant about how soulless and insane everyone has become, only broken up by the occasional essay on the nature of the human condition. Unusually for Vince Gilligan he seems to have forgotten the basics of show-not-tell for this new project.

Verdict: I’ll definitely stick it out – if only for You Know Who – but with six more episodes to go (and a second series already ordered) Plur1bus is desperately in need of a bit of plot and character development. 6/10

Martin Jameson

www.ninjamarmoset.com