Episode 6 of Plur1bus revealed more about the limitations of our perfectly moral and altruistic collective: they cannot do any farming, period. They can only collect apples when they drop from trees of their own accord, for example. They can milk animals, but that’s it. So they’re eating the dead (all one billion of them), which is a finite supply and won’t last 7 billion people for long.
The collective projects they’ll be facing mass starvation within 12 years.
So there we have it: the collective is doomed, and what’s more, they know it. But their moral imperative takes precedence over survival: they’d rather die than step on a bug or cut down wheat.
Which raises a question: what’s the point, both meta and in-universe?
If Vince Gilligan is indeed a Libertarian, I can see him setting up a sci-fi scenario as a vehicle to explore and contrast selfishness vs. altruistic collectivism.
Is the underlying point here to show the bankruptcy of suicidally moral purism?
If so, I get it. I don’t think he’s shown the furthest extreme of the opposite (psychopathy and malignant narcissism), however disagreeable Carol can be. I definitely see ideas percolating under the surface.
But what about the in-show explanation for this pathologically moral collective?
Why would aliens devise a virus like this?
If the aliens want to wipe out humanity, why not just send a virus that sterilizes people? Or kills them outright? Why this long game? Why create a perfectly harmonious population of willing psychic slaves, unless an invasion is coming down the line?
And if an invasion is indeed coming, and the humans are to be a willing slave race for the occupiers, why let humans starve? Would it not make sense for the future slaves to be able to harvest plants, so that they can last long enough for the invaders to make use of them?
If humanity dies out in 12 years, aliens will have to arrive prior to that.
Otherwise, I don’t see the sense in making a harmonious world prior to occupation. Just introduce a lethal virus. Wipe everyone out. Wouldn't that be easier than this hive mind thing?
Perhaps the idea is to get infected worlds to build a transmitter first, before they all die out, and spread the virus further. A species somewhere out there must want to exterminate competitors, as I don’t see a virus like this evolving on its own.
And yet, to design a virus tailored for another species, you’d have to know a great deal about it. The virus would have to be programmed for the specific genetics of a single species, one planet at a time, or all planets would have to be populated by very similar species, which seems astonishingly unlikely. But hey, Star Trek did it, and this is TV sci-fi, so...
Gilligan has been very thorough in plotting things out, in realizing the logical consequences of his setup, so I can't imagine he hasn’t thought this out far enough ahead to consider these issues.
The radio signal the anti-social South American discovered could be a frequency on which the aliens communicate with each other. I had thought this was some form of telepathy, and still do, which means the radio signal is likely something else: the alien signal coming in, sending out orders, or… a new signal being generated on earth, sent out to alien worlds.
Is the hive engaged in building some kind of massive transmitter? Is it already built?
That, at least, would give the show somewhere to go while we wait for 7 billion people to slowly starve to death, and smile while doing it. It’ll be the holly-jolly version of the Holdomor. Billions contentedly dying.
Somehow, I don’t see that being Gilligan’s end game.
A big tell is that Carol is still cut off from the collective: they greatly fear her ability to suss out how to undo the joining. And if they’re that scared, it's going to happen.
I expect a few other things to come up in future episodes: the hive building a transmitter, more information on the cause of the virus, further escalation between Carol’s newly disconnected group of liberated souls and the collective (what can a pacifist collective do to stop her?), and the impending arrival of alien colonists.
The last one is probably the least likely to happen, as it’d require further leaps of disbelief and a large budget to realize convincingly.
But I don’t see the logical point of the virus, as designed, without this element.
As an exploration of ideological extremes, the show makes sense. Will that be matched by an in-universe explanation? Time will tell.
Either way, this is one of the most thoughtful sci-fi shows I've seen in a long time.
