Plur1bus: Milk is people! Episode five review

"Milk is peeeeeople!", as Charlton Heston might holler to an earlier generation of cinemaphiles. 

The latest episode of Plur1bus, Got Milk?, delivered the goods, with fabulous and unexpected twists and turns. 

First, the hive evacuated the entire city of Albuquerque (what a weird name) to get away from our favourite anti-hero, Carol, who pushed her personal pirate what's-her-face for information on how to undo the great joining. Not cool, Carol: the hive viewed this as harm. 

They needed ‘space’. 

The show hilariously replicates patterns of emotional abuse, just on a global scale. Carol’s selfish, willfully inconsiderate, even abusive, while the hive is unctuously accommodating, suicidally pacifistic and agreeable to a fault. 

The show contrasts these two diametrically opposed personality types: the selfish individual and the altruistic collective. Both are flawed, and the show doesn’t pull any punches in depicting each at their worst. Well. Carol could actually be even more awful; she’s not acting like a psychopath or malignant narcissist, which would be the true opposite of the codependent. 

But to what end? What’s the POV driving the narrative? 

Time will tell, but three things to keep in mind: first, the codependent hive is doomed from an evolutionary POV, while Carol is not. True, it will take time for predators to multiply enough to impact the population, but the hive lets itself be prey, so there will be no cap on predator expansion. Have you ever met someone who was endlessly self-righteous in their pacifism, to a smug, suicidal degree? That’s the hive. 

Second, the hive has a biological imperative to infect every human (including Carol), a process that killed over 800 million people. I suppose you could contrast that with selfishness killing billions throughout the course of history, but within the confines of the show, the death toll weighs heavily against the hive so far.

Three, Carol’s not as awful and selfish as a selfish person could be, while the hive is ridiculously codependent. Carol is not a compulsive liar, fraudster or serial killer. That would be the real flip side of the coin, but the show doesn’t go there. As such, the deck is decisively stacked from the get go.

Other than the city evacuation, the other big surprise is a truly horrific reveal: remember those 800,000,000 who died when the virus was downloaded? Well, they’re being ground up, liquified, and served up in milk cartons to the hive for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

Ew.

Of course, this makes total, pragmatic sense: the hive refuses to harm anything, even bed bugs. Their only defense is avoidance, so they can’t kill animals for food. They can’t kill insects that eat crops. Their idealism is absolute: they even free lions and tigers that then prey on hive members. Because moral superiority. As such, a readily available food source (dead people) would be very valuable, as it has no ethical cost. 

What happens when the Eaters of the Dead run out of dead bodies to feast upon? 

They’ll have to subsist on what crops they can grow without harming anything, anything at all, which will be… challenging. 

My guess? Some people are going to starve. Not that the hive will mind, it sheds hosts like Stalin sheds Kulaks and I shed skin.

So, all in all an excellent episode. I wasn’t expecting the hive to go no-contact with Carol. I also hadn’t, but should have, predicted the hive would eat the dead. 

What’s next, Vinny? 

I’m looking forward to more twists and turns. 

The Baker’s Dozen might be put off by the hive eating the dead, possibly making Carol new allies. 

If Carol is able to find a way to break the hive connection, the show could go in a whole new direction. Would the hive, threatened with dissolution, become less passive? It might let individual members be eaten, but what if the entire collective is threatened? Whats it’s biological imperative? Why does it have to spread to everyone, unless it is to neutralize all possible resistance? Because the biological imperative it has shown so far is a one-way abnegation ticket to extinction. 

If the show goes on long enough, I suspect aliens might arrive in a colony ship, ready to turn humanity into their eager and willing slave labour force. I predict invaders will be human in appearance, principally because prosthetics would look cheezy, and wouldn’t fit with the show’s overall vibe. Star Trek this is not. Perhaps the aliens seeded humanity on earth in the first place, in the distant past. That’d be an easy, quick exposition drop.

So far, the show has presented everything in a very grounded, plausible manner (as much as an instantaneous communication hive mind is realistic). 

Which leads to another question: if the hive is connected irrespective of distance, does that mean the transmitters, who are also part of the hive, are in communication with the hive on earth? Is it a pansolar-system, or pangalactic, hivemind? 

Does it drink Pangalactic Gargleblasters?

Something for Carol to inquire about in future.

It’s worth noting the questions that Carol is NOT asking. The hive cannot lie, so the show will have to avoid areas of inquiry that would give away future plot points. If she doesn’t ask easy and obvious questions, then that’s probably the direction the show is going.

Plur1bus review

The Pur1bus debut is slick and fascinating high concept television: humanity downloads instructions for ai virus sent from 600 light years away, and promptly accidentally infects itself.

Because of course it does.

If you’ve read The Hot Zone, so far, so believable.

The show centres around Carol (Rhea Seehorn), a cynical and disillusioned writer of romance novels who holds her own audience in complete contempt, who is immune to the virus. Everyone else hits pause, jitters in place, and then becomes part of an interconnected, altruistic hive mind.

It's happy happy joy time, which doesn’t sit well with our anti-heroine. She loses her partner in the great virus download. Some 870 million others also died... not that Carol really gives a shit about them.

One of the main themes underlying the drama is the battle between selfish individualism and selfless collectivism. 

We all know what side Elon will be on.

Carol doesn’t really care about anyone… except her romantic partner. She’s willing to shove aside, or even drive over, anyone who gets in her way if her partner is at risk. 

Shortly after the altruistic virus takes over (it’s fittingly spread by mouth to mouth kisses... and less so by surreptitiously licking donuts), a White House representative talks to Carol through her TV set. The spokesman, the (former) Secretary of Agriculture (or something), tells her that everyone got a infected by a virus from outer space. No alien invasion. 

Just happy people!

The hive mind then ships to Carol someone from Israel who resembles her romantic ideal. The hive wants Carol to be happy, you see. 

It’s totally selfless.

It’s also sensitive: when Carol explodes in rage at Romantic Substitute, the hive goes into shock and 11 million people die. 

Talk about Emo. 

It reminds me of that episode of Star Trek where Spock is infected by happiness spores.

Carol asks if there is anyone else who is immune, and it turns out there are a dozen, 5 of whom speak english. 

So they organize a get together in Bilbao, Spain, and we see just how different individuals can be. Carol is sorely disappointed by this pack of unnotables. The most eccentric, and narcissistic, is a young man who’s already assembled his own harem, and flies in on Air Force One. 

Not the kind of person Carol was hoping to sync with. 

But is she any better?

As a social experiment contrasting individualism with collectivism, it’s fun. The collectivism, however, is so extreme and complete, I wonder how much dramatic fuel can be wrung out of it. Carol needs to be exceptionally dysfunctional for the show to work. 

Happiness, after all, writes white on a page.

The most interesting direction I can see is to lean into Carol’s efforts to thwart the aliens. She’s correctly determined that it’s up to the uninfected to save humanity.

Why? 

Because the hive here is completely incapable of defending itself. It won’t slap a bug that’s biting them. It won’t kill. In other words, if there are bed bugs, it will let the vermin breed and feast on the hosts until they die of blood loss. That’s how extreme the altruism here is. They will let lions and tigers out of zoos, and just accept people being eaten by these predators as a cost of doing business. Or being virtuous. Whatever.

It's like some kind of extreme, Heinleinian or Randian caricature of altruism. Yes, there are some people out there (like Madonna) who spout half-baked, naive, altruistic peacenik slogans such as 'violence never solved anything'. (Really? Have you checked with the Phoenician  Carthaginians? Oh wait, you can't: the Romans slaughtered their armies, razed their city, and sold those who were left into slavery. Seems to me they solved their rival problem with an awful lot of thoroughly genocidal violence. As Tacitus wrote: "To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false titles, they call empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace." Dare I mention aboriginals? No? Too soon?) But these are the exceptions. 

Heinlein famously despised altruism, saying that it was 'self-deception, which is the root of all evil'":

"Gratitude: An imaginary emotion that rewards an imaginary behavior, altruism. Both imaginaries are false faces for selfishness, which is a real and honest emotion."

and: 

"Of all the nonsense that twists the world, the concept of 'altruism' is the worst. People do what they want to, every time. If it pains them to make a choice - if the choice looks like a 'sacrifice' - you can be sure that it is no nobler than the discomfort caused by greediness... the necessity of deciding between two things you want when you can't have both."

That's right: altruism is the worst: it was behind The Holocaust, the witch trials, slavery, the Robber Barons, cryptocrime, tech oligarchies, dictators, and most vile of all, The Salvation Army. 

Personally, I think unrestricted selfishness, which gives birth to bigotry and greed, are behind the vast majority of suffering. Sure, sometimes a fig leaf of justification is pinned atop, but it's not often the underlying motive. Rudolf Hoess wasn't driven by 'concepts of altruism'. 

There are worse concepts that twist the world.

But hey, that's just me.

I can only wait for the show's underlying ideology to unfold with bated breath.

Within the narrative set up by Vince Gilligan, however, we can immediately see a core flaw in the hive's altruistic nature. The show's deck is naturally stacked that way. Given how grounded the show is with its presentation of events, I’m not sure we’ll ever actually see aliens arrive, but that's what would reveal the game. 

The virus is a very clever, clean weapon: it’s turned humanity into a codependent hive mind that’s incapable of self-defence, an entirely willing and exploitable workforce, determined to please anyone who still has a POV. 

In other words, when alien invaders do arrive, humanity will do everything the aliens want. The aliens don’t have to fight anyone. All the infrastructure, along with the workforce, will be captured intact. No loss of productivity. 

Like codependents servicing their favourite narc.

Will the show go in that direction? I have no idea, but it seems the most logical path. 

We'll see if the hive mind starts preparing for their arrival.

Otherwise, what on earth are all these hivers doing with their time? We see them cleaning up the detritus caused by the virus download, but beyond that? Everyone knows what everyone else knows. Individuality is gone. There are no specialists, because everyone is. What need then is there for entertainment? Gambling? Vanity products? Tchotkies? Education? Crime? Military forces? Police? 

So much is rendered obsolete by the virus. 

The problem here is that I’m not sure the answers will be interesting.