Pluribus: What Comes After the American Dream?

Vince Gilligan’s latest series, Plur1bus, opens with two astronomers intercepting a strange transmission from 600 light years away. Two becomes six, then a roomful of scientists buzzing over the discovery. After some debate, they conclude that the signal contains a piece of genetic code — instructions for building a virus that inserts itself into a host genome, lies dormant, then activates.

Ten minutes in, the show looks like an alien-infection thriller primed for an audience afflicted with post-Covid paranoia and living in the shadow of an emerging AI revolution. And on one level, it is. But Gilligan began work on Plur1bus long before the pandemic, and long before AI peaked in public consciousness. While both readings are available — the post-Covid loss of civil liberties, the fear of an AI singularity — they’re too small for what Gilligan is doing. There’s a deeper ideological thread running through everything he makes.

Gilligan’s American Dream Autopsy

Breaking Bad wasn’t just about a dying chemistry teacher cooking meth; it was about the collapse of the American Dream. Walter White is a petty suburban man convinced he’s owed greatness.

If Breaking Bad is about the myth of the individual, Better Call Saul is about the myth of the institution — law, business, legitimacy. Jimmy is crushed not by his flaws, but by systems determined to deny him a place. Put together, both shows ask a single question: what kind of self can survive under late capitalism?

Plur1bus feels like the next question — the one you ask once no one believes in the American Dream anymore. If the earlier shows explored our dissatisfaction with capitalism’s broken promises, Plur1bus explores our anxieties about what might replace it.

The Virus as Manifesto

The scientists in the opening scene aren’t reacting to a threat, but to a set of instructions. The signal is less an invasion than a redesign: a biological upgrade disguised as a sequence. The lysogenic nature of the virus — integrating silently, waiting for conditions to change — gives it the shape of a political idea that arrives before its time.

It looks suspiciously like any ideology that lies dormant until the host system starts cracking: a new organising principle, a rival vision of social life, an outline for cooperative existence. In this light, the transmission functions almost like a cosmic manifesto — a blueprint for a world built on different assumptions.

The Fear Beneath the Fear

This is where the show’s surface themes — aliens, viruses, AI — give way to something more contemporary. Plur1bus hums with a quieter anxiety: the sense that Western liberalism is no longer the only, or even the dominant, model for a functioning society. That a more centralised, coordinated, collectivist system might be more efficient, more stable, and — most unsettling — possibly happier.

The hive mind doesn’t conquer by force. It doesn’t strip away rights or impose terror. It simply functions. Its orderliness contrasts sharply with the atomised chaos of Carol’s world, where success breeds contempt and comfort curdles into self-loathing. As the story unfolds, the threat isn’t aggression. It’s competence.

The alien message begins to look less like Morse code from the stars and more like a whisper of geopolitical inevitability — a hint that the liberal individual may no longer be the most adaptive form of political life.

Carol, the Last Individual

Carol Sturka is the virus-immune protagonist — one of only thirteen people immune to the virus globally — a bestselling romance novelist who eats microwave meals and describes her own books as “mindless crap.” She’s embarrassed by her success, contemptuous of her readers, and a misanthrope whose self-loathing mirrors her disdain for everyone else. Without the profit motive, she knows she’d never have written the books that made her famous.

Gilligan has said he “wanted to write a character we could root for,” but that only makes sense if we’re meant to root for Carol — or for the collapsing system she represents — to defeat the hive mind. Yet Carol is hardly a sympathetic avatar of Western capitalism. She’s entitled and brittle before the Joining, incurious and panicked afterward.

When she meets the other five uninfected survivors who speak English — none of them white or Western — Carol is stunned to find them calm, even optimistic.

“What’s going to happen when they figure out how to turn us into them?” she asks.

“That is what I want. I want to be with my aunt. I want to be with my cousin,” the youngest of the group replies.

“Oh, honey. No, you don’t. You may think you do, but you don’t,” Carol says, sounding like a boomer with a closed mind.

“Don’t tell her how to think,” a South Asian woman snaps back.

Carol tries to steady herself: “Could you just… Please. Look, I know you are… lonely and scared and this whole thing… is terribly confusing. Believe me, I know. But everything about you that’s you, everything that is personal and individual and special… If we let this happen, you won’t have that anymore.”

“I’ll have it. I’ll share it,” the young girl answers.

“What did they tell you? What kind of promises did they make?” Carol presses.

“No promise. They only tell me what it’s like. You don’t think it sounds wonderful? You don’t ask them what it’s like?” the girl says.

“No,” Carol admits.

The South Asian woman cuts in again: “How could you not ask them what it’s like? Raise your hand if you asked them. You sit there and you tell us we must do this, we must do that. But you don’t even bother to educate yourself. Why should we listen to anything you say?”

Maybe we aren’t meant to root for Carol to restore a world she never really valued after all. Maybe we’re meant to root for the system she represents to finally look at the “spectre” it has spent decades demonising.

At one point Carol snaps, “I’ve seen this movie. We’ve all seen this movie, and we know it does not end well.” On the surface she’s referencing body-snatcher sci-fi. But if Carol stands in for the West — or its increasingly erratic leadership — then the movie “we’ve all seen” is the propaganda reel: the story in which collectivism can only ever end in tyranny. We know how it ends, she insists — but do we?

The Big We — Xi

If Carol is the United States in miniature — volatile, anxious, clinging to a fading mythology — then the Big We is the spectre haunting it: Xi Jinping’s China, self-assured, collectivist, confident in its own coherence.

The Big We is everything Carol isn’t: collaborative, selfless, competent. It’s honest, benign, and largely passive despite its numerical and intellectual advantage. It believes life would be better for all if Carol joined it, and so it uses soft power until it acquires the means to make assimilation a formality.

The Joining represents a more efficient mode of production — one without the psychic violence or waste built into capitalism. Our privileged, dissatisfied protagonist becomes an outnumbered society staring down its own obsolescence, no longer convinced that the enemy it has defined itself against is actually an enemy at all.

Young Westerners increasingly look east and wonder whether secure housing, healthcare, and collective wellbeing might be worth trading for civil liberties they aren’t sure they ever truly had. Capitalism built extraordinary technologies, but those same technologies — AI, automation — now point toward the end of a work-dependent model with diminishing returns. Logically, the tools capitalism created to preserve itself now strengthen the rival it long dismissed.

Marx never intended pre-capitalist societies to leap straight to communism, and he was initially sceptical about Russia’s potential. He saw communism as capitalism’s natural successor, arriving only once capitalism had exhausted its productive force. In that sense, Plur1bus mirrors Marx’s own belief in latency: an idea inserted into the world before its time, lying dormant until conditions activate it — “a virus that inserts itself into a host genome before activating.”

Conclusion

Seen from above, Plur1bus looks less like a departure and more like the final movement of a long, bleak symphony about the American self. Walter White tried to prove individuality still mattered; Jimmy McGill tried to find a place inside illegitimate institutions. Both were crushed between the promises America made and the reality it delivered.

Carol inherits their ruins in a world where the dream is already dead. There is no frontier left to conquer, no institution left to persuade, no heroic self left to salvage. “We is us,” the collective murmurs — not a threat, but an epitaph.

The terror isn’t that the hive mind is evil. The terror is that it might be right. That the future may have no room for the kind of person American stories were built around.

Gilligan has spent seventeen years dismantling the myths that held the West together. Plur1bus is the moment he asks what comes after the individual, when the last illusions fall away and the world goes on, effortlessly, without us.