The End of the ‘I’: Pluribus and the Collapse of the Autonomous Subject
16 January 2026
By Silvia Gerlsbeck Premet
Pluribus, the nine-episode first season from Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul creator Vince Gilligan, is the science fiction series of the moment, yet it is far more interested in the ethical and philosophical contradictions of the present than in the future.
The title draws on the United States’ motto E Pluribus Unum (“Out of many, one”), which originated in the idea that a new nation should emerge out of the union of the original thirteen colonies which rebelled against the Kingdom of Great Britain. Gilligan pushes the phrase beyond its origins. In Pluribus, “the many” are not unified into a new nation, but a new form of human existence. An alien viral RNA sequence originating near the exoplanet Kepler-22b sweeps the globe, merging humanity, save for thirteen immune people, into a single collective consciousness. The infected are permanently happy, peaceful, and non-violent, they cannot harm any living thing, including animals and plants, which poses the threat of slow starvation. Skills, memories, and knowledge are shared among the collective – now, a former TGI Fridays waitress can pilot a plane. Language itself changes with the ‘joining’: The pronoun “I” disappears and is replaced by a universal “We.”
Opposing this collective is Carol (played by Rhea Seehorn), one of the thirteen people immune to the virus, who has lost her wife Helen during the infection. A writer of adult fantasy novels, she is deeply unhappy with her own work, which she regards as lacking literary value. Carol despises the collective, refuses to recognise its members as human, and insists on her life continuing as before. Her resistance, however, is framed less as heroism, but as (egotistic) insistence: on individuality and on a vision of freedom defined by separation.
Pluribus seemingly invites easy allegorical readings: communitarianism versus individualism, socialism versus capitalism, utopia versus dystopia. But these binaries do not do justice to the ambiguities of the series, which never falls into the traps of placing one social vision above another. More compelling is reading the collective – and Carol herself – as an interrogation the fantasy of the autonomous subject, i.e. the idea that the individual is self-governing, coherent, and independent. Carol’s ‘freedom’ depends on enormous invisible labour and resources: entire city grids are kept illuminated to make her feel less alone, restaurants and supermarkets remain open just for her, golf courses are meticulously maintained to give her a sense of normalcy. Her lifestyle, expressive of liberal autonomy, exposes its own fictional, constructed status, and her independence and individuality are revealed as deeply dependent, resource-intensive, and environmentally destructive. In this sense, Pluribus resonates with Martin Heidegger’s critique of the modern, isolated subject. Carol insists on being an “I,” yet her existence is exposed as always already entangled with others, infrastructures, and a world – or worlds – she neither controls nor acknowledges, an entanglement that can be understood as Dasein, or being-in-the-world. The collective merely makes that dependence explicit.
The series also speaks pointedly to contemporary politics. Like MAGA-era individualism, Carol’s resistance can be read as personal desire framed as liberty, even when it undermines collective well-being. The needs and desires of a few individuals override what would materially benefit the many, all while being sold to the public as ‘freedom’.
Pluribus also reflects anxieties around generative AI and Big Data, not through the presence of machines, but through the absorption of individual ideas, thoughts and work into a giant data store. Humans become patterns, probabilities, and clusters. In this sense, the collective is less expressive of a dystopian takeover than an extrapolation of what is already happening. Aesthetically, Pluribus is unmistakably Gilligan: long static shots, slowness, an austere, unemotional visual language, all of which serve to defamiliarise the everyday and decentre the human.
The season ends with Carol joining forces with another immune survivor, Manousos, a store facility manager from Asunción, as they prepare to fight the ‘Others’. Whether the show can sustain its unsentimental exploration of the contradictions of modern subjecthood and competing idea(l)s of how society should be organised without retreating into familiar narratives of heroic resistance remains to be seen in season two.
Further reading:
https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20251106-pluribus-review