"Pluribus" captures the isolation of COVID-awareness in a COVID denialist world

For years I've described having Long COVID as living in a horror movie. Now that horror movie (well, prestige Apple TV show) is here.

Before I’d watched the first episode, Rhea Seehorn’s screaming mug on the promotional poster for Pluribus captured the heady mix of primal terror, disbelief, horror and rage that’s been stewing in me over the last several years as a homebound person living with a virus most people will not acknowledge.

On hearing the show’s stated premise, I was even more intrigued: “The most miserable person on Earth must save the world from happiness.”

In my daily life as a Long COVID patient, disabled by an infection in late 2023, it sounded like a tagline I might write about my own efforts over the last several years.

The happiness in question, of course, being “back to normal” - a state of affairs wherein all humans are repeatedly infected with a dangerous virus while being told it’s safe to catch, slowly or rapidly losing their health over time at varying rates. I.e., a false happiness.

The happiness in Pluribus, too, is a false one. And it, too, is spread by a virus of sorts.

I don’t believe Vince Gilligan set out to write Pluribus as a COVID analogy, but unmissable references to the pandemic abound as he sets up his “joining event.”

[SPOILERS AHEAD]

After astronomers detect a repeating, non-randomized sequence beaming at Earth from hundreds of light-years away, they set about decrypting it and soon realize the quaternary signal codes for the four components of DNA.

Months later, in a government lab, two scientists are shown experimenting on lab rats when one breaks PPE protocol. “I can’t feel anything in these gloves,” she complains, stripping off an outer-layer, heftier glove and revealing a thin rubber glove beneath. (I like the shades of anti-condom and anti-mask language in this throw-away line; there are, of course, other ways to go about doing what she needs to do without shedding PPE; protocols exist for a reason.)

Just then, the thought-to-be-dead mouse she’s handling bites her; it’s both an animal-to-human transmission event, and a lab leak.

She collapses but appears to be regaining consciousness as her lab partner carries her from the room. When we next see the lab partner, he’s approaching a security guard- and kissing him on the mouth. Mouth to mouth transmission continues through several scenes. At one point, Patient Zero opens a box of donuts and carefully begins licking them all, top to bottom, and replacing them.

As each worker is kissed, licked, and infected, they gather and familiar swabs appear. They begin, in creepy coordination, using the type of swabs we’re all so familiar with from COVID testing, to swab their cheeks, drawing little smiley faces into now infected specimen dishes. The dishes are then packed away, presumably to be shipped off for their mass infection project.

Let’s take a moment here. Whether or not Vince Gilligan meant to evoke the pandemic with this show, this is a show carrying a lot of psychic COVID baggage. The show begins with misused PPE, animal transmission/lab leak (pick your theory!), and the inversion of early pandemic measures.

Rather than social distancing, these characters immediately begin kissing on the mouth. To me- and I’d guess, many other COVID cautious individuals, the invaded personal space and licked donuts evoke people’s continued insistence that they have the right not to isolate and mask while infected with COVID.

What’s mine is yours, what’s yours is mine.

Rather than swab to prevent the spread of disease, they swab to further it. And while to many this may feel like a far-fetched, sci-fi premise, for those of us living with Long COVID, it does in fact feel that most people today are actively promoting the spread of COVID rather than engaging with our ongoing efforts to halt and reduce the virus’ spread.

For example, we’ve known for years that cleaning the indoor air by introducing higher ventilation standards and HEPA filtration standards would drastically reduce airborne illness. There’s a new technology called Far UVC that inactivates viral pathogens in the air. Combining these two could be a game changer- drastically reducing how much we all get sick. Yet no matter how much we bring up this idea- and no matter how often and how seriously their children get sick- people seem to prefer getting sick than breaking from The Borg.

And The Borg, to be clear, is approximately where the show goes next.

This “virus” from space functions to join all humans together into one superbeing- a hive mind. Well, almost all. Carol, our hero, does not get absorbed into what Pluribus dubs “The Joining”. Neither do 12 others. “In Albuquerque?” asks Carol, hopefully. “In the world,” responds Everyone.

During the “joining event” during which the vast majority of the world population uploads into one hive mind, Carol’s partner is one over 800 million people who don’t survive the process. I found this artistic choice to be both interesting and important.

First, “The Joining” itself is a mass death event. To get to the other side- the “new normal” that is so wonderful, 800+ million people must die, but this is neither commented on nor mourned by the survivors. If and when it is broached by Carol, the fact is met with discomfort- not because of the death, but because of the topic of death. “Ya gotta break a few eggs!” she shouts sarcastically to a sullenly quiet room.

Secondly, there is the narrative decision to take Carol’s partner off the board, and how this affects her character and the character’s willingness to be hostile to “the new normal”. As a COVID safe person myself who’s been active in this community for some time, a partner who is not themselves COVID safe is an incredibly difficult dynamic to navigate and ultimately leads usually to either a break-up or the COVID-safe person pushing their boundaries in order to join the “back to normal” world.

We see this play out when Carol insists on meeting the handful of other English-speaking people who were not able to “join” with the hive mind. Unlike Carol, all of them bring family members, and all of these family members have “joined.” One woman who is particularly hostile to Carol, Laxmi, has a young son.

While Carol immediately wants to discuss how to bring down the hive mind, the other unjoined individuals disagree with her. They want to join their family members.

This felt realistic to me as a COVID-safe individual without children or a COVID-unsafe partner. In particular, parents of young children seem to avoid information about COVID-19, and even people who previously sought out such information may avoid it once having children. It’s more pleasant to be part of a group that says COVID is not dangerous - and psychologically more soothing- than it is to look more closely when people you love are on the line.

Especially when those people you love may be out of your control. If you can’t control what is going on at your child’s school- if you can’t control what your partner does outside of your home- if you can’t control what your parents choose to do- isn’t it better to join the “back to normal” party and have some fun, than to rage against the machine? To be the world’s most miserable person trying to save the world from happiness?

This dynamic is well represented in Laxmi and her son. As Carol- with nothing left to lose- begs her to understand that her son is not really her son anymore, but is also an ex-boyfriend, and a pilot, and a trained gynecologist- Laxmi grows more and more hostile, insisting that she knows her own son. At dinner, Carol begins asking him technical questions about gynecology, which he immediately answers, much to Laxmi’s horror and offense.

Unsurprisingly to anyone in the COVID-safe community however, she is not angry with the Hive Mind for infecting her son; she is angry with Carol for exposing how the virus has affected him.

It’s unclear how much the Hive Mind itself can question or break free from the virus. We know that when Carol loses her temper, the Hive Mind goes into some sort of shutdown mode, seizing up and causing worldwide chaos. People behind the wheels of cars, flying airplanes, whatever they may be doing, get into accidents; it’s mentioned that the first time Carol yells at the Hive Mind, 11 million people die.

“Shutdown Mode” feels like a pretty apt comparison for those of us attempting to get information about our situation living with Long COVID to the wider world. We have a smaller, more aware community that argues with us about the best course of action- people like Laxmi. These people may understand that COVID exists and is infecting people, but feel that “it’s here to stay,” “we can’t fight it”, and “I’d rather be with my family”- giving themselves up to the virus in order to join with the majority due to fear of isolation.

And then we have the larger world, the “back to normal” world, much of which acknowledges no threat from COVID, some of which simply cannot and does not say the word COVID and seems to go into some sort of fugue state when it’s mentioned.

These are the people who repeatedly post things like “there is a respiratory virus going on and it’s not the flu and it’s not RSV and it’s a mystery virus and I have no idea what it could be”. Nurses who don’t mask in a NICU. Leftists throwing superspreader events during COVID waves and ignoring every disabled person asking them about protocols. People who cannot seem to fathom any middle ground between “2020 lockdown” and “doing literally nothing at all ever to prevent COVID spread”.

People online claiming they’ve “never had the virus” when their own post history shows that they’ve had it several times. People mocking those who mask when they previously begged people to mask for the safety of family members. People asserting they’ve had “no lasting damage” from COVID while listing new onset medical issues they’re suffering from since their infections (I can’t, of course, know for certain which medical issues are arising from which infections, nor do I claim to; but by that same token, when a certain medical issue is a known sequelae of COVID, it can’t be ruled out by the person in question as a post-COVID medical issue either).

I’ve often spoken about the experience of Long COVID feeling like living inside a horror movie. Because it’s not merely that we’re so sick with this new disease- a disease our doctors don’t understand, often knowing less about it than we do, staring blankly at us as we bring up new studies and clinical trials. It’s not merely that we’re so sick and we don’t know for sure what is going wrong inside us- a freaky, body horror sort of feeling.

It is not just the illness. It is the bizarre social response to COVID that has grown up around us that isolates and alienates us, creating a constant sense of pressure, anxiety and tension. People do not believe in our illness, and not only do they not care to help us avoid reinfection, they actively work to ensure that reinfection risk is as high as it can possibly be.

When we ask people who nominally believe in listening to marginalized groups to do bare minimum things to reduce infection risk, they, along with the rest of the Hive Mind, resort to insults and mockery. There is no left or right anymore; it’s dizzying. There’s just: The Blob. A massive group of Most Everyone on Earth who Does Not Care that COVID disabled us and we must avoid reinfection.

A massive Hive Mind who won’t stop kicking us while we’re down, recoils at the thought of reducing spread of the virus, and shrieks if try to explain that yes, we really got disabled by COVID and we really exist. “Leftists” who agree with fascists that it’s unreasonable to ask people to mask in a pharmacy or a grocery store to reduce the spread of a virus that disables people.

Why? I’ve never encountered something so strange, so bizarre.

Each day I feel like I’m waiting for some fever to break, but it never does. While I lost my ability to walk down the street as a 38-year-old, no one would acknowledge anything was wrong, nor acknowledge why I might want to avoid another infection. “We’re back to normal,” says the Blob, “this is normal.”

I am in a support group with dozens of other Long COVID patients where we discuss treatments, doctors, experiences, medications. One woman recently shared that she can no longer transfer from her wheelchair to make it to the bathroom independently. I felt so deeply terrified. Online, the Hive Mind mocks us.

The quietest channel in my Long COVID support group is called “Improvements/Recovery”. No one ever really posts there.

The Hive Mind shares one overwhelming belief, downstream from which all other behaviors flow: COVID is harmless. If that foundational belief shatters- the central tentpole of back to normal which has been supporting a fantasy world since 2021-2022- everything else must be rebuilt from the ground up. It is, as some have put it, a “load bearing delusion.”

But it’s not the first, only, or last load-bearing delusion our society runs on, and that’s why it doesn’t surprise me that Gilligan could write a show so closely matching my experience while not necessarily thinking of my life with Long COVID at all.

The idea that we continue burning fossil fuels the way we are- that we can continue expanding fossil fuel infrastructure- that’s a load bearing delusion. Nothing that anyone in government is doing matches anything near the scale of the crisis, and yet everyone walks around grinning and flying and partying like there’s no tomorrow. Hell, there might not be!

Capitalism, unchecked growth and consumption on a planet with finite resources, will lead to a middle-class American lifestyle for all before the world is scorched: load bearing delusion.

Everyone gets equal opportunity in the land of the free and the rich are rich because they worked harder than you and the homeless are homeless because they made bad choices: load bearing delusion.

Poor countries are poor because of bad governance, not because of decades of neocolonial pillage and foreign resource control by the first world: load bearing delusion.

I could go on.

And for me it’s interesting because, when I hear the words, “back to normal,”- back to normal in the context of COVID, of the lockdowns, of the pandemic, I also hear them in regard to every single one of those other load bearing delusions just listed.

“Back to normal” was never just about forcing you to accept that life was going to be worse from now on, and you better not think about fighting back. You better not demand paid sick leave for the many more days a year you’ll be out sick. You better not ask for legal protections since this new virus might end up disabling you at work. You better not ask for clean air or far UVC. You better not even ask for COVID tests that consistently work.

It was also about getting back to the office. About losing that little taste of free healthcare you got, and extra unemployment. About halting the George Floyd protests. Ever notice how often people talk about “woke dying” and “woke died back in 2020” or “you can’t tweet like it’s 2021 anymore”? Back to normal was about Back to NORMAL because people had a little too much time, a little too much money, a little too much attitude, and a little too much freedom.

They said back to normal, and they meant back to normal. All of it. Capitalism, racism, sexism, environmental destruction, and disease. Back to the office. Welcome back, back to the Hive Mind. Hustle for your check. Buy yourself something nice. Immigrants are the problem. Disabled people are the problem. Trans people are the problem. Woke is dead. Now take that fucking mask off your face.

At one point in Pluribus, Carol is speaking to the Hive Mind, in the body of an authority figure. He assures her they are going to “figure out what is wrong with you,” and when she asks what he means, he replies, “so you can join us.”

This is the ask of our state, of our governments. If you’re COVID conscious, they want to psychologize you, stigmatize you, threaten you, until you “go back to normal.” They want us to join back up with the Hive Mind that tells us to leave any weak and wounded person behind to suffer and die. That there is no society, and no community- only capitalism, only hedonism, only selfishness, only consumerism.

For those of us who are sick, homebound and bedbound, it’s admittedly, a bit harder. It is a bit harder to propagandize a person who’s been disabled by a virus that that virus isn’t dangerous. But should we ever recover, we too will be encouraged to rejoin the Hive Mind, encouraged to forget our fellow disabled comrades, encouraged to learn no lessons, practice no solidarity, fight no battles but those we fight for ourselves.

I think- I hope- that that won’t happen. In Carol I already see a hero for the COVID era, for the COVID aware, and for the Long COVID community.

So, thank you Vince Gilligan.

If you haven’t had the pleasure, allow me to introduce us: I’m Julia, and I’m part of the Long COVID community. We’re the most miserable people on Earth. And we’re here to save the world from happiness.