I said when I began this series that one of
the most important things both Gordon and Gilligan learned from their work on The
X-Files was what not to do with a serialized drama. And that's far
more true of Gilligan then it is of Gordon, if for no other reason then he was
there from Season Two to the end of the original run.
Unlike Gordon who wrote several episodes
that were mythology-adjacent, if not directly related to the conspiracy
Gilligan never wrote a single script that had to do with the mytharc. The
closest he came was co-writing several episodes that had to do with Scully's
relationship to the conspiracy, whether in regard to her being diagnosed with
cancer (Memento Mori) or the aftereffects of the experiments on her (Christmas
Carol, Emily). Other than that all of his episodes fit the traditional monster
of the week format.
And the interesting part of Gilligan's
tenure on The X-Files was that he basically was an optimistic writer as
well as its resident humorist. Gilligan spent much of the show poking fun at
the tropes of the series but never with the kind of meta that Darin Morgan did.
With him he was gently poking fun at it. We get the clearest sense of this in
his first comic episode, the classic Small Potatoes.
Mulder
and Scully are called to a small Virgina town where babies are being born with
vestigial tails. The most recent mother Amanda Nelligan claims the father is
from another planet, which naturally brings our agents there.
When Mulder questions Nelligan about how
she got pregnant, Amanda tells her that the father just showed up on her door
one day. It wasn't an alien; it was Luke Skywalker. With perfect comic timing
Scully says: "Did he have his lightsaber?" "No" Amanda
says. "How many times have you seen Star Wars?" Scully asks absolutely
delighted. "368. I should break 400 by January."
(Was it possible that Gilligan's taking a
gentle dig as the nerd culture that was forming online, including on The
X-Files?")
Mulder wants to go home but then they find
out all five babies have the same father. This leads them to a sperm bank and
the janitor Eddie Van Blundht. "The H is silent" he will constantly
remind us.
Fans of this episode – and everyone loves
it – knows that Eddie has the ability to make faces and turn into anyone he
wants. This is a direct reference to the Bounty Hunter we saw as early as
Colony. But Gilligan cleverly indicates that he's not taking it seriously and
neither is Mulder. When Scully asks him if Van Blundht is an alien, Mulder is
dismissive: "Not unless aliens live in trailer parks." This is
clearly a dig at Carter and how the mytharc is so portentous: we're not going
to dignify the idea that someone who has to power to shape shift would do so
only to impersonate Jedi Knights.
And so Gilligan spends much of his humorous
monsters of the week episodes going out of his way to gently puncture
everything that Carter and his colleagues hold sacred about the aliens. He will
usually do so by doing everything in his power to make one, if not both of our
beloved agents, look like stuffed shirts.
The
best example of this is Bad Blood where the episode opens with a young man
being chased through the woods by a figure in dark, screaming for help. Then he
trips and is staked by Mulder. Scully runs up looking horrified. Mulder gets
her to look at the fangs, saying this man is a vampire. Scully pulls them out.
"Oh, sh---" Smash cut to the titles before Mulder can complete the
obscenity.
The episode then shows how Gilligan is
going to play with the format in which our agents are being sued for $446
million for their role in the wrongful death of their killer. Skinner wants
their report and Mulder asks Scully what she's going to say. So Mulder asks
Scully to tell what she said and then Mulder tells Scully what he saw.
The episode then goes out of its way to
show how Scully sees Mulder and Mulder sees Scully. Both versions show the
narrator as the calm, rational human being and their partner is the person who
is the burden to everything. Mulder (in Scully's version) is an overexuberant,
hyper person, who loves his slideshows and points out trivia, all the while
pushing his partner to do autopsies in the dead of night. Scully (in Mulder's
version) is a whining harridan who hates being dragged around the country by
their partner and keeps falling over herself in front of a buck-toothed
sheriff. (In Mulder's version. In Scully, it's Luke Wilson.)
What's the most telling part of the
narrative is that in reality Sheriff Hartwell and the entire town are vampires
– but they're not the monsters. Late in
the episode Hartwell apologizes to Scully for putting them through all of this.
"He makes us all look bad. He's not who we are any more. I mean, we pay
taxes. We're good neighbors. Ol' Ronnie, he can't quite seem to grasp the
concept of 'low profile'."
There's a deep irony here. Mulder and
Scully have stumbled on to a town of monsters but they're not monsters in the
sense that they've been hunting all this time. This is one of the best ways
Gilligan pokes fun at the entire Monster of the Week format, something he'll do
quite a bit more often. Perhaps the real problem with so many of the monsters
we've met over the five seasons so far (and more to come!) is not that they're
mutants or demons but that they don't have a community. Perhaps Eugene Tooms or
Flukeman wouldn't be a threat if they had their own village somewhere. And its
worth noting that though the vampires have both Mulder and Scully at their
mercy when the episode ends they choose to 'pull up stakes' because while they
could kill our heroes, it would just draw the wrong sort of attention to them.
But there was always a darkness to
Gilligan's humor and in a sense that darkness was a foreshadowing of what would
come in Plur1bus. In 'Je Souhaite' Gilligan's directorial debut Mulder
finds himself the master of a genie and given three wishes. He tries to be altruistic and wishes for
world peace. And how does the genie grant it? By erasing everyone but him from
the planet.
And in the Pilot of Plur1bus Gilligan's aliens manage to invade Earth and
create a world that is a perfect paradise with no violence, crime, pollution or
deviancy. And how do they do that? They manage to eliminate all but thirteen
people on Earth into a hive mind.
Gilligan's aliens are completely different
from Carter's. The aliens do not invade on UFOs nor do they colonize through
black oil or bees. They arrive on a transmission and they manage to create a
compound which the best scientific minds on Earth synthesize. Then they manage,
in ways Gilligan and his writers have yet to explain, to take over the minds of
every single person on Earth so that they all become the same brain. And all
they want to do is create a paradise for those who live. The cost is one's individuality,
one's soul, everything that makes you a human being. And what's surprising is
that in Season 1 there only appear to be two people left who don't want to go
along with the program.
As with the vampires in Bad Blood the
aliens in Plur1bus want to be good neighbors. They are willing to
accommodate everything that the remaining thirteen people who have not been
processed want. In the case of one such survivor that means allowing him to
live out all of his fantasies, played in the level of James Bond in Las Vegas
or being able to fly Air Force One. In the later episodes Zosia, who is
established as an inspiration for a major character in Carol's fiction, tries
to befriend her by playing games, going through couples massages and eventually
rebuilding the diner she once used when she was deciding to become a writer.
These are not the hulking bounty hunters we
spent all of The X-Files watching but there is a similarity: in The
X-Files the aliens can take the form of any person on Earth ; in Plur1bus
they have the minds of every person on Earth. As a result they always refer to
themselves as 'we' whenever they talk to Carol about anything. In one example
of the humor of the show Carol demands to that Zosia use terms like 'I' and
'you' and Zosia visibly struggles with it.
We also know far more about the aliens in
the first season of Plur1bus then we ever got to during The X-Files. At
one point Zosia tells Carol that they come from a planet called 'Kepler 23' and
that they plan to spread everything they've been taught across the known
universe, in theory, through a great radio transmission. Human emotions affect
them so strongly that it causes them physical pain and that extends to not
wanting to cause emotional pain either. They are also incapable of either lying
or refusing any request that their subjects. Carol becomes aware of this in the
worst way possible when she drunkenly calls for a grenade and Zosia shows up on
her door with it. She doesn't believe they'd give her a live grenade until she
pulls the pin – and it detonates, severely injuring Zosia.
The aliens also seem incapable of hurting
living things, whether they are animal or plant. As 'John Cena' tells us if an
apple falls from a tree they can eat it, but they can't actually pick an apple.
They are currently surviving of a kind of protein found in dead humans but as
they are told within a decade they will all starve to death from lack of
nutrition. In another irony the aliens have managed to solve most of humanity's
problems but Earth has done nothing to solve their own.
The biggest difference between Carter's
alien invasion and Gilligan's is a difference in style. As any fan of The
X-Files knows the mytharc episode were increasingly dragged down by a lack
of action and forward movement and burdened by every single character giving
long ponderous speeches in purple prose that is often referred to as
'Carter-speak'.
Gilligan, by contrast, has always been a
far more visual storyteller: many of his series are an example of show, not
tell. Plur1bus is by far the biggest example of this writ large as so
much of the first season focuses on Carol Sturka (Rhea Seehorn) one of the few
women left untouched by the hive and how she tries to resist in Albuquerque.
Like Scully Carol has a skeptical worldview
but hers was always cynical to the point of unpleasantness. A best-selling
romance novelist who seemed to hate everybody except her lover Helen she never
liked people when things were normal.
Established early in Pluribus is that all of the aliens only seem
to want to fulfill the fantasies of every human on Earth and Carol is the
angriest person alive. Indeed her anger is so toxic that just being in its
presence can be fatal to so many of those who are still alive – something that
sickens Carol when she learns the consequences of one such outburst.
So much of the first season is done in
long, visual sequences where action speaks louder than words. We see Zosia
(Karolina Wydra) traveling from one section of South America to an airstrip in
the opening teaser of the second episode. We see all of the aliens working to
clean up the mess and Zosia traveling as the rest of the aliens silently work
as one. A similar section takes place with Manousos, who we will learn maybe
the only person left on Earth who shares Carol's worldview. We watch him in the
opening sequence of the fourth episode in his darkened apartment, assessing his
food supplies, rationing what he has and methodically working his way through a
shortwave radio. Gilligan doesn't formally introduce us to him until the sixth
episode when he starts his long trek to see Carol in New Mexico.
Carol spends much of the first season
trying to learn the truth about the aliens, who are incredibly forthcoming. She
learns very quickly that they will do anything to make her happy and that they
don't want to hurt people. In fact they can't do it either physically or
mentally. Indeed we eventually learn the process to finish conversion involves
an invasive medical procedure and because that will cause harm, they refuse to
do it unless the subject consents.
In the Season 1 finale we get the clearest
picture yet as to how to aliens are planning to convince everyone else to 'join
them. One of the remaining unchanged is a Peruvian girl named Kusimayu. Two and a half months after the invasion she
has agreed to the process. She lives in a small Quechuan village. The mood is cheerful and hopeful and its clear
'they' are trying to make Kusimayu feel good about her choice. She says she's
not scared and she feels happy to do this.
In the last moments before the process begins she's among the pets she keeps
and is stroking a young goat. She asks if it will hurt and they assure her it
won't.
They take out a large tube that has been
kept in cold storage. (This could be an homage to The X-Files where we
learned that the alien fetus – or the wellspring – was kept that same way for
nearly thirty years as early as the season 1 finale.) They open the tube and
she inhales. As in the pilot she begins to seize and passes out.
She opens her eyes and has the same
beatific smile we've gotten used to over the course of the series. Immediately
after doing so all of the members of her community begin to pack up clearly
intending to leave the village forever. 'Kusimayu' opens the door to the coop
and the animals begin to run free…with one exception. The goat that she was
stroking just a few minutes ago runs after her. She walks away from it without
even looking back.
Gilligan has illustrated without a word of
dialogue what the cost is of being part of the hive and it's devastating. In a
single moment you give up everything you ever cared about as a human being
without thinking twice.
Later on Carol and Zosia slowly manage to
become involved in large part because the aliens want her to write her next
book. This is another humorous twist. By this point they have read every book
on Earth and they want something new to read. That Carol has never thought her
literature of great value prior to the invasion is wonderful because it turns
out that, like the teller of the Arabian Nights, it might keep her human. And
sure enough after the two of them have sex – which Carol initiates – she manages
her first chapter of her new book.
It's difficult to register the sincerity of
any one of the Hive mind but there seems to be genuine delight as Zosia reads
the first draft and sees the changes she's made by turning Raban into a woman
and discusses how this would be possible through canon. That the world might be
saved via a cheap fantasy novel is a very Gilligan touch and it’s a far more
direct idea then 'the truth'. Which makes you wonder if what Zosia and the rest
of the hive is thinking involves thought or is just an act. Do they realize that if Carol joins them that
they would never read another story from Wycaro?
But by design that fits the kind of writing
Gilligan has done, not just in The X-Files but all of his series
afterward. He has always been interested in character rather than story, even
when he his shows have some of the greatest plots and continuity in 21st
century TV. Pluribus is a show
about the angriest woman left in a world that many of the human's left now
consider a paradise but that she argues isn't because all of what makes us a
human – our individuality – has been taken away from them. For all her contempt
for the world when it was normal, she understands it is the flaws in humanity
that makes us who were are, even if that it is our rage and ways of causing
pain.
This is seen more clearly in the second
half of the first season which focuses more on Manousos (Carlos Manuel-Vespa).
Manousos is just as resistant to the aliens as Carol but for a different
reason: he believes that they are thieves who are taking what is not theirs
anymore. He knows from the start that this is a lie when the alien who is
taking the form of his mother talks to him warmly. "You're not my
mother," he says. "My mother was a heartless bitch." Again Gilligan's writers argue that by taking
away the bad characteristics of those we love, we are robbing them of their
humanity. He equates all of the things they are willing to do to help him as he
makes an increasingly perilous crossing to find Carol, and at every level
refusing the help of the aliens.
One almost sees a sense of Mulder-like
stubbornness in Manousos as he seems more determined to die on his way to see
Carol then to take any help from the aliens. But unlike Mulder, who rushed
headlong into danger thinking the truth would protect him, Manousos knows all
too well what he's getting into every step of the way. The seventh episode of the show focuses on
his long journey from Paraguay to the tip of Columbia, syphoning gas from cars,
focusing on learning English from a series of cassettes, hunting and fishing as
he goes. When he reaches a point he can travel no further by car and the aliens
try to warn him away (compassionately) he takes out his gas can and then sets
his cars on fire. Manousos is clearly a man of faith – we see him sleep in a church
and with a religious icon hanging from the mirror – but it's not a blinding
one, it just has simple moral principles.
Taking this further, at one point in his
journey, he suffers horrible injuries and is hospitalized. When he escapes from
the hospital he demands to know the cost of the medical care they have given,
as well as for an ambulance he is going to take. The aliens immediately give
him the bill – and in a Gilligan twist, an itemized receipt.
Throughout his journey he says the same three
sentences in English over and over. "My name is Manousos. I am not one of
them. I wish to save the world." What makes you who you are is a recurring
theme throughout Gilligan's work starting with what he did on The X-Files and
how Manousos simply and eloquently phrases it is one of the simplest and most
profound things ever written in 21st century TV.
By the time Manousos arrives (twelve days
before Kusimayu commits to the process on the timeline we see) Carol has
clearly started to rethink her priorities. She tells Zosia that she intends to
hear him out and send him on his way. In typical the two people who most want
to save the world not only don't meet in person until the end of Season 1 but
spend much of their initial discussion disagreeing where to initially meet
because Carol, like all white women, is afraid of being raped by strangers have
their entire conversation, arguably the one that might save the human race,
take place over Siri in google translate. Their priorities are different. She
wants to see if there's a way to reverse the process believing their basic
humanity is intact. He thinks that the transformation has taken away their
souls – something that the opening of the season finale implies – and the best
thing is to exterminate them.
If one wanted to draw parallels to The
X-Files one could see this as a meeting between this show's Mulder and
Scully, only it is simultaneously hostile and absurdist. By the end of their
first encounter Carol is so annoyed by Manousos she tells him "We'll save
the world tomorrow," gets royally drunk and when she wakes up puts a chair
blocking her door.
When Zosia tells Manousos everything about
their relationship Carol is horrified particularly when Zosia tells Carol:
"We love him the same as we love you." For Carol this is the most
grotesque violation yet. When Zosia starts seizing – in large part because
Manousos is choosing to experiment with radio waves – her reaction is to take
her rifle and threaten him with it.
In the final twenty minutes Manousos asks
very bluntly: "Do you want to save the world or get the girl?" It
seems for a while as if Carol has chosen the latter. In this he is not unlike Mulder seeking the
truth at any cost. For a while it seems like Carol has chosen the alternative
as we see a montage of the two traveling the world as a couple and Carol
looking happy – genuinely happy for the first time in the entire series.
Looking at this we are reminded of both Gilligan's final episodes of the series
'Je Souhaite' and 'Sunshine Days'. In both he made essentially the same
argument: it's less important to find some existential truth then the friends
and loved ones you meet along the way. In Je Souhaite the real truth Mulder
finds is watching 'Caddyshack' with Scully in the final scene and in the latter
Scully argues that proof of the paranormal is less important then that of human
connection. One could see him making the same argument here in his scenes with
Carol and Zosia at a ski chalet by an open fire.
But ironically it is Carol's inability to
just be happy that saves her humanity as she asks the questions she needs to
about how they've improved the process. And because Zosia is unable to lie she
tells her exactly what we saw in the opening scenes: that very soon they'll
have a way to do this without an invasive procedure. Carol tells them they
can't do this if Zosia loves you. Zosia says they have to do this because they
– and she uses I – love you. This is a parallel to so many of the experiments
Scully went through during the various biological experiments done during her
abductions, which also involved a lack of consent.
Immediately afterwards Carol comes home and
she's back to her old, bitter self. We'll have to see in later seasons (when
Gilligan and his crew finally come up with them) if these parallels between
Gilligan's first show and Plur1bus continue. But I should add that at
the end of the first season one of Carol's last lines is "We save the
world." This is a line that no one on The X-Files ever said during
its entire run – and in typical Gilligan fashion its delivered by her in such a
way that it sounds more like an annoyance than something that she really wants
to do.
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