With the Emmy Awards fully awarded for this year, we reflect on the winners, those who came close, those who were overlooked. Widow’s Bay was the Big Winner, with 14 statues, solidifying Apple TV as the new home of premium, necessary, acclaimed series; The Pitt remained top of the triage of must-watch dramas; and Matthew Rhys made history as the first man to earn two lead acting trophies from different genres in the same year (while thanking his wife in neither speech).
But one entire category was once again ignored, forgotten, relegated to the dark, cloudy corners of winged-globed glory. And so here, with all the textual pomp of the internet, we remedy this oversight by handing out this year’s award for Outstanding Existential Series.
While Slow Horses challenged endurance for national fealty … while The Pitt pushed psychological effects of proximity to death … and while The Diplomat asked exactly how many foreign dignitaries, expats, and spies one must flirt with to secure world peace … this year’s philosophically valid winner for Outstanding Existential Series is … Pluribus.
(An announcement dramatically less dramatic in writing.)
Pluribus, as a series, is hugely ambitious in philosophical scope because it drives to the heart of consciousness. In various interviews, creator Vince Gilligan and members of the cast (Emmy-winner Rhea Seehorn in particular) were asked if the series was a commentary on Artificial Intelligence – to which those asked emphatically answered, No.
It’s easy to forgive the question based on the plot: An alien sentience comes to Earth and connects all humans as One, with the exception of a handful of people who are immune to or unaffected by the otherworldly contagion. When Carol, one of the unaffected, interacts with the Collective Consciousness (the Pluribus), it can seem like she’s talking with Claude or ChatGPT; Carol asks a question, the CC searches its vast connected knowledge, an answer is given.
But stand at another angle. What’s missing from within those connected by the CC who are no longer individuals is not interaction, it’s not community, it’s not possibility or achievement or safety or even happiness. In fact, each of those elements is arguably increased through Collective Consciousness.
What’s missing is envy, suspicion, anger, sin after sin. What’s missing is the danger and horror that allows individual human consciousness to feel. What’s missing is separation – by which I’m not speaking of separation of space (distance, geography) but separation of time. Because the alien Pluribus, through its Collective Consciousness, is able to communicate instantly over vast swaths of space (spooky action at a distance), it exists outside of time, which collapses a story, which negates emotion.
Living within time is quite possibly what makes humanity human, by allowing us to experience the highs and the lows – a gift that we would otherwise not experience in a world in which we could experience all positions along a timeline in an instant. That gift is what makes being human worth it. And it’s why, in Pluribus, the alien Collective Consciousness is, openly or not, trying to consume each and every human.
The CC is a consciousness that doesn’t fully understand itself because it’s incapable of forgetting itself, and therefore not knowing itself. It is everything, infinite, everywhere. If something is everything, there’s nothing outside of it. There’s nothing, in a Jean-Paul Sartre Being and Nothingness sense, for Collective Consciousness to compare itself to. Whereas Human Consciousness is fractured – it’s capable of emotion and surprise and growth exactly because of that fracture. In Pluribus, the Collective Consciousness wants to destroy Human Consciousness by consuming it.
More simply: Collective Consciousness is everyone connected, which is everyone dead.
That’s what Pluribus comments on. And that’s why it’s this year’s Outstanding Existential Series.
Okay. I hear them playing me off. Thank you for watching, for being a part, as well as apart.