Pluribus, Vince Gilligan’s aggressively polite dystopian Apple TV series, has been pretty great. So great that when its season finale finally hits, folks will no doubt start looking for a new show to watch that scratches that same itch. Might we point you in the direction of the Wachowskis’ Netflix series, Sense8—a TV series we think pairs well with Pluribus in a sci-fi Barbenheimer kind of way?
On paper, there’s not much to draw clear points of comparison that would deem these two series, created by different people and with very distinct points of contention, star-crossed twins. It’s kinda like smooshing South America and Africa together and yelling “Pangea” randomly, without letting folks in on the first part of that thought process that happened in your head before you spoke aloud.
But we’d argue that their shared sci-fi themes, which address the human condition and our inherent need to connect, make them pretty great companion pieces. In Sense8, it’s about a fight to celebrate difference in a diverse world, while in Pluribus, it’s about safeguarding human autonomy amid the pull of a homogenized alien collective framed as a sacrifice for the greater good.
Let’s start with Pluribus.
While Gilligan won’t say flat out whether the series is about AI or not, having been once bitten and twice shy for guiding Breaking Bad fans to water and beckoning them to drink and massaging their throats, for the sake of argument, let’s say it is (because we think so). Main character Carol Sturka (Rhea Seehorn) finds herself among the 13 people immune to the hivemind alien invasion of Earth.
As Carol journeys forward, she grapples with language barriers and confronts crushing solitude as her longing to undo the invasion is met with indifference and resistance from fellow survivors across the globe—many of whom welcome a hivemind that placates to their every whim. God forbid Carol displays strong emotions about the matter, lest she cause the bodysnatched collective to have seizures on a global scale.
So what we’ve got here with Pluribus is instrumentality à la Neon Genesis Evangelion, with a heavy dose of danger in Carol, who struggles to express her true feelings and fights to regain the world’s autonomy—also known as good television, unless you’re a content creator who needs instant gratification. If you were to take that point of friction Carol is currently going through and flip it on its head, that’s basically the struggle that the sensates fought through in Sense8.
The Wachowskis’ once-cancelled and later revived 2015 sci-fi series takes that feeling of preserving human difference and runs a parallel track to celebrate it. In contrast to the moment of peril of AI, Sense8 spoke on the prejudice of racism and homophobia and took that on a global scale. In it, eight people born on the same day around the world share a psychic connection, allowing them to break down language barriers, appear alongside one another in a kind of out-of-body projection, and even take over each other’s bodies. All of which is spurred by either party feeling a strong emotional connection that triggers the phenomenon and giving each other consent to body snatch each other.
The central villain of the series, Whispers, has a similar evil plan for the human race as the aliens in Pluribus do: to evolve the human race. His ends justify the means; his raison d’être isn’t hinged on consent, nor is it gussied up with a smile.
Aside from the above, what makes Pluribus and Sense8 near-perfect companion shows is that their speculative fiction about human connections and the celebration and preservation of our autonomy hinges on the consensual nature of it all, and that, regardless of the setup, the perversion of it is something we all find icky.
Sense8 and Pluribus form a striking yin-yang dialectic with one another. Sense8 imagines a small-scale, immaculate hive‑mind phenomenon that is non‑consensual yet rendered beautiful through its resilience under real‑world strife. Pluribus pushes the inverse. Sense8 arrived with its finger on the pulse of global discord, offering an intimate vision of shared consciousness as an internet without screens. Pluribus insists on the limits of intimacy of humanized, reimagined AI companions on today’s internet—decked out with its stolen knowledge—reminding us that authentic human connection does not require omniscient access but the humility to ask.
If you want to see how another celebrated creator handles the sci-fi possibilities of a collective consciousness with as much an intimate focus on the beauty in the messiness of human uniqueness and connection, you might consider watching Sense8 after Pluribus.
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