Pluribus Episodes 1 & 2 Review: What the Show Gets Right About Emotional Avoidance (Spoilers)
Rhea Seehorn in "Pluribus," now streaming on Apple TV+.
There's a new show on Apple TV that accidentally nails something most therapy never addresses: what happens when happiness stops being a feeling and becomes a defence.
Pluribus follows Carol Sturka, a novelist who watches in real-time as nearly everyone on Earth gets infected by a virus. But this isn't a zombie apocalypse. The infected aren't violent or dangerous - they're relentlessly, uniformly happy. They move through a world of perfect cooperation, infinite patience, and unwavering optimism. They've achieved world peace, ended discrimination, and eliminated all conflict.
Carol is one of twelve people immune to this transformation. And she's furious about it.
The show's premise sounds absurd until you realise we're already living in a milder version of it. We've spent the last decade building a culture where difficult emotions are treated like symptoms to manage rather than information to understand. Where "toxic positivity" isn't just an internet complaint but a lived reality in which admitting you're struggling feels like a moral failure.
Pluribus takes that impulse and follows it to its logical conclusion: a world where negative emotions don't just make you uncomfortable - they make you incompatible with society itself.
The virus doesn't make you happy
Here's what makes the show unsettling: the infected aren't artificially euphoric. They're calm, helpful, endlessly accommodating. They genuinely want to make things better for everyone. They've eliminated suffering by eliminating the capacity to suffer.
They've also eliminated the capacity for anything else.
The infected share a collective consciousness - a hive mind that contains all human knowledge and connects every person on the planet. They refer to themselves as "we" instead of "I". They can access any skill, speak any language, solve any problem. But they can't want anything for themselves. They can't disagree with each other. They can't feel anything except a steady, pleasant contentment.
This is the fantasy that underpins most self-help culture and a disturbing amount of contemporary therapy: that emotional pain is a problem to solve rather than an experience to understand. That if we just found the right technique, the right framework, the right medication, we could eliminate suffering and live in perpetual ease.
The show asks: what if you could? What would you have to give up to get there?
Why Carol is immune
The show suggests that Carol and the other immune individuals weren't spared by accident. Their immunity comes from something in their psychological makeup - specifically, their capacity to tolerate negative emotions.
Carol is described as "the most miserable person on Earth." She's cynical, difficult, frequently drunk. She's grieving the death of her partner. She's angry about things she can't change. She's the opposite of optimised, the opposite of well-adjusted, the opposite of the person wellness culture tells you to become.
And that's precisely why the virus can't touch her.
The infected can't tolerate her emotional intensity. When Carol has an outburst - when she expresses genuine rage or grief - it causes a system-wide glitch. The hive mind experiences what looks like a seizure. In one scene, her anger kills millions of infected people simply because the collective consciousness can't process that level of authentic negative emotion.
Her realness is toxic to a system built on emotional suppression.
This isn't a metaphor. This is how psychological defences actually work. When you've built your entire identity around being fine, around staying positive, around not burdening others with your difficulties - genuine emotion becomes a threat to the whole structure. Someone else's unfiltered anger or grief or despair can trigger a cascade of anxiety because it reminds you of everything you've been working so hard not to feel.
The other "survivors" don't want saving
One of the most psychologically astute aspects of the show is what happens when Carol meets the other immune individuals. She assumes they'll want to fight back, to find a cure, to restore humanity to its previous state.
They don't.
They're perfectly comfortable in this new world. Yes, they've lost everyone they knew. Yes, those people have been replaced by eerily helpful automatons. But the infected treat them like royalty, anticipate their every need, create a world without friction or difficulty.
Why would they want to go back to a reality where people disappoint you, hurt you, leave you? Where you have to navigate conflict and tolerate discomfort and risk genuine connection with people who have their own needs?
Carol is the only one who finds this arrangement intolerable. She's the only one who insists that choice matters more than comfort, that autonomy matters more than ease, that being able to feel pain is worth protecting even when pain is all you're feeling.
The other survivors think she's being difficult. They can't understand why she won't just accept paradise when it's being handed to her.
This is the same dynamic that plays out in therapy all the time. Someone comes in saying they want to change, they want to feel better, they want their relationships to improve. But when the work starts requiring them to tolerate discomfort, to sit with uncertainty, to risk being seen without their defences - suddenly the complaint shifts.
"Maybe I'm fine as I am." "Maybe this is just how I'm built." "Maybe trying to change is making things worse."
What the hive offers
The infected genuinely believe they're offering something valuable. They've eliminated war, poverty, inequality, suffering. They've created a world where everyone's needs are met, where no one is left behind, where harmony is guaranteed.
The cost is just that no one exists as a separate person anymore.
One character explains that the hive doesn't want to hurt anyone - it wants to help. It wants Carol and the other immune individuals to join voluntarily. It will give them anything they want, do anything they ask, create whatever conditions might make them comfortable enough to surrender their autonomy and join the collective.
It's control dressed up as care. Not violence, but overwhelming accommodation.
The hive presents itself as benevolent while systematically eliminating the conditions necessary for genuine choice. It offers comfort while removing the possibility of anything real. It promises happiness while deleting the self that could experience it.
And most people in the show accept this trade without hesitation.
The rage underneath
Throughout the first two episodes, Carol is angry. Constantly, loudly, inappropriately angry. She snaps at people trying to help her. She refuses comfort. She rejects every attempt at accommodation or care.
The show could have made this seem unreasonable. Instead, it makes clear that Carol's anger is the only sane response to what's happening.
Everyone she loved has been erased and replaced with pleasant simulations. The world has ended, not with violence but with enforced niceness. She's being offered everything except the one thing that matters: the right to be herself, to feel what she actually feels, to exist as a separate person who can disagree, struggle, suffer, and remain distinct.
Her rage isn't a character flaw. It's resistance. It's the part of her that refuses to be managed, accommodated, or soothed out of existence.
This is what gets missed in most conversations about anger: that sometimes rage is the healthy response. That the person who won't calm down, who won't be reasonable, who won't accept comfort isn't being difficult - they're refusing to participate in their own erasure.
In therapy, this often shows up as the client who challenges every interpretation, who seems determined to stay miserable, who resists every attempt to help them feel better. And sometimes - not always, but sometimes - that resistance is the only part of them that hasn't been colonised by other people's ideas about who they should be.
The part that's still fighting to exist.
The question the show is asking
Pluribus isn't really about a virus. It's asking whether happiness matters if you have to stop being yourself to achieve it. Whether connection counts if it requires you to dissolve into something larger. Whether peace is worth having if it means surrendering the capacity to want anything different.
These aren't theoretical questions. They're the same questions underneath every impulse to fix yourself, optimise yourself, improve yourself into something more acceptable to others.
Would you give up your difficult edges if it meant finally fitting in? Would you trade your capacity for genuine feeling if it meant you'd never hurt again? Would you surrender your autonomy if someone else promised to take care of everything?
Most people, given the choice in the abstract, would say no. But in practice? In the moment when staying separate means staying in pain, when being yourself means being lonely, when holding onto your authenticity means tolerating ongoing discomfort?
Most people choose the comfort. Most people join the hive without anyone having to force them.
Carol is the holdout. The one person who'd rather be miserable and real than happy and erased.
The show hasn't revealed yet whether she's right to fight back. Whether there's any way to restore what's been lost, or whether holding onto individuality in a world that's moved on is just pointless suffering.
But it's already revealed something else: that she's the only one still asking the question.
What this means for therapy
The real work of therapy isn't about becoming happier. It's about becoming more yourself - which often involves getting less happy for a while.
It means discovering that the strategies you've been using to avoid discomfort have also been preventing you from wanting anything real. That the version of yourself you've been performing to keep other people comfortable has been keeping you lonely. That choosing ease over authenticity isn't protection - it's a slower form of disappearing.
The right therapist won't try to make you more positive, more optimised, more adjusted to circumstances that might be genuinely intolerable. They won't sell you the hive's promise that if you just learn the right techniques, you can feel good all the time.
They'll help you recover your capacity to feel everything - including the things you've been working so hard not to feel. They'll help you discover what you actually want underneath all the accommodation. They'll stay present with your rage, your grief, your inconvenient truth.
Even when - especially when - it makes the room uncomfortable.
Because the alternative isn't happiness. It's just a very sophisticated way of ceasing to exist.
If you're exhausted from performing positivity or struggling with the pressure to be constantly optimised, therapy can help. I work with people in Croydon and online. Email hello@talktoluke.com
