The first time I watched Breaking Bad, I was late to the party. The cultural storm had already passed its midpoint, and I caught the final season as it was unfolding in real time. Yet from the moment I began, I could not stop. I watched every episode, tracing Walter White’s descent from a weary chemistry teacher into the calculating Heisenberg. It was the first show I ever watched in its entirety, and it left me thinking about choices. Not the cinematic kind of choices that make for great television, but the ones that expose what we value most. In its essence, Breaking Bad was a story about priorities and selfishness, about what happens when talent and fear fuse into power.

Vince Gilligan, the show’s creator, has now returned with Pluribus, his newest series on Apple TV. The name alone is telling. Pluribus evokes the Latin phrase E pluribus unum, out of many, one. It hints at unity, but also at the tension beneath that unity. The show takes on nothing less than the question of what humanity owes to itself when the world begins to break apart. Gilligan, ever the moral architect, builds his story not on spectacle but on decisions. As with Breaking Bad, every scene feels like a test of character, a study in how ordinary people behave when the moral compass stops pointing north.

I will not spoil the premise, because Pluribus deserves to unfold for you too. The first three episodes, released Friday’s on Apple TV, are visually stunning and psychologically unsettling. The plot centers on a worldwide event, one that challenges every assumption about survival, belonging, and sacrifice. It is not simply science fiction. It is an experiment in empathy. The show asks what any of us would give up for world peace, and whether peace achieved through force is peace at all.

Apple TV and the Pursuit of Quality

As I have written before in my movie review post about The Gorge on Cloaking Inequity blog, Apple TV has become the home for high-quality storytelling in the streaming era. They recently dropped the “Plus” from their name, a small but fitting simplification. In a landscape flooded with disposable content, Apple TV remains committed to quality over quantity. Their productions are deliberate. They trust viewers to think. Pluribus belongs in that lineage. Like The Gorge and Severance, it is not meant to be binged; it is meant to be absorbed.

BTW. This is not a sponsored blog, I’m just a fan.

When I watch most streaming services today, I feel the weight of excess. Hundreds of titles, few of them memorable. Apple’s catalog is different. I would rather rewatch their best series several times than sift through endless noise elsewhere. Their shows feel cinematic and patient, built for reflection rather than distraction. Pluribus fits that tradition. Every frame looks like it was painted, every silence feels intentional. The music hums with unease. The result is not escapism but confrontation. It demands your attention and your ethics.

Gilligan thrives in this environment. His storytelling has always balanced philosophy with entertainment. He usually does not rely on special effects to create tension, although the appearance of Air Force One did do that for me. He builds it through ordinary moral collisions. Just as Walter White’s cancer diagnosis became a prism for questions of ego and control, the mysterious event in Pluribus becomes a canvas for exploring conscience in crisis. Gilligan’s brilliance lies in forcing us to confront the same question every episode: What would you do?

American Exceptionalism and Rights

One of the first themes that emerges in Pluribus is the myth of American exceptionalism. The show quietly interrogates the belief that the United States is the moral compass of the world. When the global event strikes, the illusion of control begins to dissolve. Government agencies flounder. “Karen” shows up and clings to collective nationalism as if it were a survival strategy. The dialogue often circles back to one haunting idea: what if the very thing we celebrate as strength, our independence, is the weakness that prevents collective survival?The show’s title reminds us that America’s motto, E pluribus unum, was supposed to be a promise. Out of many, one. Yet the story suggests that unity is fragile when comfort is offered.

Pluribus highlights another American tension: the cult of individual rights versus the needs of community. The series shows people torn between personal freedom and collective responsibility. A recurring motif involves small acts of defiance, some noble, some destructive. Rhea Seehorn, who plays the lead character and earlier appeared on Don’t Call Saul, has insisted so far on keeping her individuality at all costs, even as her choices endanger others. Each of these moments feels painfully familiar, as if drawn from the current American landscape. Pluribus refuses to simplify these choices. It lets viewers sit in discomfort, watching people wrestle with what they are willing to sacrifice for the greater good. Gilligan’s approach is both critical and compassionate. He does not mock the characters who cling to independence or condemn those who seek control. Instead, he presents a moment caught between its mythology and its humanity.  

Fear, Indifference, and the Mental Health Crisis

Another thread running through Pluribus is the mental health crisis, particularly as it intersects with drug abuse. This is familiar terrain for Gilligan, whose earlier work in Breaking Bad dissected addiction from multiple angles. Yet Pluribus treats the crisis less as an individual tragedy and more as a collective blindness. The story lingers on people who are happily moving through the motions of living without true connection or awareness.

What stands out most is how the series portrays compassion as a vanishing resource. Concern exists, but it is detached, abstract, and performative. The protagonist talks about helping others but avoids those within her immediate reach. Her empathy is intellectual, not embodied. This contradiction feels painfully familiar in an age when awareness often substitutes for action. Gilligan captures that tension perfectly, exposing the gap between the language of care and the labor of care. The result is a subtle but devastating critique of our era of performative empathy. We are flooded with compassion-themed campaigns but starved for genuine human contact.

Mental health is not treated as a subplot but as the invisible weather of the show, a condition that surrounds every character, shaping their decisions and distorting their sense of purpose. The protagonist’s restlessness, her panic, becomes a mirror for society’s own exhaustion. She is constantly searching for meaning while pretending to be composed, and the act of pretending becomes its own form of collapse. 

The Unusualness of the Ordinary

One of the most haunting aspects of the first three episodes is how they depict people in traditional career roles—pilots, nurses, teachers—suddenly unmoored. With certainty and expertise abounding, the story reveals how much of stability is psychological. The world appears ordinary, but something about its order feels off balance. Gilligan plays with that unease, showing how quickly the familiar can become foreign when people inhabit roles that once seemed far beyond their reach and that restoring that order encourages calm.

For example, a striking scenes come when someone who does not look like a pilot— a TGI Fridays waitress— and has never claimed to be one, begins to act as if they were. Watching that stereotype is deeply unsettling. The gestures are imperfect but recognizable, guided by something that feels both instinctive and impossible. It challenges every assumption about who is qualified and what confidence really looks like. The result is not parody but revelation. Seeing an airline pilot on camera who does not fit the traditional image of command reverses the normal order of trust. The audience must decide whether to feel fear or admiration, doubt or faith. Gilligan’s fascination with this inversion becomes a quiet metaphor for the entire series. 

Conclusion: Four Stars for a Mirror

The pacing of Pluribus is deliberate. Every episode feels like a slow intake of breath before something inevitable. Gilligan resists the easy rhythm of spectacle and revelation. He builds tension not through chaos but through quiet—the silence between decisions, the hesitation before courage, the long pause where morality is tested. What separates him from most storytellers is his faith in the audience. He does not explain every detail as the story progresses or even preach. He trusts us to think. He constructs ethical puzzles and leaves us to wrestle with their implications. That trust is an act of respect, and it is why his stories linger long after the TV screen goes dark.

After three episodes, I give Pluribus four stars out of five. It is visually striking, conceptually ambitious, and morally relevant. The pacing may frustrate some, but that slowness is part of the experience. It asks us to be patient with discomfort and to see uncertainty not as confusion but as invitation. The show forces us to slow down, to watch our own reactions, to ask what we would do in a world where survival depends on empathy as much as strength. It is, in the best sense, an exercise in moral imagination.

The fourth episode, released next Friday, will no doubt complicate everything we think we understand. But that, too, is the point. Pluribus is not simply television, it is a mirror held up to our fractured age. It reflects both our fear and our potential. It challenges us to ask whether we still believe in the possibility of unity, in the idea that out of many, one can mean more than a motto. The world it shows us is unsettling, but within that unease lies something profoundly hopeful.

Gilligan reminds us that the work of belonging, like the work of healing, begins in uncertainty. The question is not whether we will face chaos, but how we will face it together. The real reward of Pluribus is not in its mystery but in its invitation: to remember that even when the world feels unmoored, we are still capable of meaning, still capable of care, and still capable of choosing one another.

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Julian Vasquez Heilig is a civil rights leader, scholar, and lifelong sci fi fan who believes great storytelling can teach us as much about humanity as any academic book. He especially gravitates toward post apocalyptic and zombie narratives, which explore what people become when the world falls apart. It has been a while since he has seen a truly great one, although World War Z remains one of his favorites for its scale and intensity. He also appreciates the stark moral clarity of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, a story that strips survival down to its most human questions. When he is not writing about education, equity, or democracy, he spends his Saturday nights watching and reviewing thought provoking films and series that linger long after the credits roll.