When Pluribus premiered not that long ago and I watched the first episode with baited breath and truly, truly enjoyed the crap out of it I was thinking "oh man, we finally have something really inventive and well-done here!" it stayed that way for another 3 episodes or so and it looked like once again Vince Gilligan (Breaking Bad, Better call Saul) is just a screenwriter like no other and can do no wrong. I kept this idea in my head until the end of episode 3...things were going great and I was really looking forward to every Thursday when the new episode was out. TV was back baby!
Then the next 4 episodes happened.
If you familiarize yourself with my criticism or praise of just about anything you will know that I am extremely critical of anything that has what I call "filler" built into the story. Filler, in a shell, is when the writers of a series or a movie do not have enough material to actually fill up the amount of time that it has, for some reason, been pre-determined that they must fill in order to complete a season or a film. Instead of actually making more story, they instead will just fill up all that time with useless crap that doesn't actually add anything to the story and is only there to ensure that we get to a certain number of episodes or in a film, get it to that 90-minute mark.
Pluribus hit the ground running in episodes 1 and 2. Everything that happened had meaning. The character development was important. Everyone that we were introduced to had a purpose and the minor characters didn't stay on screen for long. There was very little in the way of "side quests" and everything that happened was meaningful.
We liked the characters we met, we could kind of identify with Carol (Rhea Seehorn) and at points we were starting to get upset with her for being such a pain in the ass when the world is literally at her feet if she wants it but yet, she resists the services at almost every turn.
By the end of episode 4, which is entitled "Please Carol", we had reached a sort of very important point in the story where Carol attempts to thwart the "others" and it looks like she makes some level of progress and we, the audience are really looking forward to what can possibly happen next.
Then for the next 3 episodes basically nothing happens at all.
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it was a good plan, everything made sense, the writing and execution of said writing was spot on... seriously good TV
The next 3 episodes we see carol drive somewhat senselessly back and forth to Vegas and this eats up a ton of time. Then her police car finally breaks down and we see her upgrade to a Rolls Royce, and this takes 40 minutes to make this one thing happen and it is merely indicating that Carol is starting to accept that she can't change and should take advantage of the services that are being offered to her. Did we need to spend 40 minutes doing that? No we didn't.
Then in the last episode we are shown the guy in South America that we haven't been exposed a great deal to and they spend damn near the entire episode merely showing him going hiking for some reason and the entirety of damn near half an hour was all in vain.
I suppose if one thing good came out of all of this lovely looking, but useless aspect of the series that was drug out waaaaay too long was that I found out that the Darien Gap is a very real place between Colombia and Panama and it makes for some interesting reading about why those two countries have the political lines that they do. So thanks Vince, I appreciate learning stuff every now and then.
This has all been very disappointing to me because I have higher expectations of Vince Gilligan than I do your average show-runner. One of the main points of praise that I have for Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul is that both of those series could have been made significantly longer than they were. They could have milked the audience for years longer than they did but they didn't do so. They had a story, they told it, then they wrapped it up. Pluribus wasn't even halfway through with their first season before they started making most or all of the episodes just total time-wasters as we eventually reach what is bound to be a really big cliffhanger that I think is rather obvious at this point and how Carol and Manousos are going to meet up and develop a team framework for season 2.
Did we really need to spend 3, 40-minute episodes, establishing this?
At this point I still think this is one of the best shows of 2025 but this has a lot to do with the caliber of TV that this year has shown us, not because Pluribus is as awesome as I had originally hoped.
So tell me, dear viewers out there, what you think about the direction that this show has gone in? Do you feel like me and that they are senselessly dragging this one out, or am I just a numpty that doesn't appreciate true art when he sees it?
Both of these situations are admittedly possible.
