Or is that just the most exhausting and obnoxious thing possible?
that does sound exhausting and obnoxious but as someone who is watching it, it’s only anti-communist if you go into it thinking ‘communism is whenever everyone is a hivemind and has no free-will’ which very well be may Vince Gilligan’s take on it I guess but I think he’s just doing invasion of the body snatchers 2025
It has one weird anti-communist line and even that’s in a gray area because Carol is kind of a dumbass and has wrong opinions.
All US media is anti-communist garbage in a way
Star Wars is fascist, Harry Potter is fascist neo-feudal dreck, selfie-obsession is fascist, British soap-operas are fascist, sci-fi is generally fascist, ironic detachment is fascist, porn is fascist. Masscult under imperialism is inherently fascistic. Sorry to spoil your ‘fun’.
-Phil Greaves
trvth nvke
Also its 9 episodes of 45-60 minutes, do you really want to watch 6.75-9 hours of a show you dont think you will like just to say its bad?
My body is a machine that turns media into criticism.
There’s a single line from a character that is explicitly shown to not have great takes.
I like the show so far, and it doesn’t seem to be anticommunist any more than most US TV.
I say this as someone who stopped watching Stranger Things many years ago because it was anticommunist slop fare.
We’ll see how the first season shakes out, but I am having a lot of fun watching this show and I dont see anything that would make me write it off just yet.
To anyone reading this thread and having doubts, watch the show for yourself and be the judge. I don’t think you’ll have a bad time watching.
stopped watching Stranger Things many years ago because it was anticommunist slop fare.
same and I was really digging that show. also it should have just stuck to being about an entirely unknowable, alien, Lovecraftian Old One intelligence instead of the stupid hamfisted anti-collectivist BS they went with
as soon as the CIA black opts group shifted from utterly evil SCP type org to more benign “we won’t even have you killed and may call upon you later” i knew that show was fucking doomed
The show is a criticism of American chauvinism if anything. At least so far. The main character is a typical privileged upper class white American lib. She’s a cynic, and has all the bad American beliefs.
Like the Stalin line someone else mentioned read more like her ignorance and inability to imagine anything outside the propaganda she grew up with, than the show trying to be anti-communist.
I mean spoilers, but that Stalin line was delivered moments before we find she was responsible for like 10 million people dying… I think the show did that on purpose. Like Americans always saying everybody else is the evilest then going around committing the worst atrocities ever….
I’d say it’s a good watch, but I mean I don’t have expectation an American show is NOT gonna be lib shit. So let’s see.
If you think thats the thesis of the show you’re gonna be in for a rude awakening. The other survivors are either in denial or exploiting the situation (except for the radio guy).
You are not supposed to be convinced by Laxmi’s rant. Laxmi is wrong in a way that we have been shown repeatedly, she is as unpleasant as Carol is at her worst, and she is obviously a hypocrite who won’t consider Carol’s perspective because she is in total denial about the situation. If Carol is right her son is functionally dead, so Carol is wrong.Carol also “killed 10 million people” by being upset and telling one instance of the hivemind to fuck off, which caused them to get into accidents due to being unable to cope with the stress of that. That is extremely obviously not her fault, something the hivemind also highlights.
I don’t think that invalidates that the show is about American chauvinism and cynicism. And yes Laxmi is obviously delusional, I’m not sure what that has to do with anything.
Like just because no one left outside the collective isn’t dealing with it well or being a ML about it doesn’t mean it’s not criticizing how Americans see themselves and the world (and their place in it).
I think if we take Vince Gillian at his word, he doesn’t really write with themes or thesis like this. So it’s all an exercise in literary interpretation after all.
And yeah the collective says that Carrol shouldn’t worry about killing millions, but that happens right after she comments about Stalin. I don’t feel that’s accidental.
But again, we’ll see. Specially after this last episode, who tf knows where this is going.
I mean spoilers, but that Stalin line was delivered moments before we find she was responsible for like 10 million people dying… I think the show did that on purpose. Like Americans always saying everybody else is the evilest then going around committing the worst atrocities ever….
You got it a bit mixed up. She wakes up after the meeting with the survivors where she learns this piece of information, then goes to the Mauritanian guy and says the line. So she is conscious that she was the one that killed millions of people.
Didn’t she find out the exact number after the comment? Cause I remember finding out the number and being “damn you’re worse than even what your shitty propaganda says Stalin was”.
Maybe it gets brought up again later, but when Zosia doesn’t tell her the actual number she learns it later from Laxmi, 11 million, she internalizes it and freaks out, and wakes up the next day comparing herself to Stalin.
What does it have to do with communism? Its not a strong metaphor for a communist society as the entire social structure of the species is fundamentally altered where class distinctions are no longer relevant, instead of what one might imagine today as communist countries as those still working through the contradictions of transitioning to a socialist and then hopefully communist society.
Well I haven’t seen the show (hence my question) but my impression is that it’s prestige TV slop that relies on the audience’s understanding of the abstract Other as an ontological antithesis to the individual and freedom for its central conflict; that’s a contradiction that serves as the structure of almost all anticommunist narratives. Even if Vince Gilligan isn’t specifically trying to make an anticommunist piece of media, the only way it could avoid that trap is by actively steering into it and biting the bullet, making the hivemind the hero (but even this message would probably fly above the audience’s head because of how strong individualist culture is; much like how the anti-hegemonic masculinity message of Breaking Bad flew over the heads of its male audience).
It’s hard to get into it without spoilers so I’ll try to be unspoilery while giving the general of the first season so far:
spoiler
The main character is pretty glib and cynical. Even before the event that kicks off the series, she is shown to be a bummer. She struggles with enjoying things and seems to resent other people’s ability to enjoy things. It’s hard to say that the show frames her as being correct in her stubborn individuality. So far her only valid reason for being angry is that her girlfriend dies during the initial reboot of humanity as it causes her to fall down and hit her head. The hivemind hasn’t actually been shown to be directly evil or mischievous. However you can read an ulterior motive or something happening behind the scenes if you try. That is to say most of her stubbornness comes from her own pre-hivemind personal issues, or social issues that don’t have anything to do with the hivemind. She reveals that she had some adolescent trauma which causes distrust.
We simply don’t have enough information yet to suss out the motives of the hivemind. With all we have to go on right now, they seem nice and functional as a new society, albeit a little odd. I assume this is the writer playing with our expectations about alien invasions. He did write on X-Files after all. Vince probably wants us to think something bad is going to happen to put us in the same headspace as the main character. You can also argue that there are breadcrumbs to find out the hivemind is bad. The show lays out information very much in the same way BrBa/BCS did.
I will say that this show beats you over the head with how prestige it is. You get lingering shots that seem to exist more for cinematography composition nerds than any real narrative function in the show. The show is deliberately paced with little sprinkles of information in between long character moments. It’s more of a Better Call Saul character show than a Breaking Bad genre show. Apple TV lists it as “Drama, Sci-fi” so I don’t think this is going to be a sci-fi heavy show, or sci-fi horror/thriller.
Apple TV lists it as “Drama, Sci-fi” so I don’t think this is going to be a sci-fi heavy show, or sci-fi horror/thriller.
Good call. I’m intrigued by Carol as a character. I’m mildly curious about the alien invasion.
I think people are interpreting it that way because the plot line is so similar to invasion of the body snatchers which is more explicitly anti communist and came out during McCarthyism
the “what am I, Stalin?” line was crazy
If you enjoyed Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul, and/or high-concept sci-fi, just watch it. Since others have already put the Stalin line into context, I’ll add another plot point that clowns hard on Carol’s USian individualism:
Episode 3
Carol tries to goes grocery shopping in this episode, only to find her local Sprouts (bougie Whole Foods-style store) completely empty. So she calls up the plurbs to complain, to which they helpfully offer to bring her anything she needs. She then starts on a rant about how she’s “a very iNdEpEnDenT person” and doesn’t want anyone “waiting on her,” and asks if they can restock the grocery store “by Friday, I’m thinking?” Which is then immediately followed by dozens of plurbs showing up with trailers full of food, and working in unison to stock the grocery store so Carol can “be independent.”
It’s a very obvious commentary on the modern person’s concept of independence. It’s also fucking hilarious, as soon as she was talking about them stocking it “by Friday” I knew we were about to see a montage of Plurbs swarming and finishing that shit now.
When she
spoiler
Got specific instructions on how to bag her trash and despite having absolutely no other responsibilities in her life she still consciously chooses not to follow the instructions :::
it felt very much like interactions with average US Americans in my experience.
I loved this part so much hahaha
I popped in the first episode just for this post-
The show seems to be an elaborate Thought Experiment in the vein of a lot of classic sci-fi: How would the average upper/middle class American react to their society transforming from an individualist one to a collectivist one overnight?
The POV character in the show isn’t exactly the most flattering portrayal of the average upper-class American, I’ll say that much.
Yeah, the hivemind is an old redscare sci-fi trope but I don’t know, the vibes I’m getting are that ol’ Vince “Breaking Bad” Gilligan isn’t exactly going weigh in on the side of American exceptionalism, but I could be wrong I only watched 1 episode.
Edit: I thought about it some more- If the hivemind is actually supposed to be villainous, there’s a queer reading where the hivemind could represent hetero-normative society attempting to stamp out what makes the main character (who is a lesbian) “different”. But I’d need to see more of the show to see how exactly it handles queer identity beyond what was introduced in the first episode.
Double edit: Ok made it thru episode 2 and the entire scene set on Air Force One of a white person belligerently “explaining” to a room of coloured people that they have to save the world, only to engender the response of “Wait what why? The world doesn’t need saving from this” is waaaaaaaaaay too on-the-nose that there really isn’t any further room for discussion here.
Also, pre- and post-hivemind, the show has been deliberate in highlighting Carol’s flaws, isolation, and poor decision making, specifically her being a functional alcoholic. In some regards, the hivemind is correct; Carol does need fixing. So I would think the Stalin namedrop right before she accidentally kills millions of people fits into the “bumbling empire” trope of a typical lib in the imperial core.
Plus, the anti-communist message is blunted slightly by Carol’s attempts to build solidarity (on the surface) with the other individuals but being completely ill equipped to do so, specifically because she’s an American chauvinist. So she orients her position out of her own personal gripes rather than providing a benefit for the others to rally around. She even begins by asking the hivemind, “how many of them speak English?” lol. I mean, c’mon! If you really think the world is at stake, put in a little effort!
can you expand more on your Double edit? without seeing the show I’m having trouble discerning which way you’re going
I don’t think the show is anti-communist.
I don’t think the show is explicitly pro-communist either, but it’s very very critical of American Exceptionalism. The entire point of the scene I described is to show how absurd the main character is for trying to do what she’s doing- she just immediately thinks that her way of seeing things is correct, without considering that other people might have other points of view and see the situation differently. (And the dramatic irony is that even the bloody hivemind gets that.)
And sure there’s a line about “being the worst mass murderer since Stalin”, but that line is coming out of the mouth of our American brain-wormed white-splaining main character, who is err… not portrayed as an authority on anything, really. Rather the opposite, like she’s Harry DuBois levels of complete fuck-up.
My interpretation of the show so far is that it is a character piece about how the average American would react to their society changing drastically (whether the societal change depicted in the show is an allegory for communism or A.I. singularity stuff that other commenters pointed out in this thread is kinda left to the viewer’s interpretation). It’s an examination of exactly how many of their fears of change are legitimate issues of identity and consent/rights, and how many are knee-jerk reactionary fears born from a lifetime of capitalist and American propaganda.
The show is not exactly kind to the average American, in my opinion.
thanks. I like his past work enough to at least give this a shot
Yeah, Breaking Bad is probably my favourite American tv serial too, tho maybe it’s a toss-up with True Detective S1.
Altho to be fair my friends have yelled at me for not having seen the Wire, dunno if I’ll ever get round to that lol
I felt ashamed at causing Discourse the way I did (no investigation no right to speak) so I watched up to the last episode. I think it’s fine, it’s worth viewing. It does a decent job of making the question of joining the plurbs actually hard to decide. There isn’t really an obvious political allegory, and while I think the show might be commenting on AI as some people in this thread have said, I think there’s a lot of other clear symbols and allusions to other themes that I don’t think it’s just a commentary on LLMs. The commentary on American Chauvinism, similarly, is definitely there but it’s not the meat of the show. The meat is the thought experiment and the character drama.
I mean, the protagonist seems pretty obviously in the wrong, she’s not a good person and most all of the other non-integrated people have no problem with it. The hivemind is genuinely not dystopian, at least yet.
The Stalin line is a little anti-communist though, but just the normal amount, not a part of the core theme.
No. She is. What are we doing here? While Carol is a complex character with multiple flaws, the argument we see presented by the other survivors are either facile (“I sure do like having a harem!”), or based on information we know to be untrue (“Each instance of the hivemind remains an independent individual”). She gets dinged for not even having asked the hivemind what it’s like, but she’s pretty obviously not a villain protagonist.
The hivemind is genuinely not dystopian
It killed near a billion people to assert itself, it refuses to give people choice in their assimilation and it cannot handle the idea of something not going to the plan to the point of shutting down.
Not to mention think of how viscerally disgusted most of us would be at the prospect of AI bringing our loved one’s likeness to life in visual form with the imitation of personality etc. Now think about it in the flesh. Oh laxmi may seem fine with it now but days go by and her son not doing things out of lock step with her whims will get to her and she will move out of the denial stage. This is a mindfuck that no one really is ready for when reality starts to hit because everyone you know is pretty much gone
“I sure do like having a harem!”
Pluribussy. (somebody had to say it)
Such a Carol response.
She’s so unlikeable but at the same time relatable, I’m really rooting for her but I also find myself saying “Oh Carol, not this again” every couple of scenes.
Each instance of the hivemind remains an independent individual
Did the show actually conclusively prove this is wrong? I took the interaction with the kid to be a failure to prove anything, like sure the kid wouldn’t normally know that stuff but reading a book and gaining knowledge from it doesn’t de-individuate me. From the information presented, unless I’m missing something, it is feasible that people could still be individuals who are glad to participate in the hive mind.
Nah she’s acting how a lot of people would act tbh. Almost a billion had to be killed for the hivemind to get to this. That is catastrophic anyway you look at it. The hint at the end of the last episode could be organic material recycled for efficiency. Maybe human corpses too which would be hilarious especially with the wolves digging her fiance out maybe being a hint. That would horrify anyone and we all know those near billions gotta go somewhere. What happened to your grandpa Laxmi?
It’s not like those people were killed intentionally, they had to speed it up because the military discovered them. And presumably if they didn’t speed it up, and the military did their thing, many more people would die. It’s true human corpses were hinted at, but surely there’s plenty of other things that could be shocking to Carol? The hivemind isn’t really exactly comparable to communism, but revolutions often require large amounts of bloodshed, because the right-wing military is going to slaughter you otherwise.
The hivemind explained their whole attitude to death, and honestly it’s pretty logical. They won’t kill or harm any humans or animals, but if it’s already dead there isn’t any real need to respect it. That’s why they’ll cook already dead animals for the living people, but won’t slaughter them. It’s not like the dead person would care what happens with their body, they’re dead. It seems like a pretty ethical and morally consistent position to me.
I’d rather not be sharing my mind with Netanyahu or anyone else. Hiveminds in human context are dystopian.
They’re also
spoiler
Making people eat Corpse Starch
spoiler
Oooh is that what it is
spoiler for the last scene of the latest episode
I think she found frozen corpses in the freezer last episode and they’re just liquefying them. Would explain the neutral PH too, as human bodies average on neutral with a slight tendency towards sour.
spoiler
Thanks
I watched the ep where she went to the milk factory, and I remember she walked into a coolroom or something but I thought it left on a cliffhanger (you could see her reaction but couldn’t see what she was looking at). It being corpses in a freezer makes sense.
(I probably wasn’t paying sufficient attention tho…(
spoiler
You did pay attention to it, that’s what happened. I’m theorizing the human body thing bc of all the chemical experiments she made after They were gone from the city
spoiler
Okay cool. I thought her experiments were perfunctory and that was kind of the point? Like testing the ph with ph strips and smelling it, just observing colour. She’s not a scientist but she did what she could, but that’s not enough to say that the liquid definitively resembled, say, plasma.
I don’t doubt that soylent green is people but yeah I’m glad to be reassured that I didn’t miss anything obvious like actual corpses in the freezer.
Thanks for explaining :)
spoiler
You’re welcome
It could just be perfunctory though, I’m just assuming that there is a connection that she just wouldn’t see as a non-scientist. Let’s see if I’m right, next episode is sure to come.
The fact that it was one line made it seem like a studio note, not Gilligan’s one opportunity to shit on communism.
What the hell is a Pluribus?
It’s when you have more than one bus.
SPOILERS
Oh my god if you put multiple buses together they become a train. My eyes have been opened.
Nothing, what’s plurbing with you?
That one thing from Rick and Morty that was funny for a week or so.
“I’m Pluribus Riiick”
who want their pluribussy ate
Don’t sexualize the pluribus.
Show on apple TV where main character is normal and everyone on planet seems to be happy hive mind trying to make main character “happy”. I only saw trailer.
What I’m getting from it so far is mostly “AI bad.” One could argue that AI is a proxy for collectivism in the twisted mind of a liberal, but I don’t know.
I feel like the show could easily veer in another direction to make a larger point. Or not.
It’s perfectly watchable slop either way
I’m curious how the concept of a hivemind that literally takes over all the world except for one person is a reference to AI more than it is a reference for some ideology or political system.
Feels like having the entirety of the world’s human knowledge and experience available to the hivemind should have given it better strategies and understanding of how to handle a single person who has just gone through some pretty traumatic events.
spoiler
Hell, the hivemind has the memories of Carol’s partner and its programming is so locked in to “multiply” and “make happy” that the best it can think of is “hey, remember that time you ate some good food with your dead girlfriend? We made you some of those pancakes! Aren’t you happy now?”
They beat you over the head with the metaphor multiple times in the show. The main character has conversations with the hivemind ripped straight from AI chatbot logs.
minor spoiler
At one point she jokingly asks them for a grenade and they give it to her, not understanding the subtext/danger.
No they understand the danger fully. That is also why they hesitate with giving her a nuclear bomb, but state that if it makes her happy they would still do it. They are fully cognisant, they both know facts and can put those facts in context. We see that they are, for instance, fully capable of understanding the emotional importance of the hats.
I don’t feel like you can spoil much since literally nothing that has any actual relevance to the narrative has happened since episode 1.
spoiler
Except maybe the introduction of the paraguyan guy, the milk, and possibly maybe the introduction of the pirate lady or whatever her name is in episode like 2.
I haven’t seen pluribus, but tangentially I used to have the same assumption of the Borg, from Star Trek. But to be honest, I don’t even think that the Borg are intended to be an anti communist allegory, despite being a hive mind. Ultimately, the hive mind’s entire purpose is to fulfill the whims of the Borg Queen. In summary my point is that it’s totally possible to write a hive mind, and to use it to even criticize monarchies, or any other ideology for that matter.
Not sure sure what the Borg were intended as originally, but adding the Queen was a huge failure of imagination. They had to reduce a cosmic hivemind into having a singular human ruler, so they could do human things at it and it would make human mistakes.
The Pluribus collective having hardcoded ethical imperatives like “no killing” is already more interesting than the Borg Queen… though the viewpoint character is really dragging things out and the Pluribus’ forced incompetence at interaction with her is a bit odd.
the Borg could be seen through a more Marxist lens.
the Federation is already nominally mature socialist but has not actually reached communism yet and the Borg could be seen as a failed path to “stateless, moneyless, classless” society. basically a species that decided to try a short cut (let’s just all jack in and become a Society of One) instead of building communism on more natural terms.
something like the Culture (Ian Banks) could be seen as what a truly communist Federation could become while still maintaining and protecting individual sapience. everyone’s still jacked in but it’s voluntary and entirely one directional. the neural lace (standard cybernetic augmentation everyone of biological origin has) is more about gaining totally authority over your own body and having built in communicator as well as putting humanoids on par with fellow sapient AI comrades
(also the Queen did fuck this up badly i really hate that they went there. at most the Queen should just be a sort of hallucination of the greater Hive Mind or like a dream character created to interact easier with species difficult to assimilate)
i like it, there’s obviously a individualist vs collectivist aspect but it doesn’t harp on irl politics too much there’s a single throwaway line about Stalin but there’s a lot worse and more in other (subjectively)good shows, it doesn’t force to viewer into thinking the hive is inherently bad(imo the hive is just a sci-fi gestalt mind not an allegory for communism like so many other hive minds in fiction, people have been commenting its like AI which Bince as said its explicitly not and it was written about a decade ago, but I see where people are getting that from), its a well made enjoyable show imo watch one ep and see what you guys think
I hated and everyone who liked it should be ashamed of themselves
I like you and am ashamed of everyone who hated the show
The vast majority of scenes, details, plot points, “stuff” (both the stuff it points to >>>this is important<<< and the more subtle stuff) just do not strike me is fitting into the theory that this is trying to make some anticommunist point.
This is a concept show, everything must be assumed to be there for a reason. If a theory about what the message is here doesn’t explain most of the scenes, it’s probably wrong.
