Pluribus Just Channeled The Most Unique Sci-Fi Story Of All Time
Let's talk about the other “Others.”
How would a massive, shared, alien consciousness communicate with humanity if it had no frame of reference for individual humans? In many science fiction stories, when faced with a vaguely telepathic alien species, the notion that human beings have secrets in their minds becomes of primary importance to the plot. Both 3 Body Problem and this year’s breakout Apple TV hit, Pluribus, tackle this notion from different angles, with the outright honesty of alien intelligence being both morally dubious and logistically jarring. Humanity might crave complete honesty in theory, but science fiction sometimes teaches us that total honesty isn’t always desirable, or even ethical.
But how does a strange hive mind like this even function? And, if we’re not part of that hive mind, how can a subjective, non-joined single human mind fully communicate with such a vast, different type of awareness? In the penultimate episode of Pluribus, “Charm Offensive,” the series seems to allude to the origin of the shared minds of the Others, and in doing so, intentionally or not, references one of the best sci-fi stories of all time: Solaris.
Mild spoilers for Pluribus Episode 8 ahead.
While looking through a telescope at the star Kepler-22, Carol (Rhea Seehorn) and Zosia (Karolina Wydra) chat about the origin of the message that led to the massive hive mind joining on Earth. The planet is Kepler-22b, which is a real exoplanet that was discovered in 2011, with a radius twice that of Earth, a detail which Zosia also echoes. She also says that the planet “may be one enormous ocean.”
Carol and Zosia’s relationship in Pluribus feels similar to the main emotional arc of Solaris.
This final detail also dovetails with current astronomical theory about Kepler-22b, but it also does something else. For certain science fiction fans, the idea of a massive ocean planet that also houses a shared intelligence is basically the premise of Solaris. That famous 1961 novel from Stanislaw Lem was later made into a 1972 film from Andrei Tarkovsky, and later, a 2002 version from Steven Soderbergh. (Lem more or less liked both film versions while he was alive.)
In Solaris, the titular ocean planet is almost entirely covered with a gelatin-like ocean, which, for years, scientists have been trying to figure out. In the book (and the film versions), a psychologist named Kris Kelvin comes to a space station orbiting Solaris, and promptly discovers that the shared intelligence of the planet has created simulated duplicates of humans, drawn from the memories of the crew. Specifically, Harey (Rheya in some translations), Kelvin’s old lover, who committed suicide before the novel began, reappears on the station as a kind of non-human copy of herself. (Trekkies will recall that Star Trek: The Motion Picture low-key ripped this idea off when Ilia, the former lover of Decker, reappears on the Enterprise after getting zapped earlier in the movie.)
The Star Trek version of the Solaris trope, Ilia, now echoed in Zosia in Pluribus.
Either way, this idea feels echoed in Pluribus insofar as Zosia is an attempt on the part of the Others to replace Carol’s deceased wife, Helen (Miriam Shor). In both Solaris and Pluribus, the main characters (Carol and Kelvin) are processing trauma, with the strange “help” of a shared alien hive mind that sort of doesn’t know how to help.
What’s interesting about the way Pluribus handles this is that, in a sense, all the “Others” are like the “Visitors” from Solaris, but literally, and in the case of Zosia, metaphorically. In Solaris, Kelvin and other members of the crew are driven mad by the simulacra of the visistors, knowing that these beings are not representative of the deceased people they’re meant to look like. In the case of most of the Others on Pluribus, all of the people are quite literally the same human bodies that once contained human personalities. Earlier in the series, Manousos (Carlos Manuel Vesga) has his own Solaris moment when confronted by one of the others who is in his mother’s body, knowing that in life she would have never been this nice to him.
By mentioning that the planet of origin is one big ocean, Pluribus — either on purpose or by accident — touches base with one of the greatest and most affecting science fiction stories of all time. Up until this point, it's been hard to visualize the original alien culture from which the Joining came.
But now, we have a little touchstone, a science fiction antecedent that helps to define some of the vagaries of Pluribus with just a touch of the tragic.
