Pluribus

Still don't really know where it's going, and it's clearly not expecting us to treat the minutia of the rules ultra-seriously (like how/why exactly they can't even pick apples, etc), but I'll say one thing about this show and how slow and contemplative it is: it does make you think about very interesting things and very weird feelings. Like, thoughts and emotions that are strange and ambiguous and hard to describe, while certain scenes are happening.

I like how it doesn't necessarily feel like "commenting" or coloring a particular scene as good or bad, happy or sinister. There is some coloring obviously, but it feels like it's purposefully trying to avoid it to let you kinda sit on it. There's something hard to describe with the relief and joy that Carol feels when waking up sleeping in the middle of all those people, despite the strangeness of the situation. There's something sweet and also disgusting about the diner being reconstructed, and as Carol points the manipulative nature of it, the dubious consent of taking previously individuals and using them as actors like that, the disregard for who they are, who they were. But also, if you no longer are those individuals at all, then why would you feel a sense of shame, why would feel like respecting a kind of dignity to them?

It's not for everyone but whether or not this is going somewhere satisfying or not, regardless what the ideological angle is going to be, I do like how it's filmed, I do like how it makes me sit with these strange scenarios. Normalizing a bizarre reality of non-individuality to create a contrast with our own, to be able to point to mundane human things and say "Isn't that peculiar? Isn't it interesting?".

Like how describing a native word or concept to someone else in a different language, it forces you to conceptualize it from a vantage point of "Other". You can better define yourself when you interact with someone else, and this feels like exploring 'What actually do we mean when we say "Humanity", or "Individual", or Me' with that method.