Apple TV’s Pluribus Offers a Compelling, if Tired, Plot, With Dubious Science

Pluribus, Apple TV+’s sci fi series that just concluded its first season, is a clever take on the alien invasion theme, from Vince Gilligan of Better Call Saul fame. I enjoyed it, but wish the writers had consulted a scientist or two in creating the backdrop of genetics and cell and molecular biology.

The series honors Isaac Asimov’s science fiction law of “change only one thing.” An alien RNA virus infects people, robbing them of their individuality and their humanity as a “hive mind” forms across the planet, with the exception of thirteen individuals. But the writers demonize RNA (don’t we have enough of that?) while conflating egg cells with stem cells.

Does accuracy really matter for plausibility in a sci-fi plot? I suspect I’m in the minority when I say yes, it does.

When I attended a workshop for scientists at the American Film Institute years ago, we learned right away that “the science doesn’t matter” by analyzing 2004’s hugely successful The Day After Tomorrow. The narrative, technical details, and logic are ridiculous, yet the film is exciting.

A New Take on an Old Theme

I’ve long loved depictions of aliens come to Earth, from the 1953 film Invaders from Mars through Apple TV’s 2021 series Invasion.

Pluribus debuted on November 7, 2025. The pandemic was far enough behind us to revisit the plot of a world where an infectious entity turns humans into automatons, functioning like social insects, all cooperating for a common goal.

Any alien invasion story has a culprit, from the bacteria behind War of the_Worlds to the body-doubling spores nestled in the giant seed pods of Invasion of the Body Snatchers.  

The enemy in Pluribus is an RNA virus. A virus isn’t a cell, isn’t alive, but is an “infectious particle” consisting of a nucleic acid (DNA or RNA) inside a coating of proteins and sugars.

Like the robot on Lost in Space rotating in panic shouting “Danger! Danger!,” Pluribus sows fear of RNA, perhaps the most important biomolecule. With its ability to replicate, change, and encode protein, RNA in its various guises was likely behind the origin of life on Earth (see A Pop Quiz in Biology for RFK Jr).

At the American Film Institute workshop, we practiced writing log lines to capture a plot in a sentence. For Pluribus, it might be:

“A radio signal from space provides instructions to manufacture an RNA virus that turns humanity into a hive mind.”

The word Pluribus means “from many,” a “1” cleverly substituted for the “i” in the logo. It symbolizes most of humanity coalescing into a vacuous, smiling sameness.

RNA From Space

As episode one opens, white-coated nerds are scrutinizing a mysterious extraterrestrial radio signal that, somehow, encodes a sequence of RNA building blocks adenine (A), uracil (U), cytosine (C), and guanine (G). Might they be the genetic instructions for an RNA virus?

Experiments ensue, the viral RNA sequence synthesized in the lab and injected into rats. When one infected rodent appears to drop dead, two nerds examine it, and when one gently prods it, the animal jumps back to life. And then, like the scene in Contagion in which Gwyneth Paltrow’s barf spews viruses everywhere, a pandemic takes off.

Everywhere, as planes spread the virus, people convulse, pass out, and soon reawaken, accepting and complacent of the epic Joining. Their faces are free of signs of emotion, except for the 886 million or so who instantly die. The Joined are reminiscent of the scene in Invasion of the Body Snatchers when a slumbering, pod-encased Becky awakens and says in a devastating monotone, “I fell asleep, Miles.”

The members of the emerging hive mind lack individuality, empathy, and passion, seemingly satisfied with their existence – except for the resistant thirteen, among them protagonist Carol Sturka, played by the excellent Rhea Seehorn.

The Invasion Begins

Carol lives in a beautiful home on a cul-de-sac in Alburquerque, which she can afford thanks to the legions of fans who devour her fantasy-romance novels. When the alien virus infects and she is apparently immune, she morphs quickly into investigator mode.

As episode 1 opens, Carol loses her partner Helen in a car accident minutes before all the people in the world, except for the dozen in addition to Carol, suddenly collapse. Most awaken moments later, eerily complacent.

Carol, grief-stricken, staggers home where she discovers what is happening by tuning into her big TV screen. On it, addressing her by her first name, is an authoritative figure whom I recognized instantly as Peter Bergman, who plays patriarch Jack Abbott on the soap opera The Young and the Restless, and was once Dr. Cliff Warner on All My Children. He fills Carol in on events, including the existence of others like her. She must contact them, to resist.

But as Carol soon discovers, resistance is futile. It’s tough being one of the few sentient human beings in the world of Pluribus, although she merely needs to wish for something, and the hive sends it, by drone. Even an atom bomb (huh?). So she channels her grief and anger into investigation, listing traits of the converted on a chalkboard. Most important:They can’t lie.

The ensuing episodes revolve around Carol’s attempts to find the other escapees and to figure out how to reverse The Joining. What makes them immune? Helpfully, each episode opens with a digital clock tracking the spread of the virus and occasionally backtracking to the past, like the critical frozen egg scene of Episode 3.

Journeys

Seven years before the invasion, Carol and her partner visited an “ice hotel,” where the northern lights hovered. The couple stored Carol’s eggs in the deep freeze, presumably to be awoken for a future fertilization event.

Back in the present, people are disappearing. Where are they going?

In one episode, perhaps my favorite, Carol investigates a warehouse in her abandoned city, where she finds stored body parts of freeze-dried people. Is this what’s turned into the liquid that the hive mind drinks out of cartons, like milk, as in Soylent Green?

Much of the action, like in The Day After Tomorrow and all the Invasion clones, follows a few individuals seeking each other out, traversing destroyed cities on foot amid extinction-level disasters in record time. In Tomorrow, the Great Schlep takes the protagonists down the east coast of the US. In Pluribus, the trek is north from South America. Manousos, a man from Paraguay, ventures north to find Carol, even crossing the Darién Gap. 

The most talked-about scene, in the final episode, follows one of the virally-spared, a teenage girl in rural Peru, Kusimayu. As it starts, the teen lovingly cradles an adorable baby goat who stares up at her with devotion. Suddenly, she puts the animal down and walks slowly, in a trance, over to her blank-countenanced neighbors. They encircle her as she lies down, jerks a bit, then goes still. She awakens, much like the aforementioned Becky whose body was snatched by a seed pod, with a blank countenance. In the final scene, Kusimayu walks away, zombie-like, past the sad baby goat, a look of heartbreaking abandonment on its furry face. To anyone familiar with the Borg identity of Star Trek fame, she has clearly been assimilated into the hive mind, resistance now futile.

Of Eggs and Stem Cells

Remember episode 3’s frozen eggs? They’re apparently now needed as a source of  stem cells.

WHY? We aren’t told, other than providing a hook for a second season. Meanwhile, the biology makes no sense.

First, eggs are haploid – that means they have one set of chromosomes, one copy of each of the 23 types in a human cell. Stem cells are diploid – they have two copies of each chromosome. Doubling the genome of a haploid egg to make a stem cell would pair up recessive mutations, likely dooming development. Eggs won’t jumpstart development without a sperm. That’s meiosis. Biology 101.

Second, there are far easier ways to sample Carol’s stem cells, to supposedly save humanity, than scooping out her eggs in a frozen cave.

Why not simply collect the rare hematopoietic stem cells that we all have in our blood, emissaries from the bone marrow, and expand them in culture? But that won’t work, because the alien virus will not take part of a human’s body, although there are those weird warehouses full of legs and heads and powdered people. Reddit has some good threads on these points; I admit I couldn’t quite figure out the logic of the stem cells.

A third strategy? Make induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells from any of Carol’s somatic (body) cells. Pluck a fibroblast from a bit of skin, culture it to expand the number of cells, and inject the four proteins (Oct4, Sox2, Klf4, and c-Myc) discovered in 2006 that can reprogram pretty much any specialized cell into iPS cells. Shina Yamanaka pioneered the technology in 2006, receiving the Nobel Prize in 2012.

The so-called Yamanaka factors could be sent into an egg, reprogramming it, but why bother? Skin is a lot easier to sample.

Yet another anti-egg argument is that these are the most naked of cells, in terms of epigenetic markers. These modifications to DNA “imprint” recent experiences through the language not of DNA base sequences, but of expression, or suppression, of the genes that DNA encodes.

Epigenetic markers are small molecules – acetyls, methyls, and phosphates – that attach to the histone proteins that DNA wraps around. The markers control which genes are expressed and which are silenced under specific circumstances.  Therefore, they reflect what’s going on in the environment during an organism’s lifetime – such as being infected by an RNA virus from outer space.

Isn’t an epigenetic signature more important to know, in the face of an invasion of an alien RNA virus, than the inherited DNA sequence? A skin fibroblast may be more telling than an egg, frozen or otherwise.

I eagerly await season 2. In the meantime, I hope the writers will consult a few scientists when brainstorming how to continue the saga. I’m available.

(Image courtesy of Apple TV on Wikimedia Commons https://www.apple.com/tv-pr/originals/pluribus/trailers-videos/)