Author: @feldmez
Imagine a world where no one cries. No one screams. No one asks uncomfortable questions, wakes up at three in the morning with their heart racing, or feels that familiar weight in their chest. A world where sadness has been effectively removed, like a redundant feature in an outdated app. Sounds like a dream come true? Pluribus, with a gentle smile, tears that dream apart and shows that behind the facade of eternal contentment lies something far darker than tears.
In this reality, happiness stops being an emotion and becomes a systemic product. The new norm. The only socially acceptable version of a human being. People are calm, predictable, polite in their bliss. Their faces look as if someone has smoothed them from the inside, erasing every crease and sharp edge. The world pulses with pastel harmony, like a therapist’s office without a trace of despair. And then Carol appears.
Carol is a crack in the porcelain. An uncomfortable reminder that humans were not made to experience a single emotion on continuous mode. She is probably the unhappiest person on Earth, yet the only one who sees the cost of this polished perfection. This paradoxically makes her the strongest. She refuses to succumb to the “happiness epidemic,” unwilling to blend into the mass of identical smiles. By choice, she becomes an outsider. And from this position, she begins her quiet, solitary war to reclaim something very fragile: free will, genuine emotions, and the right to cracks.
The “perfect order” that Pluribus imposes on the planet is painfully beautiful. The series seduces with aesthetics: soft lighting, bright spaces, sterile calm of a world where everything is “okay.” In this velvet scenery, Carol looks like an algorithmic error: tired, ragged, belonging to nothing and no one. She reminds us that authenticity is not always photogenic, and true emotions often have an unappealing face.
Pluribus provokes a question we dislike facing: do we really want a world without suffering if the price is losing ourselves?
The series doesn’t rush headlong toward sci-fi fireworks. Instead, it unfolds like a philosophical thriller: slowly, oppressively, with growing unease. The nine episodes of the first season don’t serve quick, digestible answers. Instead, they stretch the moment of hesitation when we realize that what was meant to free us is starting to trap us.
The most interesting thing, however, is that Pluribus does not demonize happiness. It is tempting, understandable, even rational. But it also shows its other side: when it becomes an obligation, it ceases to be a gift. When everyone is supposed to be happy, no one truly is. Individuality disappears, choices vanish, unpredictability the thing systems hate but that fuels life fades away.
Carol is not fighting a grand revolution with poster-worthy slogans. She fights for something far more intimate: the right to complexity. To fragile sensitivity, to moments when the world overwhelms us, to not always “keeping it together.” Pluribus reminds us that sadness, doubt, and chaos are not manufacturing defects they are part of the human instruction manual.
This is not a “light” series. It’s not something you watch in the background. Pluribus is a cold, elegant, and merciless mirror. We all see ourselves reflected in it: our obsession with productivity, wellbeing, and a smoothed-over emotional image. The series does not moralize. It simply asks questions and remains silent long enough for us to answer them ourselves.
Because if happiness can be switched on like a light, maybe it’s worth turning the lamp off sometimes and seeing what remains in the dark.
Image courtesy of Apple TV
