Pluribus: Never...? Let the Dead Bury the Dead

...we Tossed our way into oblivion with the exciting new show Pluribus in this one.

Hello audient!

The new show Pluribus comes at us with all the niceties, trappings and plot pitfalls  to be found in our rot-attacked brains. While the first Season leaves many more questions than answers, leaving large holes in the logic and the story, it makes for a perfect Tossers episode; a real conceptual skeet-shooting playground.

Pluribus deals with an alien(?) hive mind that has taken over every person on Earth except for very few who had an "incompatible" genetic material. The fact that this hive speaks and behaves in an almost one-to-one parody on the "personality" of ChatGPT in our increasingly compartmentalized realities and interactions with one-another (like in Social Media) makes the connection to AI-related issues almost inescapable.

We'll mention here just one particularly interesting toss we cam across, concerning the 'body' (the 'animal' part of Aristotle's famous definition of the "Human" as 'a talking animal'). It juts out of the narrative like a sore thumb, like an unmourned loss: what does it mean for the main protagonist to "fall in love" with a body from the hive mind? How does a hive mind approach real issues of attachment, like pain and discord, as they arise through the "affair" with the protagonist? What is the role - within our attachments - of the body's memories, its unique history, when it is "pluribussed" like that?

This also connected to a recurring theme in the Tossers' arsenal, the ethical imperative we inherited from our Derrida(ddy), the one we express as "Never let the dead bury the dead." As the bodies of the entire world's population become an indistinct mass grave, a Frankenstein-monster-cum-Turing-machine, it becomes both overly relevant and no longer relevant: when the dead are recycled into food for the "hive-people" and yet you can fall in love with a person whose body is completely controlled by the "everyone" of the hive, including going and sleeping with another "survivor" (of the assimilation) while expressing love to our protagonist.

Confused? We hope so. But it is a rather productive confusion, we believe, in our day and age. Rather appropriately, all Stars made an appearance here in one way or another.

The rest will be told to our one, loyal (and virtual!) audient, and her flaming lips...