Review: In 'Pluribus,' Vince Gilligan examines humanity's right to be unhappy

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Vince Gilligan, of “Breaking Bad” and “Better Call Saul,” has gone back to his roots, when he wrote for “The X-Files,” with a new sci-fi series, “Pluribus,” premiering Friday on Apple TV, continuing in its quest to be your home for fancy speculative fiction.Rhea Seehorn, who played Kim Wexler, Bob Odenkirk’s love interest, on six seasons of “Saul,” stars as Carol Sturka, a successful but unsatisfied author of historical romance fiction.She regards her work as “mindless crap,” but it has made her rich.

She’s in a personal and professional relationship with Helen (Miriam Shor), who is also her manager.They live on a cul-de-sac in Albuquerque, the city where “Breaking Bad” and “Saul” were set — but don’t expect a crossover.A signal from space is translated into an RNA sequence which is synthesized in a laboratory and, after getting out into the world, becomes the series’ central device, a virus-like whatever that infects the globe in a jiffy — except for Carol, a person constitutionally indisposed to its supposed benefits, and a remote dozen others.

Described as “a psychic glue capable of binding us all together,” the virus links the world into a hive mind, like “Star Trek’s” Borg, or the explicitly referenced pod people in “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” — the most frightening of all science-fiction/horror premises.That those infected are compulsively helpful and blandly cheerful, like cult members asking you to “a party,” is no less, if not more, disturbing.

(The “pluribus” of the title you will recognize from the phrase on the money, if you have spent any time looking at money — “e pluribus unum,” or “out of many one.” Get it?)There are ideas about the nature of happiness and an individual’s right to be discontented, but Gilligan doesn’t seem to be engaging in any targeted social commentary — t...