From “Sinners” to “Pluribus,” 2025 was the year of the hive mind

For a few exuberant days, Carol Sturka (Rhea Seehorn), the despondent heroine of “Pluribus,” almost convinces herself to be happy at the end of the world. That wouldn’t be much of a challenge for most people in her position, since Carol’s apocalypse is curated to please her. As one of a dozen people worldwide immune to a phenomenon called the Joining, which unified billions of people into a blissed-out hive mind, Carol’s well-being becomes everyone else’s mission.

It takes her a while to get used to that. First, she had to stop fighting the Others, the term for the billions united in groupthink, and accept if not entirely trust that the collective love they profess to have for her is real. That required modulating her anger and recognizing she prefers the company of her designated companion, Zosia (Karolina Wydra), to sullen loneliness.

In the season finale, “La Chica o El Mundo,” Zosia and Carol flit between paradises before landing in a pristine ski resort, where the once-steadfast misanthrope momentarily believes she and the Others can coexist on mutually agreed-on terms. That’s when Zosia reveals Carol’s days of free-wheeling free will soon will be over. Although Carol was under the impression that she had to give the Others consent to harvest the stem cells that they need to concoct an assimilating formula, the genetic material from the eggs she froze before the Joining, which they’ve obtained, is sufficient.

Like any other hive mind, the Others have a biological imperative to assimilate the immune, whether the immune wants to be integrated or not. They view this as a gesture of salvation, not violation. Who wouldn’t want to live out the rest of their days in a state they insist is beyond anything Carol or others like her can presently imagine? Don’t we all just want to make life great again, for however long that lasts?

The hive mind is one of genre fiction’s most reliably unsettling tropes, embodying our native fear of being overwhelmed by a force organized around a singular purpose. That purpose could be the urge to compel people to surrender their individuality to a pooled consciousness, portrayed with frightening, infuriating effectiveness in this show and “Sinners.” It could be physical annihilation by way of a networked swarm, demonstrated by the “Alien” xenomorph’s drive to kill and procreate, answering only to a queen. “Alien: Earth” ends its first season with a teenage girl in a synthetic body, Wendy (Sydney Chandler), functioning as the monster’s command system, which is both exciting and a more terrifying idea than anything Ellen Ripley confronted.

Or, as in “Stranger Things” and “Weapons,” the gestalt entity may be ruled by one being devoted to conquest and control.

The final episodes of “Stranger Things” are a psychological slugfest between Vecna (Jamie Campbell Bower), the villain who rules the Upside Down, and some of the kids he tried to bend to his control, starting with Will Byers (Noah Schnapp). Regardless of Will’s newfound and limited power to control Vecna’s monsters, one has the impression that this only slightly rebalances the scales.

In 2025, all these frights felt apt.

Vince Gilligan chewed over the concept behind “Pluribus” for most of a decade, nullifying any theories that the show is commenting on our culture’s lurch into blind obedience to authoritarianism.

That was in motion well before 2015, when Donald Trump descended that golden escalator to announce his first presidential bid. But if Gilligan’s story and others are in conversation with the censorship and whitewashing tides that caught 2025 in its undertow, that can’t be helped.

Our hive mind fears constantly recycle into relevant warnings about whatever conformist, politically driven movements define a given age. Look at the many cinematic versions of “Invasion of the Body Snatchers”: The 1956 film is a McCarthyism allegory, steeped in the paranoia of the enemy hiding in plain view. The 1978 version resonated with our growing distrust of the government, following Watergate and the Vietnam War. The late Roger Ebert viewed a 1993 take as a metaphor for the ravages of the AIDS epidemic. On it goes.

That story and all the thematic clones emerging in its wake center contradictory thought as heroic and easily imperiled because it muddies a convenient, consolidated prescription of how the world should work. If everyone just got on board with one program — except for those who aren’t desired — all our problems would be solved.

This was Remmick’s (Jack O’Connell) argument in “Sinners.” Ryan Coogler’s lead vampire doesn’t merely turn his prey into blood-drinking monsters. Remmick compels them to align with his desire to claim the culturally specific magic of the community’s griot, Preacher Boy (Miles Caton), as his own.

Thus, Coogler’s vampire story doubles as a parable about cultural appropriation and assimilation, one among many readings he incorporates into the movie. Whether current politics inspired that thread doesn’t matter; those ideas are baked into the clay of American history, making the broader lessons of “Sinners” timeless.

Trumpism has long been described as a cult. Between 2015 and 2024, this simplified our understanding of the stakes. People join cults seeking solutions to what’s going wrong in their lives; if you’ve tried everything else, why not follow someone’s lead?

But the hive mind’s horror differs in that there is no choice. Whether we fight or submit straightaway, once we’re engulfed and pesky tensions like personal freedom or opinion are no longer available to us, many find it easier to float along instead of struggling. Is this who we are now?

Perhaps that anxiety is why the hive mind conceit dominated these last 12 months, whether in our thoughts, on TV or at the movies. If you are worried that the odds of besting a system so ridiculously rigged are impossible, yet refuse to accept that nothing can be done, these stories may have spoken to you.

What they’re saying about our future isn’t necessarily optimistic. Abandoning a cult is relatively easy compared to unplugging from a hive; although deprogramming can be an arduous process, a hive mind hollows out everything but our skins. Maybe not in “Star Trek,” where survivors of its all-absorbing Borg collective include a Starship captain and a commanding officer. But here on Earth, Carol’s mission to reverse the Joining in “Pluribus” doesn’t consider whether anybody can return to who they once were.

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But perhaps that was a foregone conclusion. In nearly every tale that involves a subjugating force, the individual bucking the system may win the day but lose the war. That’s possible even in “Pluribus,” where the hive mind seems benevolent, acting from a shared belief in doing the least harm to the planet, including to plant life.

There’s always a catch. The Others’ ethos dooms humanity to a mass die-off within a decade. Nothing Carol can say or do can convince them of their folly, especially the pillar of their philosophy that justifies ingesting ethically sourced human-derived protein. Once she’s like them, they assure her, she’ll understand.

That assumes they survive her resistance. “La Chica o El Mundo” closes with Carol splitting off from Zosia and joining her prickly, unexpected houseguest, Manousos Oviedo (Carlos-Manuel Vesga), who traveled to Albuquerque, New Mexico, from Paraguay to join her crusade to save the world.

Carol’s idea of love tricked her into thinking that it couldn’t or shouldn’t be done. Knowing she’ll lose the ability to pick a side cast her back into the fight, and with an atom bomb that the hive mind, by its endlessly giving nature, had to provide. They may have collectively tumbled into the secret of life’s meaning, but they won’t drag her into that ocean without the battle going nuclear.

“Pluribus” is streaming on Apple TV. “Stranger Things” is streaming on Netflix. “Alien: Earth” is streaming on Hulu. “Sinners” and “Weapons” are streaming on HBO Max.

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