This is a review of the first season of Pluribus, but I'm going to do it by talking about lots of things that aren't Pluribus, including and especially Doctor Who.
Back in 2005, when the revival started, I liked it, a lot. But I didn't like it as much as the original series. I thought that Christopher Eccleston was an excellent Doctor, that Billie Piper matched him as his companion Rose, and that the scripts were effective, and the directions and effects were well done. But there was still something I missed about the original series that was preventing me from fully committing to the new one.
What is it, a friend asked. What is it about the old Doctor Who that you're missing in the new one? The new one's great!
It is, I agreed. But it lacks the gothic feel of the original series, and I miss that.
That was my assessment on the revival's pilot episode Rose, and also for the second episode, The End of the World. When I said the same thing about The Unquiet Dead, which featured gaslight ghosts and Charles Dickens in late 19th century London, my friend said (paraphrased) Great Googalamoogaly, James! We went to the frickin' Victoria Era! How much more gothic do you want?!!?
I did say it was paraphrased.
But that was the point I realized we were talking past each other. Yes, the word "gothic" describes an architecture. It describes an aesthetic. Gothic horror and Victorian settings often (but not always) go hand in hand, and the original Doctor Who series married the two quite often. But gothic describes more than just arched doorways, darkened passages and stained glass windows.
Gothic horror, in my opinion, works on the premise that those things which are unseen are scarier than those things which are seen -- a lovely premise for filmmakers on a budget. Consider the classic 1963 movie The Haunting, where terror is imbued from the beginning through eerie camera angles, optical illusions of faces in the wainscotting, and somebody banging a cane against a wall somewhere. I always thought it was a telling irony that Hollywood completely forgot that sentiment when they remade The Haunting as an effects-heavy, hide-nothing horror in 1999, the same year that The Blair Witch Project recaptured the original movie's sensibilities, got called a visionary, and launched a genre of found-footage copycats.
Gothic horror lets you know, from the beginning, that Something Is Wrong. Then it holds its tension as it takes its sweet time telling the story, before the final, slow release. Doctor Who's best gothic episodes worked on this principle. The thing is, though: it doesn't just apply to horror.
Consider Doctor Who's The Time Meddler, which I would call an example of gothic comedy. Early on, it establishes that Something is Weird when the TARDIS lands at the base of some cliffs in 1066 England, and is seen by a mysterious monk from the clifftops, who doesn't look panicked or flabbergasted, only thoughtful. The story is mostly played for laughs as we slowly go through three 22-minute-long episodes until the reveal of the Monk's TARDIS.
Note that this was the first time that the viewers of the time (1966), had seen a TARDIS owned by anybody other than the Doctor, so consider the impact of this revelation to those viewers after three episodes of wondering, back then.
Establish the tension. Hold the tension for parts two and three. Release it in part four. Doctor Who played that card for a lot of its original run -- though, if I'm honest with myself, it was starting to shake up that approach by the time Colin Baker and then Sylvester McCoy took over the lead role.
So, that was my real issue with the first few episodes of the revived Doctor Who. Back in 1989, the program told a ninety-minute-long story broken out over four episodes. In 2005, it told that same story over a single forty-five-minute-long episode.
Then we got to Dalek, and I stopped complaining. I'd gotten used to the new pace of storytelling, and I just went with it. But I think this change of approach is one of the best examples of the genius of Russell T. Davies as he launched the series' revival. Could the new Doctor Who series have survived in 2005 if it told its stories at the same pace as the stories told back in 1989? I don't think so.
Davies understood that sixteen years had passed between the end of the original series and the launch of its revival, and a whole new generation had grown up. What had happened in the meantime? We had shows like Babylon 5, The X-Files, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The pace of storytelling picks up. The scripts get snappier. There's less time to breathe. During this period, we also have The West Wing, which was parodied for the way its characters held breathless, banter-y conversations while walking briskly through the corridors of power. Doctor Who had plenty of corridors before, but The West Wing walked them a lot faster.
In this day and age, you look around at the media, and everything is just so fast. Star Trek series used to have twenty-five episodes a season to build their characters and storylines; now we're lucky if they have ten. The Marvel movies are sped along, not just by action scenes, but the pace of the conversations the characters have. There's more repartee. There's more jokes.
And, consider this: as psychedelic as movies like 2001 or Phase Four were in the 1970s, would you be able to make the movie Everything, Everywhere, All at Once in 1975? Would the people of 1975 understand it?
I'm sure there are people who want to blame social media for this, but I'm not so sure. I think the micromovies of YouTube and the reels of Facebook are a symptom rather than a cause. Doctor Who was starting to pick up its pace in the late 1980s. The changes of storytelling in the 1990s were done before social media or even online video was a thing.
But the big question I have is, can gothic storytelling succeed in this day and age. Can audiences tolerate a story that establishes tension early, then holds it, and holds it, before that final release? Marvel's Wandavision is well regarded, except that people were complaining by episode two about how slow the story was. Nothing's happening, they exclaimed, until the big reveal at the end of episode three, and the astounding shift in the characterization at the end of episode four. For those who complained, think of how much more impact those cliffhangers had in episodes three and four, thanks to the drawn-out storytelling of episodes one and two. But will Marvel try something like this again? I'm less certain. Wandavision took a risk, and venerable franchises can be notoriously risk-averse.
Which is why Vince Gilligan's Pluribus is so amazing, in my opinion. The man takes gothic storytelling to an extreme. Once the tension is there, he holds on every moment. Is somebody coming to visit the main character? We don't start the scene with the knock on the door. We hold on the character sitting pensively in the kitchen. We follow the long walk up the front walkway. We get the knock on the door, and we get the slow walk to open the door. Conversations are passionate, but they're slow.
I've heard plenty of complaints from people who've called the pace of Pluribus glacial, but that's the point. If Vince is successful in lodging the tension of Something is Wrong in your heart, the drawing out and drawing out can make for stressful, sometimes frustrating, but ultimately successful television. The payoff and release, when it comes, is more valuable because it has taken that long to arrive.
Because of this, Vince Gilligan was able to deliver more power with the utterance of two words to end a season than other showrunners do with a big explosion. I'm so glad I got to see it, and I look forward to season two.