As a lesbian who cares infinitely more for stories about women than stories about men (sorry), I’ve had to suffer through the last two decades of television. Ever since Vince Gilligan’s Breaking Bad came out in 2008, every request I have for complex characters on TV comes with the suggestion to watch that show and its spinoff, Better Call Saul.
Finally, there’s a show like that for us.
Gilligan is back with another prestige TV show, one that’s leaping to the top of Apple TV’s streaming charts: Pluribus, and this time, the main character is a lesbian.
Pluribus is a twisty sci-fi mystery about jaded romance author Carol Sturka (Rhea Seehorn), who is one of only about a dozen people left unaffected by an alien virus that joins nearly every person on Earth into a single, optimistic-to-a-fault, hive mind.
Obviously, Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul are great shows with top-notch writing, superb acting, and all-time great characters. But they’re not for me. And I know I’m not alone in that.
For every lesbian who’s been champing at the bit to have this titan of TV give us some good food, Pluribus is here.
Lesbians love morally complex characters. We love toxic relationships and toxic women.
Traditionally, flawed heroes are a male-dominated field. Now, they can add Carol Struka to that list. (Does this officially make Carol an all-time iconic lesbian name?)
Carol is, for lack of a better term, a bitch. She’s condescending to her readers, she bickers with her partner, she’s rude to everyone she meets, and once the world becomes a hive mind, her negative energy literally kills thousands of people. And that’s just how the sapphics want her.
After meeting up with the rest of the unaffected humans and learning that they don’t mind the new hive-mind world, Carol takes it upon herself to be the last chance for humanity.
Of course, it takes a lesbian to save the world.
Carol is as no-nonsense as lesbians get. When she and Helen (Miriam Shor), her manager/partner, go on a once-in-a-lifetime trip to Norway to see the Northern Lights, Carol can only complain that the bed, like everything else in the hotel, is made of ice. When all wars, crime, violence, and suffering stop, all Carol can do is wish things were back to the way they used to be. But if anyone can put their foot down and make people listen, it’s a lesbian.
If only Carol had been in charge of releasing the Epstein files, they would’ve been public months ago.
Not only is much of Carol’s motivation based on her long-term partner, the only person on earth that she even kind of liked, dying when the virus spread — but the way the virus reacts to her also hilariously hinges on her gayness.
In the second episode, viewers see a Moroccan woman climb out of rubble, hop on a plane, and fly to New Mexico, where she becomes the Others’ representative to Carol. Why did they pick her out of the billions of people on earth? They looked into Helen’s memories and found the one person on Earth who most closely matches the fantasy lover Carol originally imagined when she was writing her book as a lesbian story.
Of course, the tragedy is that, even though Carol’s dream woman is standing in front of her and knows all her favorite things, that person is actually all six billion people on earth.
In many ways, Carol is the last lesbian alive (as far as we know). If everyone on the planet shares the same mind, that means no one is unique, no one has their own sexuality, and no one has their own gender. Carol is utterly alone.
Carol isn’t the first flawed lesbian lead (look at Love Lies Bleeding, Yellowjackets, Bottoms, and Work in Progress for other recent examples), and she won’t be the last. But now that TV’s most esteemed showrunner is focusing on them, studios may realize this is what the people want.
Pluribus is only three episodes in, with the fourth coming out this Thursday, and it’s already one of the most talked-about shows on TV, with an order for a second season.
After Breaking Bad, shows centering male anti-heroes like Barry, Narcos, BoJack Horseman, The Knick, Succession, Peaky Blinders, and Bosch have become the norm. Hopefully, Plurubis will help usher in a new era of wonderfully problematic lesbian leads next.
Mey Rude is a staff writer for Out. Find her on Instagram @Meyrude.
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This article originally appeared on Out: ‘Pluribus’: Carol Sturka is the flawed lesbian hero America needs
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