In this interesting series from Vince Gilligan, Better Call Saul’s Rhea Seehorn plays a cynical woman who lives in a world where people are suddenly happy. The result is George Orwell meets Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
If a mysterious man speaks directly to you by name through the television and you don’t have dreams or hallucinations, it’s safe to assume that the world has changed. How and why does this question arise throughout Breaking Bad? Better Call Saul A fun new series from creator Vince Gilligan. Pluribus plays like an invasion of George Orwell and the Body Snatchers, but it still has Gilligan’s distinctive voice, blending the realistic with the whimsical. After all, how ridiculous would it be for a high school science teacher to become a drug lord, like Walter White did in Breaking Bad, or for a slimeball lawyer like Saul Goodman to become the hero we root for? Here, Gilligan has created one of the smartest and funniest shows of the year, wrapping timely social commentary in sci-fi tropes and centering the story around a prickly but sympathetic and down-to-earth heroine.
Its heroine, Carol Starka, is played by Rhea Seehorn (Kim from Better Call Saul, sans Kim’s unruly ponytail), and she’s perfectly in sync with Gilligan’s mix of genuine emotion and wild twists and turns. A catastrophe occurs, and Carol is always surrounded by happy people. She’s already one of the most cheerful humans on the planet and seems unaffected by what’s going on around her. The best-selling romance novelist has privately said that her readers are “a bunch of dummies” who devour books with titles such as The Blood Song of Waikaro. She’s cynical and acerbic, and her sheepish skepticism is a wonderful and refreshing quality in a world full of people who smile and walk the talk. “No sane person is that happy,” she claims. The series puts us in Carol’s shoes, and Seehorn’s empathetic performance is dramatic and witty, rooting the sci-fi plot in her visceral, fear-filled, determined reactions.
Although the show’s premise is planted in The Twilight Zone, it’s one of the many genre classics the show evokes alongside The Body Snatchers (Gilligan is said Both are inspirations), Carol’s position is very accurate. She lives in a large house on an upscale cul-de-sac in Albuquerque, New Mexico, the setting for Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul. These shows don’t overlap with Pluribus, but the locations allow Gilligan to hide some Easter eggs. The science fiction aspect takes him back to his early days as an X-Files writer. But here he uses genre tropes in an intellectual and meta way. “We’ve all seen this movie and we know it doesn’t end well,” Carroll says. And the science fiction never overwhelms her human story. Her sarcastic wit and Seehorn’s always sharp remarks make the show very entertaining. Sometimes I think of the comedy movie “The Good Place.” At times it’s reminiscent of the eeriness of the HBO drama The Leftovers, but it shifts easily from one tone to another throughout.
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Source: BBC Culture – www.bbc.com
