Move Over, Walter White: Pluribus Features Vince Gilligan's Most Dangerous Protagonist

We're glad that you called, Carol: This article contains spoilers for "Pluribus" season 1, episode 2.

Carol Sturka (Rhea Seehorn) is no natural born killer. Sure, she's a profoundly negative person even before the hive mind virus from outer space turns the world upside down. Still, morality-wise, the worst we see her do is sulk, despair, drink more than she should ... and, of course, lash out verbally. 

That last trait, unfortunately, turns out to be deadly in the most literal possible sense. In the world of "Breaking Bad" creator Vince Gilligan's "Pluribus" hive mind, sticks and stones can break all the bones they like, but words? They can really, really hurt. When Carol loses her cool and snaps at the hive mind in "Pluribus" season 1, episode 2, her angry outburst has unintended consequences. Unable to deal with such unadulterated negative emotion, every single person connected to the shared "Us" mind goes into a temporary, seizure-like shock. 

To her credit, Carol is deeply concerned when she understands the situation, and immediately (if ineffectually) sets out to help whomever she can. Despite this, her outburst has severe consequences. As she finds out later in the episode, the incident ends up killing no less than 11 million people all over the world. What's worse, this horrifying number doesn't deter her from later lashing out and causing another global emotion-shock incident. Let's just say that it's no surprise that Carol refers to herself as the biggest mass murderer since Joseph Stalin. (For reference, the number of deaths caused by the Soviet dictator has been estimated at around 20 million.) 

As a rule of thumb, Vince Gilligan's protagonists aren't exactly paragons of virtue. Jimmy "Saul Goodman" McGill (Bob Odenkirk) ruins lives and even causes deaths with his constant scams and schemes. The resident memorable moment machine of "Breaking Bad," Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul), is one of the key people behind the blue crystal meth distribution operation on the show, and can get his own hands dirty, too. However, Walter White (Bryan Cranston) is a cut above — or, as the case may be, below — the rest. During the five seasons of "Breaking Bad," he personally kills numerous people and causes the deaths of who knows how many others, be it by hit orders, complex machinations, or the deadly products of his drug empire. 

And then, along came "Pluribus." Carol's ability to kill millions of people around the world with little more than a needlessly harsh tone of voice makes her far deadlier than any other main character Gilligan's shows have ever wheeled out, which is actually pretty ironic since Rhea Seehorn's "Better Call Saul" character Kim Wexler is a rare Gilligan character whose moral hiccups lead to comparatively few irreversible atrocities. 

To be entirely fair to Carol, though: her octuple-digit body count might dwarf Walt's, but it isn't intentional and needs to be compared to the other events on "Pluribus." For context, the purportedly benevolent hive mind itself unwittingly causes no less than 886 million deaths during the global conversion event, so the show is operating on a calamity scale that's well beyond any other Gilligan project.