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This is fresh air. I'm Terry Gross. One of the most talked about TV series now is the Apple TV series Pluribus, created by Vince Gilligan.

It stars my guest Ray Seahorn.

You may know her as the co-star of Better Call Saul, which was both a prequel and sequel to Breaking

Bad.

Seahorn and Pluribus were just each nominated for a Golden Globe. In Pluribus, Seahorn plays Carol,

a writer of best-selling romance novels. Her life partner, Helen, is her manager. One night,

Carol and Helen are leaving a bar when Helen has a seizure and dies. Suddenly, everyone around Carolyn,

the bar and in the ER are frozen in place,

or have fallen down and having a seizure. And then most of them get up and seem changed.

They're talking and walking in unison. Their faces are somewhere between happy and hypnotized.

What's going on? Back home, when Carol turns on the TV looking for a new

show that might explain, all the channels are blank, except C-SPAN. A man on that channel is at a White

House podium talking directly to Carol by name. He gives her a phone number to call for more information.

She calls, and the man she saw on the TV is the one talking to her. He apologizes for Helen's death. Millions of others have

died, including the president. He explains that everyone now has the benefits of an extraterrestrial

technology. Through pulsing signals that were sent,

everyone around the world is now held together by a psychic glue.

Here's part of that scene.

Rest assured, Carol, we will figure out what makes you different.

Figure it out, why?

So we can fix it.

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