The Great Pop Culture Conspiracy

...to make you believe in conspiracy theories

About halfway through the 2025 invasion of the body snatchers apocalypse series Pluribus, Carol (Rhea Seehorn), one of a handful of humans unaffected by the space hivemind virus, makes a terrifying discovery. Snooping around a deserted city, Carol finds an enormous freezer full of dead bodies. The apparently peaceful collective which has taken over the entire human race is storing and eating human corpses. This revelation, Carol thinks, changes everything! She rushes to tell the other 12 surviving humans, who so far have been reluctant to try to fight the invader.

The punchline, though, is that the other survivors already know. The hivemind is so peaceful that it won’t harm any living thing, including plants; the only way to prevent the entire hivemind from starving to death is to extract protein from dead bodies. The other survivors already know the unpleasant truth and have accepted it. The plot twist is a plot dud; the revelation isn’t even really a spoiler, since Carol’s newfound knowledge changes nothing. The truth is out in the open, and no one cares—or at least no one cares enough to do anything about it.

Pluribus is deliberately playing with and undermining the conspiracy theory secrets and plot reversals which drive our entertainment narratives and, perhaps not coincidentally, our politics. In fiction, and not just in fiction, we’re obsessed with hidden truths—and with the belief that if we just expose the last layer of secrecy, we can end injustice, defeat the villains, and return the world to a state of righteous purity and normality.

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Severance and the (non) conspiracy of work

Conspiracy theory narratives are so ubiquitous that it’s hard to pick just a couple of examples. One show that leaps out, though, is Severance—a brilliant satire of the emptiness and exploitation of work in its first season (2022) which relies more and more on less and less coherent conspiracy mechanics as it moved into its second (2025).

Severance is set in a near future, in which Lumon industries has perfected a biotechnology that allows it to split people into two different personalities. The tech is used for corporate security; employees at Lumon have a worker identity—”innies”— who knows nothing about life after work experienced by “outies.” This creates a nightmare of work-life unbalance for innies, who essentially never leave the office. They are bound to their cubicles in perpetuity by their other selves, in an all-too-literal wage slavery.

The first season mostly explores the experience of the innies, who know nearly nothing about the outside world. They perform pointless tasks identifying numbers on a screen and are rewarded with corporate branded tchotchkes and meetings with an affirmer who tells them what wonderful people their outies are. Outside the office, though, outie Mark (Adam Scott) begins to realize that Lumon isn’t all it seems. His investigations lead to more and more elaborate revelations, which in season 2 increasingly move to the center of the narrative.

As the show uncovers more truths, though, it also increasingly obscures, or denies, its initial insights. The first season is so effective because it captures the emptiness and pointlessness of office work—and really of all work. Lumon employees are completely alienated from their own labor; they literally don’t know what they’re doing, either at work or outside work, and this lack of knowledge robs their lives of meaning and reduces them to powerlessness. They are nobodies. It’s only through solidarity with each other that they can build agency, identity and consciousness.

But the plot outside the office ends up working against these insights. Innie Helly R (Britt Lower) turns out to be a Lumon heir; Harmony (Patricia Arquette), a middle manager, turns out to be a key inventor. Mark turns out to be a major figure in Lumon’s machinations, rather than just some hapless cubicle drone. Solidarity as a theme isn’t entirely lost, but it becomes secondary to figuring out why this character or that character is one of the most important people in the world.

Severance starts out with an elegant insight: being chained to a desk for 8 hours a day is exploitive, demeaning, and meaningless, even if we “choose” to subject ourselves to it. But precisely because that insight is so simple, it doesn’t sustain the narrative drive you need for a pulp series. And so you need twists, revelations, secrets, conspiracies—the exciting machinery of hidden evil, distracting you from the mundane evils we grind through 9 to 5 every day.

Superman and the (non) conspiracy of fascism

The 2025 film Superman is, like Severance, a pointed commentary on contemporary evils—in this case, not work, but the rise of xenophobic fascism. In the film the evil tech billionaire/Elon Musk analog Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult) constructs a complicated plot to undermine support for the alien do-gooding hero Superman (David Corenswet). Luthor sets up Superman to interfere in international conflicts and smears him with audio of his alien parents telling him to conquer earth. Luthor then holds Superman in a pocket universe which functions as a black site for all of Luthor’s enemies.

The hero of the story is as much intrepid reporter Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan) as Superman. That’s because the key to defeating Luthor is discovering and publicizing his lies. Once people realize that Luthor is conspiring against Superman out of envy and hate, they instantly turn against the villain. Xenophobia, in this telling, is a cognitive error; people hate because they don’t know enough. Reveal the conspiracy, educate the masses, and all is quickly restored to rights.

Revelations and secrets and hidden twists drive narrative; they keep you engaged and guessing. But they also provide a satisfying resolution, inasmuch as when the truth is finally unearthed, the good guys win.

In that sense, conspiracies are not dystopian, but utopian—since, unfortunately, in the real world, uncovering malevolence is often not sufficient to make malevolence disappear. Currently, we have extensive evidence that immigrants are not in fact a threat and that federal agents are kidnapping people on the basis of racist animus. There is video ICE and CBP agents murdering multiple people without provocation.

In a movie, these revelations would uncover the conspiracy, and Luthor would go to prison. In our miserable reality, though, the Trump administration just flatly lies about the shooting, insisting you believe them rather than your own eyes.

People don’t hate because they are fed bad information. They are mired in falsehoods and untruths and their own conspiracy theories—2020 election conspiracy theories, Great Replacement theories, Hitler’s rants about Jewish world domination— because they have chosen hate. To the extent there is a fascist conspiracy, it just consists of the worst people on earth telling bald faced lies and daring someone to stop them.

Pluribus and honest conspirators

Pluribus is very aware of this dynamic—so much so that it grants its world conquering viral hive mind perfect honesty. The hivemind takes over the world with some sneaky conspiratorial doings initially. But once it has seized the minds and bodies of virtually everybody on earth, it doesn’t bother with subterfuge, and in fact appears to be incapable of lying. It tells Carol straightforwardly that it is working on a way to overcome her immunity and make her one of the hive. It even tells her the ETA for success. When you have power and numbers, deceit is superfluous.

Without conspiracies to generate narrative propulsion, Pluribus has to get tricky. In part it does this by using sham revelations; Carol—who is a pulp romance author—convinces herself she’s found plot twists or secrets in part by simply not asking the hivemind straightforward questions. She, like the viewer, wants to uncover some truth which will fix everything, even though there is no such truth. The series even plays with the idea that Carol is the fascist trying to destroy the perfect peaceful new world. Her conspiratorial mindset is a justification for violence, and in fact leads to violence on a terrifying scale.

Another way to say this is that the series’ need for twists and revelations is satisfied by Carol hiding information from herself—about the hivemind in part, but also about her own motivations and investments. The story isn’t really about whether Carol can find the one true fact that will reveal iniquity and reset the world. Instead, it’s about Carol playing a shell game with her own moral intuitions. The series suggests that doing the right thing isn’t about uncovering some hidden iniquity out there, but is instead about finding the resources within yourself to grapple with facts that are already pretty much apparent.

It will be interesting to see if Pluribus manages to keep conspiratorial thinking at arms length, or whether it, like Severance, falls back on more conventional plotting as it has to find its way through its second season. So far, though, Carol does not uncover conspiracies to save the world. Instead, the series shows that the real conspiracy may be the way that our conspiracy theories keep us from recognizing the boring, narratively uninteresting evils that are right in front of us.