- 5 weeks ago
Doing The Job on The Cheap, are You?
PLURIBUS AND THE DARIÉN GAP
December 12, 2025
Pluribus Ep 7 uses the Darién Gap to crush the myth of independence. Manousos’s failure in the silent jungle proves connection is the only survival.
Manousos Oviedo (Carlos-Manuel Vesga) in the Darién Gap - Pluribus, episode 7
In the cartography of the Americas, there is a jagged scar known as the Darién Gap—a sixty-mile stretch of swampland and jungle straddling the border between Colombia and Panama. It is the only break in the Pan-American Highway, a road that otherwise stretches from Alaska to Argentina. For decades, this roadless void has served as a symbol of nature’s stubborn resistance to human engineering, a place where the myth of connectivity goes to die in the mud. In the latest episode of Vince Gilligan’s Pluribus, fittingly titled “The Gap,” this geographical anomaly becomes the stage for a profound examination of the show’s central anxiety: the terror of absolute independence.
For seven episodes, Pluribus has quietly dismantled the romanticism of the “last man on Earth” trope. The series, which depicts a world sedated by a benevolent alien hivemind, leaves its few immune protagonists in a gilded cage of total freedom. In “The Gap,” we find Manousos Oviedo, played with fervent desperation by Carlos-Manuel Vesga, attempting to drive his own MG Midget from South America to New Mexico to reunite with Carol Sturka. It is a journey of romantic individualism, but when the road dissolves into the mud of Yaviza, Manousos is forced to continue on foot. Here, Gilligan strips the Darién Gap of its contemporary context to devastating effect. In our reality—and certainly in the years leading up to the show’s fictional 2025 setting—the Gap is anything but silent. It is a harrowing corridor of humanitarian crisis, a migration route where, in 2023 alone, over half a million souls risked flash floods, venomous snakes, and the predation of the Gulf Clan cartel to seek sanctuary in the north. The real Darién is a place of discarded camping gear, plastic waste, and the chaotic struggle for survival.
In Pluribus, however, the alien “Others” have sanitized the globe of such desperation. Manousos enters a jungle that has been returned to a primeval indifference. There are no desperate migrants from Venezuela or Haiti, no Médecins Sans Frontières tents in Bajo Chiquito, and no armed smugglers. There is only the overwhelming, suffocating green. The silence of the jungle is arguably more terrifying than the chaos it replaced; it emphasizes that Manousos is not just the only traveler, but perhaps the only person left on Earth foolish enough to choose suffering over safety. The biodiversity of the region—the jaguars, the disease-carrying mosquitoes, the relentless humidity—remains the true hegemon. The show captures the landscape’s hostility with a lush, claustrophobic beauty that underscores the absurdity of one man trying to conquer a terrain that defeated the c
PLURIBUS AND THE DARIÉN GAP
December 12, 2025
Pluribus Ep 7 uses the Darién Gap to crush the myth of independence. Manousos’s failure in the silent jungle proves connection is the only survival.
Manousos Oviedo (Carlos-Manuel Vesga) in the Darién Gap - Pluribus, episode 7
In the cartography of the Americas, there is a jagged scar known as the Darién Gap—a sixty-mile stretch of swampland and jungle straddling the border between Colombia and Panama. It is the only break in the Pan-American Highway, a road that otherwise stretches from Alaska to Argentina. For decades, this roadless void has served as a symbol of nature’s stubborn resistance to human engineering, a place where the myth of connectivity goes to die in the mud. In the latest episode of Vince Gilligan’s Pluribus, fittingly titled “The Gap,” this geographical anomaly becomes the stage for a profound examination of the show’s central anxiety: the terror of absolute independence.
For seven episodes, Pluribus has quietly dismantled the romanticism of the “last man on Earth” trope. The series, which depicts a world sedated by a benevolent alien hivemind, leaves its few immune protagonists in a gilded cage of total freedom. In “The Gap,” we find Manousos Oviedo, played with fervent desperation by Carlos-Manuel Vesga, attempting to drive his own MG Midget from South America to New Mexico to reunite with Carol Sturka. It is a journey of romantic individualism, but when the road dissolves into the mud of Yaviza, Manousos is forced to continue on foot. Here, Gilligan strips the Darién Gap of its contemporary context to devastating effect. In our reality—and certainly in the years leading up to the show’s fictional 2025 setting—the Gap is anything but silent. It is a harrowing corridor of humanitarian crisis, a migration route where, in 2023 alone, over half a million souls risked flash floods, venomous snakes, and the predation of the Gulf Clan cartel to seek sanctuary in the north. The real Darién is a place of discarded camping gear, plastic waste, and the chaotic struggle for survival.
In Pluribus, however, the alien “Others” have sanitized the globe of such desperation. Manousos enters a jungle that has been returned to a primeval indifference. There are no desperate migrants from Venezuela or Haiti, no Médecins Sans Frontières tents in Bajo Chiquito, and no armed smugglers. There is only the overwhelming, suffocating green. The silence of the jungle is arguably more terrifying than the chaos it replaced; it emphasizes that Manousos is not just the only traveler, but perhaps the only person left on Earth foolish enough to choose suffering over safety. The biodiversity of the region—the jaguars, the disease-carrying mosquitoes, the relentless humidity—remains the true hegemon. The show captures the landscape’s hostility with a lush, claustrophobic beauty that underscores the absurdity of one man trying to conquer a terrain that defeated the c
Category
📚
LearningTranscript
00:00Music
00:14In England, the 1690s were the years when the victors of 1688
00:19congratulated themselves on a glorious revolution.
00:24In Scotland, there were years of purgatory.
00:34After the massacre at Glencoe came famine and pestilence.
00:39For several summers in a row, the sun refused to appear.
00:43Torrential rains poured down.
00:45Cattle and sheep became diseased with foot rot.
00:49Fields of barley and oats turned into mildewed slurry.
00:53The Jacobite clergy said this was God's wrath
00:57for turfing out the rightful king.
01:04In all this darkness, there were some who saw the light.
01:07A light that was going to shine hot and strong on Scotland.
01:12A plan that would transform the country from impotence
01:16and destitution into riches and power
01:19beyond anyone's wildest dreams.
01:22It would make Scotland, or its colonial trading post,
01:26New Caledonia, the hub of the universe.
01:30And where was that to be?
01:32Well, of course, in Panama.
01:38A group of merchants and bankers, including William Paterson,
01:41the Scottish founder of the Bank of England,
01:44had the idea of creating a Scottish trading post
01:47on the Isthmus of Darien in Panama.
01:51At first sight, the idea sounds like the purest lunacy.
01:55But take a look at the map of world trade and it becomes visionary.
01:59A major obstacle to east-west trade was the long, dangerous,
02:03and ruinously expensive journey round Cape Horn.
02:07A trade route that cut through Panama was an obvious boon.
02:11At Darien, the distance between the Pacific and Atlantic oceans
02:15was only 40 miles.
02:17Goods could be carried across the narrow strip of land
02:21to waiting merchant ships.
02:23The trading economy of the world would be revolutionised,
02:30and Scotland would run it.
02:40The Darien scheme instantly captured the imagination
02:43of the Scottish people, men and women from all walks of life
02:46and from all over Scotland queued up to invest in the venture.
03:00So when the First Fleet sailed from the Firth of Forth in July 1698,
03:05flying the Saltire and the extraordinary company flag
03:08of Indians, llamas, towered elephants and the beaming rising sun,
03:15it was carrying more than 1,200 people selected to be the lucky colonists.
03:20It was carrying the hopes of an entire nation.
03:26But the only information the Company of Scotland had about Darien
03:30was from a pirate surgeon called Lionel Wafer,
03:33who claimed he knew the Caribbean like the back of his hand
03:36and had convinced them the place was paradise.
03:40The climate was mild, he said, the soil fertile,
03:43and the natives friendly.
03:46They were also vain, spending much of the day combing their long hair.
03:50So naturally, the ship got the conditions they were expecting to encounter.
03:55Crate loads of catechisms and Bibles for converting the pagans.
04:001,400 hats, an even greater supply of wigs.
04:04The Darienites were expecting to live like Lairds of the lagoon.
04:09But before the ship got anywhere near Darien,
04:13the dream had turned into a nightmare.
04:1540 crew and passengers died on the long voyage.
04:21And when they found their golden island,
04:24it was, of course, a mosquito-infested swamp.
04:28The natives did not, it seemed, want their combs or anything else.
04:34In the sweltering, rainy jungle,
04:36all the colonists' efforts went into lugging cannon
04:39into a primitive stockade bravely christened Fort St Andrew.
04:45They were dying now of disease and hunger at a rate of ten a day,
04:50and their supplies ran with maggots.
04:56And there was no outside help.
04:58Tropical New Caledonia was a direct threat to the English trading empire,
05:03and a government in Westminster was determined it should fail.
05:09A law was passed making it illegal for any Englishman to invest in the scheme
05:14or give assistance to the desperate Darienites.
05:17When a second Scottish expedition arrived at New Edinburgh,
05:22all they found were hundreds of graves.
05:31Back home, when the full extent of the disaster sunk in,
05:35the fate of the Darien expeditions became a national trauma.
05:39They consumed a full third of Scotland's liquid capital,
05:43but the most serious casualty of the fiasco had been the last, best hope
05:48of a national rebirth, Scotland going it alone.
05:52That hope died in the malarial swamps of Darien.
05:58Many laid the failure of Darien squarely at England's door
06:02for its deliberate sabotage of the scheme.
06:04A wave of Anglophobia swept the country,
06:07startling the men who ran things in Westminster.
06:11They became even more worried when it looked likely that Queen Anne,
06:15who had succeeded William in 1702, would die childless.
06:21A crisis over the succession loomed.
06:23For the defenders of the revolution of 1688,
06:26whoever succeeded her simply had to be Protestant.
06:30In Scotland, however, after the humiliation of Darien,
06:34many Scots now favoured Anne's half-brother, the Catholic,
06:38James Edward Stuart, who was living in exile with England's old enemy, France.
06:44Westminster could not tolerate these kinds of threats from its own backyard.
06:51It knew it had to take away Scotland's independence
06:54and insist on full political union.
06:58The creation of a single British state under a single parliament
07:02was now a matter of immediate urgency.
07:06The Westminster politicians knew they needed a sweetener to make the union more palatable.
07:15And this is it.
07:16In this chest was deposited the equivalent,
07:19the exact amount that had been lost in the Darien adventure,
07:23all £398,000 of it.
07:27You can almost hear the advocates of union saying as they beamed broadly,
07:31now this is what union means.
07:35You seem to be a little hard-pressed for funds, my dear fellows.
07:38Well, now Scotland's debts will be Britain's.
07:42Sink or swim, we shall do it together.
07:47The equivalent money, along with favourable trade concessions,
07:51was the carrot dangled before members of the Scottish Parliament.
07:55And by now, there were many who were already looking south,
07:59saw reality, smelt the profits.
08:02But behind the carrot, of course, lay the stick.
08:05Westminster threatened to block Scottish exports to England
08:09unless Scotland entered union negotiations.
08:16The writing was on the wall.
08:19Distraught, Lord Belhaven delivered a lament
08:22over the funeral pyre of Scottish independence.
08:26I see our ancient mother Caledonia like Caesar sitting in the midst of the Senate,
08:34attending the final blow and breathing out her last.
08:38We are an obscure poor people, though formerly of better account,
08:45removed to a remote corner of the world without name and without alliances.
08:51In 1707, the deed was done.
08:57A Treaty of the Union had been drafted.
09:00It took just ten weeks to go through the Scottish Parliament,
09:03six through Westminster.
09:07Scotland and England were now joined at the hip.
09:12The
09:16The
09:20The
09:22The
Be the first to comment