Watch on YouTube: Pluribus official trailer
The hive mind in Pluribus can give you anything you want, but apparently it takes Apple and Sony Pictures Television to hand out a series regular contract. Samba Schutte, who played the gleefully unassimilated Mr Diabaté in two episodes of the first season, has been promoted to a regular for season two, the trades reported on Friday. He joins Rhea Seehorn, Karolina Wydra and Carlos-Manuel Vesga in the main cast.
Mr Diabaté was one of the first season’s great comic creations. Like Seehorn’s prickly bestselling author Carol Sturka, he is one of the handful of humans immune to the alien joining that has turned everybody else into one blissfully helpful collective. Unlike Carol, he has decided that this is the best thing that ever happened to him, and has settled into a Las Vegas casino hotel where the hive mind caters to his every whim. Where Carol sees the end of humanity, he sees room service. The performance earned Schutte a Saturn Award nomination for best guest star, and it isn’t hard to see why the writers want more of him.
Schutte, a Mauritanian-Dutch actor and comedian who grew up in Ethiopia, will be familiar to many from Our Flag Means Death, in which he played the ship’s cook Roach, and from the sitcom Sunnyside. He also has a sideline in games, as a voice actor in Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order and a writer on Battlefield V.
Season two is in production in Albuquerque, where cameras started rolling at the end of October, but Apple has yet to name a premiere date, and nobody involved seems to expect one soon. Vince Gilligan’s first season took six Emmys from 18 nominations, so Apple can afford to be patient, even if the rest of us are reduced to rewatching season one and wondering what happened to the champagne.
Here at SFcrowsnest we approve. Every good apocalypse needs one survivor who is having a far better time than everyone else, and Mr Diabaté in his penthouse is the Terry-Thomas of the end of the world. Whether season two lets him keep the room service is another matter. Gilligan has a long record of making people pay for their choices.
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