This is not a review of the new Apple series by Vince Gilligan, though if it were, it would be a good one. Rhea Seehorn’s performance, the writing, the cinematography, the sound track, all of it is excellent. But this piece is less about the show than about the reaction to its lead that I’ve seen from commenters online.

Especially male commenters.

So, be warned, here be monsters in the form of, not only a feminist perspective, but spoilers. If you haven’t watched this so far smart, wonderful science fiction series and would rather go into it clean, stop reading now.

Plur1bus could be described as yet another post-apocalyptic zombie series, except that the zombies, instead of groaning and lunging at non-zombies, smile a lot and ask how they can help. In the first episode the main character Carol Sturka (Rhea Seehorn), a wildly succesful romantasy author, witnesses a zombie takeover. It arrives in the form of an extra-terrestrial infection that, for a few minutes, freezes most of humanity into twitching, rigid convulsions. The resulting chaos — head injuries, blood loss, car and plane crashes, fires, drownings, etc. — kills millions, including Carol’s wife. When it’s over, all of the remaining human population on earth, except for a handful of the immune, have been melded into a single hivemind.

A very happy hive-mind, Carol is told, and one that insists it has her best interests at heart. She’s assured that all the combined intellects of Earth’s scientists will be working hard, from that night on, to figure out what went “wrong” and how they can get her and others like her to join them.

Whether she wants to or not.

Carol’s fight against this “benign” agenda is complicated by the fact that, if she loses her temper and yells at an individual body in the hivemind, the whole hive once again freezes worldwide for several minutes. This results in more car and plane crashes, injuries, etc, and millions more deaths, all of which are blamed — by many of the other unassimilated humans and quite a few viewers — on Carol. A form of emotional blackmail familiar to most women is thus writ large.

Which makes Plur1bus a fascinating examination of how even the most clear-eyed, justifiable female anger is treated as a pathology. It’s practicaly a Rorscharch test revealing how many male viewers — and some female viewers — react to persistently uppity women.

So far I have seen Carol described as “damaged,” “fighting inner demons.” ” and “her own worst enemy.” She is, some viewers have commented, “self-absorbed.” “narcissistic.” And, of course, she is a “Karen.” (I suspect writer Vince Gilligan chose her name for its similarity to that term.)

There is little indication she is any of these things. True, it’s established early on Carol has a drinking problem that resulted in a breathalyzer being installed in her car, but if she’s an alcoholic, she’s a functional one. At a book reading in the first episode she handles herself beautifully, interacts with her fans with grace, courtesy, even kindness. Only after she’s left the event do we learn Carol is bitterly unhappy with the direction her career has gone and considers her successful fantasy series “mindless crap.” Once everything falls apart, and she finds herself the only person in the United States who’s not been assimilated, she goes on a brief binge of drinking and watching DVDs of Golden Girls, but hey, who wouldn’t? (She’s had to bury her wife in the back yard, for God’s sake.)

By the end of the fifth episode, Carol has displayed every aspect of a heroine. She is smart, resourceful, compassionate, and profoundly principled. Her fury at the hivemind is not merely because of its impact on her own life, but because it has robbed the humans around her of agency. In one especially telling episode, she prevents a woman in the hivemind from being used by an unassimilated man who sees the passivity of the hivemind bodies as an opportunity for sexual gymnastics.

And yet, I keep hearing Carol described as “unlikeable,” and her attempts to fight back against the eternally smiling hive denounced as “out of countrol”, vicious, mean, etc. The force that resulted (according to the script) in almost a billion human beings dying is, some viewers have speculated, actually the good guy because it’s erased all racism, crime and warfare. Carol’s attempt at learning the truth by drugging one member of the hivemind and inadvertantly causing a dangerous heart attack is, on the other hand, cited as proof that Carol is the true villain.

Why can’t she just be nice?

I can’t say for certain what direction this series will go, but I am reasonably sure of one thing. No successful 21st century screenwriter is going to promote a story with the moral being “this angry lesbian needs to calm down and relax and enjoy being assimilated by a hivemind.”

It’s possible, I suppose. This is, after all, the Age of Trump. I may be wrong.

But I doubt it.