It was twilight or dawn, and I was looking at a painting. Or I was looking at my phone, which was showing me an impression of a painting, given the brightness was turned down low so as not to wake the baby. And of course the phone itself – poor inanimate thing – wasn’t strictly showing me anything, but Instagram was. The algorithm had noticed my attention had waned and stepped up its efforts. I’d lost interest in its feed of bossy postpartum content, now that the baby and I had survived the first nine months of her life. The algorithm understood that these days when I came to the app I wanted to look at pleasing things. Stylish images in high contrast colour that spoke a luxurious visual language.

The one that caused me to stop and turn up the brightness was an untitled painting of an ashtray full of cherries by an American artist called Meghann Stephenson. The ashtray was one of those classic 1960s pewter ones in the shape of a clam shell that you used to find in a certain kind of restaurant, when smoking inside was still permitted. It sits in the centre of the frame on a cream tablecloth that evokes the heavy linens you’d find in those same establishments, formal and unremarkable all at once. The cherries are a radioactive, semi-translucent scarlet, their surface glycerine smooth. Maraschinos: an amped-up drag performance of a cherry, temptation preserved forever in food dye, sugar and brine.

The image grabbed me for a number of reasons. Firstly, there was a glamour to it, and in my current life glamour was in short supply. Secondly, it looked great on my phone screen, as if it were designed to be admired this way. And then there was the composition. There are seven cherries pleasantly lounging about inside the shell, while a rogue eighth one sits on the tablecloth to the left of it, tilting back towards the ashtray, its long stalk resting on the lip. I’m surprisingly moved by the ambivalence of its pose. It occurs to me I am identifying too much with this cherry.

I’ve been thinking about separateness and togetherness a lot lately. Being part of a mother-baby dyad throws the question of individuality into very sharp relief. ‘There’s no such thing as a baby,’ said the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, meaning that a baby can’t survive without a caregiver: from the moment of conception there is always a baby and someone. That someone is usually a mother who, encouraged both by society and by her instincts, subsumes her own needs – temporarily, one hopes – to those of the baby. For a while, the new mother’s primary role is to intuit what her baby needs, then to provide it. The gradual separation that underpins Winnicott’s idea of a mother who is ‘good enough’ begins when she fails to meet those needs as seamlessly, when a little friction settles into the dyad, and begins to cleave it apart. It is in that bittersweet experience of separation that the infant begins to understand themselves as an individual. It follows then that our desires are central to our sense of ourselves. Yearning and frustration help us to experience our separateness, and therefore our individuality. What happens to that sense of self if desire becomes obsolete? This is one of the central questions of Pluribus, Vince Gilligan’s new show. It takes its name from the Latin E pluribus unum, meaning ‘out of many, one’, and it came to mind when I looked at those cherries. And also while I looked after my baby.

The show’s premise is, what if a highly transmissible extra-terrestrial virus colonised Earth, linking all infected humans via a psychic glue into one enormous hive mind, therefore doing away with any sense of separateness or individuality, and as a result eliminating all war, prejudice and deliberate violence. Once joined together, the hive mind feels a blissful oneness, so it’s the end of the world, but no one minds, because everyone is of one mind. And what if this virus were able to colonise everyone on Earth apart from thirteen individuals from across the globe, who are somehow mysteriously resistant. And what if one of those individuals was an American woman named Carol Sturka (Rhea Seehorn), a misanthropic romantasy novelist with a drinking problem who lives in Albuquerque. For those who have participated in ‘the joining’ comes a feeling of perfect harmony (their only remaining desire is to recruit those thirteen anomalies), but not for Carol. For Carol comes apocalyptic rage.

Carol’s wife Helen was one of the billion unintended casualties of the joining, one of many reasons she is set against being recruited by the entity she thinks of as ‘the Others’. Instead, Carol is determined to find some way of reversing the virus. Afraid of Carol’s fury, the Others withdraw from her for forty days, leaving her literally the only person in New Mexico. Eventually broken by isolation, Carol relents, and enters a phase of powerful ambivalence. Still certain she doesn’t want to join them, she nonetheless permits herself to have a relationship with the Others via one particular ‘individual’, Zosia (Karolina Wydra), who they have assigned as Carol’s chaperone. Because the Others assimilated all of Helen’s memories in the split second before her accidental death, they have access to a whole marriage’s worth of knowledge about Carol, meaning Zosia can satisfy Carol’s deepest desires without her breathing of a word of them. And so, Carol enters a blissful stretch where everything feels copacetic. She and Zosia become lovers, and, misanthropic no more, Carol experiences the seductive lull of having every need and longing met, even those that she can’t articulate. Basically, Carol becomes a baby.

Initially I thought that the cherry painting and Pluribus shared this tension between the desire for togetherness and for separateness. But the reason I thought of Carol Sturka when I looked at that lone cherry wasn’t because of the ambivalence I projected onto it. It was because the cherries had been offered to me by an algorithm trying to satisfy a desire I hadn’t articulated. While I paid deep attention to my baby, trying to intuit her needs before she herself became aware of them, the algorithm paid deep attention to me. And while I spent countless dawn or twilight hours in a semiconscious limbo of tender care, I allowed the algorithm, in its way, to take care of me. I fed the baby milk, while the algorithm fed me a stream of images, offering me cherry after cherry.

Through the relationship with Zosia, the Others give Carol a taste of the utopia they offer: a feeling of seamless togetherness. They do this because they want to please her, but also because they want to subsume her. Ultimately, it’s Carol’s anger at this that punctures her loved-up bubble, and returns her to herself. Like the Others in Pluribus, the algorithm, too, wants to merge. And if something or someone can consistently give you what you want, or predict what you might want, it can also shape what you want. I am learning, striving to be that good enough mother, to incrementally let my baby separate so that she can begin to make the world her own. As she does, I understand more than ever the need to butt up against the shape our specific, individual wants in order to know and therefore choose for ourselves. To bite into the cherry and feel our teeth scrape the pit. But maraschino cherries have no stone.