Manousos Oviedo is embarking on a journey unlike any other. In a world where he’s the last person refusing to join the collective human consciousness known as the Joining, Manousos (portrayed by Carlos-Manuel Vesga) is taking his old car on a solitary trek. Starting in Paraguay, his destination is Albuquerque, New Mexico. If his vehicle can’t make it, he’ll continue on foot, braving a hostile jungle teeming with flora and fauna intent on eliminating any unwelcome guests.

This odyssey is fraught with challenges. Manousos must navigate immense distances, secure food and water, and endure searing heat, all while refusing any assistance that might be offered. The isolation and intense physical strain add to his burdens, creating an intense trial of endurance.

Manousos’s journey is part of a longstanding narrative tradition. His story in Pluribus Episode 7 (“The Gap”) is a classic example of a genre that may be familiar yet unnamed to many: The Ordeal. In this genre, a character, either alone or in a small group, must traverse a challenging landscape made perilous by distance, terrain, injury, illness, or hostile entities. This journey removes them from their known world, plunging them into a foreign and often dangerous environment where survival is uncertain.

While you might not consciously categorize these films as such, you would recognize them by their intense experiences: Deliverance, Sorcerer, The Revenant, Apocalypse Now, Gravity, Aguirre – The Wrath of God, Stalker, Fitzcarraldo, The Descent, Valhalla Rising, Annihilation, Children of Men. These films immerse you in their worlds, making you feel as though you’ve navigated rivers or trudged through harsh wilderness alongside the characters. The experience is an Ordeal, shared by you and the protagonists.

Unlike quest narratives that aim for an ultimate goal, the essence of an Ordeal lies in the punishing journey itself, which becomes increasingly grueling both physically and emotionally as it nears its end. Even when there’s a pursuit element, an Ordeal is not a chase—it’s a relentless, exhausting march through suffering. This transformative journey leaves the protagonist irrevocably changed, if they survive at all. In this sense, Frodo and Sam’s mission in The Lord of the Rings fits the Ordeal mold, unlike the adventures of their companions.

We don’t yet know how, or even if, Manousos will survive his encounter with the deadly chunga palm spines. But we’ve already seen him change since he decided to leave the cardboard-wrapped confines of his storage-unit rental office: As he goes farther away from his native Paraguay, he literally becomes bilingual thanks to his language instruction tapes. 

Reaching Carol Sturka (with whom he’ll now be able to converse) and saving the world is his goal, but he’s far more focused on the gritty business of getting there from here: siphoning gas by sucking through a tube then spitting out what comes through, catching fish with a net, gathering rainwater with cans so he’ll have something to drink, and finally hacking and slashing his way through the jungle itself. The heat, the exertion, the sheer tedium of travel: This is the stuff of the Ordeal.

Usually — but not always: see The Descent, Gravity, Annihilation, and the Netflix series American Primeval — the protagonists of these stories are men, since the anxieties and desires they deal with tend to be male-coded: exploration, physical struggle, the conquest of territory, protecting the family. Some Ordeals tackle masculine anxiety directly: Deliverance, for example, only takes place because four city slickers decided to show off how rugged and capable they are in a world of men gone soft, and the sexually violent fate that befalls one of them is a core male fear. The outstanding AMC adaptation of Dan Simmons’s The Terror is a study of an entire crew of men forced into an Ordeal when their ships become stranded in the Arctic ice, studying their dynamics of rivalry and brotherhood as circumstances worsen.

Manousos was given a name with the word “man” in it by Vince Gilligan and company. He’s traveling all on his own, with a handful of glove compartment maps and a little know-how about old cars. He refuses all help and directions. He decides to strike out on a hike well beyond his abilities. He carries a machete. It’s not the point of Manousos’s storyline that what he’s doing is pretty macho shit, but, well, it’s pretty macho shit. That suits the Ordeal to a tee.

But as the female-fronted Ordeals listed above indicate, the terror of being lost in a great hostile nothing that wishes to envelop and erase you is universal. So is our ability to relate to the kind of unceasing, thankless effort required to navigate such spaces successfully: Think of the rivers that so frequently figure in these stories, the way they inexorably carry us from home no matter what we do to fight the current. These circumstances are a reflection of our own experience of a world that seems designed to destroy us, whether through sociopolitical forces beyond our control or the simple fact of our own mortality. This is part of what makes the Ordeal such an engrossing subject for visual narrative.

The “visual” aspect is key here. Following from their need to situate their protagonists in the hostile environment they have unwisely invaded and their desire to show the sheer scale and scope of the journey, Ordeals tend to favor shot compositions that bring a full world of details into focus. They also want to make you, the viewer, feel the heat, the cold, the exertion, the exhaustion, the fear, the physical and psychological pain, resulting in closeups designed to draw forth and transmit the protagonist’s emotional state to the audience. As such, they’re full of haptic triggers, images that make the films and shows in question feel more real to us as viewers by setting off our senses. These movies and shows are full-body experiences.

Rooting you in the physical experiences of another person, one who isn’t even real, is one of the great magic tricks cinema is able to pull off. It’s especially hard when those experiences are unpleasant, enormously so when those unpleasant experiences drag on and on for an episode or a movie. Yet the Ordeal draws us in, because there’s catharsis to be found in physically connecting with someone who is suffering — the profound catharsis of empathy, which requires us to get out of our own heads just as the Ordeal itself requires its harried heroes to leave the comforts of the familiar world behind for parts unknown. As for Manousos, he’s still got a long way to go if he survives the spines. (The arrival of a hivemind helicopter is a good sign, right?) With any luck — ours, not his — his grueling, stunning Ordeal will continue. 

Sean T. Collins (@seantcollins.com on Bluesky and theseantcollins on Patreon) has written about television for The New York Times, Vulture, Rolling Stone, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pain Don’t Hurt: Meditations on Road House. He lives with his family on Long Island.