[Ed. note: Spoilers ahead for Pluribus episode 5.]
Entitled “Got Milk?,” Pluribus episode 5 ends with Protagonist Carol (Rhea Seehorn) coming across a horrifying discovery inside some sort of frozen storage facility previously run by the hivemind in her now-abandoned hometown of Albuquerque, New Mexico.
We don’t actually get to see what terrible thing lies beneath the plastic wrap Carol lifted up while exploring the facility, but based on her reaction, it’s something truly awful. The first thing that comes to mind for me is, obviously, the possibility that the hivemind is eating people. Or drinking them, rather, out of those weird little milk cartons. I think we’re dealing with a Soylent Green (er, Yellow?) setup here.
Soylent Green, a 1973 sci-fi noir based on a book by Harry Harrison, is set in an overpopulated future where the government feeds the masses a mysterious processed food called — you guessed it — Soylent Green. The film builds to its infamous twist: the horrifying revelation that Soylent Green is… made of people. It’s one of the great dystopian tales.
But I don’t think the situation on Pluribus is nearly as sinister as the comparison makes it sound. We know the hivemind quite literally cannot hurt a fly, at least not on purpose. If they’re eating people, surely they must be people who were already dead when the hivemind took over, have died of natural causes since then, or have keeled over due to the unexplained but deadly effect Carol’s anger inexplicably has on these pod people. The hivemind seems to see things from a “waste not, want not” point of view. Why wouldn’t they eat dead people?
Honestly, the hivemind engaging in cannibalism in a (relatively) benign manner for a (relatively) benign reason is pretty in line with their characterization so far. There’s a sort of innocence and obliviousness to the hive that makes its members somewhat charming and pitiable despite the whole “taking over the planet” thing. The scene in which a pack of wild wolves breaks into Carol’s yard, attempting to dig up and eat the recently buried corpse of her beloved partner, Helen (Miriam Shor), seems to line up with this. The wolves weren’t doing what they did out of malice, they were simply following a biological imperative. If the hivemind is eating people, I think it’s doing it for the same reason as the wolves. (After all, mantises do this in real life.)
We’ve already seen the hive consolidating resources (which, as they explained to Carol, was why her local grocery store’s shelves had been emptied). Zosia (Karolina Wydra) also explained in episode 2 that the hivemind “prefers to eat vegetarian,” but didn’t say that they strictly eat vegetarian. Maybe the human-consuming is a result of the hivemind having unique nutritional requirements, or some other special biological circumstance that requires the occasional, mostly harmless act of cannibalism. What if, like the wolves, this is just nature attempting to take its course? Not some cosmic punishment, not some evil, human-eating society, just the food chain doing its thing.
I might be completely off-base, but I can’t help but this comes to pass: then Pluribus is starting to ask a much more interesting question than “How do I stop the bad guys?” Carol keeps asking it, understandably, but it seems like Vince Gilligan is far more concerned with encouraging viewers to question whether these “bad guys” are even bad, or if anyone should try to stop them in the first place. The entire concept of the show — a mysterious force politely taking over the planet — toys with typical expectations of dystopian fiction. Is it really a dystopia if your overlords are really nice, let you do whatever you want, and didn’t really take over the world on purpose anyway?
Whatever was under that plastic in the freezer room, we know it’s awful enough to leave even Carol shaking, and at this point, she has really seen some shit. If Carol’s freaking out, so am I. No matter how innocent wolves may appear, they can still pose a danger to humans.
