If the letters “HDP” send chills down your spine now, you’ve come to the right place. In Pluribus episode 6 (titled “HDP”), protagonist Carol (Rhea Seehorn) makes a disturbing discovery, which leads to an even more bizarre revelation.
This is the wildest episode of Pluribus since the series premiere, and there is so much to discuss. Thankfully, we were able to take our questions straight to the source: series creator Vince Gilligan. Here’s what he had to say about H.D.P. and everything else that happens in Pluribus episode 6.
[Ed. note: Full spoilers for Pluribus episode 6 below.]
OK, so what happens in Pluribus episode 6?
To answer that question, we have to go back a little further. In Episode 5, after the hivemind abandons Carol, she starts investigating why they seem to love drinking milk. While exploring a nearby dairy factory, she discovers something horrible: the hivemind is eating people. Specifically, the factory is full of dead human bodies, which are apparently being ground up and turned into a liquid that’s packaged in little milk boxes.
Maybe we should have seen this coming. After all, Gilligan pointed to The Twilight Zone as inspiration for Pluribus, and the science fiction anthology show notably explored the theme of human-eating-aliens in the famous episode “To Serve Man.” And yet, just like the rest of us, Seehorn was shocked to discover that the hivemind was eating people. “This is bananas,” she recalls thinking when she first read the script. However, once the idea began to settle, she decided it’s just another example of Gilligan’s brilliance.
“It’s another trope he’s playing with from horror movies and apocalyptic movies and body-snatcher movies,” Seehorn tells Polygon, “but it’s also this awesome storytelling device.”
Right at the point where audiences may be ready to side with the hivemind, this reveal pushes us in the opposite direction.
“You’re just starting to be on the edge of thinking, Maybe Carol should relax. She’s kind of being a pain in the ass about not a big deal,” Seehorn says. “But now it’s like, Wait, Carol might have a point that she really should figure out what the hell is going on.”
Human Derived Protein and John Cena
Once again, Carol’s seemingly rightful indignation is quickly nullified by the nuances of Pluribus. After recording a video where she shares this information with the other survivors, she drives to Las Vegas to see one of them in person: Koumba Diabaté (Our Flag Means Death’s Samba Schutte).
Carol tells Koumba her big news, and he seems weirdly unconcerned. Not only does he already know the hivemind is eating humans, he’s actually got a video that explains why. And it stars John Cena (or, at least, the hivemind-controlled version of John Cena), who calmly explains why they have no choice but to eat every scrap of available food — including any human corpses lying around. They’ve even come up with a clever name for this product: Human Derived Protein.
“This did seem like the lawyerly way for them to put it,” Gilligan tells Polygon. “It was a little more palatable — no pun intended — when you market it that way.”
As for why the hivemind is eating Human Derived Protein, here’s Gilligan again, to explain how he and his writers came up with the idea in the first place:
It was something we came up with in the writers room. I’ve got these really brilliant writers, and we all sit around for hours on end, and we discuss. It seemed self-evident at a certain point that, if you presuppose a world in which these people are so peaceful that they will not kill, that means they have to be vegetarians. But wait, maybe it’s more than that, because if you’ve got to take it to the nth degree, that means you can’t lop down a field full of corn. You can’t even be a vegetarian. You’ve gotta eat pre-existing food.
And as John Cena explains, if an apple falls off a tree, you can eat it, — gratefully, as he says — but you can’t get one of those machines to shake all the almonds off, or all the apples off, or whatever. You can no longer cultivate vegetables, because you’d be killing them to a certain extent as well. And even if you’re not killing them, if you’re shaking the fruit off the tree, you are defying their agency as living beings.
I mean, these people are hippy-dippy to the nth degree. They’re beyond Jainists. So then you think, OK, so they’ve got to eat human flesh. They don’t kill to obtain it. It’s like roadkill or dead animals that died of their own accord, of old age or whatever; same goes with people.
And if you’re wondering why Cena was chosen to deliver the news, the answer seems to be: Why not?
“Who better to explain this than John Cena?” Gilligan says. It seemed like such an oddball thing, but he was game, God bless him, and he did a great job. He did this thing in like, three takes flat. And as you can see, it’s very dense dialogue. It’s pages and pages of dense dialogue explaining why they do the things they do. Because he’s trying to very gently explain to Carol, We know this is upsetting. Would we do this if given our druthers? Would we choose to do this? No! It wouldn’t be our first choice. But we can’t kill, so we’re kind of in a box here. It just seemed like it’d be funny if it was John Cena.”
Pluribus episodes 1-6 are streaming now on Apple TV. New episodes release weekly each Friday.
