The installment titled “Got Milk?” closes on a chilling beat: Carol (Rhea Seehorn) discovers something dreadful in a frozen storage area once maintained by the hivemind in her abandoned Albuquerque neighborhood. The scene with the plastic-wrapped object is withheld from viewers, but Carol’s visceral reaction makes clear that what she found is deeply disturbing.
It’s hard not to recall Soylent Green — the 1973 dystopia whose infamous twist reveals the population’s staple food is made from humans. That comparison (yellow instead of green, perhaps) is an instinctive one when you see a fridge full of mysterious rations and a protagonist recoiling in horror.
That said, the hivemind on Pluribus has been characterized as essentially harmless in intent. If the hive does consume human remains, it’s worth considering that this might involve bodies that were already deceased — either before the hivemind’s arrival or as a consequence of other events, including whatever lethal effect Carol’s anger sometimes appears to trigger. The hivemind’s approach so far reads like pragmatic resource management rather than calculated cruelty: if something is available and not being used, why let it go to waste?
Photo: AppleViewed through that lens, any human consumption by the hivemind might be analogous to scavengers or predators in nature — an instinctive, nonmalicious act to use available nourishment, not an ethically motivated campaign of slaughter. The sequence where wolves tear up the yard to reach Helen’s (Miriam Shor) shallow grave underscores this: the animals aren’t acting out of malice but following biological imperatives. Biological actors — from wolves to praying mantises — sometimes behave in ways humans find brutal but that are simply natural. (See the discussion of mantid cannibalism for a real-world parallel.)
We’ve also seen the hive systematically consolidate resources — an explanation it gave Carol for the emptied grocery shelves — and Zosia’s remark in episode 2 that the hivemind “prefers to eat vegetarian” suggests a general dietary leaning rather than an absolute rule. Perhaps rare consumption of human tissue reflects unusual nutritional needs or opportunistic behavior rather than ideological malevolence. In short: this might be the food chain doing what food chains do, not an emblem of pure, calculated evil.
That ambiguity is what makes Pluribus more intriguing than a straight-up “stop the villain” story. Carol’s instinct is to resist and to label the hive a threat, which is natural — but the show, under Vince Gilligan’s guidance, seems intent on complicating that binary. Rather than presenting an unequivocal dystopia, the series asks whether the hivemind’s takeover is categorically bad when its members are often benign, accommodating, and even inadvertently helpful. Is it still dystopia if your new rulers are pleasant, let you keep your agency, and didn’t set out to conquer the world?
No matter what explanation the writers ultimately offer, the reveal in that freezer was potent enough to unnerve Carol, and given all she’s already endured, that’s a strong indicator of how awful whatever lay beneath the plastic must have been. If Carol’s shaken, the audience should be, too — charm and innocence don’t eliminate danger.
Source: Polygon
