This article contains spoilers for Pluribus episode 5.
In its first four episodes, Pluribus opened up a fascinating debate about whether Carol or the hivemind were in the right. With the RNA virus, there is now world peace, but at the expense of individuality. Is the trade-off worth it? Was it worth losing what makes us human in order to finally achieve peace on Earth? Personally, I’m on Carol’s side. Not only do I feel she’s fighting the good fight on behalf of humankind, but the way the show draws parallels between her queerness and the hivemind’s insistence on changing her has completely hooked me. Team Carol all the way.
With Pluribus‘ fifth episode, that debate has come to a close in my view. If my theory is right, then this is a big win for the Carol truthers and there can no longer be any doubt that she’s on the right side of history here.
The Theme of Death in Pluribus
Without a doubt, episode 5 is Pluribus‘ strongest thematic showing thus far. Everything in this episode served to build up to the reveal right at the end, and it worked, even without needing to see what the reveal actually was.
Things start off with Carol going on the offensive again as she tries to get to the bottom of things. She makes great progress here when she notices the milk cartons in the recycle bins before tracking them down to a dairy factory. However, we learn that the hivemind wasn’t actually producing milk in the factory. Instead, Carol finds a strange amber liquid that’s being deposited into the milk cartons. She comes to the conclusion that this strange liquid is what the hivemind consumes to sustain itself.
More importantly, Carol also learns that the liquid is made by mixing water with a white powder. In the factory, she finds sacks of the powder stacked up, with crows picking away at it in the storeroom. And that’s our first clue.
Later on in the episode, now that the hivemind has completely evacuated Albuquerque, the wolves start to encroach on Carol’s territory. Things get particularly bad when they attempt to dig up Helen’s corpse in Carol’s backyard, but Carol manages to fend them off with the police car.
To ensure that the wolves can’t get to Helen’s grave again, Carol takes the time to gather paving stones in town, set them over the grave site, and makes a small piece of decorative art to be placed on top of it. Before Carol can rest, though, it strikes her that the bag being used to hold the white powder looks similar to the food bags you might be able to buy from a supermarket.
Detective Carol strikes again when she goes down to her local Sprouts and actually manages to identify the exact same bag that’s being used for the powder. These bags were originally used for storing dog food, and a label on the bag leads her to another factory and storage area in town. This time, she finds a large freezer room in the factory where tons of similar bags have been stored. She looks through one of the bags, then leaps back in horror. The episode ends.
By this point, I didn’t even need to guess what Carol saw in the bag because the episode had done such a good job of setting it up. There’s always the outside chance that I’m wrong about this, but I’m 99% certain that human remains or bones were being stored in those bags. It would explain the white powder; it could be human bones getting crushed up and stored in there, to be mixed with water to create the liquid that the hivemind needs to survive.
From the crows to the wolves being a stand-in for the hivemind trying to get to Helen’s dead body, I’m fully convinced that “Soylent Green is people” and I’m looking forward to having that theory confirmed in next week’s episode.
Sentiment Versus Efficiency
The biggest takeaway from this episode, though, isn’t the fact that the hive people are eating dead bodies. I found it particularly poignant that Pluribus took the time to show us how Carol paid her respects to Helen and honored her memory. She fends off the wolves and risks her life to protect Helen’s grave, despite the wolves simply trying to get to her dead body out of a need for food and self-preservation. Carol stacks the stones to protect the grave before making a piece of art to put on display on the grave, as compared to the hivemind, who eats their dead in order to function and continue their production line.
Humans are driven by emotion and sentiment, whereas the hivemind is driven by productivity, efficiency, functionality. This, to me, signifies that the hive people are no longer human. Despite the hivemind’s claims of being an elevated being where all minds can share their consciousness and individuality, Pluribus‘ fifth episode proves that once you join them, you lose everything that makes you human. At this point, it’s not even about individuality anymore. It’s about trying to preserve your own humanity.
While people like Koumba can celebrate world peace and enjoy life to the fullest now that everyone’s part of a collective consciousness, it’s Carol who really has the right idea going into this. Joining the hive simply means, as Carol put it, that you’d be a traitor to humanity.
Pluribus is now available for streaming on Apple TV.
