Hello and welcome to Autostraddle’s Pluribus Episode 5 Recap. I’m your host Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya, and first off I just want to apologize for the lateness of this recap! Apple TV dropped this episode a couple days early, which threw me off guard, and then there was the holiday and the fact that I ran my first road race ever (yes, just a 5K Turkey Trot, but as someone who used to lie about having my period to get out of running the middle school mile, this was a personal feat!). So alas, I’m serving up this recap a little late, but here we are! As a reminder, you can find beat-by-beat recaps of this series so many places around the internet. My recaps offer something else: a deep dive on just a couple moments or on the overall themes of the episode or just what it got me thinking about while watching. Additional topics for conversation are listed at the end, and I hope you’ll join me in the comments to chat!

In the fifth episode of Pluribus, “Got Milk”, the hive abandons Carol to take some needed space after she made them all collectively cry at the end of last episode. They leave Albuquerque and set a voicemail message for Carol’s helpline noting she can call if she needs anything and that their feelings about her have not changed. When Carol does need things taken care of, they send a drone to do it, the limitations of the technology on comedic display. (I am someone who cheers every time I see someone’s drone crash, so I was quite delighted by this.)

And in her quest to learn more about the hive in order to undo it, Carol makes an important discovery: They’re all drinking some mystery liquid out of milk cartons.

My first thought was that the hive has tried to “optimize” food intake, one of the many tenets of the scientifically dubious trend known as “biohacking.” Tech bros and wealthy men are obsessed with biohacking, an attempt to live longer — forever! — and lower one’s biological age. Intermittent fasting, bulletproof coffee, keto, “dopamine fasting” — there are all sorts of strategies (many of them easily falling into disordered eating territory) these biohackers employ to supposedly maximize their health and streamline food, which becomes purely “fuel.” And while it’s super normalized and popular among millionaires and billionaires, “biohacking” is also alarmingly prevalent across many corners of social media.

The hive in Pluribus often claims to prioritize efficiency, supposedly “optimizing” the human experience (and, in turn, taking all humanity out of it). Fueling with a mysterious goo feels like yet another extension of that. They’ve taken the literal flavor out of life. This is again the harrowing “promise” of AI, big tech, etc.: that we will live streamlined, efficient, frictionless lives. But drones can’t effectively replace sanitation workers without running into poles. And amber goo in a milk carton can fuel, but it cannot satisfy.

My second thought was: Soylent Green.

Soylent Green is a 1973 science-fiction apocalypse movie that is best known for its twist but is also interesting for reasons beyond it. It’s set in a dystopian world where overpopulation and ecological collapse has fractured society and made humans reliant on one company’s — the Soylent Corporation — processed foods, like the titular wafer allegedly made from plankton. If you haven’t seen Soylent Green, I’m about to spoil it, so stop reading if you don’t want to know its famous twist.

In what clocks in at #77 on AFI’s 100 Greatest Movie Quotes of all Time list, the twist of the 1973 film is succinctly conveyed with the line: “Soylent Green is people!” Yes, the wafers are made from human remains. There are several indicators that Pluribus is headed toward the same twist.

For starters, Carol’s reaction to whatever she discovers at the factory at the end of the episode is such abject horror that I can’t think of anything else that would elicit such an extreme response from her. The wolves trying to dig up Helen’s remains throughout the episode also hints at this possibility, the idea that human corpses could be being used as food (or, more accurately, fuel). We know many people died during the initial joining and then again when Carol put the hive on the fritz twice. And the hive sure was meticulous about collecting and moving those dead bodies. Where were they taking them? We never saw them digging mass graves. In fact, we saw them loading bodies onto…delivery trucks.

I’m not the first to point out these potential parallels with Soylent Green. It feels obvious to the point that even Drew Burnett Gregory, who has not seen the film herself, texted our group chat to say she, too, could see where this is going. That’s what I love about series like Pluribus though; they’re not trying to be overly complicated puzzleboxes with twists for the sake of twists. Pluribus isn’t being tricky or manipulative in its storytelling. Lesser shows mistake those qualities for complexity.

But now, to bring it back to the biohacking element: I often think it’s only a matter of time before the ultra wealthy decide the best way to try to live forever is, actually, to consume human flesh. I’m not joking! The most famous tech CEO biohacker Bryan Johnson used his teenage son’s blood and plasma in a grab for longevity. What comes next after receiving blood plasma transfusions from your son, especially after it didn’t do anything? Well, eating him of course.

Soylent, one of the more mainstream “meal replacement” (it’s not) drink that was once popular among tech bros, literally lifted its name from Soylent Green and the novel the film was loosely based on, seemingly without any real sense of humor about the naming decision. Yep, they named their company and product after fictional cannibal crackers, and we all just accepted that.

If the hive is slurping human remains out of their milk cartons, no doubt Carol’s accusations will be met with their smiling faces explaining calmly that they were already dead anyway and that this is merely logical and productive way to dispose of their bodies while also fueling their own. The hive, like the people obsessed with immortality and optimization in our real world, thinks of life only in terms of productivity and efficiency. It’s a joyless, robotic life. Biohacking is pushed as a way to increase productivity and focus in workplaces. Indeed, attempts to streamline the human process of eating food are largely to make people available to work more. It’s not about caring for our health and bodies — or about creative solutions to hunger problems throughout the world, for that matter — but rather about reducing life’s pleasures into soulless systems so that we can either live forever (in the case of the ultra wealthy) or work forever (in the case of the rest of us).

But at what point does “biohacking” become an attempt to force our bodies to be machines? I think Pluribus shows the nightmarish places this way of thinking can lead to. Even without confirmation yet, I think we all know what’s in those milk cartons.

More things to discuss in the comments:

• I guess we’ll have to wait until next week to confirm the cannibalism. Does anyone have alternate theories?
• I really wanted to make the headline of this recap The Milk Is People but feared it was too big of a spoiler.
• I love so many of the details of Carol’s home, like that she has a bottle of Writers’ Tears whiskey, which is something just about every writer who drinks has received as a gift at some point.
• Also, the book on her nightstand is And Then There Were None, the Agatha Christie novel which in my opinion also invented the slasher formula. I’m trying not to read TOO much into potential significance of the book for the show, but it does famously hinge on someone actually being alive who was presumed to be dead.
• How do we think the other immune survivors will react to Carol’s revelation if the hive is indeed eating people? Wouldn’t Lakshmi presumably know if her son is drinking human juice? Maybe the others will think this is yet another necessary and acceptable discomfort in their surface-level comfortable new lives.

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