Here is your Pluribus episode 6 recap, which yes, contains spoilers obviously for episode six, so if you haven’t watched yet, go do that and then come back! If you’re looking for a scene-by-scene breakdown of the episode, you won’t find that here, but you will find it plenty of other places around the world wide web. Instead, my recaps delve into one or two particular moments, threads, or themes from the episode that stood out to me. The final section includes some further conversation points. Let’s discuss in the comments!

In “HDP”, Carol drives to Las Vegas to pay a little visit to her fellow survivor Koumba Diabaté, who is living his wildest fantasies in the land of artifice and hedonism. I found myself interested in some of the reference points for this episode of Pluribus. It nods to Soylent Green as expected after last week’s cliffhanger, with John Cena — playing a hive-minded John Cena — confirming that indeed the hive is consuming Human Derived Protein in order to survive, as they cannot interfere with any living thing, which extends even to plants.

The Las Vegas of it all also seems to nod toward Stephen King’s The Stand, an end-of-the-world epic novel I’ve been reminded of throughout Pluribus, but especially in the pilot and in this episode. Las Vegas plays a significant role in The Stand, becoming the stomping grounds of the novel’s primary villain and an epicenter for the worst case scenario of the apocalypse, a place where the old punitive and stratified systems of before become even more pronounced, sinister, violent. I don’t think that’s exactly what we’re seeing in Pluribus, and I don’t even think Diabaté is necessarily positioned to be the Randall Flagg of this series, which feels more gray-toned in its rendering of good vs. evil than the more black-and-white story of The Stand (to be fair, the novel explores morally gray territory, too, though its adaptations tend to really stick to the black-and-whiteness).

Beyond confirmed cannibalism, this episode of Pluribus also channels another element of Soylent Green when it comes to the ways Diabaté uses members of the hive for his sexual satisfaction. In Soylent Green, the sexual subjugation of certain women is normalized across class lines. In the 1973 film, these women are quite literally called “furniture” and treated as such. In Pluribus, Diabaté fills his artificial Vegas life with sex and merriment, always surrounded by his chosen entourage of women. The question of consent is, of course, complicated in Pluribus by the strange nature of the virus and the fact that these women are no longer the individuals they once were. It would be not quite right to draw a direct parallel between them and the women in Soylent Green, whose motivations are rooted in survival, and certainly they differ from sex workers who have agency and who perform these roles as parts of their literal job. No, the hive women in Diabaté’s entourage — and, in fact, all of the hive members who help him enact his fantasies — are more akin to AI companions.

Shocker, I know. Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya is writing about the parallels between the proliferation of AI and Pluribus again.

We first encounter Koumba Diabaté in this episode in a lavish sequence full of old-school glam, gambling, girls in sparkles and guys in sharply tailored suits, the French language. Diabaté is at the high-roller table, playing a risky hand in poker against a formidable foe. Only, there’s no risk at all. It’s all a farce, a fantasy cooked up by Diabaté who has convinced members of the hive to play along, dress up, stay in character so that he can live out this casino cliché. When his poker opponent doesn’t have a big enough reaction to losing the hand after going all in, Diabaté reminds him to stay in character, and he immediately hits a glass in performed anger. To Diabaté, it doesn’t matter that this is all fake and all for his carefully constructed satisfaction. He’s getting what he wants.

It would be easy to make fun of or laugh at Diabaté in these moments of delusion. It is absurd the lengths to which he has gone to make this all happen. The hive cannot read minds, so did he sit down with a group of them and explain everything he wanted in detail so that they could follow suit? Choreographing everything down to each hand of the poker game? Pluribus, though, does not end this scene on a comedic note though. It ends with Diabaté leaving with some of his chosen women and then three members of the hive bending down to clean up the glass left behind from the faked outburst after the poker game, those creepy slight smiles we’ve become accustomed to seeing on the show plastered on their dutiful faces. It isn’t funny; it’s unsettling. And in general while watching Diabaté move through the new world in this episode, I didn’t feel like making fun of him. I just felt sad.

A recent article in The Cut explores the growing popularity of AI boyfriends and girlfriends (and does so with a lot of empathy for the people in these relationships, which I think ironically adds a lot of humanity to the piece). Many people in these romantic relationships with chatbots become convinced the machines are “real” and sentient. OpenAI has attempted to mitigate the issue of users developing unhealthy emotional dependency on AI companions via an update that attempts to flag instances of user distress. But the damage was already done, and sudden “rejections” — as they were perceived — from their chatbots sent some users into even more emotional distress; others migrated their chatbots to more DIY platforms. OpenAI responded to ongoing complaints about the update by re-releasing a version closer to the previous iteration that paying users could access. Any attempts to walk back usage of its platform for developing human/AI relationships were quickly undercut by Sam Altman’s announcement that ChatGPT would soon be able to sext with verified adults.

Research and a better understanding of why AI is causing some users to experience psychosis and extended mental breakdowns has only just begun and is struggling to catch up to the breakneck speed of AI becoming more used and more normalized. People have already killed themselves after developing a dependency on chatbots. It all makes me very scared and very sad. Whereas my instinct is to critique and even shame frequent users of AI when it comes to tasks like writing, problem solving, and organizing and generating ideas when people can just use their human brains and nurture creativity and challenging mental activity instead of just taking shortcuts that are destroying the planet and our abilities to think for ourselves, when it comes to these users of AI chatbots for companionship, my feelings become more mixed, more complicated, especially when it comes to young and impressionable users. Like the unregulate,  manipulative, and intentionally addictive design of social media, when it comes to these chatbots, we should be loudly critical of the platforms themselves, which do next to nothing to guardrail against the harm they cause.

Something about the 2025 horror film Companion didn’t sit quite right with me. In it, Sophie Thatcher plays Iris, a lifelike AI companion, who performs her programmed role as girlfriend to an asshole named Josh. The film makes a villain out of Josh and a hero out of Sophie. It’s a compelling horror film, and Thatcher’s brilliant performance aids in the film’s intention of getting you to root for a robot. What’s missing — though occasionally hinted at — from the film is a more thorough exploration and indictment of Iris’s makers, Empathix, the robotics company that makes products like Iris, a company that profits off of its promise of uncomplicated, completely controlled companionship. In the end, it feels as if we are supposed to believe Iris is, if not real exactly, something we should care about and empathize with as if she were, rooting for her to achieve final girl status, playing into the idea that robots can be just like people, too. And if you ask me, that’s not what AI horror should be doing.

I suppose I’ve drifted kind of far from Pluribus. All of this to say: I see Diabaté as neither villain nor innocent victim in this episode of Pluribus, but I do think the episode taps into the very real horrors of what it would look like to normalize this kind of companionship and fantasy-fulfillment that AI and other technologies like virtual reality promise. Diabaté has not reached full on psychosis, but he’s living in a realm of delusion, playing god. In real life, prolonged interactions with chatbots made a man believe he was a real superhero. How long before this mirage, all this perceived power corrupts Diabaté to a point of no return? Chatbots are programmed to tell users what they want to hear, and similarly, the hive is biologically programmed to make Diabaté happy and will adjust their behavior accordingly, all to serve this prime objective. I fear its for this reason he does not wish to consent to the joining (another reveal in the episode is that the hive needs express permission in order to collect individual’s stem cells in order to complete the process) rather than a desire for individuality like Carol.

It all makes me want to know more about Diabaté and who he is. The most I’ve learned about him comes not from the show itself but from an Instagram post the actor Samba Schutte wrote about the character’s name. “We landed on the name Koumba Diabaté,” he writes. “Koumba is a female name, but in my culture a man takes on the name of his mother if she passes during childbirth, which we found fascinating for his backstory.”

I would love to know more about Diabaté’s life before the joining and if there’s anything that would further contextualize his desire for this sham of a life he has constructed. There’s clear allure to the fantasy for Diabaté, and I’m not sure it’s as simple as hedonism at the end of the world. He seemingly doesn’t have anyone around him from his previous life, something he actually shares in common with Carol, who lost Helen and who doesn’t seem interested in reconnecting with any hive-minded versions of people she knew before the joining. Even without knowing much about him, there’s a deep loneliness to Diabaté’s need to surround himself with people, pleasure, and performance. AI promises to solve the problem of loneliness, but that in and of itself presents serious problems.

The fact of the matter is, we don’t know much about him, because Carol doesn’t ask much. I get it; I don’t think I’d like Diabaté either if I were in her shoes. But for a writer, Carol is somewhat incurious about the motivations and backstories of others (I do find this trait to be true of some writers) and assumes others should just think the same way as her. It’s no wonder she isn’t invited to the other survivors’ twice-a-week meetings.

I am, of course, rooting for Carol. I care about this character deeply, but especially because she is not beyond reproach. What I like about Pluribus is that it doesn’t use this episode to set up some sort of straightforward Carol vs. Diabaté narrative, which is where I thought we were initially headed when I saw we were in Las Vegas, The Stand plucking at my assumptions. I by no means think Diabaté’s use of the hive for sex and wish fulfilling is excusable, but more than anything, it saddens me. It’s sad to watch someone so lost in this kind of delusion, a delusion readily sold to us by tech and capitalism in general. So much of consumerism hinges on a false promise of luxury. This year’s Black Friday season seemed to last forever, and so many of the ads I was force-fed promised luxury on a budget, cheaply made materials sold as must-haves that’ll give you a better, fancier life. Diabaté and his elaborate games of make believe in Vegas represent this hollow promise.

In viral pandemic stories like that of Pluribus (and The Stand and Soylent Green and so many others in conversation with this show), characters so often circumvent the possibility of building a better world and instead lean into what they already know. Carol, too, will likely have to shed a lot of her ingrained beliefs and ways of thinking from the past and imagine something else entirely if she hopes to defeat the hive.

More things to discuss in the comments:

• Rhea Seehorn is acting her ASS OFF in every single episode WOW. I love how much time is spent with just her, no one for her to play off of, and yet she remains so compelling and funny even in those isolate moments.
• Samba Schutte’s performance is also part of the reason I don’t perceive Diabaté as some sort of one-note creepy villain; he lends a certain softness to the character that feels intentionally complicating.
• Small detail, but I love how we have to listen to the extended voicemail message every. single. fucking. time, so that it becomes as grating and tedious to us as it does to Carol. This show doesn’t want to take any shortcuts, and I appreciate that.
• On that note, something about the way the hive talks about needing space from Carol reminds me of the self-care templates that hinge on a misunderstanding of what emotional labor actually is. Another way in which the hive reminds me of AI: this templatizing/scripting of relationships.
• I NEED MORE HELEN FLASHBACKS 😫
• We get another sequence of Manousos Oviedo, the guy in Paraguay who is mighty distrustful of the hive and who might be Carol’s only hope for an ally. I’m looking forward to seeing where his journey is going, especially because of his flat our refusal to accept help from the hive. Biggest laugh of the episode was definitely him blowing off his hive-minded mother by saying his actual mother was bitch.
• Okay but also where is he driving? He can’t make it all the way to the States in that car?
• I love the opening sequence of the episode, with the camera waiting outside for Carol to come out and fully react to what she just saw.
• The John Cena cameo delighted me on several levels; the whole time I’ve been watching, I’ve been like “what about the celebs who are hive-minded now!” On that note, the mayor of Albuquerque from a couple episodes back was the real mayor of Albuquerque.

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