This article contains spoilers for “More” season 1, episode 6
The cliffhanger at the end of season 1 of “Pluribus”, episode 5 (“Got Milk”) teased it, and this week confirms it: the liquid in the Others’ milk cartons is people. Well, in part, at least. The huge discovery at the end of Carol Sturka’s (the superb Rhea Seehorn) admittedly clever detective work is a gigantic walk-in cold room where chopped up human bits wait to become ingredients for a nutritious mulch, distributed to members of the hive mind in convenient milk cartons.
As /Film’s Devin Meenan pointed out, the show’s hive-minded “pod people,” Others, make Pluribus seem like a secret remake of the sci-fi classic “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.” The revelation that the hive mind added human remains to its diet is a nod to another great old-school sci-fi film, “Soylent Green” (1973). Set in the distant future of, er, 2022, Richard Fleischer’s film stars Charlton Heston as Robert Thorn, a detective whose investigations lead him to the horrific truth behind the film’s corporate-controlled dystopia: Soylent Green, the supposedly plankton-based food that’s fast becoming humanity’s favorite source of nutrition, is actually made from human remains.
The desperate “Soylent Green, it’s the people!” of Heston. remains one of the most iconic lines in science fiction, and Carol certainly treats the discovery with the same severity. Unbeknownst to her, of course, all the immune people who actually communicate with the Others already know about the situation, and it’s not as worrying as it seems… but the fact that Carol ends up taking the wind out of her sails doesn’t make the initial reveal and obvious homage of “Soylent Green” any less effective.
The Others are what they eat, but they don’t particularly like it
To their credit, the Others aren’t particularly happy to feed on their dead either. As hive mind member John Cena’s handy how-to video highlights, they find the situation just as unpleasant as Koumba Diabaté (Samba Schutte) and Carol, and use the corpses as a single ingredient in their cardboard-packaged nutritional smoothies instead of going full-on cannibalistic.
Yet beggars cannot choose. Despite the Others’ extreme aversion to killing animals and plants, they need to find sustenance somewhere. Since they’re effectively reduced to food and people keep dying anyway – and, thanks to the massive losses of “Joining” the hive mind and Carol’s subsequent contributions that made her Vince Gilligan’s most dangerous protagonist, have done so at a particularly massive rate in recent times – it makes a dark sense to put their leftovers to good use in a situation where food supplies can’t easily be replenished.
The issue of diminishing resources also raises interesting questions about the future of humanity. Unless a solution emerges, the world will eventually be faced with a situation where it will discover for itself whether a hive mind made up of billions of people, virtually all of whose members are slowly starving to death, can still be as benevolent as it currently appears to be. After all, the Others have already shown some displeasure with Carol by looking at her and eventually avoiding her altogether after she tried too hard to figure out how to “fix” them in Episode 4 (“Please, Carol”), so they can feeling things that are not just pure happiness. It remains to be seen how happy their new brain chemistry can make them if they are all hungry enough.
“More” is streaming on Apple TV.
