Pluribus may have just confirmed a chilling connection to the 1973 dystopian film Soylent Green. The new Apple TV+ series, from Breaking Bad's Vince Gilligan, stars Rhea Seehorn as Carol Sturka, one of the few unaffected survivors on the planet after an alien virus has turned the rest of humanity into a hive mind. Throughout Pluribus, Carol has been searching for the truth about the Others, and a discovery in Episode 5 could change everything.
Warning: This article contains spoilers for Pluribus Episode 5.
In the latest Pluribus episode (which received a last-minute early premiere), Carol finds herself alone in Albuquerque after the Others vacate the town following her attempt to poison Zosia with truth serum. This gives Seehorn's character a chance to look around the city, and she soon finds a collection of oddly uniform milk cartons in every recycle bin around town.
Tracking these cartons back to the dairy factory, Carol finds that the Others have been producing and consuming a strange amber-like liquid, which is derived from large bags of an unknown powdered substance. After investigating it further, she finds the substance has no prominent smell and a neutral pH balance.
The clues eventually lead Carol to a food packing plant where she enters a refrigeration room filled with tarp-covered shelves. Carol lifts one of the tarps and then recoils in shock, but the reveal of what is underneath is being saved for Pluribus Episode 6. That hasn't stopped fans from coming up with their own theories, and one of the most prevalent is that Pluribus has orchestrated its own version of Soylent Green.
What Is Soylent Green's Meaning In Pluribus?
While Soylent Green is never explicitly mentioned throughout Pluribus, the direction of the Apple TV+ show seems to be heading in a similar direction to the 1973 film.
In Richard Fleischer's dystopian classic, the world is depicted as being overpopulated and under-resourced, with key materials like water and food only available to the rich. The rest of the population survives on biscuits known as Soylent Red or Soylent Yellow, until the Soylent Corporation releases a new line, Soylent Green, which is supposedly derived from sea plankton.
After NYPD Detective Robert Thorn (Charlton Heston) begins an investigation into the Soylent Corporation to solve a murder among their ranks, he comes across the truth about Soylent Green. As it turns out, the Soylent Corporation has been using human corpses to create its new product, processing them into food for the humans that remain.
This twist has become one of the most memorable in cinematic history, and now fans are suspecting that Pluribus will follow a similar path to Soylent Green.
Is Soylent Green Really People? Or Just Food?
For a while, the fictional Soylent Corporation was able to fool the population into believing Soylent Green was just another variant of its nutritious biscuits. However, after Roth (Edward G. Robinson) does some investigating, he learns that the oceans have been declining at a rate that would render it impossible for the company to produce enough plankton to sustain Soylent Green. Thus, he uncovers the true ingredient: the Soylent Corporation has been processing and manufacturing people into an edible cracker.
While it's a chilling truth, stances on whether or not Soylent Green is a bad thing fluctuate. In the film Soylent Green, the truth incites revolution, but in reality, it's possible to see how the idea of turning human corpses into food could actually be an efficient process. Humans, after all, are animals and are capable of providing a similar amount of nutritional value as livestock.
Even in the film, the Soylent Green biscuits are proven to be a promising and nutritious source of food. In a world that suffers from overpopulation to the extent that the one in Soylent Green does, turning the remains of humans into a resource, rather than wasting them, seems like an efficient strategy. The real evil lies in the company's deception about what's in Soylent Green, forcing the population to unknowingly feed on their own.
Are the Others in Pluribus Eating People?
While audiences will have to wait until Episode 6 to see whether Pluribus is pulling its own Soylent Green twist, several pieces of evidence support this theory.
When the hive mind virus took over Earth, it killed nearly a billion people in the process (including Carol's wife, Helen), but there has always been a question of what happened to the remains of these bodies.
In Episode 2, the Others are shown putting corpses into a refrigerated dairy truck. Then, in Episode 5, Carol discovers the Others' food being processed in a dairy factory, and she learns that they consume it from within cardboard milk cartons. In a show like Pluribus, where every connection matters, it seems like the show's choice of using a dairy truck for the corpses in Episode 2 was a foreshadowing of the Others' actual plan.
Along with this connection, it's been established in Pluribus that the Others cannot kill, but in this case, the humans are already dead. Additionally, the Others don't seem to like waste. It seems very plausible then that the hive mind would look at the massive quantity of already dead humans as a resource and find a way to turn them into an ongoing source of food, rather than bury them.
The idea of burying or cremating bodies is a very human process, often driven by grief. However, the Others have been stripped of many human emotions and instead seem to be driven by practical survival methods; therefore, they wouldn't see the ethical issues in eating human remains, they would see only a potential resource.
Further speculation about the physical appearance of the amber liquid and the powder that creates this liquid has led many fans to believe that these could be derived from human remains. Some suspect that the powder is processed bones and marrow, as these are highly nutritious and also share a similar pH score as the test Carol ran. Others suspect that it is powdered human plasma, as plasma has a similar color and appearance to the Others' milk.
Of course, there's also a chance that the mystery revealed under the tarp isn't human remains at all. Carol's slightly delayed reaction to seeing what's under the sheet has some convinced that human bodies would be too obvious a solution. Some theories speculate it's human body parts, rather than corpses, which could take Carol a split second longer to identify. Others think it might be pets under the tarps, which is another horrifying prospect. The answer will have to wait until Pluribus Episode 6 airs on December 5.
