{"id":160336,"date":"2025-11-30T07:27:09","date_gmt":"2025-11-30T07:27:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/160336\/"},"modified":"2025-11-30T07:27:09","modified_gmt":"2025-11-30T07:27:09","slug":"pluribus-episode-5-recap-the-horrors-of-biohacking","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/160336\/","title":{"rendered":"Pluribus Episode 5 Recap: The Horrors of Biohacking"},"content":{"rendered":"

Hello and welcome to Autostraddle\u2019s Pluribus<\/a> Episode 5 Recap. I\u2019m 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\u2019m 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\u2019ll join me in the comments to chat! Also this feels obvious, but the following contains spoilers for\u00a0Pluribus\u00a0episode five.<\/p>\n

In the fifth episode of Pluribus, \u201cGot Milk\u201d, 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\u2019s 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\u2019s drone crash, so I was quite delighted by this.)<\/p>\n

And in her quest to learn more about the hive in order to undo it, Carol makes an important discovery: They\u2019re all drinking some mystery liquid out of milk cartons.<\/p>\n

My first thought was that the hive has tried to \u201coptimize\u201d food intake, one of the many tenets of the scientifically dubious trend known as \u201cbiohacking.\u201d Tech bros and wealthy men are obsessed with biohacking<\/a>, an attempt to live longer \u2014 forever! \u2014 and lower one\u2019s biological age.\u00a0Intermittent fasting, bulletproof coffee, keto, \u201cdopamine fasting<\/a>\u201d \u2014 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 \u201cfuel.\u201d And while it\u2019s super normalized and popular among millionaires and billionaires<\/a>, \u201cbiohacking\u201d is also alarmingly prevalent<\/a> across many corners of social media.<\/p>\n

The hive in\u00a0Pluribus\u00a0often claims to prioritize efficiency, supposedly \u201coptimizing\u201d 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\u2019ve taken the literal flavor out of life. This is again the harrowing \u201cpromise\u201d of AI, big tech, etc.: that we will live streamlined, efficient, frictionless lives. But drones can\u2019t effectively replace sanitation workers without running into poles. And amber goo in a milk carton can fuel, but it cannot satisfy.<\/p>\n

My second thought was:\u00a0Soylent Green.<\/p>\n

Soylent Green\u00a0is a 1973 science-fiction apocalypse movie that is best known for its twist but is also interesting for reasons beyond it. It\u2019s set in a dystopian world where overpopulation and ecological collapse has fractured society and made humans reliant on one company\u2019s \u2014 the Soylent Corporation \u2014 processed foods, like the titular wafer allegedly made from plankton. If you haven\u2019t seen\u00a0Soylent Green, I\u2019m about to spoil it, so stop reading if you don\u2019t want to know its famous twist.<\/p>\n

In what clocks in at #77 on AFI\u2019s 100 Greatest Movie Quotes of all Time<\/a> list, the twist of the 1973 film is succinctly conveyed with the line: \u201cSoylent Green is people!\u201d Yes, the wafers are made from human remains. There are several indicators that\u00a0Pluribus\u00a0is headed toward the same twist.<\/p>\n

For starters, Carol\u2019s reaction to whatever she discovers at the factory at the end of the episode is such abject horror that I can\u2019t think of anything else that would elicit such an extreme response from her. The wolves trying to dig up Helen\u2019s remains throughout the episode also hints at this possibility, the idea that human corpses could be being used as food (or, more accurately,\u00a0fuel). 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\u2026delivery trucks.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not the first to point out these potential parallels with Soylent Green.\u00a0It 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\u2019s what I love about series like\u00a0Pluribus\u00a0though; they\u2019re not trying to be overly complicated puzzleboxes with twists for the sake of twists.\u00a0Pluribus\u00a0isn\u2019t being tricky or manipulative in its storytelling. Lesser shows mistake those qualities for complexity.<\/p>\n

But now, to bring it back to the biohacking element:\u00a0I often think it\u2019s 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\u2019m not joking! The most famous tech CEO biohacker Bryan Johnson used his teenage son\u2019s blood and plasma<\/a> in a grab for longevity. What comes next after receiving blood plasma transfusions from your son, especially after it didn\u2019t do anything<\/a>? Well, eating him of course.<\/p>\n

Soylent, one of the more mainstream \u201cmeal replacement\u201d (it\u2019s not) drink that was once popular among tech bros, literally lifted its name from Soylent Green\u00a0and 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.<\/p>\n

If the hive is slurping human remains out of their milk cartons, no doubt Carol\u2019s 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\u2019s a joyless, robotic life. Biohacking is pushed as a way to increase productivity and focus in workplaces<\/a>. Indeed, attempts to streamline the human process of eating food are largely to make people available to work more. It\u2019s not about caring for our health and bodies \u2014 or about creative solutions to hunger problems throughout the world, for that matter \u2014 but rather about reducing life\u2019s 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).<\/p>\n

But at what point does \u201cbiohacking\u201d become an attempt to force our bodies to be machines? I think\u00a0Pluribus\u00a0shows the nightmarish places this way of thinking can lead to. Even without confirmation yet, I think we all know what\u2019s in those milk cartons.<\/p>\n

More things to discuss in the comments:<\/p>\n

I guess we\u2019ll have to wait until next week to confirm the cannibalism. Does anyone have alternate theories?
\nI really wanted to make the headline of this recap The Milk Is People but feared it was too big of a spoiler.
\nI love so many of the details of Carol\u2019s home, like that she has a bottle of Writers\u2019 Tears whiskey, which is something just about every writer who drinks has received as a gift at some point.
\nAlso, the book on her nightstand is\u00a0And Then There Were None, the Agatha Christie novel which in my opinion also invented the slasher formula. I\u2019m 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.
\nHow do we think the other immune survivors will react to Carol\u2019s revelation if the hive is indeed eating people? Wouldn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

\t\t<\/p>\n

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Join AF+!<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Hello and welcome to Autostraddle\u2019s Pluribus Episode 5 Recap. I\u2019m your host Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya, and first off…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":160337,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[146,85,46,68266,411],"class_list":["post-160336","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tv","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-pluribus","tag-tv"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/160336","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=160336"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/160336\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/160337"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=160336"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=160336"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=160336"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}