This week’s Pluribus takes us to the fabulous city of Las Vegas, where Carol is the guest of Mr. Koumba Diabaté, who currently lives in the Verona Sky Villa on the 30th floor of the Westgate Hotel. His penthouse suite is filled with happy revelers—drinking, laughing, dancing, gambling, and speaking in French. Koumba himself playacts as an international man of mystery, wooing ladies with his suave style and poker skills. You’ll want to stick close to Mr. Diabaté, though, because whenever he’s not in the room? His guests are a lot less fun.
Throughout this Pluribus season, we’ve only seen the Joined in their natural state a few times. In episode one, as the takeover spread, we saw them behaving robotically, unconcerned with how they might appear to anyone not in the collective. In last week’s outing, when Carol was asleep, we saw them silently pack up and move out of Albuquerque. And in this week’s “HDP,” they become eerily silent and begin joylessly cleaning up the Verona Sky Villa when their host is gone.
This is the point that Carol keeps trying to make to her fellow un-infected. Even though she’s never really seen the Joined in their natural state (except a little bit, on that first horrifying night), and although the collective keeps insisting they’re “not aliens,” Carol can tell there’s something wrong here. These parasites aren’t who they’re pretending to be.
As “HDP” begins, Carol thinks she’s found her smoking gun to prove once and for all to the remaining human humans that they should be fighting against this invasion rather than treating their new lives as one long bachelor-party weekend. Last week’s “Got Milk” ended with a gasp, as Carol discovered something shocking at the Agri-Jet pet food plant. This week begins with her documenting what she saw: human corpses, cut up into parts and preserved in freezers, plus a room containing “a meat-grinder the size of a bus” alongside huge cooking vats.
This opening sequence is a fine example of how Pluribus finds the intersection between absurdist comedy and science-fiction/horror. The blueish glow from Carol’s flashlight, seen through an ajar door from the outside of Agri-Jet, sets an eerie tone in the episode’s opening seconds. The show then goes full found-footage thriller, as Carol grabs her camera and heads back inside to capture the gruesome tableau. She considers calling for another drone to distribute her video but doesn’t trust the Joined with the delivery, so instead drives it straight to Vegas.
The style and the tone of Vegas scenes are just as remarkable. There’s a haunted quality to this mostly vacant city, where all the electronic casino marquees have messages welcoming Carol and where Koumba finds himself torn between wanting to be a gracious host and getting back as soon as possible to having his whims catered to. There’s a heartbreaking moment on Carol’s second day in Vegas in which she talks about finding her own suite at the Westgate, so that she and Koumba can keep kicking around ideas for what to do about the Joined. She then immediately says that she was just kidding after she sees how crestfallen he looks.
Even before that exchange, though, it’s clear that Carol and Koumba have different ideas regarding “what to do about the Joined.” When Carol comes charging into the Verona Sky Villa, she asks immediately for Koumba to direct her to a television, then has to wait while a screen slowly rises from a hidden cabinet. (Visual comedy is all about pacing and timing, which is why it’s so funny to see Carol impatiently watch the screen emerge before briefly struggling to find the HDMI connection.) Before she can even push play on her video, she’s surprised to learn two things: 1.) The Joined have, in fact, been distributing her other videos (which Koumba describes as “very well done…very dramatic”): and 2.) Everybody else already knows the aliens are eating people.
This episode’s credited writer Vera Blasi and director Gandja Monteiro handle the subsequent explanatory infodump in a fun way. Koumba pulls up a different video, in which the individual known as John Cena tells Carol what the Joined are up to, diet-wise. (“We’re John Cena and we’re here to address some questions you may be having about our food supply!”) The gist of the matter is that the collective’s “no kill” policy extends to plants, which means the only things their human vessels can consume are foodstuffs processed before the Joining or plants and animals that are already dead. Apples that have already fallen off a tree are a-okay. Ditto corpses.
Despite all of its revelations, “HDP” (named for the 8 to 12 percent of “human-derived protein” that goes into the alien’s “milk”) is a less eventful episode than the ones that immediately preceded it. It’s lacking a big “Carol executes a plan” sequence, like the ones that made “Please, Carol” and “Got Milk” such a joy. And for the first time, I think Vince Gilligan and his writers have handicapped themselves with their deliberate narrative pace. There’s something a bit off in the scene in this episode where Koumba admits to Carol that he and the non-Carol non-Joined have been having regular meetings without her. It’s been just a little over a week since they all met up in Bilbao. Frankly, that’s not enough time for anything like a routine to develop.
That said, it’s shattering to see Carol’s reaction to the news that she’s been excluded from the human club. Sure, she thinks it’s ridiculous that Koumba and his new friends have been brainstorming ways to help the Joined overcome their looming caloric deficit, which will lead to Earth’s entire population dying of starvation within the next 10 years. But, y’know, she’s a professional fantasy fiction author. She can come up with all kinds of crazy futuristic shit that might help. (Robot farmers are a no-go, though. Programming a machine to terminate life is forbidden.)
The biggest takeaway from Carol’s meeting with Koumba is that the collective has apparently come up with a way to complete the Joining process for the remaining humans. But it’s an invasive and painful procedure, which they can’t undertake without consent. Koumba doesn’t want to do it. And Carol? No frickin’ way. She’s also struck once again by the alien-ness of these aliens, who’ll choose to starve to death before they’ll yank a carrot out of the ground. She tries once again to get Koumba to understand this, while Mr. Diabaté is talking about his good friend John Cena. “He’s not John Cena,” Carol stresses. He’s not human.
The only other person on Earth who understands Carol’s frustration may be Manousos Oviedo (Carlos Manuel Vesga), the Paraguayan self-storage manager who also refuses to have anything to do with the Joined. “HDP” ends by jumping back four days, to the moment when Manousos received Carol’s first video. Inspired by her message, he returns to his old apartment, gathers some road maps and food, and dusts off his sputtering sports car. It seems he’s about to drive up to Albuquerque! (Or at least motor off to a boat or plane that can take him to Albuquerque, since it’s impossible to drive all the way from South America to North America.)
As he’s rolling out of his garage, Manousos sees his mother on the dark, empty street, warmly urging him to ask the hive mind any questions he may have. He replies that she’s not really his mother. He knows this because, “My mother’s a bitch.” We also know she’s not his mother—or at least we should. After all, we’ve seen how the Joined truly behave. They’re not nice. They’re not mean. They’re not anything.
Stray observations
- • For some reason, when I watch Pluribus via Apple’s screener app on my smart TV, I don’t get any subtitles when characters speak in a foreign language. After I watched this episode, I went back to pick up the French and Spanish translations, by accessing the screener site on my laptop. But aside from two short scenes (one of them being Manousos and his “mother”), the subtitles aren’t that necessary. The images and performances tell most of the story—especially in the poker scene, which mainly consists of people saying bigger and bigger numbers in French while shuffling chip stacks.
- • The other scene where the subtitles really matter is the one where Koumba makes a call to someone—or, more accurately, nearly everyone—ending the conversation with, “I miss you too, my loves.” Koumba’s an odd bird, whose gentle demeanor can seem a little alien-like. (I’m thinking especially about the way he watches Carol turn the breakfast plate he cooks for her into an open-faced avocado, egg and bacon sandwich, then awkwardly copies her.)
- • How good is that John Cena video? It’s not just Cena’s delivery that makes it funny; it’s also the details in his little speech, including the casual aside about how not all human cultures frown on “anthropophagy” and the explanation that “someone John Cena’s size” needs eight cartons of HDP milk per day.
- • Another magnificently written and staged scene: Carol calling the Joined to get confirmation that they can’t convert her without her consent and having to wait through the entire Patrick Fabian recording (twice!) before receiving replies to her questions on the Westgate electronic marquee. Throughout this scene I kept thinking about how good Rhea Seehorn is at physical acting. Her face is often impassive, but she does a lot with her compact body, expressing her emotions with a flick of an arm or a subtle bend of the leg.
- • Bookmark for later: Before Manousos leaves Paraguay we see him checking radio frequencies yet again, returning to the setting 8.613.0, where he hears a rhythmic humming and clicking. I have no idea what this means. But it’s probably meaningful!
Noel Murray is a contributor to The A.V. Club.
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