A place to discuss the Pluribus series created by Vince Gilligan.
Rules:
Carol we wish You a great day, and remember, we will move heaven and Earth to make you happy.
I'm late here, just watched E5. I can think of nothing else to give Carol the shock reaction than human remains of some sort. Yet I sense she has the wrong idea somehow.
I bet we'll have to wait awhile to find out. The title card for E6 has the Mauritanian guy on it, and this episode was almost entirely Carol.
Her face at the end there was amazing. I am so anxious for the reveal of what she saw. What do you guys think? Is it a soylent green situation? I feel like that would be too expected.
I think it could be a Soylent Green misdirect, but only because I want to believe that Vince Gilligan is smarter than spelling out the twist this way. Until we find out more next week my guess is the bodies are being Aqua cremated. How the milk cartons are involved is anyone’s guess.
The Others constantly talk about efficiency and they never are seen burying the dead, just taking them away. So dead people are recycled, because burying perfectly good meat is waste.
It is so fricking thrilling, such a cliffhanger! Really looking forward to the discovery, hoping that it won’t be the obvious
I bet thats what we're meant to think. Maybe they're condensing the planet's population and it's like the cordyceps fungus in ants.
Sorry for the late post, I thought this episode would release on friday 😅
Thoughts:
It's gotta be wild to be dumped by the whole planet, that message they recorded for her that played every time she called was too much lol.
I expected she would have just asked to shorten that message so that she can get to them faster :D
That was my same thought. After hearing that recording a second time, my second request would have also included "...and leave a shorter recording".
The CGI was so bad this episode. The blurred rooftop scene, the wolves — they looked completely unrealistic. With 15 million per episode, they could have either hired better graphics artists or used real animals. This episode broke something for me. Like… I can see now that Gilligan isn’t perfect.
I thought of Soylent Green the moment Zosia revealed that 800 million people (10% of the global population) died during the conversion. It seems like a logical step to use them as food rather than bury useful nutrients. I personally wouldn’t care, but it would be hilarious if this fact ended up helping Carol gain support from a few people who are still unaffected. “You consume the consciousness and personality of people? We don’t care. You consume the flesh of people? No, no, no, you can’t do THAT.”
Question, though: is it even possible to turn flesh into this kind of grain/dust/powder? Why not just eat the flesh directly—make “human jerky” or something like that? I mean… as humans we don’t consume or produce meat in the form of liquid or dissolvable powder; it’s too hard to make and not very feasible. Why did they decide to make it a powder specifically? Just for the plot? Really strange, considering Gilligan’s love for science and chemistry.
On the last part: I guess they would extract essential nutrients from bodies and other sources like fruits and vegetables and process them into a powder with much longer shelf life and ease of storage.
Edit: and I would add that it looks more like crystals, isn’t it?
In retrospect, it definitely has to be either some sort of nutrient mix, or maybe additional doses of viral culture (maybe humans actually do generate antibodies that need to be periodically overwhelmed with re-exposure). But it had me wondering why Zosia would be drinking milk in the hospital while also hooked up to an IV, it's not as if she needed the fluids from it.
Could be that this is what most everyone eats now, and the "coffee" we see her drink on her own in episode 2 is just more of this stuff. It had me wondering at that time if the afflicted would actually still bother wanting to enjoy food and drink like people do, or if they opted for absolute pragmatism and bare essentials only. Seems like the latter may indeed be the case.
The CGI was so bad this episode. The blurred rooftop scene, the wolves — they looked completely unrealistic. With 15 million per episode, they could have either hired better graphics artists or used real animals.
I guess if you ignore the plot and acting, you pay attention to this.
Was that Howard (Patrick Fabian) from Better Call Saul on the voice recording in the beginning?? IMDb doesn’t list him here, but it sounded just like him.
It's def his voice
I hope Carol will do collab with the greatest vlogger of all time, Lalo Salamanca.
It was quite a leap to go from powder bag to dog food factory.
Maybe next episode will have more reveals, so if Carol saw dead bodies it will be the smallest of surprises awaiting us.
Regarding the leap: she did probably just imagine this as working similarly to the milk cartons: they reuse some other factory, but in this case could omit the labeling. So she browsed the store, looking for a similar bag.
I feel it would have worked better if she scanned the barcode on the bag and the register actually rang it up as dog food (instead of throwing an error at the register). It's apparent that the infected are just reusing the dog food packaging from its original production site to package up whatever this powder mix is they're now producing there instead.
If it was a random package with a barcode, I'd expect the register to not recognize if it wasn't coded in the store's database, and in that situation I'd just assume it meant the store doesn't stock whatever the bag was supposed to be. But we saw it actually corresponded to something they stocked, which Carol then somehow managed to figure out impressively fast (not just recognizing it as a dog food bag, but the specific dog food bag among several that were stocked). Just makes less sense to me.
Good point. That would still have required her to check out the correct package with the label for the address, while seeming more logical.
It seemed to me that the barcode was under the dog food label, and she had to discet the bag to find it. I would assume that the barcode was from the manufacturer of the bags and not the dog food, and that's why it didn't register in Sprouts. Kinda like how Amazon boxes have like 6 barcodes on them, but one of them corresponds to the UPS tracking number, and to UPS, all the other barcodes are ignored