Plur1bus: Milk is people! Episode five review

"Milk is peeeeeople!", as Charlton Heston might holler to an earlier generation of cinemaphiles. 

The latest episode of Plur1bus, Got Milk?, delivered the goods, with fabulous and unexpected twists and turns. 

First, the hive evacuated the entire city of Albuquerque (what a weird name) to get away from our favourite anti-hero, Carol, who pushed her personal pirate what's-her-face for information on how to undo the great joining. Not cool, Carol: the hive viewed this as harm. 

They needed ‘space’. 

The show hilariously replicates patterns of emotional abuse, just on a global scale. Carol’s selfish, willfully inconsiderate, even abusive, while the hive is unctuously accommodating, suicidally pacifistic and agreeable to a fault. 

The show contrasts these two diametrically opposed personality types: the selfish individual and the altruistic collective. Both are flawed, and the show doesn’t pull any punches in depicting each at their worst. Well. Carol could actually be even more awful; she’s not acting like a psychopath or malignant narcissist, which would be the true opposite of the codependent. 

But to what end? What’s the POV driving the narrative? 

Time will tell, but three things to keep in mind: first, the codependent hive is doomed from an evolutionary POV, while Carol is not. True, it will take time for predators to multiply enough to impact the population, but the hive lets itself be prey, so there will be no cap on predator expansion. Have you ever met someone who was endlessly self-righteous in their pacifism, to a smug, suicidal degree? That’s the hive. 

Second, the hive has a biological imperative to infect every human (including Carol), a process that killed over 800 million people. I suppose you could contrast that with selfishness killing billions throughout the course of history, but within the confines of the show, the death toll weighs heavily against the hive so far.

Three, Carol’s not as awful and selfish as a selfish person could be, while the hive is ridiculously codependent. Carol is not a compulsive liar, fraudster or serial killer. That would be the real flip side of the coin, but the show doesn’t go there. As such, the deck is decisively stacked from the get go.

Other than the city evacuation, the other big surprise is a truly horrific reveal: remember those 800,000,000 who died when the virus was downloaded? Well, they’re being ground up, liquified, and served up in milk cartons to the hive for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

Ew.

Of course, this makes total, pragmatic sense: the hive refuses to harm anything, even bed bugs. Their only defense is avoidance, so they can’t kill animals for food. They can’t kill insects that eat crops. Their idealism is absolute: they even free lions and tigers that then prey on hive members. Because moral superiority. As such, a readily available food source (dead people) would be very valuable, as it has no ethical cost. 

What happens when the Eaters of the Dead run out of dead bodies to feast upon? 

They’ll have to subsist on what crops they can grow without harming anything, anything at all, which will be… challenging. 

My guess? Some people are going to starve. Not that the hive will mind, it sheds hosts like Stalin sheds Kulaks and I shed skin.

So, all in all an excellent episode. I wasn’t expecting the hive to go no-contact with Carol. I also hadn’t, but should have, predicted the hive would eat the dead. 

What’s next, Vinny? 

I’m looking forward to more twists and turns. 

The Baker’s Dozen might be put off by the hive eating the dead, possibly making Carol new allies. 

If Carol is able to find a way to break the hive connection, the show could go in a whole new direction. Would the hive, threatened with dissolution, become less passive? It might let individual members be eaten, but what if the entire collective is threatened? Whats it’s biological imperative? Why does it have to spread to everyone, unless it is to neutralize all possible resistance? Because the biological imperative it has shown so far is a one-way abnegation ticket to extinction. 

If the show goes on long enough, I suspect aliens might arrive in a colony ship, ready to turn humanity into their eager and willing slave labour force. I predict invaders will be human in appearance, principally because prosthetics would look cheezy, and wouldn’t fit with the show’s overall vibe. Star Trek this is not. Perhaps the aliens seeded humanity on earth in the first place, in the distant past. That’d be an easy, quick exposition drop.

So far, the show has presented everything in a very grounded, plausible manner (as much as an instantaneous communication hive mind is realistic). 

Which leads to another question: if the hive is connected irrespective of distance, does that mean the transmitters, who are also part of the hive, are in communication with the hive on earth? Is it a pansolar-system, or pangalactic, hivemind? 

Does it drink Pangalactic Gargleblasters?

Something for Carol to inquire about in future.

It’s worth noting the questions that Carol is NOT asking. The hive cannot lie, so the show will have to avoid areas of inquiry that would give away future plot points. If she doesn’t ask easy and obvious questions, then that’s probably the direction the show is going.