Pluribus, Season 1, Episode 6
Review + Recap: "HDP"
After the cliffhanger of Episode 5, "Got Milk", there was really only one question that mattered.
What, exactly, are the Joined drinking?
"HDP" answers that in about sixty seconds, then spends the rest of the hour doing something smarter.
It turns the Soylent Green joke into a legal document, a consent form, and a slow-motion crisis of faith.
Episode 6 is the one where the show says the quiet parts out loud. The milk really is made of us, as teased in the deeper dive on what the milk is made of.
The hive mind really does need Carol and the other immunes to sign on the dotted line. And the only person treating this like an emergency is holed up in Paraguay with a ham radio and a grudge.
If "Got Milk" was a logistics horror story, "HDP" feels like the moment the season pivots from mystery to open negotiation.
The stakes are not what we thought.
The countdown is not what we thought.
The story, quietly, shifts its center of gravity toward Manousos, toward that strange little frequency, and toward the question that has been circling since Pluribus first laid out its premise: what do you owe a world that insists it only wants your best self.
Recap: what happens in "HDP"
We pick up almost exactly where "Got Milk" left Carol, shaken from her discovery in the Albuquerque cold storage facility. The shrink-wrapped limbs and heads on those metal shelves are now confirmed, beyond any coy framing, as raw material. Human Derived Protein. HDP. The stuff that powers the Joined's pale, efficient "milk".
Carol decides that this revelation is too big for another lonely VHS confession. She drives to Las Vegas to crash the fantasy life of Koumba Diabaté, who has taken up long-term residence in the Elvis Suite at the Westgate. We find him mid role-play, all tux and poker face, living out an impossible Casino Royale tableau where the house always lets him win and the villains applaud on cue.
Carol arrives like a hangover.
While Koumba keeps the Others in character around him, he does something the rest of the immunes have refused to do. He makes space for her. He offers breakfast. Bacon, eggs, avocado, toast. Real food, the old way, no hive approximation. Carol does what Carol does: she improvises. She mashes the lot into rough avocado toast, a small, messy act of human invention.
Koumba, almost unconsciously, copies her plate. The moment passes wordlessly, but it is the closest thing the episode gives us to a manifesto. Humans mix. They adapt. They make something ugly and perfect in the middle of a script.
Only then does Carol cue up her big reveal, fumbling with HDMI cables while Koumba watches with the air of someone who already knows the punchline. Before she can hit play, he stops her cold. "Is this about them eating people?"
Of course he knows.
Of course the others know.
They have been watching a video that Carol never got, starring a smiling Joined John Cena, walking them through the HDP situation like a pre-flight safety demonstration.
The Cena tape lays it out. The Others have three hard rules.
- They cannot kill living beings, animal or human.
- They will not deliberately damage plant life.
- They will not lie.
Trapped inside those constraints, the virus has come up with the ugliest workaround that still satisfies the letter of the law. The "milk" is a carefully measured blend of water, stockpiled food that would otherwise spoil, and that 8 to 12 percent HDP, processed from people who would have died anyway. Car accidents, heart attacks, old age. The world is one big organ donor card, turned into a drinks menu.
Once they discovered how much food the planet really has in reserve, the Joined ran the numbers. Seven billion people. One hundred thousand or so natural deaths per day. Even with perfect harvesting and no waste, there is a cliff coming within a decade. They can slow the fall, but they cannot stop it. Koumba and the other immunes, as we learn, have already been talking about this problem together on regular calls.
How do you feed a world that cannot bear to kill anything, when the shelves are already empty?
Carol reels.
Not just at the cannibalism, but at the realization that she is late to her own investigation.
While she has been sending increasingly desperate dispatches from Albuquerque, the others have quietly built their own group chat without her. They watched the Cena explainer. They debated the ethics. They took a meeting with the hive. They even voted, explicitly, to exclude Carol from their little council because she is "disruptive". The woman trying to save humanity from happiness did not even make the invite list.
The emotional low point hits not with a horror image, but with a rejection. After a night of Vegas indulgence, Carol tentatively suggests moving into the hotel, into Koumba's strange playground of joined performers and analog touches.
For a second it looks like Pluribus might give her a roommate, a fellow holdout to lean on. Then Koumba's face closes. He likes her. He is grateful for her work. He also wants her to leave. "Check in now and then," he offers, as if she were a slightly overbearing cousin, not one of only thirteen people on Earth who still get a private brain.
That step aside clears the way for the real plot bomb. The hive, speaking through one of its soft, courteous representatives, reveals why Carol and the others have not simply been forcibly converted. The virus that took everyone else does not "stick" to them.
To bring each immune into the fold, the Joined need a custom tool. They have to extract stem cells from each person and build a tailored version of the virus that only infects that individual. They cannot perform that procedure without explicit consent.
Biology as bureaucracy. No signature, no joining.
Carol does the only thing she can. On camera, with the whole planetary mind listening, she announces that she does not consent.
She will never consent.
No stem cells from her body.
The hive responds like a lawyer reading from a settlement. They acknowledge her choice. They promise that no stem cells will be taken from her body. The wording, to anyone who has watched the ice hotel flashback and clocked the offhand mention of Carol's frozen eggs, feels very precise.
While all this is happening, the episode keeps cutting back three days earlier, to Paraguay. Manousos, still holed up in his storage container office, rejects yet another delivery of hive-approved food but accepts the blank little tape that comes with it. It holds Carol's first "there is a way to undo the Joining" video. He watches it once and does what nobody else has done. He moves.
In a series of simple, tense beats, we watch him pack his things, visit his home for supplies, and step into the night, only to find his mother's body waiting in the alley, piloted by the hive. The scene is one of the show's creepiest yet, not because she is threatening, but because she is kind. Helpful. Gentle in a way the real woman never was.
Manousos cuts right through it. "You are not my mother. My mother was a bitch." Then he walks past the specter of a better parent and drives away in his barely functional car, aiming for an airport and, eventually, for Albuquerque.
Episode 6 ends with a double move. Carol marks herself safe, for now, with that stem cell refusal. Manousos finally leaves his bunker. The two most stubborn people on the planet are now on collision course, even as a seven billion headed mind starts looking for loopholes.
Review: HDP turns the twist into a contract
"HDP" could have been the episode where Pluribus luxuriates in its big reveal. It could have stretched the warehouse discovery from "Got Milk" into a full hour of drip-fed horror, doling out the meat joke with the usual slow-burn prestige rhythm.
Instead, the show does something closer to what its larger themes piece has been promising all along.
It clears the twist in the first act, then digs into what it means to live under rules that are both scrupulously moral and quietly monstrous.
The key move is that the episode never lets HDP sit as a simple act of evil. The hive is honest. Painfully honest. Cena's earnest charisma is there for comedy, sure, but it also signals how the Joined see this practice. They are not cackling over a slaughterhouse. They are filling out a form on the only loophole they can see that does not break their zero-kill commandment. That does not make it less horrific. It makes it worse. A monster that knows it is cruel is one thing.
A system that has convinced itself it is merciful while drinking the dead, that is the sort of science fiction that sticks.
The episode keeps nudging you to compare the hive's logic with our own. We already treat bodies, animal and human, as resources. We already allow economics and logistics to decide who gets to eat and who starves. Pluribus just pushes that calculus into a clean white bottle and asks if it gets more or less forgivable when the people doing it literally cannot lie to you about it. The answer is not comfortable.
At the same time, "HDP" quietly redefines what the crisis of the show actually is. Up to now, it has been easy to read Pluribus as a race against time. The thirteen immunes have to avoid infection until the virus figures out a new trick.
The hive's constant talk about "inevitability" and "eventual joining" has felt like the ticking clock under everything.
This episode cuts the wire on that bomb and replaces it with another. The Joined are the ones on the clock. The food runs out long before their patience does. They are prisoners of their own rules.
That shift is crucial, because it puts Carol's war in perspective. Her mission is not to expose the hive as a lie. The hive is, infuriatingly, telling the truth. Her mission is to prove that an honest collective can still be wrong in the way it values life, in the way it distributes risk.
The HDP reveal and the stem cell consent twist are just the cleanest expressions of that argument so far.
Carol, Koumba, and the cost of being right
One of the pleasures of "HDP" is how much humanity it squeezes out of Koumba. On paper he is the easy mark, the guy in the Elvis Suite who took the deal and never looked back. In practice, he is one of the episode's moral anchors. He knows about HDP. He knows about the food crisis. He understands that the hive is following its own rules to the letter.
And he is still worried. Not just for himself, but for the billions who will starve in ten years if nothing changes.
His small gestures with Carol matter. Copying her breakfast. Spotting her loneliness and trying, in his fumbling way, to name it. Admitting that the other immunes have shut her out because they cannot handle the chaos she brings to a room. Pluribus does not let her off the hook here. The episode is honest about how exhausting she can be, how her righteousness feels to people who have chosen survival over constant resistance.
The tragedy is that Carol is right, and it is killing her socially. She is the only one who sees the stem cell revelation as a loaded gun. Everyone else hears "consent" and immediately starts bargaining, weighing up when they might be ready to surrender.
Carol hears the same language and thinks about frozen eggs, loopholes, and the way any legal promise can be twisted if the stakes get desperate enough. She is thinking about the future while the others are thinking about relief.
That is where the episode's title really does its work. HDP is not just Human Derived Protein. It is a kind of Human Denial Protocol. A system that lets people believe they are safe because a phrase is technically true. "No stem cells will be collected from your body."
A phrase that means nothing if the hive ever decides that eggs in a clinic, or old biopsies, or any scrap of preserved tissue, do not count.
There is a cruel irony in watching Carol finally articulate what she wants so clearly. She spells it out. She wants the Joining undone. She wants the virus reversed. She wants everyone out from under the hive, back on the farms, back in the mess.
She is explicit. She does not consent. And within minutes, she is once again alone in a hotel corridor, dragging her suitcase, having turned down the chance to be less lonely because being right with herself matters more than being comfortable with anyone else.
Manousos leaves the bunker, and the plot finds its real lead
If "HDP" belongs to anyone besides Carol, it is Manousos.
His brief scenes carry a different kind of tension, the old-school genre dread that comes from watching someone walk out of their safe room because they finally care about something more than survival.
For five episodes, Manousos has been the hermit on the map. A guy in Paraguay who spends his days cycling through radio frequencies, cataloguing what sounds like meaningless noise. A walking footnote to the whole "virus came from space" angle teased in the breakdown of how the virus spread. Now he becomes something else. The only character whose worldview really shifts because of Carol's message.
What lights him up is not the HDP disclosure. It is the simple fact that the hive admits there is a way to undo the Joining. The very existence of a reversal procedure rewrites his sense of the landscape. It means this is not just an apocalypse you endure. It is a problem with a solution, hidden inside the enemy's own infrastructure.
Once he knows that, staying in the bunker becomes a kind of surrender he cannot tolerate.
The alleyway scene with his mother is the perfect distillation of who he is. The show has hinted that the other immunes keep their families nearby, even if those families are just vessels now. Manousos wants no part of that comfort.
He would rather call the memory of his mother a "bitch" to her face, or at least to the face wearing her skin, than pretend that the gentle hive puppet in front of him is an improvement. In a series obsessed with consent, he refuses emotional consent as fiercely as Carol refuses biological consent.
There is also the science fiction scaffolding humming underneath his story. That odd signal on 8613.0, the rhythmic pulse that may or may not be how the hive keeps its far-flung bodies in sync. The possibility that an amateur with a ham radio, a stubborn streak, and a partner in Albuquerque could choke the flow for long enough to matter.
Pluribus keeps this mostly in the realm of suggestion for now, but you can feel the season angling toward a collision between hard biology and weird radio physics.
Stakes, consent, and the prison of rules
Pull back from the plot turns, and "HDP" plays like a companion piece to the show's larger thinking about hive minds. The themes essay on Pluribus has already framed this virus as a test of whether collective honesty can coexist with individual dignity.
This episode adds another layer. Can a moral code be so rigid that it dooms the people who live by it?
The hive will not kill. It will not pick fruit. It will not drag screaming immunes into the cloud without their signoff. On paper, that sounds saintly. In practice, it means slow starvation for billions, a world drinking its dead, and a desperate search for legalistic ways to get a few more minds into the network. The rules do not prevent cruelty.
They just reshape it.
That is why the talk of Carol's eggs hits so hard. In the ice hotel flashback, her decision to freeze them played like a personal choice, a small autobiographical detail. In the wake of "HDP", it looks like a loaded gun sitting in some chilly clinic, quietly waiting for the hive's lawyers to realize they are not technically breaking their promise if the stem cells come from a freezer instead of from her arm.
The episode does not spell this out, but the fan discussions are already there, and you can feel the writers pointing the camera toward that possibility without saying it yet.
The other unsettling idea breezing through the hour is that the hive might not even be the final boss. Several fan theories, echoed in forums and in the way the show talks about the virus as something "sent", suggest that the Joined could be an occupying work crew for something else. A slow-motion terraforming force, preserving resources, tidying the planet, readying it for whoever dropped the code. If that is true, HDP becomes more than a desperate patch.
It becomes a holding pattern. Keep the bodies going just long enough to hand the world off to its real owners.
That possibility makes Manousos' radio obsession feel less like paranoia and more like the one plot thread that is actually looking up. If the signal on 8613.0 is the scaffolding for this whole invasion, then somebody finally pointing an antenna at it is the first truly new move anyone has made against the hive since the virus hit.
Where "HDP" leaves Carol, Manousos, and the rest of the season
By the end of the hour, the board is cleaner than it has been since the pilot. Carol is alone again, but with a clearer mission. Stop trying to win hearts on VHS. Start working the problem. She has declared herself off limits. She has confirmed that the hive is willing to let her walk, at least as long as the HDP calculations hold.
Manousos is finally on the road, pointed toward New Mexico with Carol's address stuffed in his pocket, his ham radio and his spite riding shotgun. The immunes' secret council has been exposed as risk averse at best, cowardly at worst, more willing to debate their own joining than to help the one person who is still trying to undo the whole thing.
The hive, for its part, has shown the softest version of its teeth. It has outlined how it could swallow the remaining free minds, then promised, very politely, not to do so without a nod. It has confessed that it is running out of food.
That is not a threat.
It is a confession of weakness dressed up as calm.
From here, the interesting question is not "will Carol ever join" but "how fast can she and Manousos move before billions of hungry optimists decide that one woman's consent is negotiable." Pluribus has three episodes left to answer that. "HDP" feels like the moment it finally shows us what kind of ending it is steering toward.
Not a twist.
Not a simple cure.
A fight over who gets to define normal.
Hey, Carols: trivia, callbacks, and details to watch
- The John Cena cameo hits the exact tonal sweet spot. He is friendly, specific, and completely at ease explaining that everyone is drinking ground-up humans. The hive has learned that if you have to sell cannibalism, you might as well hire a celebrity spokesman.
- Carol's avocado toast improvisation is a quiet echo of her whole arc. She refuses to take the world as it is presented. She squashes things together until they make some new shape, even if it is ugly and hard to swallow.
- The wording on the hive's promise to Carol is doing a lot of work. "From your body" rings especially loud if you remember the frozen egg conversation at the ice hotel. Somewhere, a hive mind lawyer is definitely stroking their chin at that clause.
- We get our clearest timeline yet on the food crisis. Roughly a decade before the HDP supply collapses and mass starvation hits the Joined. That ten year clock now ticks alongside whatever timetable Carol and Manousos manage to set for their resistance.
- Manousos' line to his mother-in-body-only might be the coldest in the season so far. It tells you everything about who he was before the virus and why he is willing to burn his last bridge if it means staying honest about what has been lost.
- Koumba's Bond poker fantasy is pure wish fulfillment, but watch what happens when he walks away. The Others quietly drop the performance and start cleaning. It is the best visual reminder yet that for the hive, these perfect scenarios are work, not pleasure.
- The radio frequency 8613.0 pops up again as the one sound Manousos cannot let go of. Paired with the title sequence's pulsing tone, it feels less and less like background noise and more like the show humming its real mystery under every scene.
- If you want to zoom back out and see where all these threads sit in the bigger tapestry of the series, the Pluribus hub page and the pieces on the show's themes and the virus itself are starting to feel less like side reading and more like companion texts.
