Pluribus
Got Milk
Season 1
Episode 5
Editor’s Rating
Photo: Apple TV+
This week’s episode of Pluribus premiered early and is currently streaming on Apple TV.
One hallmark of a Vince Gilligan show is a very specific kind of patience. To call it “slow-moving” would be to disrespect its intentionality and gripping dramatic effect. It’s more about focusing on difficult labor and using time as a tool for understanding the significance of a challenge and the determined mind-set of a person willing to put in the work. A few examples: the rigging of a junkyard magnet powerful enough to access a police evidence locker in Breaking Bad (“Yeah, bitch! Magnets!”); the off-site rehearsal of a department-store robbery in Better Call Saul; and, in the latter show, the seasons-long accumulation of evidence for a civil suit against a chain of retirement homes for bilking it residents. That’s how a high-school chemistry teacher becomes the Eric Ripert of methamphetamine. That’s how a mailroom ne’er-do-well at a law firm gets a degree from the University of American Samoa.
There are several such examples in this week’s mesmerizing gearshift of an episode, but consider Carol’s updating of Helen’s burial site in her backyard. We have already witnessed her determination to give the woman she loved a proper burial. Until Zosia came along with an upgrade in supplies and a bottle of Aquafina that she poured into the ground, Carol was fully prepared to carve six feet deep into stubborn volcanic rock, which would have cost her untold hours and likely some nasty blisters, too. She’s the “Jimmy Hustle” or Kim Wexler type in that she’s willing to push herself beyond reason to do what needs doing, no matter how uncomfortable a grind. Humanity is worth the hardship. Helen was worth even more.
With the entire city of Albuquerque skedaddling to get some space from Carol — truly a new frontier for her in being personally off-putting — hungry coyotes start to target her home as a food source, first for her garbage and then for the organic rot they can sniff under the ground. Carol’s desperate effort to shoo them away is amusingly extreme, as she plows her squad car, sirens blaring, through the back fence. But the attention the episode pays to her labors the next day to secure Helen’s grace is a great example of Gillian’s slow-burn style paying off. The show could have montaged its way to a shorter version of the sequence where Carol lugs heavy stone tiles from a home-building depot to her house and places them one by one over the grave site. But it’s important to the show that we feel the weight that she’s carrying here, in both a literal and figurative sense.
Opening just eight days, 22 hours, 36 minutes, and 29 seconds after the Others took over the planet, this episode is really the first time Carol has had any space to process everything that she’s lost. Up to this point, the project of saving humanity has been an excellent distraction from her grief and loss, but things have changed dramatically for her. After nearly killing Zosia with a live grenade and then nearly killing her again by interrogating her over how to undo “the Joining,” Carol is surprised to find that those happy and endlessly accommodating Others seem a little pissed off at her. The random people serving as nurses and orderlies are curt when she tries to boss them around or ask about Zosia’s condition, and the moment she falls asleep in the lobby, the entire hospital makes an orderly exit in buses and ambulances. She’s stunned to find herself alone in the building and even more stunned when she climbs to the roof of a hotel and witnesses a full evacuation of the city in both directions.
The capper to all this is a voice recording — read in a true chef’s-kiss piece of casting by Patrick Fabian, who played Howard Hamlin on Better Call Saul — to create a buffer between Carol and the Others. “Our feelings for you haven’t changed, Carol,” the recording assures her. “But after everything that’s happened, we just need a little space.” In a very real sense, the Others’ mass exodus from Albuquerque represents a great victory for Carol in the fight against her mysterious foes, recalling the satirical triumph in Starship Troopers of humans capturing a “Brain Bug” and Neil Patrick Harris’s clairvoyant officer reporting, “It’s afraid.” She has unnerved and repulsed a seemingly indefatigable adversary, and that’s no small achievement.
It does compound her loneliness, however. Being able to fight with Zosia and the Others — along with most of the survivors — about the supposed wonders of joining the happy collective has kept her mind occupied. Now she’s feeling like the last person on earth, unable to get a call from the other survivors and only speaking to the Others through a voice recording, as if direct contact with her were equivalent to radiation exposure. The episode does take time to register her grief, but Carol has a restless mind, and she’s starting to gain some traction in learning more about this benevolent invasion. She buys a video camera and sends out a missive to her fellow survivors about the possibility of reversing the Joining. Then she stumbles on the true X Files–level revelation that there’s something amiss in the small cartons of milk that the Others keep sucking down. Why are all these grown-ups drinking so much school-lunchroom milk? Is the Joining a cure for lactose intolerance?
Carol’s sleuthing pays dividends, and the show draws tension and suspense from every turn of the stone. Like the grotesque origins of Slurm on Futurama, the milk is not milk at all, but a slick, straw-colored substance, and further investigation leads Carol to believe the liquid is produced from a combination of water and mysterious sugarlike crystals kept in large dog-food bags. We’ll see what the survivors make of this information — which they could well dismiss as a conspiratorial crackpot nonsense from a woman they don’t like — but to close the episode on Carol literally gasping over the raw materials for this drink is a hell of a cliffhanger. Stay tuned …
• Good to hear from Laxmi, who pops up again to yell at Carol for her son crying along with the rest of the world. For her to refer to Zosia as a “chaperone” is the cherry on top of this annoying sundae for Carol.
• Consider this passage from Carol’s first video to the other survivors: “Now, I realize some of you think the world might be better off this way, with all the newfound peace, love, and understanding. Enjoy that opinion. Relish it. Because it may be the last one you ever possess. And when that day comes that you have peace and love forced upon you, who knows, maybe in that last fleeting moment, you might just realize you treasured your individuality.” She gets no response from any of them after sending it out. Then she records a second video about the milk in a similar tone and opts to erase it and start again. She may be learning that insulting her fellow survivors is not the best way to win them over.
• Does Carol deliberately leave out a garbage bag heavier than 17 pounds just to mess with the drone the Others sent to pick it up? Or does she simply not care to follow this directive that closely? Whatever the case, the drone getting caught up in a light pole is both great deadpan comedy and the transition that brings us to the milk subplot.
• Lovely moment where Carol paints a little tombstone for Helen and cries when she sees it propped up.
• When Carol squeezes herself under the garage to get into the AGRI-JET warehouse in the end, did anyone else think of Clarice Starling checking out the storage unit in The Silence of the Lambs? Just me?
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