Diksha Sundriyal
Apple TV+’s ‘Pluribus’ presents a world where a woman named Carol Sturka finds herself isolated after the entire world seems to have been connected by a hive mind. She is one of the few people who have not been affected by it, and with each passing day, her desire to reverse whatever has happened to humanity grows stronger. In the fifth episode, titled ‘Got Milk,’ she makes a shocking discovery that takes a new direction in his investigation. However, it also raises more questions, the answers to which remain out of her reach for now. SPOILERS AHEAD.
Carol Finds Out What the Others Eat, or Rather, Drink
In the fourth episode, Carol’s determination to find out how to reverse “the Joining” leads her to inject Zosia with truth serum, which leads the latter to suffer cardiac arrest. In the fifth episode, the Others decide that they’ve had enough of Carol’s antics, so they pack up and flee the city, leaving Carol to her own devices. The next day, in an attempt to dispose of the garbage, she notices something curious in the town’s dumpsters. It turns out that the only garbage they have is empty milk cartons. The label on the cartons reads “Duke City Dairy,” which is a local factory, so she heads there, and soon it becomes clear that the cartons don’t contain milk. Instead, she finds an amber-coloured liquid, which seems to have been made by dissolving a white powder in water.
She finds bags of the white powder after a couple of crows try to eat from it at the factory. She takes the bag and the liquid home and runs a basic test, which leads her to a conclusion she shares with the rest of the humans. She tells them about the cartons and the not-milk substance they contain. It’s clear that the Others entirely depend on it as sustenance because there is no evidence that they are eating or drinking anything else. She has yet to identify the white powder, but when it mixes with water, it turns into an oily substance that is thinner than olive oil and has a weird texture. It doesn’t have a distinct smell and has an almost neutral pH of 7.1. She also notes that it doesn’t have chlorine. While she is yet to fully uncover the true scale of this discovery, she knows she has landed upon something important.
This feeling is exacerbated after she makes another discovery in the last few minutes of the episode. A bar code on the bag with the white powder beads led her to the Sprouts store, where she made the Others restock. When the bar code is not scanned at the checkout, she looks for another bag similar to it. This leads her to a packet of dog food, on which she finds the name of the manufacturer, AGRI-JET. When she reaches their warehouse, she ends up inside their freezer. At first, she sees rows of fruits and other edible stuff. But as she moves forward, some mysterious stuff covered by a tarp comes into view. When she lifts the cover, she sees something shocking that makes her gasp. It is not revealed what she found, but it is clear that she has discovered what the white powder is made of.
The Milk May Have a Human Connection
The true nature of the white powder and its origins will not be revealed until next week, but the previous episodes of the show have already dropped a major hint about what to expect. While Carol notices the milk cartons for the first time, they have been around in almost all the previous episodes. In the second episode, Zosia’s introductory scene has her and another man dragging dead bodies into a milk truck. In another scene, a milk truck is seen parked outside the hospital. In Episode 4, Zosia receives a carton of strawberry milk while in the hospital, and at the beginning of the fifth episode, we see another man drinking the not-milk from a carton. It is also worth noting that the milk Carol has in her house is oat milk, not dairy milk.
For now, it looks like the thing that Carol found under the tarp is a human body, and the shock on her face is out of the realisation that the white powder comes from the dead body. After all, we saw the Others collecting the dead bodies, but we didn’t actually see them bury or cremate them. The only person who received a funeral after the Joining was Helen, and the fact that she is still in her grave can be confirmed by the fact that coyotes tried to dig it up to eat the corpse. The same cannot be said about all the other millions who died during the Joining and many more who died after Carol’s bad mood caused a massacre. Moreover, we know that the Others cannot kill other living things, but it doesn’t mean that they cannot consume what is already dead. This sets the stage for the possible revelation that the white powder, and hence the milk, has human origins.
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