When Pluribus Finally Says the Quiet Part Out Loud
Episode 6 of Pluribus is where the show stops hinting and starts confessing. “HDP,” written by Vera Blasi and directed by Gandja Monteiro, landed on December 5, 2025 as part of Apple TV’s nine‑episode first season rollout. It picks up seconds after the “Got Milk” cliffhanger and answers the question fans have been asking for weeks.
Yes, the hive mind is eating people. And no, it is not quite as simple as that.
For Plur1bus.tv’s ongoing Story Retold series, this chapter sits at a turning point. The milk mystery is solved, the hive’s biggest weakness is laid bare, and the show quietly shifts its center of gravity toward an unlikely partnership on the horizon.
From “Got Milk” to “HDP”: The Cold Room Answer
“HDP” opens by paying off one of Season 1’s nastiest teases.
At the end of episode 5, “Got Milk,” Carol Sturka rolls back a tarp in a refrigerated room at a food‑packing facility tied to Duke City’s off‑white “milk.” The camera cut away before we saw what she did, inviting Soylent Green‑style theories about human ingredients in the hive’s diet.
Episode 6 wastes little time confirming those fears. Inside the cold storage, Carol finds shrink‑wrapped human body parts, processed into what the Others clinically label Human Derived Protein, or HDP. That powder, first glimpsed in the previous hour, turns out to be the secret additive in the milk‑like liquid that sustains the joined world.
Rather than upload her footage and try to spark a revolution, Carol does something more personal and arguably more telling. She gets in the car and drives from Albuquerque to Las Vegas to confront Koumba Diabaté, the fellow immune who has been living like royalty under the hive’s protection.
This is our first clear sign that Pluribus is less interested in a standard resistance fantasy and more focused on the psychology of lonely holdouts.
Koumba’s Vegas Fantasy, Carol’s Worst Reality
If Albuquerque has become the quiet capital of post‑apocalypse grief, Las Vegas is its surreal funhouse mirror.
When Carol reaches Koumba, he is ensconced in the Elvis suite at the Westgate Las Vegas Resort & Casino, where he treats the joined population as an endless extras pool. His life has become a glossy mash‑up of James Bond, heist movies, and spy capers, all staged by a hive willing to indulge his every narrative whim.
Koumba may be one of only thirteen immune humans on Earth, but he is also one of the happiest. Actor Samba Schutte has described him as someone who loves his new life yet still refuses to give up his individuality to the Joining. He recognizes Carol’s misery, and he wants her in his orbit, if only to avoid facing his own isolation.
Carol arrives ready to blow that orbit apart with her tape. She expects to drop a bombshell: the Others are drinking their dead.
Instead, Koumba casually finishes her sentence. Before she can show the recording, he asks if this is “about them eating people.” The twist that shocked viewers in “Got Milk” turns out not to be news to the inner circle of immunes. The horror has been absorbed, rationalized, and filed away as another uncomfortable fact of survival.
That reversal is where “HDP” really starts.
“Hello, Carol. We’re John Cena”: The Hive Explains Itself
To Carol, the cold room is a moral line. To the hive, it is a math problem.
Koumba plays her an informational video sent by the Joined, hosted by a hive‑controlled John Cena. The cameo, filmed over a weekend in Tampa according to showrunner Vince Gilligan, has quickly become one of 2025’s most discussed TV moments.
In the video, Cena greets her directly:
“Hello, Carol. We’re John Cena, and we’re here to address some questions you might be having regarding our food supply.”
From there, the hive lays out the logic of HDP in precise numbers:
- There are 7,348,292,411 Joined “as of this taping.”
- Roughly 100,000 people die per day worldwide.
- Each carton of the pale drink contains 8 to 12 percent HDP: Human Derived Protein.
The Joined explain that the extraterrestrial virus that created the hive also hard‑wired a constraint. They cannot intentionally kill any living thing, not even plants. They survive on windfall crops and pre‑existing stores, but those are not enough for more than seven billion bodies.
Dead humans, they argue, are like “fallen apples.” The hive simply picks them up.
The speech takes an idea that has been lurking under the surface since the pilot and states it in corporate training‑video language. Critics have noted that Gilligan chose Cena precisely to “make palatable the idea of eating human flesh.” Bringing in a wrestling and film star as the face of hive cannibalism underlines how normalized this has become for nearly everyone except the last holdouts.
For Carol, though, the numbers do not make it less monstrous. They just add scale to the nightmare.
Consent, Stem Cells, and Carol’s New Leverage
The Cena video is not only about food. It also slips in another crucial rule, and “HDP” treats that revelation as quietly seismic.
The hive explains that it cannot forcibly convert immune humans. To create a custom strain of the virus that can join someone like Carol, the Others must first acquire that person’s stem cells with explicit consent.
That one clause hits three pressure points at once:
- Bodily autonomy now has a literal, contractual definition in this world.
- Any prior medical procedure involving stored tissue becomes a potential loophole.
- The hive, which has seemed omnipotent, suddenly reveals a dependence.
Carol connects the dots to her own history, including her frozen eggs. If those cells are still on ice somewhere, they could function as an open door the hive can step through later. So she does the most Carol thing possible: she formally revokes consent.
“HDP” shows her informing the Others that they may not use any of her stem cells, present or stored. It is less a heroic speech than a bureaucratic hex. The episode reframes resistance as paperwork, and that may be more unsettling than any image in the cold room.
Several commentators have pointed out that this decision also deepens the show’s ongoing interest in grief and control. Carol cannot save the eight‑plus billion Joined from their future famine, but she can still say no for herself. That stubbornness is her religion.
The Other Immune Story: Manousos Finally Opens the Door
While Vegas glows, Paraguay festers.
Across the globe, Manousos Oviedo runs a storage facility and lives in a bunker of his own making. We have seen him in earlier episodes, but “HDP” gives him his clearest motivation yet. He receives one of Carol’s VHS tapes hinting that the Joining might be reversible, and unlike many recipients, he actually believes her enough to act.
He rejects another shipment of hive‑approved food, digs out his maps and supplies, and begins to plan a route. This is not a triumphant training montage. The episode presents it more as a grudging surrender to hope from a man critics have called “even more miserable than Carol.”
Before he leaves, the hive makes one more attempt to fold him back into its warmth. On the street, he meets a Joined version of his mother, who sweetly tells him he can ask the Others anything. His response is flat and brutal: “You are not my mother. My mother was a bitch.”
It is another small but telling refusal. Like Carol’s consent revocation, it tears down a comforting illusion in favor of an ugly truth. Then he drives away, headed toward Albuquerque, where the show has long hinted he and Carol will eventually collide.
By the end of “HDP,” both of the season’s most isolated immunes have chosen movement over stasis, even if they still refuse the hive in different ways.
Pragmatism, Privilege, and Who Gets to Say No
With the HDP revelation out in the open, Pluribus leans harder into its central moral knot.
On one side is Carol, clinging to her misery and individual autonomy. On the other are Koumba and the wider circle of immunes, who have known about HDP and chosen a different path.
Koumba’s position, as sketched in recaps and interviews, is pragmatic. He understands the horror of eating the dead, yet he sees a world where billions will starve if the hive’s workaround fails. For him, the job is not overthrowing the Others but keeping them fed enough to avoid mass catastrophe.
Several critics have framed episode 6 as a debate between principle and practicality. Is Carol’s refusal a moral stand or an expression of privilege, given that she is not the one keeping 7.3 billion stomachs full every day? Is Koumba a collaborator, or is he the only adult in the room?
The episode avoids easy answers, and that restraint has earned praise. One reviewer called Pluribus “such a quiet show” that uses subtle moves to get under the audience’s skin. “HDP” exemplifies that approach. Its biggest shocks come not from gore, but from policy, numbers, and the way characters choose to live alongside them.
Behind the Scenes: Big Budgets and “Made by Humans”
Away from the story, “HDP” also reflects the scale of Apple’s investment in Pluribus.
Multiple reports put the show’s cost at around $15 million per episode, roughly five times what an average hour of Breaking Bad cost. For a nine‑episode first season, that implies spending in the neighborhood of $135 million, even before marketing.
That money is visible in episodes like “Got Milk,” which reportedly used drones costing about $15,000 each for one composed shot, and in “HDP,” which stages large‑scale Vegas fantasy sequences and an intricate John Cena shoot in Tampa.
Apple gave Pluribus a two‑season order before any audience reaction, an unusual move in a cost‑cutting era. The platform now says it is the most‑watched show in Apple TV history, although it has not released specific viewer totals. Third‑party data suggests about 6.4 million viewing hours in the United States during its first week, when only two episodes were available.
Creator Vince Gilligan has also used the show to plant a flag in another ongoing industry debate. Every episode closes with a “made by humans” disclaimer, and he has described current AI tools as “the world’s most expensive and energy‑intensive plagiarism machine.” In a series about the dangers and comforts of collective thought, that choice feels pointed.
How “HDP” Landed: Reviews and Scores
If “HDP” is the point where Pluribus tips from mystery into open horror, critics have largely welcomed the shift.
- On Rotten Tomatoes, Season 1 holds a 98% critic score, with an audience score of 68%.
- Metacritic lists the season with an 87/100 Metascore and a user score around 7.0/10.
- Episode 6 itself runs about 50 minutes and currently carries a 6.8/10 user rating on Metacritic, based on a small sample.
- On fan‑tracking site MyShows, “HDP” sits at 4.312 out of 5, with more than 7,500 views logged.
Several reviewers have singled out episode 6 specifically. Collider called it a “quiet episode” for a story set in a city that never sleeps, but praised the “critical worldbuilding reveals.” Others noted how swiftly Gilligan and his team “pull the rug out” from under the expected twist, then shift focus to the fallout rather than the shock.
The John Cena cameo, meanwhile, has been dissected in dedicated pieces. Tech and entertainment outlets highlighted it as one of 2025’s “wildest” guest appearances, and pointed out how earlier episodes subtly foreshadowed the idea of a friendly public‑relations face for the hive.
What Happens Next
“HDP” arrives as Pluribus enters its final stretch. With Apple’s release pattern, the episode aired on December 5, 2025, followed by new installments each Friday through December 26.
By the end of the hour, three lines are clearly drawn:
- Carol has new leverage in the form of consent and stem cells, but she is more isolated than ever.
- Koumba has chosen to work with the hive and enjoy its gifts, even while knowing its darkest secrets.
- Manousos has finally left his Paraguayan bunker, turning Carol’s remote VHS plea into the beginning of a physical alliance.
For fans following along with our Story Retold series, “HDP” marks the moment when speculation about the milk and the hive’s rules gives way to something more uncomfortable: living with the answers.
The cold room mystery is solved. The real question now is what Carol, Manousos, and the hive do with those truths when food, freedom, and eight billion lives are all part of the same equation.
