Hello, Carol.

This is your favorite podcast, E Pluribus Unum, on your favorite show, Pluribus, where we do a deep dive into the hive mind.

This is Eric.

And this is Josh.

And this is episode five.

I have to ask right off the bat, Josh, what are your initial thoughts on episode five, Got Milk?

I enjoyed this one.

Yeah, it really dove into those themes that we've been talking about of loneliness and grief.

But especially in this episode, there was a lot about overcoming grief.

And there was also the same theme of that illusion of independence that Carol had.

And this episode really exemplifies her first step forward into not only breaking that illusion of independence, but finally truly becoming independent.

Yeah, overall really great episode and it ended on a pretty cool, I guess you could call it a cliffhanger, but I think as we talk, I'm going to get into a little bit about how I don't think it's as much as a cliffhanger as it first seemed.

I will say I was as shocked as Carol at the end there, so I don't know.

You're gonna have to do some pretty heavy convincing.

My overall thoughts on this episode are quite similar.

It reminds me a lot of episode three, where it feels half character study and half mystery, and not as much intense action as we had in the last episode, especially at the end there.

Again, overall, Rey knocks it out of the park.

She...

literally carries the entire episode on her shoulders.

We're with her the entire time.

The only other folks in the episode in particular are coyotes.

That's interesting as well.

That's one thing that we'll probably get into a little bit later in the episode, but I guess I was slightly confused or I had two paths of thinking whether it was coyotes or if it was wolves.

Well, let's roll into this episode here.

The episode begins with us looking through a hospital window toward the desert and it backs up.

And one of the first things that we see in this opening sequence is a man lying in a portable cot and he's drinking a carton of milk, which I think is a direct reference to the title of the episode.

And Carol is standing outside one of the nurses' stations and the telephone rings.

And it's your favorite character, actually.

And she has something to say.

Yeah, Lakshmi is certainly quite the character.

But we find out from Lakshmi that not only did the joined that was around Carol at the end of last episode begin this sort of crying as they're chanting out, please, Carol, but it also made the rest of the hive mind cry.

And Lakshmi's very angry about Carol making her child cry.

I feel like at this point, I'm feeling about Lakshmi that she's likely the survivor that has the wool pulled over her eyes the most, because it is her child that is part of the hive mind at this point.

Well, I half agree with you and I half disagree with you.

And this is why with Lakshmi, I think she is deluded.

I don't know that it's a I bought into it scenario.

I think she's diluting herself, but I think she's also angry with herself as much as she's angry with Carol.

And imagine that you're in this situation and here's your child that's also not your child.

And she's obviously intelligent enough to know that, but she can't let that go as a mother.

And you have this other woman who's never had children coming in to tell you your child's no longer your child anymore, pointing out the obvious, but you absolutely refuse.

That is just a cognitive dissonance for you, and it makes you angry because I think in the back of her mind she knows Carol's right.

And I think that bothers her.

And every time we see Carol have an outburst, it obviously directly affects Lakshmi.

And here it is again.

She's made quote unquote her son cry.

And I think it's just another reminder that no, this isn't business as usual.

This isn't your son still.

And I think she's going to come around eventually.

But I think her being against Carol at this point works perfectly.

But it's like the other character we spoke of previously having more in common with Carol.

than one might think on the surface.

I believe the same thing with Lakshmi and I think that's why they brought her back in this episode because I didn't see necessarily that she was mad at Carol.

The reaction I got both from Lakshmi and the actress playing her was frustration of coming close to admitting that Carol's right.

I like that take quite a bit.

Yeah.

And one thing that we didn't really get from this conversation, we know that her son cried, but we don't know if the rest of the hive mind were also chanting, please Carol at the same time.

Oh my goodness.

Something interesting to think about as well.

And imagine you're sitting there at dinner and then all of a sudden all the joined that are around you start chanting, please Carol.

I mean, horror movie material there.

Pretty good stuff.

I love Lakshmi, she's absolutely fantastic.

At this point, Carol goes back to check on Zosia and there's a nurse in the room and she asks the nurse if Zosia is going to be okay and so forth.

And instead of the nurse being overly friendly, like we're so used to the joined being, she is actually very stoic and...

just very flatly says she'll be alright and doesn't even look Carol in the eye and turns very quickly and exits the room.

And you can tell that she's put off, this joined person is put off, and it shows a different dimension of these characters, right?

All up to this point except for the last part of the last episode, they've been Mr.

Rogers.

It's like when you upset your partner and you still have to live together and so you just...

our ships in the night, and you just answer questions with one word.

So it seems like they're having an emotional response to her literally drugging Zosia and trying to get the truth out of her.

Any guy out there who's forgotten to take the trash out knows this sort of response that Carol is getting from the hive mind.

They're not necessarily angry or aggravated, but they are disappointed in Carol.

and they're making that known to her.

It's a stark difference from what we've seen from The Hive Mine previously and it's almost as if this is a defensive posture that they've taken with Carol and we really dive into that quite a bit more in the next scene where Carol leaves Zosia's room and then Carol goes out to the waiting room and lies down on a bench out there with her pillow.

and proceeds to fall asleep.

And I thought it was very interesting that the hive mind specifically waited for Carol to go to sleep to begin their sort of exodus out of the hospital.

It's almost as if they wanted to wait until she was gone or sedated.

in order to leave so that she couldn't ask them where they were going because they would most likely end up telling her or she couldn't ask them to stay in particular to please her.

It would please her if they all stayed.

They waited until she was asleep to leave so that she couldn't do that.

And that leads us to where Carol wakes up and she finds herself alone within the hospital.

And again, this is where we start getting back into that cinematography of Carol being very small within the frame and a vast amount of empty space and Echoing audio as well.

And this is also where once again with the cinematography we begin to see Carol obstructed by items within the frame whether that's a window or a chair or anything along those lines were reverted back to that same cinematography that really Expounded that loneliness that Carol might be feeling Well, and not surprising, this episode is directed by Gordon Smith and it was written by Ariel Levine, both of which who worked on episode three that seems to have both the aesthetic that you're describing and sort of the writing and interaction between Carol and her environment and Carol and the joined in such a really beautiful way.

I'll even say that.

I didn't realize the idea behind them purposely waiting for her to fall asleep so that they could exit without any drama.

A brilliant catch on that one, by the way.

And again, another really beautiful ballet sequence.

I'm just going to call them ballet sequences from this point on, because I have a feeling we're going to have several of them.

At this point, we find out that the hive mind is no longer even talking to Carol on the phone, but they do have a message that says, this is a recording and We're still happy to help you, and our feelings haven't changed about you, Carol, but we just need our space.

And they beat us over the head with it, right?

And her reaction to the message is also pretty phenomenal, and how she behaves as we hear the repeats of the message throughout the episode are...

with comic gems, but also if you've ever been in a breakup scenario or something like that, essentially, and everything now becomes awkward between the two of you.

It very much had that feel to it.

And it was uncomfortable, but also done in a very funny way.

But the fluid way that everyone leaves the hospital itself, the fluid way that we see all the traffic leave Albuquerque, especially as...

Ray climbs the ladder to go up to the roof to really see the breadth of the impact that she's had as far as people exiting and I love it because she's standing on the roof and she's watching everybody leave and she says good riddance and Then about two seconds later.

She goes fuck you and It's funny because between those two seconds.

I said fuck you And I like yeah Yes, Carol You tell them.

And this is when we hit one of my favorite things, the timestamps.

We get eight days, 22 hours, 36 minutes and 30 seconds.

I am compiling my timestamp research right now.

So I'll post that on our social media feeds and I'll post it in the show notes for this episode so that we can further discuss these timestamps and what they may really mean for us and see if there is some sort of a correlation or a pattern.

but at this point when she's standing on the roof it leads us to the next sequence where she goes home and she needs to draft a script for a video so that she can communicate with the other immune.

Yeah, I enjoyed this one quite a bit because it's similar to how we are drafting the scripts for talking about this episode.

Eventually she orients herself and figures out what she is trying to communicate with this video.

I thought it was interesting that she does things specifically to look more trustworthy, I guess you could say, within the video.

She removes the liquor bottles and she...

is adding makeup and trying to make herself look good and more respectable as she's recording this.

Yeah, she thinks it's possible to reverse this particular thing.

She reiterates that they cannot lie, that apparently everyone that was joined worldwide cried all at the same time, and that they abandoned her in Albuquerque.

I've been abandoned here all by myself.

But she also does the same thing she did in episode three.

She says, You should treasure your individuality and that humanity needs saving and that we owe it to humanity.

And I'm going to say it again, I think she believes this about humanity as a whole, but I think she even more strongly believes it about the humanity in herself, that she's looking to save herself in this scenario as much as she's looking to save humanity.

I like that take quite a bit.

Yeah, I think there's some substance to that.

and not only her humanity, but her individuality as well.

Well, she finishes her video finally and then she says, well, you know, we need to get this delivered out.

So she makes her phone call and she listens to that message once again, nodding her head as they make their way through saying that they need their space.

And she states when she goes to put the blue envelope, by the way, outside with the tape in it, she tells them.

I need you to pick this up.

I need you to make copies of it.

I need you to deliver it to the other 12 that are unaffected.

And I'll stay far, far away because God knows you need your space.

And when she goes outside to leave that package by the rock, we find that it's not one of the joined that is coming to pick up the message, but it's actually a drone that comes to pick up the message.

So they're really emphatically.

letting Carol know that they do not want to be near her.

And I was thinking that drones don't have an unlimited range, right?

So they're thinking the same thing.

There's likely still at least one joined still within Albuquerque that is responsible for interacting with Carol.

There's at least somebody still there.

I want you to keep that thought in mind when we talk about another sequence later on.

But you're right, they do use this drone to come pick up the envelope and just her reaction at the drone arriving versus a quote unquote person arriving to pick up the package is absolutely priceless.

Yeah, once again, just another great lineless delivery from Ray that we've grown to love so much within this show.

For sure.

You actually remind me of what ends up happening next here.

She goes inside to make herself a drink, and I noticed that the label on one of the vodka bottles was called Tater Tears.

Which, you know, vodka is made from potatoes, but I thought Tater Tears and having that Tears line in there, especially with what happened with the last episode.

I have to think is on purpose.

And I like it.

It's those little things.

And I'll mention another one here later on.

But she goes to bed that evening.

And this is the first time I recall seeing her go to bed.

We've seen her sleep on the couch primarily.

And it didn't register to me until now that maybe she had been avoiding going to bed because that was the bed that she shared with Helen.

And there's this moment where the camera's behind.

and we see the bedroom beyond that, and she looks at the bed and takes this slight breath and a small sigh, and that's it.

But my gosh, in that, you hear all of her sadness, loneliness, grief in those two seconds, or I did anyway, and I felt it, and I thought, again, such a great performance.

and such a beautiful way to express so much and so little.

Here's where we also notice that she's still wearing the handcuff.

And my question was, with all the opportunities seemingly that she has had to take that handcuff off, is she still wearing it because she feels guilty?

Yeah, I think it does symbolize possibly the guilt that she felt over having caused that cardiac arrest within Zosia.

And so much of this series so far has really portrayed Carol as a prisoner as well.

And I think it symbolizes a bit of that.

And as we get to sort of the end of the second act into the third act and the idea of Carol finally becoming the independent person that she always believed that she was.

and also a little bit about how Carol tends to solve problems at the same time.

I really felt that this scene in particular where she finally sleeps in her marital bed that she shared with Helen, it really is that first step in her overcoming the grief of Helen's death.

And I think that the Agatha Christie novel, which is And Then There Were None, has a lot to do with the story.

To be fair, I haven't personally read this particular Christie novel, but it's about 10 people that were murderers and they're invited to this isolated island where they're killed off one by one.

And it's essentially about the consequences of your past actions coming back to bite you.

And it just got me to thinking about these 10 people, are they similar to our 13 survivors?

Is this isolated island similar to the isolation that has become our planet?

Do you have any thoughts, particularly on the novel that was shown there?

This is where we're introduced to the other characters in this episode, whether they're coyotes or wolves.

They may be wolves, definitely.

And they are rummaging through our trash outside.

But before she sees them, and she walks past a painting, and it's a painting of these two cats.

in the bedroom before she looks out the window and sees the coyotes or the wolves.

Carol calls to leave a message about turning on all the lights at this point because she feels like if all the lights were back on, then maybe the animals wouldn't come into town to raid the trash.

And she looks over to reluctantly grab her partner's sleeping mask.

in order to feel like she can get some rest, I guess, and it is sitting on the Agatha Christie novel, and then there were none, I'm going to say that it's just what it is on the surface.

She's alone, and then there were none, meaning that there are no joined around her at all.

And I think it was just reinforcing that, but I really like your take on it where you start to dig a little bit deeper about the consequences because that also rings absolutely true.

She is here alone because of the consequences of her actions that she purposefully did.

This wasn't her just getting angry because of her reaction.

This was her drugging someone to get them to speak and potentially causing a heart attack.

And now she's as dangerous as she thinks they are to her.

This also gets us to the next morning.

Apparently she's able to get some rest and she goes out to clean up the trash, leaving another voicemail to come by and pick up my garbage here.

And I wanted to bring up something here.

This brings up the concept of inefficient communication in this episode for me.

And here's where I am with that.

Number one, she's trying to communicate with people around the world via a camcorder.

tape that maybe she bounces it down to a disc or whatever and gets it delivered to these people.

In a world where we know that, she could pick up the phone and talk to people as they're on her television, right?

And be just more direct or even through the internet and do a Zoom call or something, right?

The same thing with her communication with the joined where now she's forced to leave a message in order to seek her demands, completely inefficient on the part of the hive mind.

And my question is, is it purposeful or to be passive aggressive, maybe, or is it just a simple way for them to accomplish what they're trying to accomplish, which is keep her at more than arm's length because she's dangerous?

It could very well be a bit of both.

I like your train of thought with that one.

That's really interesting and something I hadn't quite thought about myself.

Well, the next morning they come to pick up her trash and they do explain to her that the bags need to be less than 17 pounds.

And of course, when the drone comes by to pick it up, it comically gets caught up in the light pole.

A fantastic sequence.

I loved it.

I laughed hard, especially when they hold after the drone gets caught up in the light fixture and it's hanging there with the garbage bag and just a few seconds later with perfect comic timing the bag bursts and all of the garbage ends up back on the ground again.

This is Carol literally having to start completely over with what used to be a pretty mundane thing for anybody becomes sort of a major deal.

and she decides to take herself into town to deposit the trash in the city and just put it in a local recycling bin and a local garbage bin.

Also very funny because she's trying to take the silver platter and the silver dome and put it into the recycling bin and things just aren't working in the way that they should.

But it leads us to a very interesting clue, I would say, in the bottom of the recycle bin.

Yeah, once again, just expanding on the thought of this illusion of independence that we all have.

As independent as you think we are, we still trust in the society as a whole to accomplish even the bare minimum of tasks.

And as Carol is completing this very basic task of throwing out her garbage, she finds at the bottom of the garbage can a bunch of empty milk cartons.

And at that point, she even goes to a larger dumpster that's got a very vivid yellow lid on it.

And I do believe that color has a lot to do with this series as a whole, not only with the stark yellow of the marketing or the stark yellow of the jacket that she was wearing way back in episode one, but that yellow lid reminded me of that same color.

And it could be pretty innocuous, you know, it could just be recycling, but there may be something there and that's something I haven't dove too much into here.

But at the bottom of this dumpster, when she opens the lid, she finds nothing but almost a sea of these milk cartons.

We never really knew up to this point.

how the hive mind are obtaining sustenance at all.

Right.

I mean, to be honest with you, I assume they just ate and went to the bathroom and showered just like other humans.

It was now was just perfunctory, right?

And you just did it because you needed fuel or you needed to be cleaned.

And they're the milk cartons like you would get if you were a kid in school and it was the milk that came with your lunch, that sort of thing.

They very much have that.

laid out, they're also regular milk, chocolate milk, strawberry milk, which is also interesting, but she is lying in the bottom of this recycled dumpster covered in empty milk cartons and she says, you motherfuckers sure love your milk.

Just like us from Wisconsin, we love our milk.

Right, right.

I mean, when you look at the vastness of the universe, we don't really eat that much cheese.

Well, speaking of cheese and dairy, we get a good hard look at a milk carton and it says Duke Dairy and it's a local dairy.

And what does she do?

Normally we would say follow the money, but Carol, follow the milk.

And there's a really interesting sequence as she enters Duke Dairy.

And I'm not quite sure that the difference between the normal, the chocolate and the strawberry milk.

are innocuous, right?

Because as she enters into the Duke dairy sort of manufacturing, we see the production line of all of these cartons and she even flips through some of the unglued cartons as well.

But we see some full cartons and they're twisting.

almost like a double helix or a sequence of RNA, and they're different colors.

It's not all in an order.

It's normal milk, it's chocolate milk, and then it's strawberry milk, almost like that RNA sequence that made up the initial outbreak, I guess you could call it, of the joining.

So a very subtle hint there, and just how those milk cartons sort of twisted around into a double helix was really interesting.

Great catch.

I did not catch that.

I've seen so many extremely satisfying manufacturing videos where you're manufacturing paper goods or anything like that and you're bottling bottles of liquid and so forth and it's just very satisfying and so I just got caught up in all of that and how this machine works and what's going on here but you really caught something there that I think may be subtle but I think that is put in there most certainly intentionally and I really like that.

Well, what we discover at the Duke dairy is that they find out that the packaging facility has been converted over to packaging a different liquid into these milk cartons, which is why I said that the regular chocolate and strawberry flavors didn't necessarily matter because it's all this sort of yellowish, almost oily, consistent liquid with no odor.

And now we're really starting to come up with some pretty interesting questions because what is this?

Why is it?

Why do they consume it?

And as you mentioned, we have this really neat sequence that finds Carol making her way to the storage portion of the Duke dairy.

And we find that she has these pallets of what look like 40 pound bags, the little brown bags, like what you would carry your salt for your water softener or something like that.

That's what the bags look like.

And it looks like they're filled with a crystalline substance that almost looks like sugar or salt.

And this goes back to what I mentioned at the beginning of the episode where I don't think our cliffhanger is quite as much of a cliffhanger as we're sort of led to believe.

When she goes to the back and finds these large bags of this white salt -like substance, she also finds that it's being pecked at by crows, these sort of carrion birds.

And I think that's our very first clue as to what exactly happens in our cliffhanger here.

But Carol shoes away the crows, which, if anybody knows crows, that's the worst thing you can do.

Never make an enemy of a crow, because they remember things, absolutely.

Make friends with the crows, certainly, if you ever see one.

But she grabs one of these big 40 -pound bags, and the next scene is we see her as she's struggling to bring that back home.

And she begins...

doing some testing on the white substance that she's found at Duke Dairy.

Yeah, she so smartly uses the pH in drinking water testers from her hot tub to determine that the liquid has a pH balance of 7 .1, which essentially means that it's neutral, like water or celery, which is mostly water.

And my first thought, being the number nerd to a certain degree, were the ham radio channels that Menuselis was dialing through from the previous episode, which were 7 .129 and 7 .132.

So I don't know if that's a little nod there, but again, I'm very confident that Vince Gilligan doesn't put anything into his work that doesn't actually mean something.

So this prompts Carol to create another video for the immune and to see if she can further the investigation, so to speak, or share more of the clues that she's discovered on her own.

And again, it points out the utter inefficiency of the communication style here.

But she does ask herself in this scene, are you even getting these messages?

How am I even to know?

I like the scene quite a bit where she records herself and she's just providing evidence to the rest of the survivors as she calls them.

And when she gets aggravated with herself, she finally has almost a realization that she needs to stop, take a breath, and delete that video that she had just recorded and go and re -record it again.

So it almost plays into the fact that While she is finding this individuality within herself and true independence, she's also learning how to communicate with other people in a more healthy way at the same time.

It almost plays into like a stoic philosophy a little bit where you are best to the earth and other people as a whole when you're the best version of yourself.

And she's slowly figuring it out that not only can I be this independent person and be the best version of myself, but that's also the best version that is most valuable to the people around me.

I saw it as still the cynical Carol, but then doing the things that she knew she needed to do in order to make the message palatable for her very, very small audience.

And so now that I'm trying to doubt her sincerity and her arc here, if that's what it is, if we're taking a curmudgeon and making them into not necessarily a people person, but someone that can work with and communicate with other people without treating them poorly, whether outwardly or in her mind.

And especially when you talk about removing the liquor bottles from...

behind her, putting a suit coat on, doing her makeup and her hair, redoing videos.

For me, that leans more into performance than it does into sincerity.

She's still trying to get something, which is, I need these people on my side.

And a calculating person, which I believe Carol is, would do these things to do that.

It's more like, I screwed up.

I need to get you back in our room again and we need to start talking about this again.

I really like the performative aspect that you mentioned because it may be a theme with this episode because I think that the joined and the hive mind, their actions throughout the entire episode have been overly performative as well.

You know, they're really going the extra mile to...

Show that Carol is alone and we're gone now and who are you now that we're gone?

It's how I felt with the conversation she had with Larry last week and did you notice his character design by the way?

I want to point this out He was wearing what looked to be a biking outfit like when you ride your 10 speed 12 speed and that's that's your hobby, right?

But he was also sunburned.

I don't know if he noticed he was sunburned on his face He was sunburned on the top of his legs And I thought, what brilliant detail to have to adjoin is that you have the sunburned cyclist to come in to talk to Carol.

And I guess this sort of leads us into the next scene, you know, that is that night where the wolves or coyotes return.

And this kind of brings me back to the first scene where they show up and they're getting into her trash.

And I almost think that These wolves or coyotes are a small metaphor of Carol being alone and this pack that is her antagonist.

And that shows up again here where this pack is now trying to uncover the grave of Helen.

And they obviously smell Helen decomposing beneath the dirt here in her grave and are attempting to eat her.

And I just want to highlight, this is our second clue.

of what the potential cliffhanger of this episode could be if indeed we do look at the wolves or the coyotes as being a hive mind, being a pack mind, and they're also trying to dig up this grave to consume for sustenance.

But again, this is another example of Carol finally taking that step into being a truly independent person.

There's no one else around her.

that is going to stop these wolves or coyotes from digging up her wife out of her grave.

So she has to do it herself.

She's alone against the pack.

And this was such a well -directed sequence.

I think this might be the first time we've really cut into a starkly handheld...

experience as far as cinematography because she goes outside and she tries to confront these wolves and quickly finds out that she's fairly ill equipped to take care of a pack as they're growling at her.

So she runs back inside and we get this great handheld sequence where she runs out to the police car.

and she jumps in and she's trying to wrench out the shotgun that is in between the seats and she can't seem to get it out and this drives her to change her mind and now she she wants to use the police car itself as the weapon to get rid of this pack of wolves or coyotes from digging into Helen's grave so she hops in and she even flips on the the siren and the lights and she goes around the block gets through the back of her yard slams through her nice little fence that she's got and scares off the the pack and ends up parking literally on top of Helen's grave almost to protect it and from what we see at the very least it's so late and she's so tired that she ends up falling asleep within the car with the lights still on.

She wakes up the next morning and she is in the car and she looks over at the shotgun and you see that there's this little button and she pushes the button and the release opens up and she goes, son of a bitch.

And she sees that she's still wearing the handcuff and she reaches for the keys and sees that the key to the handcuff is on this key chain and once again says, son of a bitch.

And again, it makes me wonder, was she unconscious of the idea of having that on her wrist all this time or was she subconsciously wearing it because she felt guilty or as you mentioned, was she consciously or subconsciously wearing it because it is a symbol of her being a prisoner in this situation.

You have so eloquently described this episode in that she's gone from being a person who believed they were independent, yet still relying on the basics like garbage and police, to becoming the person that takes care of those things directly.

And now including relinquishing herself from her own self -imposed prison.

So again, another brilliant scene.

And I think this also exemplifies how Carol has gone about her problem solving in the past.

She's approached this situation, understandably, with a lot of emotion.

And every decision that she's made pretty much up to this point has been an emotional decision.

We find that when she takes emotion out of it and she takes a breath or she falls asleep and she wakes up with a clear head, she sees that the solutions to these problems of getting the shotgun or uncuffing herself are actually fairly simple.

And when she changes her outlook on how to approach a problem, then she finds that the solution has been right in front of her the entire time.

It leans into the thing where when you become so, whether it's obsessed or just distracted by the thing or things that are directly in front of you, how you lose sight of the things that are simple.

And this next scene is really great as well.

she wakes up the next morning and she realizes she has to find a solution for Helen's grave.

So she goes to some sort of gardening place and she picks up these slabs of square concrete and she brings them back home and she is placing them on Helen's grave and she ends up making a cairn.

as the Vikings might have called it, to not only protect her grave, but I felt that it was very symbolic of, again, taking that next step of overcoming her grief of losing Carol.

And it literally takes her all day.

We almost get a time lapse of Carol placing the Karen on top of Helen, and it literally ends on...

The sun setting behind her as she's closing the doors to the cop car.

It felt very symbolic that sunset meant that she is finally overcoming that grief and she's setting the Sun on this grief and taking the next step and of course she she makes a Tombstone for Helen as well.

And I think you looked into that a little bit more than I did So I want to hear your thoughts on the tombstone specifically On the headstone, it looked to me as though she painted an orchid that sort of overarched Helen's name.

And when you go to look up orchids, there are tons of meanings, but I knew there was something here that I think would stick for me.

And it's that orchids have come to symbolize eternal love and also are an important part of sharing sympathies after the death of a loved one.

And she does place it in the center.

the tiles as well very similarly to what you were describing the Vikings would do.

She sits down after honoring her lover and makes herself a drink and as she does she knocks over the bag of the crystalline substance and she sees that there's a barcode she hadn't recognized before and she's very smart again she takes her large bag of crystals over to her favorite grocery store and she uses the scanner there to scan the barcode but We don't get any satisfaction.

The barcode doesn't work.

She thinks that this bag is awfully similar to a dog food bag.

She goes to the dog food aisle.

She finds a bag that is quite similar with a label on it.

She peels the label back and what does she find?

The same barcode.

and she flips the dog bag over and finds out that the dog food is manufactured at a place called Agriget.

So another item that's being manufactured right there in town that she can now go and investigate.

And that's exactly what she does.

She heads to the Agriget warehouse and she sort of moves into the back of the warehouse where there's a refrigerator area.

We see mostly in this fridge that it's primarily fruits and vegetables on the warehouse shelves in here.

And we get to the cliffhanger of the episode where she lifts up the plastic and another amazing performance from Rey without any dialogue.

She is surprised and that surprise quickly morphs into horrifying as she gasps and we cut to black.

And then that's the end of the episode.

I want to note, just as a nerd, that when we first appear at Agrijet, that we have a box truck that is parked where they do their freight, and it's a Danichi freight.

And that is in respect and honor to Paul Danichi, who was a cinematographer who worked on Better Call Saul.

So I just thought that that was a cool Easter egg to be throwing in there.

But yeah, her reaction is the classic horror of the gasp and the covering your mouth, and then the screen goes black.

My question to you is now, because you pointed out a handful of times in this episode that you seem to think that you might have a theory.

I want to ask about the theory first because I have thoughts and my question is this.

Are you telling us that you think this is a Soylent Green situation?

Yeah, I think you really caught on to my thinking.

And I think when we first see the white substance as Carol goes into Duke's dairy, we find that there are crows pecking at the bag specifically.

And of course we know that crows are a carrion bird.

They tend to eat the leftovers of a carcass after it's already been killed by a predator.

And in the next scene, if we were to take the wolves and the coyotes as a metaphor for the hive mind in general, we find the wolves or coyotes digging up Helen's grave in order to be a Acherian creature as well and feast on the carcass of their prey that has been killed by other means.

What's under the tarp is likely some of the 863 million dead humans that died during the joining.

The hive mind has refrigerated these dead bodies and are now using them as sustenance.

So I think that is fairly well explained throughout the episode.

And I didn't feel that the cliffhanger was as much of a cliffhanger as we were led to believe.

Unless of course they gave us a bit of a red herring here.

What are your thoughts on that?

I will say that Yes, there is most certainly a possibility that what is under the plastic sheet is a frozen corpse or several, but I would also posit that they are not consuming them or eating them.

It was just more convenient to store them in this manner.

Maybe they're against cremation.

We don't know if they're against burial, but we've seen what could potentially happen with that.

So that might be off the books.

I would say this as well.

If this is a Soylent Green situation, then I'm out because that is not where this should even remotely go.

I'll be extremely disappointed if that's what it is.

What I more see and I would love is, We have an entire episode where Carol had all of the evidence and all of the deduction and all of the clues put together in a very, very interesting way that led from one thing to another.

And I would love to find out that what they're consuming is actually a liquid that it has all the nutrients and all of the whatever you might need to make the human body run as efficiently as possible without having to cook or chop up fruits and vegetables or do any of that stuff.

So it becomes another efficiency thing and that they're taking vegetables and other items and making them into whatever this drink is that is a power drink, a super drink.

Let's call it manna.

they make manna now.

And that is what is easier to keep those that are joined in their proper nutrition.

Yeah, that's certainly another way to look at it.

And I definitely had the feeling in the back of my mind that they are purposefully leading us this way as well as a sort of a red herring.

So that's certainly something to keep in mind.

And I think it's something we'll all be mulling about over the next 10 -day wait we have until the next episode and perhaps even longer than that I could very well see it where after this that Carol believes that they are utilizing these dead bodies as their sustenance, but When she presents that to the other 12 survivors as what she believes is fact, we find out that it is indeed fiction.

And once again, we find Carol alone and cut off from the remainder of the survivors due to that reason.

Well, I tell you what, it keeps getting deeper.

We keep coming up with interesting theories as this thing rolls along.

We are figuring out what clues we can.

And I am most certainly quite excited for the upcoming episode six.

Well, I think that'll do us this week for E Pluribus Unum.

Thank you, Carol, so much for listening to us, and we'll talk to you next week.