‘Pluribus’ Episode 5 Recap – Rhea Seehorn Must Be Tired After Carrying “Got Milk”

We’ve got a lot to thank Rhea Seehorn for, for obvious reasons, but one of the biggest is carrying an entire episode of Pluribus on her own. She has carried most of the season thus far, of course, but as a component in a wider developing idea which is in itself compelling. In Episode 5, “Got Milk”, she’s carrying it solo because there isn’t a great deal else going on in it. It’s a bit like the fly episode in Breaking Bad, only with drones, meaning it’s entirely feasible to chart our evolution as a species by the thing that lonely, desperate people become most obsessed by in Vince Gilligan shows.

Highlighting Seehorn’s brilliance is also, for the first time, a bit of a backhanded compliment. Without her, I really don’t think “Got Milk” would work. There’s a revelation at the end, or at least the ghost of one, but unpacking what’s really going on takes a backseat to facilitate Carol’s worsening mental health spiral. Seehorn is so good here that it obscures how weak the hour is on its own terms.

If nothing else, though, it’s a logical outgrowth of the previous cliffhanger, which found Carol pushing the Others a little too far by kidnapping and drugging Zosia, in the process almost killing her, in the hopes of finding out whether the Joining could be reversed. As a result, Carol has been frozen out. The aliens still care about her feelings, but they need some space. It’s a very funny idea since it implies that Carol is so grating to be around that even an alien hivemind entirely dedicated to her happiness can get sick of her.

This information is relayed to Carol through a message when she dials a line after falling asleep in the hospital while waiting for an update on Zosia’s condition and wakes up to find the place empty. It could be a joke at the expense of faux-concerned customer service boilerplate, if you’d like it to be. But it leaves Carol, for the first time, alone. When she rushes to the tallest building she can find, she sees the Others all heading out of Albuquerque in a convoy of departing taillights. Carol has finally gotten what she thought she wanted, just in time to realise that she probably didn’t want it after all.

The completeness of Carol’s isolation sends her a bit mad. She tries to make the most of the situation by recording a message for the other immune people, which she instructs the Others to pick up, subtitle for the benefit of non-English speakers, and disseminate. They do, but they send a drone to pick the recording up, a comically impersonal gesture that doesn’t go unnoticed. Carol obviously didn’t anticipate a few things. One is that in the absence of the Others, she isn’t entirely alone; all her thoughts and memories remain with her, which is why she can’t bring herself to look at Helen’s cold side of the bed. And this is presuming she can get to sleep at all, which she can’t, since the lack of power in the neighbourhood has summoned hungry wolves to the back yard, which isn’t a metaphor but could probably be interpreted as one all the same.

Carol realises throughout Pluribus Episode 5 that she needs the Others to solve almost every problem she encounters. She needs to call them to turn the power back on, then to pick up the trash, which summons another drone, this one incapable of heaving the giant rubbish bag, ending up spilling everything all over the road. After a while, the recordings and precise instructions, and absence of happy-clappy reassurances start to get to her. She begins to focus instead on the surprising abundance of milk cartons she finds around the place, which leads her to a local dairy plant that, like the rest of Albuquerque, has been completely abandoned.

The milk cartons all contain an amber liquid comprised of water and a white powder. Carol does some testing on it to reveal hilariously mundane information like its absence of smell, olive-oil-like consistency, and totally neutral, celery-esque pH level. There’s something very funny about Carol recording these totally asinine findings in another video message, like she’s blowing the whistle on a vast conspiracy. The Others dutifully send a drone to pick it up, even though whether they’re actually delivering them to anyone remains unknown.

As sterile as “Got Milk” can sometimes feel, there is some emotional sentiment underpinning it. When the wolves return and try to dig up Helen’s body from its shallow grave in the yard, Carol scares them off, sits up all night keeping watch, and then tiles over the whole patch and hand-paints a personalised headstone. What Carol’s doing, divorced from context, can sometimes be very funny, but when you think about why she’s doing it, there’s something quietly horrifying and deeply sad about it. Pluribus tends to thrive in that space.

But it also thrives in the ongoing mystery of the whole scenario, which takes another turn at the end of “Got Milk”. On the bag containing the white powder that goes in the milk cartons, Carol finds a barcode. The bag matches a dog food brand packaged at another abandoned local factory, Agri-Jet, which Carol goes to investigate. Inside, she finds a giant walk-in fridge containing various perishables and something wrapped in plastic. When Carol uncovers it, she gasps in shock, but of course, the audience doesn’t get to see what it’s covering. Maybe next week.