The original post: /r/television by /u/Neo2199 on 2025-12-05 16:53:15+00:00.
  • Maybe we should have seen this coming. After all, Gilligan pointed to The Twilight Zone as inspiration for Pluribus, and the science fiction anthology show notably explored the theme of human-eating-aliens in the famous episode “To Serve Man.” And yet, just like the rest of us, Seehorn was shocked to discover that the hivemind was eating people. “This is bananas,” she recalls thinking when she first read the script. However, once the idea began to settle, she decided it’s just another example of Gilligan’s brilliance.

“It’s another trope he’s playing with from horror movies and apocalyptic movies and body-snatcher movies,” Seehorn tells Polygon, “but it’s also this awesome storytelling device.”

  • As for why the hivemind is eating Human Derived Protein, here’s Gilligan again, to explain how he and his writers came up with the idea in the first place:

It was something we came up with in the writer’s room. I’ve got these really brilliant writers, and we all sit around for hours on end, and we discuss. It seemed self-evident at a certain point that, if you presuppose a world in which these people are so peaceful that they will not kill, that means they have to be vegetarians. But wait, maybe it’s more than that, because if you’ve got to take it to the nth degree, that means you can’t lop down a field full of corn. You can’t even be a vegetarian. You’ve gotta eat pre-existing food.

And as John Cena explains, if an apple falls off a tree, you can eat it, — gratefully, as he says — but you can’t get one of those machines to shake all the almonds off, or all the apples off, or whatever. You can no longer cultivate vegetables, because you’d be killing them to a certain extent as well. And even if you’re not killing them, if you’re shaking the fruit off the tree, you are defying their agency as living beings.

I mean, these people are hippy-dippy to the nth degree. They’re beyond Jainists. So then you think, OK, so they’ve got to eat human flesh. They don’t kill to obtain it. It’s like roadkill or dead animals that died of their own accord, of old age or whatever; same goes with people.

Soylent Green HDP is people!