A review of this week's Pluribus, "HDP" — with spoilers — coming up just as soon as I teach you the sunset flip power bomb...
Alan Sepinwall
Because I was able to watch the first seven Pluribus episodes at once to help write my review, I didn't give much thought to the cliffhanger that ended "Got Milk." I was able to immediately cue up "HDP" and learn that the thing that made Carol gasp was seeing that the warehouse freezer contained human body parts. The rest of you had to wait a week, and your comments, both here and on the What's Alan Watching? Discord, suggested frustration. It wasn't that "Got Milk" had a cliffhanger at all, but rather when the cliffhanger happened. To some of you, it felt cheap that the episode ended on Carol's shocked face, without letting viewers see what she saw. A closing shot of one of the shrink-wrapped human heads() would have been more dramatically satisfying, while still leaving the audience eager to see what happened next. "Why are they collecting body parts?" is arguably a much more tantalizing question than, "What did Carol see?" It's a fair question, and one I hadn't considered(*).
(*) On the official podcast, Vince Gilligan said that the head Carol is looking at was a model of his own.
(**) This isn't totally comparable, because it involves cliffhanger from a season finale that viewers had to wait months to see resolved, rather than a week. But the debate hearkens back to my objection to the end of Lost Season One. The show had spent many episodes making viewers wonder what was in the hatch, but the season ended before we could see anything inside it, other than a broken ladder. Even a small glimpse of something strange but unexplained — say, one of the retro Dharma computers, with Hurley's numbers flashing on the screen — would have felt like enough of a payoff, while still leaving plenty to be explored in Season Two.
Fortunately, "HDP" doesn't try to be cute by opening with a flashback or otherwise unrelated scene. We pick up right where we left off, with a nauseated Carol bursting out of the warehouse to grab her camcorder and film what's inside. And the stalling can probably be forgiven for another brilliant punchline, where Carol is on the verge of driving to Las Vegas to tell Diabate about this, only to realize that she spilled some of the HDP powder on her rug, and that she has that she has to vacuum up this disgusting stuff before she hits the road.