How is Apple TV's Pluribus related to Soylent Green? Details revealed

Apple TV's Pluribus is the talk of the town as the newest science fiction thriller o television, but although the show's concept and it's darker underlying themes may seem fresh, it does take a few notes from an older and much darker playbook. The way the show lingers on bodily fluids, storage rooms, and hidden tarps makes you feel like you’re being nudged toward a truth you definitely don’t want, and it feels a little too familiar to a 70s classic called Soylent Green.

For fans who are following it, they immediately clocked the similarity to Soylent Green, the 1973 dystopian cult classic where a mass-produced food product secretly contains processed human remains. Pluribus doesn’t copy that twist, but it does flirt with the same unsettling ideas. The show keeps dropping hints about synovial fluid, “recycling,” and the Hive’s need for something only humans naturally produce, all of this resemble the themes of Soylent Green, which is why you must have probably been hearing too many lines with both the show and the film together. If you're new to Pluribus, and haven't yet been to the Soylent Green theories, here's everything you need to know about the show and the film's connection.

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What is Soylent Green about?

Soylent Green dropped in 1973 as a dystopian thriller from director Richard Fleischer, fronted by Charlton Heston, Leigh Taylor Young, and Edward G. Robinson in his final screen role. The movie spun out of Harry Harrison’s 1966 novel Make Room!, Make Room!, but leaned harder into a blend of science fiction and a gritty cop story.

The story shoots you straight into a future version of New York City in 2022, where the world has basically buckled under overpopulation, nonstop heat, pollution, and collapsing ecosystems. Forty million people cram into the city. The rich hide behind barricaded luxury towers with private guards, clean water, and rare real food. Their apartments even come with “furniture,” a horrifying system where women are treated as disposable property. Everyone else lives in overcrowded misery, lining up at community taps for water and surviving on cheap food wafers from the Soylent corporation. Overpopulation has strangled the planet. Clean water is rare. Real food is basically a myth. People survive on processed wafers produced by the Soylent Corporation. The company starts with Soylent Red and Soylent Yellow, but soon they introduce a shiny new product, Soylent Green, supposedly made from plankton.

In the middle of the collapsing city, NYPD detective Robert Thorn digs into the murder of William R. Simonson, a powerful Soylent executive. He lives with Sol Roth, an ageing researcher who quietly uncovers the truth behind the corporation’s lies. Thorn’s investigation pulls him through Simonson’s protected life, to Shirl, and to a priest who heard a fatal confession before being killed himself.

As riots break out, Thorn survives an attack tied to the case while Roth discovers that the oceans are dead and Soylent Green is made from human bodies. Horrified, Roth ends his life, leaving Thorn to infiltrate a disposal plant, witness the gruesome truth firsthand, and stumble out wounded, shouting to anyone who will listen that “Soylent green is people.”

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So how is Pluribus connected to Soylent Green?

So why is Pluribus suddenly being dragged into this conversation about a 70s film? Because episode 5 of the show did not hold back.

The fifth episode titled Got Milk follows our protagonist Carol as she is alone in Albuquerque after the Others ghost the entire city. She notices something off. Milk cartons everywhere. Recycling bins stuffed with them. The Hivemind chugging “milk” like toddlers on a dairy high. When she finally tests the liquid, she finds out it’s not milk. It’s some neutral pH mystery juice that shouldn’t exist. Then she discovers bags of white powder being eaten by crows. She mixes the powder with water and gets the same weird drink.

And then comes the moment everyone paused their screens for. Carol enters a cold storage room once used by the Hivemind. She lifts up a tarp. She sees something. Her whole face shuts down and the scene cuts before showing us what she saw, but it's something familiar for fans of Soylent Green.

And the breadcrumbs are everywhere. Remember episode 2 when Zosia casually loaded dead bodies into a dairy truck. At the time, viewers were confused, maybe even a little concerned. Now it looks like step one of a very dark supply chain.

The idea floating around is simple and nasty. The Others might be turning human remains into whatever that “milk” is. Not murdering humans, since the Hivemind supposedly can’t intentionally harm anything, but using bodies of people who already died. People who died naturally. People who died when Carol’s emotional explosions took them out by accident. People who just happened to be available. It’s very Soylent Green, but with a cosmic twist.

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If this connection is proven true, there is still one very important difference between Pluribus and Soylent Green

Pluribus sets the whole thing up in a softer way. The Hivemind isn’t evil. They’re kind. They’re polite. They have no sense of malice. They leave Albuquerque because they don’t want to upset Carol. So if they are eating humans, it’s coming from a "circle of life" angle rather than a villain arc. Wolves dig up graves. Mantises eat their partners. Nature doesn’t always wait for permission.

Plus, we know the Hivemind “prefers to eat vegetarian,” but no one ever said they only eat vegetarian. If their biology needs something that only human bodies provide, suddenly the milk mystery makes a messed up kind of sense.

If episode 6 confirms the worst, then Pluribus is brilliantly remixing, twisting and nodding at Soylent Green. Both stories force you to think about what people are willing to consume when the world collapses, and what it means to pretend not to know the truth until someone finally uncovers it.

Pluribus might be giving us its own version of the infamous twist. Less dystopian cruelty. More cosmic awkwardness. Still gross though.

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Pluribus is available to stream on Apple TV.