Warning! This post contains spoilers for the latest episode of Pluribus, “HDP.”
One of the big reveals in the sixth episode of Pluribus comes when Carol discovers that the hive mind is, among other things, eating human-derived protein (aka, human bodies smashed up into a slurry then put into milk cartons). Later on in “HDP,” the individual formerly called John Cena explains to Carol, the necessity behind it—they don’t like doing it, but if they don’t, they’ll starve because they can’t even pick apples from a tree for food, since that hurts the tree.
Brief aside: Does it, though? Doesn’t the apple tree want animals to eat the apples, so their seeds spread and create more apple trees? Shouldn’t the hive mind see that and eagerly pick and eat the apples, since that would make the tree happy? But I digress…
Carol discovers the hive is eating people by investigating a warehouse-sized freezer, where various body parts are wrapped in plastic for future slurry consumption. We get a glimpse of some of these body parts, specifically a decapitated head with its mouth open in (what Carol likely presumes) horror.
That head is none other than show creator Vince Gilligan’s. In a conversation with Carol herself, Rhea Seehorn, he explained how the moment came to be. “I had never done the Hitchcockian cameo until episode six of Pluribus, where my severed frozen head appears on the show,” he said.
Gilligan described the process of making that head “wonderfully noninvasive.” Special effects expert Joe Ulibarri simply captured his head using a LiDAR scanner to capture Gilligan’s likeness and then 3D printed it. Gilligan also got a smaller bust of the image for his own enjoyment. Fun!
See if you can catch other Easter eggs when new episodes of Pluribus premiere on Apple TV on Fridays. In the meantime, check out Seehorn’s interview with Gilligan about his frozen head cameo below.
