Inside Tim Keller’s Pluribus Connection and Why Albuquerque Should Care
Pluribus is this year’s breakout obsession, but just as fans settled into Vince Gilligan’s mind-bending sci-fi twists, the creator dropped a curveball that could upend everything.
Vince Gilligan made a sci-fi show and, surprise, it rules. Pluribus has already turned into one of the year’s most-watched, most-picked-apart series, and now it’s flexing the kind of cameos that make you pause and rewind. One is a local-government deep cut. The other is John Cena calmly explaining why a hive mind drinks people. Yes, really.
The mayor is in the yard (no, really)
In Season 1, Episode 4, titled Please, Carol (aired November 21, 2025), Carol (Rhea Seehorn) is watching a few folks clean up her yard when she clocks a guy she vaguely recognizes. The exchange is short and perfect:
"Do I know you?"
"You're the f***ing mayor."
"Thank you for your vote."
The man is Tim Keller, the actual Mayor of Albuquerque, playing himself. It’s a quick, cheeky wink that also telegraphs where the production’s roots are. Gilligan loves a local Easter egg, and this one’s about as on-the-nose as it gets.
Two weeks later: John Cena and the protein problem
The show doesn’t stop there. In Episode 6, HDP (December 5, 2025), John Cena shows up and calmly lays out one of the series’ grimmest pieces of worldbuilding. He tells Carol that the hive mind consumes human-derived protein. They don’t like it. They’re not trying to be monsters. But if they don’t do it, the hive mind starves.
It gets weirder: they won’t even pick an apple off a tree, because they believe that harms the tree. So instead of fruit, you get the darkest pantry imaginable: human bodies are pulped into a slurry and poured into milk cartons. If your brain flashed The Matrix, same here.
(Quick timeline note, because I saw some confusion: the mayor cameo is Episode 4 on November 21; then Episode 5, Got Milk, lands November 28; Cena’s appearance is Episode 6 on December 5.)
Gilligan’s head, literally
In that same HDP episode, Carol wanders into a warehouse-sized freezer and finds body parts wrapped in plastic, queued up for slurry duty. As the camera drifts past a severed head with its mouth open, there’s a morbid little blink-and-you-miss-it reveal: that head belongs to Vince Gilligan himself. It’s gross, funny, and exactly the kind of macabre in-joke you expect from this team.
What’s next
HDP just dropped on December 5, which means there are three episodes left in Season 1. Here’s the rollout so far:
- Episode 1: We Is Us — November 7, 2025
- Episode 2: Pirate Lady — November 7, 2025
- Episode 3: Grenade — November 14, 2025
- Episode 4: Please, Carol — November 21, 2025
- Episode 5: Got Milk — November 28, 2025
- Episode 6: HDP — December 5, 2025
- Episode 7: The Gap — December 12, 2025
- Episode 8: TBA — December 19, 2025
- Episode 9: TBA — December 26, 2025
Pluribus is streaming on Apple TV. If you caught the Keller cameo in real time, congratulations on having great face-recognition under pressure.