Vince Gilligan Tapped an A-List Wild Card to Deliver Pluribus’ Most Chilling Reveal to Carol

Pluribus has never exactly been shy about getting weird, but episode 6 goes full tilt: a celebrity cameo shows up to calmly explain something truly gross, and it somehow makes the show even creepier. Consider this your spoiler warning.

Enter John Cena (no, really)

Mid-trip to Las Vegas, Carol Sturka (Rhea Seehorn) gets a broadcast from The Others, the hive running the show behind the scenes. Their chosen spokesperson? A hive-approved version of John Cena, who looks like John Cena, talks like John Cena, and then tells her the thing nobody wants to hear: to survive without killing animals or messing up the planet’s ecosystem, they’ve been eating human remains. That tidy little ethical workaround is... not exactly comforting.

Why Cena? Gilligan had a very specific thought

Vince Gilligan says the casting came out of a very Pluribus-flavored thought experiment: who would be both weirdly random and weirdly perfect to deliver the cannibalism memo to Carol?

"We just thought, 'Who is, simultaneously, the most random person to explain the eating of human flesh to Carol Sturka and the most interesting?'" Gilligan told Men's Health.

Apparently, Cena jumped in fast. He just didn’t totally know what he was saying in the moment. As Gilligan remembers it, Cena wrapped the scene with this gem:

"I can’t wait to find out what the hell it was I just said."

It’s a delightfully deranged casting swing and a smart one: when a hive needs a friendly face to sell something horrific, you pick someone audiences instinctively trust. Mission accomplished.

So where does that leave Carol?

The Others have evolved, and now they can convert the last pockets of immune humans left on Earth — but only with consent. Which sounds nice until you realize how little leverage anyone has once the hive starts making their pitch. With the human-derived protein reveal hanging over everything, the clock just started screaming for Carol.

There is one potential lifeline: Manousos, the Paraguayan survivor we met earlier, has apparently clocked Carol’s situation and is heading to Albuquerque to help. Two against the many is a bold plan — and I admire the optimism — but if the hive can roll out John Cena on a whim, I don’t love their odds.

• Cena appears as a hive-chosen version of himself, delivering the reveal via a Vegas broadcast to Carol.
• The Others’ survival plan involves consuming human remains to avoid harming animals or the planet’s ecosystem.
• Gilligan says the team picked Cena because he was both the most random and the most interesting messenger for that reveal.
• Cena was game, even if he admitted he didn’t fully understand his own lines in the moment.
• The Others can now convert the remaining immune humans — with consent — and Manousos is on his way to Albuquerque to back up Carol.