The Others’ HDP PSA serves as a meta nod to the audience that Pluribus understands the best way to use a John Cena cameo.
Photo: Apple TV
Spoilers follow for “HDP,” episode six of Pluribus.
Delivering bad news to one of the remaining survivors of an alien overthrow of Earth is hard. Delivering bad news in the form of a cannibalism reveal is extra hard! For a task this difficult, you need someone whose pleasant blandness can sell the fact that billions of mind-melded Others are going to be slurping down their liquified neighbors and there’s nothing the dozen or so conscious and unchanged people can do about it. You need someone whose energy is that of an enthusiastic golden retriever, whose aura is a turquoise blend of compassion and comprehensibility, and whose dimples are as pleasantly textured as warm focaccia. You need John Cena.
Pluribus has done an exceptional job casting the Others’ mouthpieces, the figures who so unnerve Carol as she struggles to understand the changing world around her. The key for all these people has been a great smile — broad, toothy, guileless — to emphasize the schism between the Others’ experience of togetherness and Carol’s deepening loneliness. With his perfectly knotted tie and tan glow, The Young and the Restless’s Peter Bergman made a wonderful middle-management representative for the U.S. government. Jeff Hiller’s bubbliness sold his character’s insistence that Carol’s Wycaro novels are considered by the Others to be as “equally wonderful” as Shakespeare’s oeuvre. Karolina Wydra’s apple cheeks help her seem vigorous and healthy, someone whose robustness suggests that the Others would never willingly do anything to hurt their hosts. (Well, at least not when they’re alive.)
Everyone’s been great! But the introduction of Cena in this week’s episode is a particularly perfect bit of world-building, one that affirms Carol’s reality as directly linked to our reality while also emphasizing how different things are now. It’s the same idea behind casting the Other whom Carol recognizes as “the fucking mayor” in episode four with Albuquerque’s real-life mayor, amplified by the fact that viewers outside New Mexico are much more likely to recognize John Cena than they are Tim Keller. The John Cena of Carol’s timeline is the same John Cena as our timeline, which makes the other aspects of Carol’s world so much more jarring and bewildering. How willingly the Others go along with Koumba’s James Bond role-playing, his Las Vegas largesse, and his insatiable sexual appetite. How committed they are to personal boundaries, evidenced by them squeezing out Carol via their voice-mail message and replying to her through written-out texts on the Westgate’s gigantic digital sign. The emptiness of the Strip — where is everyone? The Others’ quest to bring the remaining unjoined into the fold continues, and somewhere a possessed version of Cena is doing what he does best, which is amiably shill for an entity other than himself. At least there’s some comfort in that. Some normalcy, even.
Many of Cena’s recent career turns have leaned into anti-heroism, even unlikability. As Peacemaker, Rocksteady in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem, and Jakob Toretto in the Fast & Furious franchise, plus in his recent heel turn in WWE, Cena’s experimented with molding his persona into that of a villain. And while his supporting turn as one of the exhaustingly motormouthed Faks on The Bear’s third season technically wasn’t a bad-guy role, it was divisive-bordering-on-hated enough that it may as well have been. Sammy Fak is an object lesson in misunderstanding the power of a Cena cameo, but Pluribus gives him the opportunity to do what he does best in his outside-WWE persona: pop by in a small role, make an impact through his beaming positivity, and graciously hand the stage over to someone else.
He’s so good at this, in fact, that we learn Koumba personally requested Cena explain to him what the Others eat and then suggested Cena explain it to Carol, too. That in-universe detail serves as a meta-nod to the audience that Pluribus understands the best way to use a Cena cameo. The specialized PSA he appears in while explaining that the Others have taken “certain measures” to feed themselves via “human-derived protein” is basically an info-dump of exposition, but Cena’s steadiness keeps the video from feeling like too clunky of a narrative device. His posture is authoritative without being imposing, his voice warm without being facetious. He’s so inoffensive that he makes even the most personally distancing bits of this speech, like “Someone John Cena size,” feel genuine, and the most grotesque (HDP is “pretty much what it sounds like”) seem rational. And he nails the exact-right peppy tone for the PSA’s deliberate casualness, how much it sounds, like the Others’ voice-mail, like a customer-service message painstakingly worked out in a prepared script. “We hope that clears things up” is a hilarious way to explain away eating people, but Cena manages it.
Remember Cena as the cheerful merman Ken in Barbie, waving exuberantly at Margot Robbie, or as the stoic drug dealer Pazuzu in Sisters, willingly lifting up Tina Fey in a re-creation of the famous dance move from Dirty Dancing, or as himself on The Simpsons, helping deliver a baby after chugging an energy drink? That’s Cena in his most welcome himbo mode — indulgent, understanding, unbothered — and it’s what he brings to this presentation of himself in Pluribus, too. There’s a self-effacing awareness to how Cena positions himself as the best advocate for and representative of the Others in this current moment, to how he tamps down the bombastic elements of his wrestling persona and instead amps up the people-pleasing demeanor he’s brought to his other acting work. The result is not that different from Cena in spokesperson mode, which he’s done for years for brands like Hefty, Mountain Dew, Neutrogena, Michelob Ultra, and Capri Sun. (The man loves commercial omnipresence.) That approach enables the whole thing to play out like Cena appearing in an advertisement for the Others’ ideology and to smile through the fundamental ickiness of what the Others are explaining to Carol through their cannibalism PSA. After all, aren’t the Others trying to sell Carol something — themselves?
