WARNING: The following contains major spoilers for Utopia, available now on Amazon Prime Video.
Amazon Prime’s Utopia houses one of those rare convoluted plots where it initially appears that you have unraveled all the mysteries only for this unexpected last revelation to jump out of the blue. Throughout the season, it looks like Kevin Christie, aka Mr. Rabbit, concocted a tricky plot to spread a virus that would kill countless people. However, the final episode reveals that his plans are much more sinister than they appeared to be.
In the beginning, Christie pretends to be a visionary running the famed pharmaceutical company, Christie Bio Labs. He produces Simpro, a simple lab-grown protein in the form of meat which he calls the “future of food.” Simpro claims to provide more iron and vitamins than meat and doesn’t need land, sun or water to sustain like plan-based proteins. It appears that Christie is really looking for revolutionary solutions for a future where all Earth’s resources have disappeared. He even appears to be genuinely offended when in an interview it's hinted that his meat is the reason for the spread of the flu across schools in the United States.
However, it's later revealed that it was all a facade to hide his real evil plans as Mr. Rabbit, the leader of the shady organization, the Harvest. Seven years ago, Dr. Michael Stern discovered a lethal virus, which can be recognized by the T-shaped rash on the forehead of those infected, in fruit bats in the Andes Mountains. As Sterns works for Christie Labs, Christie took the virus, tampered with it and injected it in rabbits of Uncle Pat’s petting farm for children. As the petting farm traveled all across the country, the virus spread to children in various cities.
The next step of Christie's plan was to get approval for the vaccine of the virus, which Sterns had already created. He even orchestrated a fake loving wife, Coleen, for Sterns. Christie expected that she would be enough to steer her meek husband in the direction he wants him to take. But, when Sterns refuses to allow the vaccine’s mass production and goes to the quarantined camp in St. Louis to test whether the vaccine is safe, Christie reveals yet another twisted plan.
Christie plants a fabricated family -- Dale and his sick daughter, Charlotte -- that plays on Stern’s emotions. This ensures that Charlotte is the one to get the vaccine, and when she dies because the cure is useless, her twin Lily takes her place to pretend that Sterns’ vaccine is a miracle remedy. As for Mr. Rabbit, he purchases children from impoverished countries as parents sell them to earn money. He keeps the children at the Harvest’s headquarters, a place called Home where they are trained, some as assassins like Arby, some as martyrs like Charlotte and Lily and some as mere puppets.
Manufacturing Simpro and selling it in areas where he is spreading the virus which in turn sets it up for an FDA check was all part of Christie’s plan as Simpro gets a clean slate after no virus is found in the meat. He wanted to ensure that by the time the vaccine is approved, he comes out as a wronged samaritan whose heart is so big that he is still striving to help others.
When the FDA refuses to mass-produce the vaccine without running preliminary tests, Christie swoops in to assure that even though his credibility was deliberately maligned earlier, he is all set to begin the production of the vaccine immediately. Until it's approved, he continues spreading the virus through the petting farm to increase the mass hysteria, which cements the high demand for the vaccine worldwide.
But, while it appears that the vaccine carries another virus to kill even more people, in the final episode of Utopia, Christie reveals that his plan is far more twisted. The vaccine actually carries a “world-improving omnivirus” that will render every one of its recipients sterile, effectively stripping the next three generations of their capability to have children. This is his solution to curb global warming, mass extinction of other species, food and water shortages -- problems that are worsening as the world population continues to increase rapidly. He wants to bring the population to an ideal number where humans can be as “decadent and self-indulgent” as they want without fearing a future where all the world's resources are used up.
Created by Gillian Flynn, Utopia stars Dan Byrd, Ashleigh LaThrop, Jessica Rothe, Desmin Borges, Javon "Wanna" Walton, Sasha Lane, Farrah Mackenzie, Christopher Denham, Cory Michael Smith, John Cusack and Rainn Wilson. The series is streaming on Amazon Prime Video.