Sometimes, bigger is better—even when it costs a lot more.
The first draft of Alison Tatlock and Gordon Smith’s script for the Pluribus season finale ended on a muted but intriguing note. Rhea Seehorn’s Carol Sturka has spent much of the episode canoodling with Zosia (Karolina Wydra), the spokesperson for what the Pluribus writers have dubbed “the Others”—a seemingly blissful hive mind taking over and linking together virtually all of humanity, with a few exceptions like Carol and Carlos-Manuel Vesga’s Manousos. Carol either is in love with Zosia or has convinced herself that she is, and she wants nothing to do with Manousos’s plan to turn the world back to normal by any means necessary. But when she realizes that the Others have been secretly working to assimilate her into their collective against her will, she returns to her Albuquerque cul-de-sac and quietly agrees to team up with Manousos.
“We had a much subtler ending,” recalls Smith, who also directed the finale. “It was like a secret handshake between them, like her way of saying, ‘I’m with you.’”
But executives at Sony and Apple TV had a suggestion for Tatlock and Smith’s boss, Pluribus creator Vince Gilligan: Maybe subtle isn’t the way to go at the end of the first season of such an ambitious, high-concept, globe-trotting sci-fi drama.
So team Pluribus dropped an atomic bomb on Carol’s driveway. Literally.
To be fair, the bomb was dropped very gently, inside a secure crate, and has yet to explode. But simply placing a weapon of mass destruction in Carol’s possession drastically upped the stakes in her plan to save the human race from collective happiness. “It was a great note,” acknowledges Gilligan. And it wasn’t a cheat because the writers realized that Carol had already asked the Others if they would give her an atom bomb if she asked for one. As the great Russian playwright Anton Chekhov once said (I think), if your romantasy writer heroine asks whether she can have an atomic bomb in the first act of your season, then the planetary collective has to give her one by the end of your third act.
Never mind that this script change would require a helicopter to land in the cul-de-sac, which isn’t cheap—but, after all, Apple and Sony had already gone to the expense of letting Gilligan and his crew build the entire cul-de-sac from scratch so they could film whatever they wanted there without being at the mercy of cranky neighbors, lookie-loos, influencers, etc. If Pluribus needed a helicopter and a crate that would almost certainly be opened in a later season, then Gilligan’s corporate bosses were going to pay for it.
It’s a running gag on the series that the Others can provide almost anything Carol asks for, often at the drop of a hat—like the time she demands that they restock the shelves they emptied at her local grocery store, and they get it done within an hour and eight minutes. Similarly, Gilligan had more time and money than he ever had on Breaking Bad or Better Call Saul—where he’d worked with Seehorn, Tatlock, Smith, and most of the Pluribus crew. “It’s wonderful,” he says. “Our reach always exceeds our grasp on each show, at least by a little bit. But we get to reach a lot farther on this show.”
Much of Pluribus’s seventh episode followed Manousos as he drove from Paraguay in his beloved vintage MG Midget convertible all the way to the mouth of the Darién Gap, a forbidding jungle one would have to traverse to get from South to Central America without traveling by sea or air. But parts of the road trip were filmed in New Mexico and parts in Spain’s Canary Islands. There was no easy way to ship the car across the Atlantic within the necessary time frame, but production figured out that it could buy a pair of MGs in Europe, modify them to be exact replicas of the one in New Mexico, and get them to the Canary Islands.
“It’s the luxury of time,” says Smith. “The amount of time it takes to figure out how to do something like that is what would have killed us in the past.” Or, as Gilligan puts it, “Time equals money. But if you have enough preproduction time, you can figure out ways to lessen the cost of production.”
Breaking Bad and Saul scripts were written and rewritten while their seasons were in production. That allowed Gilligan and his collaborators to course correct if they saw an actor doing something unexpected—on Saul, Jimmy McGill’s brother, Chuck, was meant to be his closest ally until the writers watched Michael McKean’s performance for a few episodes and realized that this pompous man would never want his con man brother to be a lawyer. But it also exhausted everyone, to the point that Gilligan felt they weren’t always at their best. “We wouldn’t have been able to do that Michael McKean thing,” he acknowledges. “But we didn’t need to in Season 1.”
Seehorn has known most of her off-camera Pluribus coworkers for a decade. Their creativity and dedication stopped surprising her a long time ago, and the bigger scale of this production hasn’t changed that. “They are artisans giving 300 percent, regardless of budget,” she says. “It’s fun for me to see Vince tell the story the way Vince wants to tell it and realize his full vision.” The extra money is going wholly into the on-screen product: “It’s not like I look around and craft service got a lot better.”
When Seehorn arrived in Albuquerque to play hyper-competent Saul attorney Kim Wexler, she realized that many of the people on set were already close from their time on Breaking Bad. They welcomed her, and she made an effort to pay it forward on Pluribus, making sure her new costars Wydra and Vesga felt comfortable amid this tight-knit group with years of in-jokes and shorthand communication. As fans of the earlier series, Wydra says that she and Vesga would be in a corner of the set, asking each other in hushed, trembling tones, “Can you believe we’re in a Vince Gilligan show?”
The newcomers learned that the secret of so many of Gilligan’s magic tricks comes from both his love of collaboration and his obsessive attention to detail. When Vesga filmed a scene in which Manousos was writing with a Sharpie, he inadvertently put the marker down in a way that made it roll onto a piece of paper. “Vince comes over and says, ‘That was amazing! Can you do it again?’” Vesga tried and failed to re-create the image that his boss had become obsessed with, until finally, Gilligan himself lay down out of frame with an air can, blasting the Sharpie on each take as he tried to figure out exactly how much air pressure was required to make it do its trick again.
“There’s something that always happens with Vince,” says Vesga. “It transmits to the rest of the crew. You see in Vince’s eyes, it’s a childlike shine. His eyes shine.”
For the past couple of weeks, Pluribus fans have been debating whether Carol has actually fallen in love with Zosia—less than two months after her beloved wife, Helen, died as collateral damage in the process that joined the Others together—or whether she’s using their relationship as a coping mechanism for all that she’s endured or she has some other agenda. Seehorn admits that she had to work through the same questions. So did the writers. “We debated it a lot,” says Tatlock, “and we felt by the time they kissed, we had earned it in a storytelling way. We had set up enough desperation that Carol was ready in the moment to convince herself that her feelings were real”—and that Zosia was a real individual person, and not just a gorgeous, flesh-and-blood equivalent of ChatGPT.
Gilligan has grown increasingly reluctant to explain what he feels his shows are about since the Heisenberg days, and some actors on the show like to play things close to the vest about what may or may not be motivating their characters. (When Zosia seems to be acting more like an individual with Carol, Wydra wonders, “Is Zosia actually moving herself a little from the collective, or is she performing for Carol to make her happy? That is something that I would want the audience to have their own opinions on.”) Pluribus has also invited more speculation than Gilligan’s other series, as viewers keep trying to read nefarious motives into the Others’ actions, even though we know that they are pathologically honest. (Although, as Gilligan points out, “They’re lawyerly” in their use of language, which was why Carol had assumed they’d stopped trying to transform her into one of them.)
“People these days are very suspicious, rightfully, in a lot of ways, in everyone around them,” says Smith. “Earnestness is in short supply, so you suspect earnestness. I don’t know how we could write it to make sure no one thinks they are bad.”
“We are all attuned to the ebb and flow of a mystery-box type show or movie,” acknowledges Gilligan. “We’ve all seen our share of M. Night Shyamalan movies or Twilight Zone episodes where there’s a great twist. We are attuned to that; we expect it. Sometimes, the best twist is no twist.”
On those earlier series, the writers would often intentionally paint themselves into corners at the beginnings or ends of seasons, with no idea at the time how they would get themselves out. The final season of Breaking Bad began with a flash-forward to Walter White buying a car with an M60 machine gun in its trunk. The creative team didn’t know at the time why Walt would need such a weapon or on whom he would try to use it; Todd, Uncle Jack, and their neo-Nazi crew came about because there needed to be a small army to justify that amount of firepower. But Gilligan remembers cursing the heavens daily for not having thought the idea through until that eureka moment happened.
They still haven’t learned that particular lesson. “I feel like future Alison might be a little mad right now,” says Tatlock. “It really felt like an exciting big-swing statement for Carol to plant a flag at the end of a season. But that did not mean in any way that we had a specific plan. Now, future us is present us. We’re having to figure it out now.”
But Gilligan is more relaxed about it than usual, insisting, “I’m not as worried about paying off the atom bomb as I was the M60.” For that matter, he says, “At this point in the process, we have more thoughts about the endgame of the series than we ever did on Breaking Bad. We did have some ideas back then, but we jettisoned them all for better ideas. And we would do that here if a better idea came to us.”
There is one area where the seemingly limitless time and resources of Pluribus prove to be a double-edged sword, and that’s when you ask Vince Gilligan how long it might be until we see a second season and find out why Carol wants an atom bomb in her driveway.
“Longer than I would care for it to be,” he replies with a deep sigh, because the show takes a lot of time to get as precisely calibrated as his other shows—if not more, considering the scope of things. “It’s gonna be a while.”
Sorry, Carol.
