Vince Gilligan’s new Apple TV series Pluribus continues the tense dance between protagonist Carol Sturka (Rhea Seehorn) and the hive-mind that constantly shadows her. In episode 5, the hive-mind, finally fed up with Carol’s meddling, decides it needs some “distance” and abruptly evacuates all of its members from Albuquerque.
This leaves the hive forced to fulfil Carol’s demands with a laughably underpowered remote-controlled drone and an automated voicemail service. Predictably, on its very first garbage-run mission the drone gets tangled in a streetlamp near Carol’s house and ends up dangling there helplessly.
From Roof Pizza to Garbage Drone
For fans of the Gilligan universe, the dangling drone is instantly recognisable as the Pluribus version of Breaking Bad’s legendary roof pizza. As you’ll remember, when Walter White (Bryan Cranston) was furious at his wife for leaving him, he vented his rage by hurling an entire unsliced pizza onto the roof of their house. That pizza became a ritual for fans, turning the real-life home used for filming into a nightmare: the family who lived there were bombarded with pizzas thrown onto their roof for years. In 2015 Gilligan had to publicly beg fans to stop.
A Practical Fix and a Sigh of Relief
The humorous nod in Pluribus comes with one major difference: this time Gilligan has prevented real-world victimisation. Carol Sturka’s hilltop cul-de-sac house is not a real residence; it’s a set built especially for Pluribus in the desert outside Albuquerque. This clever side-effect both makes it impossible to film the show’s insane events in an actual neighbourhood and stops fans from turning up to hurl garbage-laden drones at the roof.
It shows that even when creating comedy, Gilligan has learned from past mistakes and has designed Pluribus so that, unlike Walter White’s actions, it remains absurd only within the fiction and harms no one in the real world.
