Creator Vince Gilligan on Season 2

[This story contains spoilers major spoilers from Pluribus’ season one finale, “La Chica o El Mundo.”]

Rest assured, Vince Gilligan fans. He absolutely has a plan after Pluribus season one’s bombshell ending.

One of the most well-worn Breaking Bad stories has to do with the flash forward in the penultimate season’s series premiere, “Live Free or Die.” Walter White (Bryan Cranston) — with a new look and a new identity of Mr. Lambert — buys an M60 machine gun at an Albuquerque Denny’s, and when he opens up the trunk of a vehicle to inspect his new hardware, Gilligan and his writers, famously, had no idea when or how it would be deployed. Gilligan’s brain trust has always had a knack for writing themselves into jams and finding inventive ways out of them. However, these old habits have officially died hard. 

Gilligan and his senior writers/executive producers, Gordon Smith and Alison Tatlock, confirm that they didn’t have Zosia (Karolina Wydra) deliver an enclosed atom bomb to Carol’s (Rhea Seehorn) driveway without knowing what Carol’s future intentions are for it. (“Fun fact” in Zosia’s voice: Gilligan explored nuclear warfare in Breaking Bad‘s second season when his team staged a scene at Albuquerque’s then-titled National Atomic Museum. Jesse Pinkman’s (Aaron Paul) friends examined the replica casings of the first two atomic bombs used in combat, “Little Boy” and “Fat Man.”)

“We’ve got a pretty good idea where we’re going with it,” Gilligan tells The Hollywood Reporter after the Pluribus season finale about season two. “We don’t consciously endeavor to paint ourselves into corners like we used to. We almost did that gleefully back in the day. That was when I was younger and had more energy. So I wouldn’t say we’re trying to paint ourselves into a corner with this [atomic bomb]. Definitely not.”

Back in the third episode, “Grenade,” Carol learned the hard way that the Joined will retrieve practically anything her heart desires. She nearly killed Zosia for the third time (out of an eventual four) when she mistakenly assumed the live hand grenade she sarcastically requested was just a dummy version. Written and directed by Smith, that episode concluded with Carol conducting a thought experiment by asking another Joined individual if they’d still fetch her an atom bomb after the grenade mishap. In an impressive turn by Robert Bailey Jr., his polite DHL guy character reluctantly agreed they would.

At that point in the writing of season one, Smith and the rest of the writers room did not know they were setting up an ominous punchline in the finale by having Carol escalate matters to the nuclear option. As mentioned, they have a plan for the A-bomb going forward, but making good on it was a late addition during the start of the finale’s production. The revised objective, in conversation with Apple TV, was to leave audiences on a show-stopping cliffhanger, as opposed to the more low-key team-up that was originally planned for Carol and Manousos (Carlos-Manuel Vesga).

Carol’s ever-changing motivation remains a topic of much debate. She was highly determined to save the world throughout the first six episodes, and while the ongoing threat of her being belatedly Joined provided her a major spark, restoring humanity seemed to be just as important as self-preservation. In episode two, she even referred to the other immune “Old-Schoolers” as “traitors to the human race” for not helping her quest. But during episode six’s Vegas getaway, she learned that she could decline to give the Joined consent to collect her stem cells in order to turn her into one of them. And thinking she was now in the clear, she abandoned her heroic pursuit in episode seven, opting to jaunt around Albuquerque for 36 days until her loneliness led her to beckon Zosia’s return.

In episode eight, Carol, while in the company of Zosia, resumed her investigation into the Joined, at least until she and Zosia consummated their relationship. Then, in the finale, Manousos finally arrives in Albuquerque after nearly dying en route from Paraguay. His immediately aggressive efforts to reverse the Joining drove the Joined to flee ABQ once more, prompting Carol to follow her feelings for Zosia instead of staying to help him save the world like he was expecting. What she didn’t know at the time was that Zosia and the Joined were already scheming as well. 

As revealed in the Tatlock and Smith-written finale, the Joined have found a loophole to turn her by way of her frozen eggs that were stored at a fertility clinic. Feeling betrayed, Carol has Zosia fly her back to Albuquerque with the aforementioned atom bomb attached to their helicopter. That’s when she reluctantly agrees to participate in Manousos’ ongoing effort to save the world. This dramatic turn of events raises the question of whether Carol wants to save the world or just herself. 

“She definitely wants to save herself at this point. I still think she wanted to save the world [earlier in the season], but she had been so beaten and isolated. It became difficult for her to stay the course,” says Smith, who also directed the finale, his third directorial outing of the season. “It’s, ‘Oh God, these people are not the people I convinced myself that they could be.” So the scales fell from her eyes a bit.”

Tatlock has a slightly different angle on it: “I believe she does want to save the world, even if it is partly selfish. It gets to the question of, what is altruism anyway? Are we not always, at least in part, looking out for ourselves?”

Season two will also get to the bottom of what Manousos learned from his solo effort to un-join a Joined individual named Rick. Gilligan makes it clear that the radio signal Manousos used in his experiment was not the more powerful signal that started the Joining in the first place. Season two may reveal who or what is behind that shortwave transmission.

Unfortunately, it’s going to be a while before we see the further adventures of Carol Sturka. Gilligan and his team have always been a meticulous bunch, and Apple TV generously agreed from the start that they’d have as much time as they needed to achieve the quality that they and their audience have come to expect. “It’s going to frustrate some folks, just to be honest. We work at the speed we work at, much like glaciers melt at the speed that they melt at,” Gilligan says.

Below, during a spoiler conversation with THR, Gilligan, Smith and Tatlock discuss Carol’s counterattack, as well as their hope for a physical media release.

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We all know the famous “machine gun in the trunk” story. When it was introduced in the Breaking Bad season five premiere, you had no idea how it was going to resolve. Is the atom bomb on the driveway the new machine gun in the trunk? Or do you have a clearer sense of the road ahead?

VINCE GILLIGAN (Creator) That’s a good analogy, but we’ve got a pretty good idea where we’re going with it. 

GORDON SMITH (EP) We have thoughts.

ALISON TATLOCK (EP) It’s not that the machine gun has never occurred to us as a comparison; it has. 

GILLIGAN Yes.

TATLOCK But you also learn from past experience. So, yeah, we have some ideas. 

Vince, I’m not sure how well-known this is, but you’ve taken your Airwolf and Blue Thunder fandom to the next level. 

GILLIGAN, TATLOCK & SMITH (Laugh.)

Did you pilot the helicopter that drops off the A-bomb?

GILLIGAN No, I’m pretty proud of my piloting skills, but I am in awe of our two different pilots. In episode two, a pilot named Greg dropped off that excavator, and man, that guy’s a pro. Then there was a pilot named Ken who dropped off the atom bomb in the final episode. I am humbled by those guys. I could have brought that thing in and set it down within 10 feet of where it was supposed to go, but those guys make me look like I don’t even know what I’m doing. I couldn’t have done it over and over again like those guys. They nailed it to the exact spot time and time again. Those guys made it look easy, and that’s beyond my skillset.

SMITH I thought Karolina [Wydra] was piloting. Was it not Karolina? 

GILLIGAN (Laughs.) It looked like it was her, didn’t it? That’s the magic of movies. She really looked like she was flying that thing. It was very well done. 

Once Carol left Vegas thinking she was free of a belated Joining, she went gallivanting around Albuquerque for 36 days. Eventually, when push came to shove, she chose a globe-trotting romance with Zosia over Manousos’ offer to save the world. It wasn’t until the personal threat returned in Big Sky, Montana, that she got back in the world-saving business. Does she actually want to save the world? Or does she just want to save herself? 

GILLIGAN Good question. 

SMITH Yeah, that’s a good way of putting it. I feel like the answer is yes. She definitely wants to save herself at this point. I still think she wanted to save the world [earlier in the season], but she had been so beaten and lonely and isolated. She was by herself without even the other Old-Schoolers to talk to, and it became difficult for her to stay the course. Then she was saying, “Okay, I’m out of energy. I’m both fighting the guy who came here to help me, and I’m fighting the world’s seven billion [Joined] people.” I think she ran out of energy for a while, and [Zosia’s reveal in Big Sky] was, as much as anything, a wake-up call to her. That personal threat didn’t make her go, “Another personal threat? Now it’s serious.” It’s, “Oh God, these people are not the people I convinced myself that they could be. I have to see them a little more clear-eyed.” So the scales fell from her eyes a bit.

GILLIGAN Yeah.

TATLOCK I believe she does want to save the world, even if it is partly selfish. It gets to the question of, what is altruism anyway? Are we not always, at least in part, looking out for ourselves? If she saves herself and not the world, she’ll still be very lonely. So it does behoove her to try to keep saving the world in addition to herself. 

Did Manousos’ experiment to unjoin an individual named Rick definitively fail? Or was it interrupted by Carol before success or failure could be determined? 

GILLIGAN That’s another good question. I don’t know. What do you guys think? 

TATLOCK He fails in the moment while still learning something. 

SMITH Yeah, an experiment within the scientific method, generally, moves through failure, and it keeps moving through failure. You learn more from saying, “That’s not right. It did not stop them from being joined, but I did learn something. So what did I learn?” What he learned and what he can do with it is hopefully going to be brought out in season two.

Was he using the same signal that started the Joining in the first place? 

GILLIGAN Well, I don’t want to ruin anything for season two, but I think it’s okay to say it’s not the [same signal]. 

SMITH I don’t think we’ve discussed it as being the signal from space. Manousos’ is the shortwave. If we looked at the stuff that the scientists [in the premiere] were doing, they were coming in on a different wavelength. 

TATLOCK Different technology. 

SMITH And way higher power. “They” had to broadcast it from Kepler-22b.

GILLIGAN Which is 600 light years away. So I don’t think we’re giving anything away to say it’s not the same signal. You don’t need to assume that’s the exact same signal. 

From episdoe eight’s diner theatrics to Zosia making the first move to consummate the relationship, does the Joined’s scheme to use Carol’s eggs to turn her retroactively prove Carol’s previous theory that everything was manipulation?

GILLIGAN I don’t know if we’ve proven it. It’s going to sound like I’m dodging the question, but I’m loath to nail down what exactly is going on there. I really want the audience to discover it for themselves — more so on this show than on Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul. Part of the joy for the audience is discovering the answers to these questions. But I will say, as human beings in real life, we can have multiple ideas in our heads at the same time, and I don’t know that the Others are any simpler than real human beings. Human beings are capable of carrying multiple, sometimes conflicting, ideas at once in their heads. I don’t know that the Others can ever lie to us. That means when they say they love us, we can take that to the bank. But can they have ulterior motives? That’s possible. Can they be carrying two ideas in their heads at once? That’s possible. But I’m loath to nail it down exactly. We definitely have feelings about what’s going on here, but I want to let the audience keep figuring out for themselves. 

TATLOCK In order to wrap our heads around it, we sometimes compare them to overly solicitous grandparents. Do one’s overly solicitous grandparents love their grandchildren? Yes. And is that love genuine? Yes. And might they offer them candy in order for them to be quiet in the car? Yes. And is that manipulative? Yes. So all of that we felt could be true, and sometimes the line between caring for somebody and trying to comfort them and trying to manipulate them gets a little fuzzy.

GILLIGAN That’s a better answer than mine. That’s the one I would use. 

When Carol presses Zosia in episdoes eight and nine about the Joined’s designs, her response is either that she doesn’t understand what she means or that they’re doing this out of love. Are the Joined even capable of recognizing that they’re manipulating Carol? 

GILLIGAN Can you think of examples in real life where people are manipulating without knowing it? I think the answer is yes.

TATLOCK It takes a lot of therapy usually to figure out if you’re gaslighting somebody or being passive aggressive. This takes a lot of introspection.

SMITH We use the word “manipulation” as if it has a negative or bad or evil connotation, but if they’re manipulating her for her own good, that’s the grandparent example. You’re manipulating us into answering your questions, but I don’t think you have an ill intent to do so. 

TATLOCK You manipulate somebody to get off the ledge when they’re about to jump, but you also save their life.

All season long, I’ve been tracking intentional and less intentional connections to Better Call Saul and Breaking Bad, and while the finale presented a bit of a challenge, I think I found something. Walter White was Mr. Crystallography. He contributed to research that was awarded the Nobel Prize. Is the crystallography book on Manousos’ kitchen table meant to be a nod to Walt? 

GILLIGAN Damn, man. You’re good.

SMITH I’m not going to get this right, but there is a mathematical theorem in science that if you go looking for order, you’re going to find it. That is why there’s constellations, right? You go looking to find a pattern and you find the pattern. But I’m going to say no in this case. At least no one brought it to my attention when we were picking through books. We were just finding the books that could clear and felt like they were in the sphere of what Manousos would be looking at. But honestly, one of the props or set dec people may have thought that.

GILLIGAN They play a deep game. 

SMITH They do.

GILLIGAN Our artisans — our department heads and crew members — think deeply about this stuff. It’s possible.

TATLOCK It may have been somebody else’s genius.

Vince, I first became aware of this show over five years ago when you talked on a podcast about trying to find a way to do away with smartphones in a present-day story you were working on at the time. So I had a laugh at the end of the series premiere when Davis Taffler (Peter Bergman) explains how smartphones have become obsolete because I knew you’d found a way. Were you reluctant at all to bring one back as a third character during the extended introduction between Carol and Manny?

GILLIGAN We couldn’t think of another way to translate English into Spanish and Spanish into English in a somewhat timely fashion. We picked our brains, as we always do.

SMITH But it is in airplane mode.

GILLIGAN (Laughs.) Yeah, it’s in airplane mode as she acts out. 

TATLOCK We were worried about it, honestly. We thought, “Oh man, all this translation is going to hold up the show.” And in the end, partly due to excellent directing [by Smith] and editing [by Chris McCaleb], it actually served the scene. It allowed us to have a little bit of humor within an also pretty heavy situation.

GILLIGAN They are amazing devices, but we just couldn’t think of another way to do it.

Vince, I don’t know if you or your agent negotiated a physical release of Pluribus, but if so, will your version of the John Cena PowerPoint be on it? 

TATLOCK He was very good [in the role]!

GILLIGAN I know, right? I was good! I was on the set when Gandja Monteiro directed that scene, and we kept it a surprise because we hadn’t recorded the John Cena part yet. So when Rhea and Samba [Schutte] were filming that scene, we didn’t tell them it was going to be me [explaining HDP in place of John Cena]. But they were pros. They just rolled with it. I was sitting there watching it, and I was like, “Oh God, I’m terrible.” But they played off it great. And I, for sure, want there to be a physical release of this show. I think I can speak for these two as well as all the writers; we believe in physical [media].

TATLOCK We like analog.

GILLIGAN I like owning the thing. I don’t like renting it through the ether until it just goes away one day. I want to own the Blu-ray or the DVD or 4K Ultra blah, blah. I love that stuff. So we definitely want to have a physical version of this show; that is absolutely our intention. It’s Sony’s department. We’re going to do our level best to make that happen, and maybe we’ll put that [temp scene] on there. I don’t know. It’d feel kind of self-serving, and it’s really not that good. There’s a reason John Cena is John Cena, and there’s a reason I’m behind the camera all the time, not in front of it.

The season two writers room is already underway. Is a May production start date in the realm of possibility? Or am I writing checks you can’t cash? 

GILLIGAN May of what year? (Laughs.) No, I don’t think so. I wish. Just like the Others, I’m not going to lie. But we’re working very hard. 

SMITH We will be back as soon as humanly possible. 

GILLIGAN Yeah, it’s going to frustrate some folks, just to be honest. We work at the speed we work at, much like glaciers melt at the speed that they melt at. For my own sake, as much as anybody, selfishly, I wish we could get this job done quicker because I don’t know how many years I’ve got left. I still want to do more things, but I go slower than I used to. So it’s going to be a while between seasons; it just is. Unless we invent a time machine or figure out how to stop time, it’s just the nature of the beast.

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Pluribus season one is now streaming on Apple TV. Read THR’s previous interviews with creator Vince Gilligan, EP Gordon Smith and stars Rhea Seehorn, Karolina Wydra and Samba Schutte.