In a revelation that flips the script on how we think about studio influence, Vince Gilligan and his team have disclosed that the jaw-dropping closing moment of Pluribus‘ first season — Carol Sturka (Rhea Seehorn) casually having an atomic bomb delivered to her driveway — wasn’t part of the original plan. What began as a subtle, understated alliance between Carol and Manousos evolved into high-stakes nuclear brinkmanship thanks to a pivotal note from Apple and Sony executives.
Alan Sepinwall for The Ringer:
“We had a much subtler ending,” recalls [Gordon] 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 [Alison] 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.
MacDailyNews Take: Unfortunately, when asked how long it might be until we see a second season, Gilligan told The Ringer, “‘Longer than I would care for it to be,’ (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.”
Hopefully not as long as the wait between seasons one and two of Severance*!
*The season 1 finale of Severance aired on April 8, 2022, and the season 2 premiere was released on January 17, 2025. That was a wait of 1,015 days, about 2 years and 9 months, due to production delays, including the 2023 writers’ and actors’ strikes.
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