How Vince Gilligan designed ‘Pluribus’ to destroy every sci-fi trope

Vince Gilligan spent a decade ruminating about his next TV series before he had a clear vision of what it was going to be. But through all that time, the writer/director, who is best known for creating Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, knew one thing for sure: it had to be entirely different from what he’d made before. In fact, it had to be completely unlike any other show, period. 

“As far as a prime directive, it is always: A) how can we make this show look different than any other show on TV? That’s the most important one,” Gilligan told me during a recent call.  “And B, how can we make the show look and sound and feel different from the other shows we’ve already done?”

Gilligan made good on his promise to himself. The resulting show, Pluribus, really is a wholly unique take on the sci-fi genre. Massive in scope, yet intimate at its core, it’s a deep study of a character who is going through an impossibly hard situation that affects the entire planet. 

Before Gilligan told anyone about his idea for Pluribus, he wanted to get his idea onto paper. “I wait as long as I can, and I have as much figured out, at least with the first episode, as possible,” he says. “And in this case, I had the luxury of having a completely written first script, I think actually, possibly a completely written first two scripts.” 

That’s what he showed to Rhea Seehorn, who played Kim Wexler opposite Bob Odenkirk’s Saul Goodman in Better Call Saul. Initially, Gilligan thought about a male protagonist for Pluribus but, after working with Seehorn, he decided to write the series for her. “I talked to Rhea first because I wanted to make sure Rhea would star in the show,” he says.

It was only after Seehorn agreed to play Carol Sturka—the grumpy bestseller romance author who becomes the hero—that he got the production ball rolling. “I started talking to our department heads, our wonderful crew people that I’ve been working with for years,” he tells me. “And that makes it a lot easier.”

Gilligan—together with series’ writer/director Gordon Smith and writer Alison Tatlock—says the show’s premise is meant to be the opposite of every “alien invasion film” you’ve seen up to this point. Having first worked as a writer on The X-Files, which embodied and invented many of the universal sci-fi tropes, Gilligan knew that Pluribus needed to serve the premise with no cracks in the story, which resulted in flipping, subverting, and ultimately destroying every single sci-fi trope wedged into our collective mind since The Twilight Zone. 

For Gilligan, Pluribus is the culmination of decades of work in TV. Filmed in Albuquerque (where most of the crew lives), Gilligan says the show is a direct result of working with the same reliable team he’s been with since Breaking Bad. Pluribus’ composer Dave Porter, who worked with Gilligan on his previous two series, told me that Gilligan’s directive cut across departments on Pluribus: “We wanted to plant our flag in the ground to say this is a very, very different experience.”

A Post-it sketch becomes a panopticon

To understand the production design, it helps to know what the series is about (my recommendation: run to watch the first episode if you haven’t yet). The series begins with an eerie but subtle alien encounter. The U.S. Army lab uses RNA code radioed from an exoplanet 600 light-years away to create a self-replicating alien retrovirus. The virus infects one person transforming her into the first node of a hive mind called The Others. Within a few weeks, all of humanity turns from a selfish, violent-prone, greedy group of individuals into a pacifist, vegetarian, and very happy collective.

Immune to this alien virus, only 13 humans survive this process, called “The Joining.” Carol being one of them, is the only person in the U.S. that keeps her free will. The Others only have one mission: To turn civilization and the entire planet into a hippie bliss paradise, all while trying to find a way to “save” those last 13 humans from what they think is the angst of freewill, the pain of our daily choices, our imperfect nature. It’s not that they want to assimilate the 13 like the Borg or cordyceps; The Others believe they are doing the right thing when they liberate you from your sad pointless life. 

Pluribus follows Carol as she grapples with this new reality, and as she tries to find a way to revert the world back to how it was. Carol has a mission, but her mission is far from a sci-fi trope of saving the world. There are no tropes in Gilligan’s vision. In fact, the series team had to strip away the spectacle usually associated with global cataclysms.

Smith and Tatlock describe this as a pursuit of “scrupulous emotional truth.” In most sci-fi, when the world changes, the characters sprint toward the explosions. In Pluribus, as it happened in Better Call Saul, they stop. “Your wife just died. Really? The world just became a hive mind, how fast do you move to get past that?” Smith asks.

This refusal to rush required a specific kind of geography and to ground the infinite scope of a global hive mind, led the production team to build a very small, very specific cage for Rhea Seehorn’s character. Her home is the center of her world.

That began with a crude drawing. “My favorite picture is a Post-it drawn by Vince,” production designer Denise Pizzini tells me. “He has a little cul-de-sac and he has these houses and he has the one house at the top that says ‘C’, which is Carol’s house.”​

That doodle evolved into a big civil engineering project. Rather than fighting the logistical nightmare of filming in a real neighborhood for multiple seasons, Pizzini and her team leased a plot of empty land outside Albuquerque and built Carol’s cul-de-sac from the dirt up, complete with plans and full permits and licenses. They poured concrete slabs, laid curbs, and constructed seven custom homes around a circle of asphalt, which became itself a way to communicate later in the series (warning: some minor generic spoilers ahead). 

A controlled gaze

The physical location of the house is real, with fully working systems and finished downstairs interiors. The team also built the upstairs bedroom, office, and hallways on a controlled soundstage. They duplicated the ground floor almost exactly, allowing the camera to seamlessly look from the street into Carol’s living room, or from her kitchen window out to the hive, without a cut, effectively building the house twice. 

The architectural mirroring was so precise that the illusion eventually fooled its own creator. “I watched the episode last night, and there’s a shot of her in the kitchen seeing the exterior, and I thought, I couldn’t tell,” Pizzini confesses. “Is that on location or is that on the set? Which is great because I don’t remember.”

For Gilligan, this wasn’t just about production convenience; it was about the gaze. Before a single wall was framed, the team pounded stakes into the empty field so Gilligan could test the camera angles. “Vince was very specific about what we wanted Carol’s view to be,” Pizzini says. “We needed from her front door and that front window, we needed to be able to see everybody else’s front door. Plus the city lights below.” They even graded each house separately to ensure the street curved precisely to vanish into a fictional neighborhood.​

The result is a set that functions like a panopticon, designed to ensure Carol is never truly alone. Pizzini designed Carol’s house as the “bastion of her humanity,” filled with the evidence of her previous life with Helen, who fails to survive the merging into the hive mind. The production team filled the space with invisible details. “Helen was [Carol’s] organizer . . . she manages all her tours,” Pizzini says. They placed Helen’s laptop on the dining room table, an orchid she bought, her sleeping mask, and her books by the bed. “Just little things like that give you an indication that they had a life together,” she says.

Pizzini also designed the interior knowing that this home was a character in itself. Inside, she used arches and open sightlines because so much of the action was going to happen there and they needed to move the camera around. “She’s in a little bit of a maze because she’s kind of stuck in her house . . . or she chooses to be,” Pizzini tells me. To show the passage of time, Pizzini added an atrium. “I decided to do this so there could be actual sunlight coming in. We could see the plants kind of growing or dying because Helen’s not there taking care of things.”​

Gilligan was over the moon with the Pluribus set, he tells me, because it opened so many creative opportunities for them. They were able to design so many scenes in advance. “For episode one, when Carol’s coming home after this horrible night she’s been through, I wanted certain angles past her onto the house next door where the little kids [part of The Others] come out,” Gilligan says.

Carol’s home is a brutal contrast to the spaces controlled by the hive mind. As The Others consolidate, they abandon individual homes for communal living to save electricity and water. The world becomes austere. Traffic doesn’t exist. Lawns grow wild. Commercial spaces and offices are closed. Buffalos roam golf courses. Hospitals have the bare minimum personnel (remember, since the minds merged, everyone has everyone else’s knowledge, so every person regardless of age, gender, or previous occupation, is now the best doctor, the best pilot, the best physicist, and the best anything you can imagine). 

Supermarkets are also empty. The production took over a real Sprouts supermarket after a year negotiating with the actual chain and weeks physically emptying the shelves. “Emptying out a supermarket . . . boy, that’s a nightmare,” Gilligan says. Sometimes you think something is going to be very complicated but turns out to be so easy. This was the contrary: They thought it was simple but it was a logistical hell, he points out. “Every step of the process, I was like, this is a nightmare,” Smith adds. Seeing the empty supermarket—and how it gets filled in a matter of hours—captures a society that has optimized itself into terrifying efficiency and silence.

Subtracting humanity, adding logic

So many other things required the same level of subtraction, which became the mandate—and nightmare—for the visual effects department. Rather than adding hordes of zombies, spaceships, and lasers, VFX Supervisor Ara Khanikian and his crew spent his time erasing life from each frame. “We’re subtracting a lot instead of adding,” he says.

To achieve the eerie stillness of a society reduced to its most efficient expression, Khanikian’s team meticulously rotoscoped out people, cars, and movement from wide shots of Albuquerque. This forced the team to realize more consequences about the show’s premise, answering philosophical questions about a post-human world. “If there’s no concept of humans and traffic . . . are they all green or do they continue blinking? Or have we turned off the electricity to that because we don’t need it anymore?” Khanikian asks.​

Another question was how The Others move. At one point of the series, there is a massive exodus from the city. The team initially created film plates to animate cars moving in perfect synchronization, assuming a networked intelligence would drive with mathematical precision. But it looked fake. “Theoretically, if everybody’s in sync together, there shouldn’t be any traffic jams,” Khanikian explains. “We have to add a little bit of that human imperfection . . . Some people accelerate just a little bit more. Some brake a little bit later.” 

Gilligan’s commitment to physical reality extended everywhere. At one point, one of the unaffected humans arrives at the airport in Bilbao, Spain, on Air Force One. Initially, Pizzini tells me, they started out building just the plane’s door, the surrounding frame, some stairs and green screen. “But we knew Vince was going to want it big,” she says. 

Gilligan saw it and he asked to expand it. “He was like, no, we need to do a little more, a little more,” she recalls amused. “So we built a big chunk of it and we found the stairs that could go up to it. And then we . . . built little pieces of the interior, so you could go inside Air Force One and shoot out and see them coming up the stairs.” 

But it didn’t end there. They ended up buying the frontal 747 landing gear. And, since they filmed scenes on the runways of Bilbao’s airport, they had to match the cement and asphalt patterns of the airport. “That was a big, big set,” Pizzini recalls.

Clothing becomes function

Like the sets, the costumes show us a civilization that has decided to stop waste, both physical and mental. Costume designer Jennifer Bryan pitched a radical concept to Gilligan: In a hive mind, clothing no longer serves to signal status, culture, or religion. It is reduced to its leanest, meanest function. “I pitched to him that the clothes shouldn’t signify any of that,” Bryan says.“Basically just leaving clothing as a shell to cover your body, like a snail has a shell.”​

She stripped the costumes of jewelry and accessories. She only kept belts in cases where pants would literally fall down. The clothes also tell the story without having to enunciate it with dialog, one of the core strengths of Pluribus. 

In the early days of the assimilation, because the hive mind shares its knowledge, anyone can do anything, regardless of their attire. This leads to the visual dissonance of a TGI Friday’s waitress piloting the Airbus that flies Carol to Bilbao. The woman wears the uniform she was caught in when the virus struck, but she possesses the skill set of a veteran pilot. “When you see the uniform or the clothing not matching the occupation, you know something’s off,” Bryan says. Even the man cleaning Carol’s house in a spandex cyclist suit is a misplacement of role (fun fact: that character is played by the actual mayor of Albuquerque).​

Those were the early days of the hive mind unification. Later in the series, as society continues to optimize, people lose their individual uniform and begin to wear plainer, neutral clothing—a “shell” aesthetic will only deepen as the series progresses. As the hive mind realizes that wool requires disturbing a sheep and silk requires killing a worm, the very materials of clothing will change to reflect a society that refuses to do harm. 

“In the second season you’ll start to see the effects of that,” Bryan teases. She explains what we all know about modern society. “Somewhere along the line, something had to die for it, whether it’s a mulberry worm to make silk or you cut on a tree to make lumber.”​

This also opens a stark contrast among the few remaining humans. While waiting to find the science to assimilate them, The Others are obsessed with pleasing the 13 free humans by doing anything these ‘freewill’ humans ask for. While Carol largely rejects the hive’s offers of help and comfort, other survivors indulge. 

Mr. Diabate, one of the 13 free humans, treats the hive like a genie lamp. To dress him, Bryan looked to the Sapeurs of Brazzaville, Congo—blue-collar workers who dress in ostentatious, high-end suits. She dressed Diabate in a tuxedo made of African fabric, a visual explosion of ego in a world that has otherwise been flattened to grey. She looked at the characters and asked herself: “If you could get every single thing that you wanted, what would you go for?”​

Since Gilligan insisted on actors who were genuinely from the regions they portrayed—like Mauritius, Colombia, China, or Peru, Bryan collaborated with them on the specific mix of Western and traditional clothing unique to their cultures.

The sound of the swarm

The final layer of this happy apocalypse is the soundscape. Like everyone else on the production team, composer Dave Porter tells me that he got the same prime directive from Gilligan. After spending 20 years defining the sonic palette of the Breaking Bad, El Camino, and Better Call Saul universe, he realized he needed to “strip it down to the studs” for Pluribus.

The series premise also defined his musical choice from the start. Instead of sci-fi synths or traditional orchestral arrangements, Porter chose the most innate human instrument: the voice. But like the traffic in Khanikian’s visual effects, he found that a controlled cacophony of a slightly off-sync choir was the perfect way to convey both the nature of The Others while introducing a disheartening, uneasy feeling. Something must be wrong.

Porter tells me that he was influenced by American minimalist composers like Philip Glass and Steve Reich to structure the score, using syncopation and phase-shifting to mirror the hive’s behavior—moving from soothing unison to chaotic dissonance. At times, this chaos gets into an ever-increasing crescendo that reminds me of the work of Hungarian composer György Ligeti for the Monolith in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: Space Odyssey. “Nobody’s singing any words, but there’s a lot of syncopation and punctuation about what they’re doing,” he says. 

This technique was used to perfection in a chilling scene in which Carol is trying to extract information from Zosia, the character who serves as her primary contact and chaperone with The Others. In the scene, Carol drugs Zosia with Sodium Pentothal, as she asks Zosia to give her information about what might reverse what’s happened to the world. When the hive mind realizes what’s going on, a mob appears out of nowhere to surround them. The on-set extras’ voices were blended with a choir to create an overwhelming wall of sound to stop her.

Tatlock told me the story logic behind that moment. The Others were not talking in perfect synchronicity because of “network latency” but as a tactic to create a buzz to stop her. “They can pretty quietly and calmly drown her out,” Tatlock explains. It is a sonic tactic designed to “foil” Carol’s questions without aggression. The hive doesn’t need to scream; it just needs to vibrate at a frequency to drown you in sound.

The ants

Porter tells me that the music was designed to explore the tension between the pain of individuality and the comfort of surrender. He also avoided scoring The Others with purely menacing music. Instead, he used vocals that could shift from comforting to terrifying. “As Vince has been saying a lot in interviews about the show, they’re not all bad, right?” he says. For Gilligan, it was important that the score didn’t paint anything in black and white—there’s always multiple ways to view things.

Which brings us back to the very nature of the show. Unlike most series, it doesn’t give us answers; instead it gives us all the questions we should be asking. At every plot turn, every reveal, and every character decision, you feel that any kind of dichotomy is a false one. Like Porter says, there are no binary answers in the real world. Especially when it comes to free will, our nature, and the nature of the societies we build. 

And that’s perhaps Pluribus’ greatest success, beyond its storytelling and cinematic virtues. Vince and his family have built a glass ant farm, removed the chaos of individuality, and forced us to watch what remains. The result is a world that feels nice, quiet, seductive, yet profoundly inhuman, which makes you appreciate your faulty humanity even more.