Members of the V-Hive (that’s the Vince-Hive, as in creator Vince Gilligan) dive deep with EW into the first season of Apple TV’s eerie, award-winning sci-fi drama.

The pursuit of happiness: How the Pluribus team crafted a series of big ideas — and of differing opinions about what it all means

Members of the V-Hive (that's the Vince-Hive, as in creator Vince Gilligan) dive deep with EW into the first season of Apple TV’s eerie, award-winning sci-fi drama.

By Sarah Rodman

Sarah Rodman is the Entertainment Editor, covering TV and music for EW.

EW's editorial guidelines

May 18, 2026 12:52 p.m. ET

Leave a Comment

**SPOILER ALERT:** **This story contains details about the entire first season of *Pluribus* on Apple TV. If you don’t want to be part of the hive mind, we suggest you stop reading. We only want you to be happy. ****** Wild theories. Intense speculation. Animated conversation. Existential rumination. Heated philosophical debates about the, um, recycling of human body parts for consumption.**** Every single person associated with the unsettling, riveting, and occasionally very funny sci-fi drama *Pluribus* has engaged with one, or all, of the above since the series premiere in November 2025 on Apple TV.

"A lot of people come up to me saying, 'I really enjoy it. I don't know what the hell's going on,'" series creator Vince Gilligan tells ** with a warm chuckle. "It's wonderful."

The Emmy-, Golden Globe-, and Peabody-winning producer-writer-director isn't in a hurry to disabuse anyone of any particular notion, leaning into opacity more comfortably than he did on his previous series, *Breaking Bad*, and its prequel *Better Call Saul*.  To paraphrase the motto — "e pluribus unum" — from which the series derives its name, he will not identify one theory out of many that might apply. (Trust us, we lobbed several notions his way.)

"I feel like with *Breaking Bad* and *Better Call Saul*, I gave my opinion on things too much" says Gilligan. "When I hear anecdotally from the folks in the office about interactions they've had with people, I love that everybody's seeing a slightly different show."

While that disparity of interpretation might have worried him in the past — "Maybe we're doing something wrong if people are seeing different things' — these days he's positively tickled.

"I love that some people say, 'It must be about AI, right?' And other people say, 'It must be about grief. Is that it?'" says Gilligan. "This time around, I don't want to mess up and tell everybody what I think it is. I want people to tell me."

*Pluribus*, primarily set and shot in Albuquerque, with much of the same crew from his two previous hits*, *chronicles what happens when an alien (sort of) virus, transmitted from 600 light years away, converts almost the entirety of the world’s population into one big, seemingly happy, hive mind.

People appear physically the same, but they are now all neurally connected by "psychic glue" and are referred to as the Joined or the Others. The newly formed collective works with an eerie mind/body coordination to solve problems. And since everyone assimilated into it has access to all available knowledge from everyone else, that also means instant capabilities. Someone who has never flown a plane or conducted a surgery or baked a pie can do all of those things.

On the plus side: Wars cease. All those insidious-isms that divide people vanish overnight. A hive-mind commitment to not harm living organisms — plants and animals — means that nature begins to heal. (Thus, the ethical cannibalism of repurposing those who have naturally perished for protein purposes.) S'all good, man, right?

Not so swell? Nearly 900 million people die, dramatically and convulsively, worldwide in the initial spread. Eventually, the "no killing" clause is likely to lead to mass starvation. Individuality is not an option. And the Others also decide that they want to transmit the signal elsewhere, like the universe's freakiest chain letter.

Rhea Seehorn on 'Pluribus'.

Courtesy of Apple

Then there are the 13 people dotted across the globe who curiously have some kind of immunity that prevents them from being absorbed… for now. Among this baker's dozen is curmudgeonly romantasy author Carol Sturka (*Saul* alum Rhea Seehorn), who is understandably deeply confused by what the hell is going on and devastated by the death of her wife Helen (Miriam Shor). But members of the hive serve as cheerfully mellow guides for the immune, a.k.a. the Old-Schoolers, to make sure Carol and the rest have everything they need. (Whether that's a single Gatorade or a hand grenade, no request goes unanswered.) It's a lot.

The cast, writers, and crew have been equally captivated by the premise and aimed to do it justice on screen, even as they were having their own excited discussions about What It All Means. (Discussions that continue now that the writers' room has commenced for season 2. No word on a release timeline as of yet.)

"I stay pretty firmly in the Vince camp," says Seehorn, reveling in the "massive amount" of analyses she's encountered, "because the answer is yes to all of them."

The actress, who nabbed a Golden Globe win and Actor Award nomination (among other honors) earlier this year for playing flinty misanthrope Carol, says, for the *Pluribus* team, the show is not meant to be a "mystery box" designed to offer answers but a character-driven drama that prompts questions.

"I'm trying to just play the human," she says of a woman juggling her anger and grief with her desire to figure out the Others in order to somehow reverse what has happened. "We had some really fascinating late-night conversations on the set. The sun's coming up and you're still shooting and talking. And now that I have friends and family that have seen the show, we're having deep conversations."

"I've literally had people text me saying they're having *Pluribus *dinners to discuss the show," says Karolina Wydra (*True Blood*), who plays Zosia, a sort of Others chaperone for Carol.

Karolina Wydra as Zosia on 'Pluribus'.

Courtesy of Apple

"It's a different way of approaching huge questions about happiness and humanity," says Gordon Smith, a Gilligan series veteran who served triple duty, executive producing, directing three episodes, and writing two (one solo and one with Alison Tatlock). "It was all different people being like, 'No, no, I absolutely think that being Joined is the right thing for humanity, because look at all the good that it does,'" he says of the writers' room buzz. "And then I was like, 'But you lose all of your spark and you lose some of your drive. So how good can it be?’"

Joining the V-Hive

If the Others are to be taken at their word, the euphoria they feel is total. Speaking with members of the *Pluribus* cast and crew, this sensation is apparently similar to the satisfaction of working on a Vince Gilligan show, where everyone puts their heads together to tell the best story possible.

This is partly thanks to the Virginia native's affinity for a group effort.

"I started off in my lonely room writing movies," Gilligan says of his early days as a screenwriter of scripts centering on offbeat characters, like the firestarters of *Wilder Napalm* and the superhero/gods of *Hancock.* (He eventually migrated to TV, working on *The X-Files*, so *Pluribus* is more of a genre return as opposed to a detour.) "This job's better for me because I actually love the collaborative process, which maybe makes me even more attuned to the Others. They're the ultimate collaborators with one another."

One crucial difference, of course, is that he allows the people in *his* collective to have free will and creativity. He spends much of this interview giving abundant credit to many people by name and enumerating what they bring to the process, from the actors to the sound team to the writing staff. He has worked with many of them repeatedly over the years, mentoring and promoting from within, which has inspired a fierce loyalty.

The cast and crew of 'Pluribus'.

Anna Kooris/Apple

"I would follow Vince into war," says writer Ariel Levine, who has worked with Gilligan for over a decade, starting as a writer's assistant on *Saul*. "It's really telling, if you look at the *Pluribus* writers' room: Of the six of us that aren't Vince, four of us used to be assistants.”"

"Vince treats it like a teaching hospital sometimes," says fellow writer Jonny Gomez (*This Is Us*), noting how often the showrunner will both solicit and offer feedback.**"He's so willing to explain his thought process. He's still the best person I've ever gotten notes from."

"Vince knows what he wants — and he's going to get it — but he's also open to the little accidents that would come up in shooting," says Carlos-Manuel Vesga (*The Hijacking of Flight 601*), who plays suspicious and tenaciously self-sufficient Old-Schooler Manousos Oviedo. (*Pluribus* marks the first U.S. series for the Colombian actor who is widely known in South America.) "He has that mind that can say, *So this is not what I planned, but this is a better idea or improves my idea*," says Vesga, echoing a common refrain among the cast and crew.

They come in peace

Before we proceed, forgive us if we're skeptical about the Others' apparent good-vibes-only posture. Plenty of humanity's previous pop culture run-ins with aliens have ended badly. For every Reese's Pieces-loving rascal, there have also been hive minds who want to destroy the Eiffel Tower and strip mine Earth for parts. Knowing that they are at work on season 2, we had to ask: How do we know there isn't a nefarious extra-terrestrial motive wrapped in beatific smiles? And will we learn it in the future?

"We are all trained to watch science fiction, and indeed every kind of genre show, to look for the tropes: This happens, so therefore this happens, so therefore a twist is coming," says Gilligan. "Sometimes less and more — even though we hit every trope I could think of in the first episode, just to have fun with it and subvert it. Going forward, I'm sure we'll hit a few more along the way, but sometimes the most fun thing to do is what you're not expecting."

Rhea Seehorn as Carol on 'Pluribus'.

Courtesy of Apple

The role of Carol was specifically written for Seehorn, and Gilligan says, like Bryan Cranston and Bob Odenkirk before her, "I tend to forget where the writing ends and the acting begins — and that is a feature, not a bug. Rhea gave Carol dimensions in season 1 that I would not have even seen coming, and I have no doubt that there'll be more of that in season 2."

"The pilot read like a heart-pounding suspense thriller to me," says Seehorn, who was excited to dig into a character so different from *Saul*'s Kim Wexler. Carol is a woman desperate to tilt her world right side up, even if she was a grump in that place, scoffing at her own work as a writer. Which, by the way, is not something Seehorn buys."

"She pretends to mock her fans because I think she's trying to beat them to the punch," she says of Carol's prickly disdain for her *Wycaro* book series and its dashing main character, corsair Raban. "I think she's very proud of her work, actually. And to say that to the audience, we had her book covers in giant frames all over her office. This is not someone who's embarrassed of her work one tiny bit."

"You can pull away all of her dialogue,: says writer Alison Tatlock. "She has entire episodes where she hardly speaks at all and I find her riveting because she is so transparent in her expressions. On *Better Call Saul*, we would write these stage directions that I didn't even know were possible in television, where you could describe what someone is experiencing in their head in great detail, and that she was able to convey that is a kind of genius."

"She is one of the best number ones I've ever worked with," Samba Schutte (*Our Flag Means Death*) — the Mauritanian comic and actor who plays the charming hedonist Koumba Diabaté — says of Seehorn, who sits at the top of the callsheet. "When you're working with her in a scene, not only is she freaking amazing and talented to watch when the coverage is on her, but also when the camera's on you, she doesn't back off. She's there with you. She made me feel so welcome to this family where they've been working together for so long."

Samba Schutte (center) as Koumba Diabaté on 'Pluribus'.

Anna Kooris/Apple

Schutte, Seehorn, and their costars particularly appreciated the tonal mix of *Pluribus*, which features a sliding scale from apocalyptically bleak to uproarious.

"Vince is very good at really playing with the genre and tone," says Seehorn, noting she can sometimes hear his voice in her head when reading a script. "Part of it is just his assumption of the intelligence of the audience."

"The joy of working for Vince is that you get to have all of that," says writer Vera Blasi (*Tortilla Soup, Woman on Top*), another newcomer to this company — and to TV, having come, as Gilligan did, from the world of features. "It's a question of sensibility, because life is made up of tiny shifts, all day long. You hear a joke and it's funny, and then you get a phone call and it's terrible news, and then that afternoon something romantic happens. We never think that takes effort, because life is made up of all of those tones."

"A good way to put it might be if you're a painter and you're squirting all your oil paints on your palette, but you left off the color red," says Gilligan of his lifelong approach to represent reality even in these heightened circumstances. "Leaving humor out of your writer's toolbox, it doesn't seem real to me. And maybe sometimes we stretch it a little too far, because I love slapstick, but I think it makes a very serious story, potentially more palatable."

Leave a message at the…

Speaking of tone, one of the funniest running bits in the series is an outgoing voicemail message that the Others leave for Carol when they have decided they need some space from her. Every time she calls for assistance, the message plays in full. It plays many times.

Gilligan deeply enjoys that this has become a polarizing issue in the fanbase.

"I can't tell you how many people I've talked to who've said, 'They will do anything for her. Why can't she ask to cut down the outgoing message to just a beep?'"

While Seehorn thinks there's a tinge of defiance in her not making this ask, both she and Gilligan point out that at this stage of the story, "It's literally the only person talking to her."

Karolina Wydra as Zosia and Rhea Seehorn as Carol on 'Pluribus'.

Anna Kooris/Apple

The voice of that message? Patrick Fabian, a.k.a. Howard Hamlin from *Better Call Saul*.

Given that Easter egg, and that the show is shot in Albuquerque, could we possibly see familiar faces from the Gilliverse in the background as members of the hive?

"Could be, you never know," is all Gilligan will say, with a laugh.

There will be plenty of opportunities, given how many background actors appear on the show as Others. Some of the most unnerving interludes in the series happen when they are seen working in concert, like a human murmuration.

"I think in one of the scripts we call it the Ballet of Hive Mind Triage," Gomez says of the elegant weave of people restocking Carol's local Sprouts or the metronomic precision of the group swabbing their cheeks and wiping the residue on petri dishes.

"Our choreographer Nito Larioza did an impossible job so well," adds Levine of the work with hundreds of background actors operating as one mind, never bumping into one another or throwing off the rhythm.

Perhaps it is not shocking that a former boy band member (shout out TNG) and Madonna dancer knows a little something about synchronized movement. Larioza (*Paradise, Avatar*), a stunt coordinator and movement choreographer, helped the actors get a move on.

'Pluribus' season 2 isn’t happening for a while, says Vince Gilligan: 'We’re working on it'

Vince Gilligan may have hidden 'Better Call Saul' Easter eggs in 'Pluribus' (exclusive)

Inspiration would sometimes arrive in the middle of the night, and Larioza would plot the movement of the trucks arriving in the Sprouts parking lot and the marks for the actors in the scene on a table.

"I had these little cars, and I would place them and then little green men too," he says with a laugh.

For the Sprouts scene, he says, "I got a bunch of football players, cheerleaders, yoga instructors, and bartenders, all kinds of people," who understood their bodies and repetitive movement to make the scene work.

The petri dishes scene in the first episode was a challenge to perfect, and it was pivotal in illuminating early on that things were strange — but now they were strange in an *organized* way.

"That was a tough one," says Larioza of getting everyone in rhythm. "But at the end of the day, they killed it. That's one scene where my friends said, 'Man, I've never seen anything like that.'"

They come in pieces

"I wish I could shadow every single person that works on the show, because I'm so in awe of these people's craft, from production design to props to greens," says Seehorn. "It's fascinating to get to talk to them and know that they, too, are thinking about tone."

Indeed, they are, from the sound team considering the variables of silence in this quieter new world to the cinematography and camera crew’s framing of the spaces, making this a distinct Albuquerque from Gilligan's previous shows, with many layers of texture.

"Everybody up in the art department was reading scripts every week and we would come out saying, 'Oh my gosh, did you read this part…." says production designer Denise Pizzini of the internal watercooler chatter. "We were all genuinely excited, 'What are we going to do?' That's what's so great about doing a project like this, because it keeps you enthusiastic and creative and awake."

Rhea Seehorn and Vince Gilligan on the set of 'Pluribus'.

Anna Kooris/Apple

Awake was crucial given the scope of the job, which included crafting everything from parts of a replica Air Force One to building Carol's neighborhood from the ground up on a patch of land in Albuquerque.

"Vince knew early on that with everything we had to do — helicopters, explosions, fires — that going to a real neighborhood wasn't going to be feasible," says Pizzini. "So we custom-built six homes, which is a great thing for production because it's our own little backlot now. It's great when people don't realize we built it."

Perhaps some of their weirdest days at work came creating the body parts Carol finds in a warehouse that lead to the reveal of HDP (Human-Derived Protein) — the need for which is very reasonably explained by hive mind John Cena in episode 6.

"We carved every single one of those for real," says Pizzini. "We had bins of torsos, arms, legs. We had people sculpting them in our warehouse, and it was funny because they sat there for weeks and it was just like a big sewing circle."

Unum or Pluribus?

On that delightfully macabre note, as the cast, crew, and writers begin to dig back in to craft season 2, we wondered how everyone would behave if something like this were to happen for real. Would anyone happily join the hive mind and enjoy floating in a pool of ecstatic oneness? Would some prefer to stick it out as one of the Old-Schoolers, with plenty of free will but lots of loneliness and a ticking clock on assimilation? Or would there be any takers for dying in the first wave, like Carol's wife?

Overwhelmingly, the vote was for semi-rugged individualism. (How rugged can it really be when the whole world of the Others is at your literal beck and call to cater to your whims of flying on Air Force One and also just, you know, cater?)

"I would go down fighting," says Seehorn. "I'm a pretty big proponent of independent thought."

"I would want to just be interviewing someone constantly," says writer-executive producer Jenn Carroll of her desire to be among the immune and pepper the Others with questions to find out all the important secrets. "It's hard not to be in the point of view of wanting to fight, but it's also hard not to want to indulge just a little bit first and be like, 'Can I know all the people who had a crush on me back in 1997?'" she says with a laugh.

"I'd be exactly like my character," says Schutte — but more chastely, it should be noted, no hot tubs full of women. "I'd want to be immune, so I could still be me. But my God, take advantage of the situation."

Among his Old-Schooler dream demands: command performances from Bruno Mars and Stevie Wonder, and pressing celebrity chefs into service.

"It's the end of the world anyway…"

Vesga is among the very few who would choose to make a quiet exit.

"Joining means the end of creativity, the end of humor. The end of surprises, the end of the capacity for amazement, for wonder."

He adds with a laugh that he'd also miss debate: "There's something good about being grumpy from time to time."

Carlos-Manuel Vesga as Manousos Oviedo on 'Pluribus'.

Courtesy of Apple

None of the *Pluribus* team voted to join the hive mind, but Wydra — who had one of the series' most difficult roles, balancing the literal weight of the world as the Other tasked as the communication liaison between Carol and the rest of the hive — was wistful for a compromise.

"I would love for it to be one week where I'm with the Others, and then another week I'm with the Old-Schoolers, so you get the best of both worlds."

But pressed to choose, she loves live theater and surprises too much to Join.

"My answer to this would probably change day by day these days," says Gilligan. "When you watch *The Walking Dead *or *The Last of Us* or other shows like that — which are very excellent, worthy shows — the choice they seem to present to me as a viewer is: How would you survive, and would you want to in this world? But the choice is never really presented as, *Would you want to be a zombie?* That's not really a choice. I've never heard anyone say, 'Gee, I want to try that out.' Actually, part of the point in the creation of *Pluribus* was to have something that looked and felt like a post-apocalyptic tale. But I think part of the hope for me was when you're watching it as a viewer, you start to think, 'Is this so bad? Are Carol and Manousos barking up the right tree, wanting to change the world back?'

"I'm almost 60 years old," says Gilligan, noting the darkness of the moment in which the real world finds itself. "I don't remember times being as scary or as anger-provoking or as sadness-inducing as they are now. These days, I'm starting to think, 'Gee, would it be so bad to be Joined?' We were actually talking about this very thing this morning before lunch in the writers' room. The simplest way to put it is, we're always trying to keep our minds open to the possibility that Carol's not right."

Gilligan continues, "Then there's other days where I say to myself, *No, that'd be terrible. That's not what human beings are here for. We're not here to just be at peace all the time.* I'd take a happy medium with the accent on happy."

Chekhov’s atom bomb

Which leads us to the nuclear weapon deposited on Carol's lawn in the final scene of season 1. Is *happy* really in the future for *Pluribus*?

One of the many questions about the weapon is whether it fulfills the "Chekhov's Gun" dramatic principle, which holds that a weapon shown in the first act needs to go off by the final act.

Does just showing the bomb constitute fulfilling the axiom, since Carol asked about it earlier in the season? Or does the bomb actually have to go off — in season 2 or beyond —  to satisfy it? The writers have done something they love to do: painted themselves into a corner.

When Carol asked hypothetically if their desire to accommodate her because they love her meant that the Others would give her a bomb in episode 3 — after the Others had ill-advisedly given her a real grenade — "we were not intending to reintroduce the bomb by the end of the season," says Smith. "It just felt like the right thing in episode 3, with Carol pushing on them, saying, 'You really will do anything for love, but you won't do that.'" (Hat tip to a writer mixing dramaturgy and Meat Loaf.)

Karolina Wydra as Zosia on 'Pluribus'.

Courtesy of Apple

"We're never looking ahead, but we do look backward a lot," says Carroll, and when Carol hit her lowest point in the finale, they realized it would make sense for her to do "the most extreme reactionary thing she can think of."

Adds Carroll, “Hopefully, it will make you want to watch episode 201."

"All I can say is we've discussed that to great length in the room," says Gilligan.

Regardless of the potential for detonation, he is glad to be back at work with this group of familiar and fresh faces.

- Sci-Fi & Fantasy Shows

Original Article on Source

Source: “EW Sci-Fi”