Pluribus Just Created Their Own Version of an Infamous Breaking Bad Gag (With One Major Change)

After everything that happened, we just need some space: this article contains spoilers for “More” season 1, episode 5.

The mostly one-sided battle between Carol Sturka (Rhea Seehorn) and the hive mind has reached a stalemate. We’ve seen how far the world’s interconnected population is willing to go to meet Carol’s demands, and how far they’re willing to go to find the secret sauce that will break the global mind meld. In episode 5, the hive mind has finally had enough of the protagonist’s meddling, thank you very much. After coldly giving in to Carol during the first few moments of the episode, he decides he needs some space and promptly leaves everyone in the collective in the city of Albuquerque.

Because the hive is still dedicated to meeting Carol’s needs and wants but doesn’t want to get anywhere near her, this creates a dilemma. To try to solve it, the entire brain trust of the world’s population settles on a hilariously repetitive voicemail service where Carol can leave requests, which are then carried out by a ridiculously underpowered remote-controlled drone. It works as well as expected: on its first trash-hauling mission, the sad little drone gets tangled in a lamp post near Carol’s house, where it remains suspended.

With this, the drone becomes the “Pluribus” version of the infamous “Breaking Bad” rooftop pizza – a foreign object that becomes a recurring, amusing feature of the exterior of the main character’s home after an off-the-wall scene strands him there. There’s one major difference, though: Vince Gilligan learned from all those people who were bombarding Walter White’s real house with pizza back in the day. Since Carol’s hillside cul-de-sac was specially built for “Pluribus”, no poor homeowner has to deal with people flying drones into nearby streetlights.

If you don’t remember the rooftop pizza “Breaking Bad,” a refresher: In the series’ Season 3 episode “Caballo Sin Numéro,” Walter White (Bryan Cranston) deals with the fallout from his wife Skyler (Anna Gunn) discovering his criminal activities and vents her frustration by throwing an entire pie onto the roof of his house after she refuses to let him share it with his family. The pizza’s original location, Venezia’s Pizzeria, appeared in a handful of episodes and its trick of not slicing the pies became a talking point in the raging “sliced ​​or not sliced” debate. Less amusingly, the owners of the very real Albuquerque house that served as White’s home found themselves in trouble when fans started flocking to see the place and some of them decorated it with copious amounts of pizza. In 2015, the “Breaking Bad” creator himself had to beg his fans to stop throwing pizzas at the roof of the house.

“Pluribus” is nothing like “Breaking Bad” in many ways, and thankfully the way the show handles its drone scene reflects that. After all, imagine people climbing onto the roof of a pizza joint with drones and trash bags, and it’s easy to see why a repeat incident would be less than ideal. Since Carol Sturka’s “Pluribus” house is not a real place but is built in the desert outside of Albuquerque, this will (probably) not happen.

In fairness, the fake “Pluribus” neighborhood wasn’t built to prevent the pizza story from repeating – rather, it had to do with the fact that the many strange events taking place there would have been impossible to film in a real residential neighborhood. Still, it’s a handy side effect that will undoubtedly prevent a trash drone prank or ten.