‘Pluribus’ Boss Gordon Smith Addresses Anti-AI Subtext, Says It’s “Less Rich” to Spell Things Out

[This story contains spoilers from Pluribus episode three, “Grenade.”]

Vince Gilligan hasn’t just created success stories and second acts for his talent on the screen — he’s created just as many behind the scenes. And one of the most prominent examples belongs to Pluribus writer-director/executive producer Gordon Smith.

The Michigan native cut his teeth in a variety of assistant roles as of Breaking Bad season three and beyond, including Gilligan’s assistant on season four and the writers’ assistant on the final two seasons. Then, when Gilligan co-created Bad’s prequel-sequel, Better Call Saul, with Peter Gould, Smith received a promotion to staff writer. Alongside director Adam Bernstein, he made his episodic television debut when he penned Mike Ehrmantraut’s (Jonathan Banks) backstory in what turned out to be the most acclaimed episode of Saul season one, the Emmy-nominated “Five-O.” (Keep the prior statement in mind over the coming weeks.) Smith went on to have a decorated six-season run as both writer and director on Saul, tallying two Emmy nominations as writer, seven noms as producer and a WGA award for season three’s “Chicanery.”

Smith returned to the small screen last week with Pluribus’ third episode, “Grenade,” which he wrote and directed. As a now-senior member of Gilligan’s creative team, he also directed the Ariel Levine-written fifth episode and co-wrote the season one finale with fellow executive producer Alison Tatlock.

Gilligan’s sci-fi series —chronicling Carol Sturka’s (Rhea Seehorn) efforts to save the world from an extraterrestrial “psychic glue” that’s turned Earth’s population into a collective hive mind —has provoked many different interpretations in its early episodes. But the most common reading so far has been that it’s a condemnation of artificial intelligence. The closing credits not only include the pointed declaration of, “This show was made by humans,” but Gilligan also routinely calls AI a “plagiarism machine.”

Case in point, during Smith’s latest episode, Carol invites Zosia (Karolina Wydra), her liaison to “the Joined” (aka “the Others”), inside her home for a glass of vodka, and Zosia proceeds to rattle off some factoids about that specific brand of alcoholic beverage. After all, Zosia has access to everyone’s thoughts, memories and know-how, including the vodka distiller’s. Unimpressed, Carol shoots back that Zosia learned the aforementioned trivia by “stealing it out of his brain.”

Thus, Smith certainly isn’t surprised that the audience is construing the show as anti-AI, but the Pluribus brain trust would prefer not to undercut the overall viewing experience by explicitly defining it one way or another.

“I don’t think we’ll beat those [anti-AI] allegations. There’s things about AI that resonate with how the Others operate,” Smith tells The Hollywood Reporter. “But it’s less rich to say, ‘Oh, this is a show about fill-in-the-blank.’ It limits both the storytelling and the availability of the show to ask questions. This is such a conceptual show, and my hope is that it makes people think about and feel different things in different ways”

In the interview below, Smith also acknowledges the other prominent theory that the show is commenting on political division, but there’s another under-discussed topic that he raises. In the series premiere, “We Is Us,” Carol’s late wife and manager, Helen Umstead (Miriam Shor), due to Carol’s earlier imbibing, refused to let her drive upon their return to Albuquerque’s airport. Their Range Rover even had an ignition interlock device, requiring the successful use of a breathalyzer for the vehicle to start. Carol has presumably had more than enough DUIs to warrant the precautionary measure, and she’s repeatedly turned to excessive alcohol intake throughout the first three episodes.

Consuming alcohol is a justifiable response to the Joining, its role in Helen’s death and the post-apocalyptic world it’s created, but over-reliance on it is nothing new for Carol. Nor is the Xanax-vodka cocktail she consumed opposite Zosia in episode three. The latter then compared Carol to someone who’s “drowning,” so perhaps one can view the Joined as interventionists for Carol’s personal demons.

“I’ve heard people talk about it as a show about addiction, and from my personal experience with addicts in my life, that harmonizes very strongly,” Smith says. “There’s that pain that is so individual within you that you have to drown it with something, and that’s Carol. So the Others offer a look at what peace looks like, but it is a peace that is fraught.”

Smith also discusses the Herculean effort to unstock and restock an Albuquerque-based Sprouts Farmers Market. Read the chat, below.

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We’re talking right after Pluribus’ two-episode premiere, and the series has now received rave reactions and reviews. Was there a lot of relief around the virtual office this morning?

Yes, people are gratified that folks seem to be finding the show and enjoying it, and getting the questions it raises. Of course, for me, every time somebody says something nice, then it’s like, “Oh no, what if they stop liking it? What if something bad happens?” I just hope people continue to enjoy it and stay with us for the ride. It’s a weird show. It’s a very difficult premise in a certain way.

Vince Gilligan was very hush-hush about Pluribus for the longest time. As Better Call Saul was wrapping up, was there a lot of whispered suspense as to how things would shake out?

The [Saul] writers office was long since gone by the time Vince said, “Oh, I’ve got this other show.” The first person who I knew had read the first two [Pluribus] scripts was my partner [writer/co-executive producer] Jenn Carroll. Vince shared them with her, and then she said she wanted to work on the show. As she and Vince prepared to take it out to the market, they were figuring out whether it should be a limited or ongoing series. That’s when I got involved with Jenn and [fellow Saul writers] Alison Tatlock and Tom Schnauz. We were the people available to have a mini room so that Vince could bounce questions off of people that he knew and trusted.

In other words, did you always assume your ticket was punched for Pluribus?

No, I did not assume. Of course not. I didn’t know what the show was. I hadn’t talked to Vince. Everybody’s schedule gets weird, and when you are a TV writer, you have to stay moving. You have to have a bunch of irons in the fire, and you never know if one of those is going to come through. So I certainly didn’t take it as a given I would be working on the show. I had time to be in the mini room, and once they sold it, it was like, “The room is coming together. Are you available?” I was. I then ended up directing more episodes than I thought I would at the start, so that was surprising and nice.

Was Pluribus ever actually called Wycaro 339? Or was that just a code name in the same way that Greenbrier was for El Camino?

No, it was never called Wycaro 339. It was always a code name. There were dark times. We pitched a ton of titles for the show. We had a list. And as we were figuring out what the show really was and really felt like, we would ask ourselves what title felt best. Some titles skewed too much into the horror of the first episode, and that’s not really the tone of the show. Titles like Signal get a partial sense of the show, but they really miscue what the feeling of the whole thing is. So those got left by the wayside.

We had a variety of code names to sync up different parts of the process. So it was Wycaro for production, and then we had a different code name for post. People are detectives these days, and they like to find little tidbits, so we tried to keep things under wraps as we best could. My sister once said to me, “You don’t even know what the title is?” And then my niece —who’s a Saul fan and spends time on Reddit —very confidently said to me, “Oh, I know what it is. It’s called Wycaro 339.” And I was like, “Okay, sure.”

In case people don’t know your origin story, you were an office PA on Breaking Bad season three and then Vince’s assistant on season four. That led to writers’ assistant on seasons 5A and 5B. Then you became a full-fledged writer and director on Saul.

You missed the part about the radioactive spider.

Well, now you’re second in command from where I’m sitting. You’re the first writer-director up to bat after Vince’s episodes, and this is similar to how Peter Gould would follow Vince on Saul until Vince bowed out for a stretch. Then Tom Schnauz followed Peter on Saul. Is it hard for you to grasp that you’re now in that seasoned slot that once belonged to Peter and Tom?

I don’t think about it that way, but there’s certain jobs I’m doing that are similar to that. In the room, Alison Tatlock and I are the senior writers under Vince, which means that we have to help run the room in a different way. It’s not really that much different than it was on Saul. It’s just that there’s a little bit more of an onus on us to keep the conversation moving in a certain direction or just to try to make sure that we’re using our time productively.

Because I was directing and in Albuquerque so much, I could bounce ideas off of Vince there. When you’re actually making the thing, questions, thoughts and ideas emerge, so you want to have an outlet for those things. Jenn, Vince and myself were around for most of the production process, so that meant that the three of us would often bounce ideas around with some of the other producers that were around. So I did the best I could to be available to chat with Vince about whatever was on his mind.

Vince told me that it was refreshing to work with a blank canvas again after 15 years of writing within the Breaking Bad universe. On Better Call Saul, you often had to invent the past and future out of random lines that Saul blurted out on Bad. So did you also enjoy no longer having to work within the confines of what Bad predetermined?

There is a different discipline when you’re building from scratch and asking questions about what the world is. It’s a big premise. So trying to understand what those big questions are and how they illuminate something about Carol, or any of the other characters, was difficult. There was a lot more heavy lifting in the early going to just work out what the episodes were. Episode three, in particular, took us a very long time because we were figuring out how the rubber meets the road.

Vince had a vision for the first two episodes that he’d written, but we also had more information as we went forward and as we were casting. Some things had to change, and we had to figure that all out at once. So it was liberating in a sense that we didn’t have the same baggage, but the methodology was still very similar. We still interrogated questions in the same way that we always do. Different questions are now cropping up as we’re getting back into the season two writers’ room.

Bad and Saul were well funded and well supported, but Pluribus is a whole other level of scope and scale. It has to be due to the genie-like function of the Joined. Was it quite an adjustment to be able pitch such grand ideas and know that they’re economically feasible?

They are, and they aren’t. My God, there were still so many things that we couldn’t do, and the things we did do were very hard to pull off on our budget and schedule. The Sprouts sequence that we broke in the room was much bigger. We then figured out how we were actually going to do it during production, and I was very naive about how hard it was going to be. I thought about it in the same way you just described: “We can do anything!” But there’s a lot of limits, and you only learn how difficult they are once you butt up against them. We kept swinging for the fences, but as responsible producers, we just tried to make sure that the important stuff gets on the screen.

There were great sequences, big sequences, that went by the wayside throughout the season. And never mind the money involved or how producible something is, it was like, “Do we need this to tell the story? Is the story going to be that much better for having ten more shots of reloading a supermarket?” Maybe not. Maybe we can tell this story another way that’s going to be more economical without the impact being lessened or making it feel small. You never want to be put in a position where a character has to reference something amazing that we’re not able to see.

Speaking of Sprouts, how simply can you sum up the process of unloading and reloading a working Albuquerque Sprouts?

At first, we thought we’d have the run of the place for a week, but as it went up the corporate ladder, a week became three days. Understandably, they had a supermarket business to run. So we had to shoot the exterior parking lot mostly at a different location —an abandoned Sears in northern ABQ. [Writer’s Note: This is the same Sears that served as the interior location for the Lancaster’s department store in Better Call Saul’s “Nippy.”] The truck action took place there for three or four days after we shot the Sprouts interior sequence.

Our art department, along with the Sprouts team, emptied out the front of the Sprouts where Carol would be. We emptied half ourselves, and then we did the rest with VFX. When the restocking starts, the stuff that came off the trucks was furnished by the art department. The trick there was keeping tabs on what each person was holding and what their place was in line. We then had to get them to that same spot a week later when we shot the parking lot. Then, after the time jump, the Sprouts team essentially returned the store to normal overnight, with the exception of a couple things I wanted to feature, like the stand of olives. Then we had to stitch each location together with VFX when looking in the direction of windows and doors.

The Breaking Bad timeline became muddled due to mistakes on Walt and Skyler’s divorce papers, as well as a few other details. But Better Call Saul had a much firmer handle on the when of it all. With Pluribus, the countdown and the countup are certainly a cool way to signify the before times and the after times. But was it also meant to keep you guys on top of your timeline in the most disciplined way yet?

No, I don’t think so. But I hear you. I’m sure we’ve had to be a little bit fudgy with our timelines, but we were still pretty disciplined given how intricate the timelines were on the previous two shows. Breaking Bad had no conception of there being a prequel-sequel when it was being timed out, so we didn’t need to know whether something was in 2008 or 2010.

But Pluribus emerges much more from the big event. It’s a big event that is about humanity becoming an entity that experiences an enforced synchronicity. The Others, the Joined, however you want to refer to them, they are all one. They are experiencing every moment in time as one. But Carol is not in sync with the Others. So keeping the clock in people’s minds is about keeping tabs on where Carol is in relation to the event, and maybe it helps viewers figure out the time signature of the show.

There seems to be a united front in regard to not explaining the themes and subtext of the show. Theories have been floated involving AI, political division and religion. I’m still attached to the idea that Vince is grappling with celebrity. I remember one of the Saul writers telling me about a time that his fame first registered with them in real life. It was during a walk to lunch, and some random person yelled, “Hey, Vince!” from afar. Carol now lives that existence in the most extreme way. Anyway, are you willing to break ranks and shed any light on what Pluribus is ultimately saying?

(Laughs.) What do you think it’s saying?

Well, let’s drill down on one potential theme. Given the closing credits disclaimer about the show being made by humans —and Carol calling out Zosia and the Joined for stealing someone else’s vodka trivia and generally being “plagiarism machines” — the AI commentary seems pretty apparent at this point. I don’t think you’re ever going to beat those allegations.

I don’t think we’ll beat those allegations. But people were anxious in the early going of Breaking Bad to make it a one-to-one correspondence about the American healthcare system, which could not have been further from Vince’s mind in terms of thematics. But it’s there. It’s a reading. So I’m not going to say that anybody’s reading of Pluribus is incorrect. Of course, because of the times that we live in, there’s things about AI that resonate with how the Others operate.

But there’s also an incredible amount of political division, and there’s a feeling that maybe things could be better if we were just all on the same page. But what gets lost in that?

Individuality.

Yeah. On both sides of the political divide, people feel that something has been lost in terms of being able to be of one mind as a nation and as a species. We can’t agree on anything. You can say the simplest things right now, and someone will contradict you in ways that you just didn’t think were possible. It’s like we’re not living in a shared reality. But the trick of Pluribus is that the Others are definitely living in a shared reality that Carol is not a part of, as her reality is very different from theirs.

So there are themes that come to mind, but it’s less rich to say, “Oh, this is a show about fill-in-the-blank.” If I said that it’s a metaphor about not using your phone, you don’t need to watch the show. The show becomes useless. The show becomes meaningless. There are AI proponents that are going to watch the show, and they might feel attacked or they might feel supported. But for us to say, “No, it should just be this one-to-one correspondence,” it limits both the storytelling and the availability of the show to ask questions that people are going to be interested in. This is such a conceptual show, and my hope is that it makes people think about and feel different things in different ways.

Does it strike a chord with you in any particularly unique way?

I’ve heard people talk about it as a show about addiction, and from my personal experience with addicts in my life, that harmonizes very strongly. There’s that pain that is so individual within you that you have to drown it with something, and that’s Carol. So the Others offer a look at what peace looks like, but it is a peace that is fraught. So I can’t really say what it’s about to me other than it’s about Carol.

I don’t want it to ever collapse into a trend that’s been in horror for a long time: “The monster is trauma,” or, “The monster is grief.” That really is a one-to-one correspondence that’s being worked out, and while some really great horror has emerged from it, I always feel like that works well for movies but not as well for TV.

Carol decides to take her Xanax with vodka instead of water. To what degree was she trying to harm herself here?

I don’t think she was trying to harm herself. What it says to me is that it’s not the first time she’s done that. She knows exactly the dose. To me, it says, “Yeah, I need something stronger.” It’s dangerous, and no one should do that. But she’s done it before, and she’ll probably do it again. If it’s a cry for help, it’s a cry for help that shows how far this person has gone. We saw that she has a breathalyzer car ignition, and that’s not something a casual drinker would have.

Carol’s emotions are already an existential threat to the Joined, so was there a lot of debate about how to justify them giving her additional weapons?

Yeah, there was a lot of conversation about figuring out what they would do. Some of the best scenes in all of our shows emerge because there is a lively debate in the room about an issue and a question emerges from it. People then take different sides, and you come to a conclusion. So that particular scene really came from us going, “What would they do for her?”

The joke that I constantly make in the room is a joke with a core of truth. The Others are basically saying, “I would do anything for love, but I won’t do that.” And so the question is, “What is the ‘that’ they won’t do?” A lot of the course of the first season is discovering what they will and won’t do, and it’s even more about what they won’t do. I take them at their word that they will give her an atom bomb or a bazooka.

They love her, and they’re not scared. They have peace. They’re not faced with loss in the same way. Everybody who joins, their memories, their thoughts are preserved. So what does it matter if you die in that circumstance? What is the meaning of death in that circumstance? They don’t have the same corporeal fear that is very natural to the rest of us because we are fragile and we are not eternal. We do not have some sense of self that’s preserved.

So we pushed on the question of whether they’d give her these weapons, and they would. They’re so indulgent, and they really want to see Carol happy. Of course, to them, the ultimate happiness would be Carol joining them. But until they can figure out how to do that, they’ll give her anything. They’ll do what they can. But the question is still going to be, “Where are the lines?” What is the “that” in “I would do anything for love, but I won’t do that”?

The Joining took nearly 900 million lives including Carol’s wife, Helen (Miriam Shor), and that immediately put the Joined in a big hole in terms of audience sympathy. Did you partially weaponize Carol’s emotions and put blood on her hands so that the Joined weren’t forever written off as villains?

To some degree, yeah. But Carol’s culpability is for people to decide. If she yells at people and the result is them dying, how culpable is she for that? She didn’t join them and make them susceptible to this horrible disharmonious shaking. But she did it, and she did it twice after she knew that doing it would cause some shaking. So the question of Carol’s culpability and guilt is an open question for the show.

This was also not the Joined’s plan. They really wanted to roll the Joining out quietly. The planes that dusted the skies in episode one caused the Joining in Albuquerque, and they did that late at night. They were hoping for everyone to be asleep. They were hoping to get as many people as possible while they were in their beds at home so that they weren’t injured. They really did want things to go safely and smoothly. But they have a biological imperative that they have to adhere to, and that meant that nearly a billion people died.

Yes, the deaths of innocent people are going to make us go, “Wow, these people are horrible.” So we had to put our thumb on the other side of the scale and say, “Well, how can they be mustache-twirling bad guys, but not be mustache-twirling bad guys?” At this point in the show, they’re certainly Carol’s adversary, but it’d be less interesting if we were just waiting for them to put the brain slug into her ear or slip something into her skin. That’s where everyone’s head is going to go. Like Carol says, we’ve all seen this movie, so the challenge for us is to show you the movie you haven’t seen.

Rhea’s line of “Chinga tu madre, cabrón!” is one of the funniest deliveries of her career, and it’s a perfect example of Carol’s fury. I remember saying to you a couple of months ago that Pluribus is The Leftovers meets Sense8. That comp was partially because Carol has a righteous anger that’s reminiscent of Carrie Coon’s Nora Durst, and they both lost their loved ones during transitional events. So was Nora Durst ever a reference point for Carol?

Rhea and Carrie Coon are both stellar actors as well. It’s hard to find better. But we did talk about The Leftovers. Some people were more familiar with the show than others. But I don’t think it was necessarily that Carrie’s character came up, so much as the various features of that show that feel reminiscent in a certain way. So I would hope that Leftovers fans watch this and feel a similarity, if not a sameness. I do think Pluribus is hoping to chart a slightly different course, but we have discussed things about The Leftovers. It’s a great show, and there’s a lot of stuff that we love from it.

Your fondness for cats has been established in your previous work. When you wrote that a couple of the non-English-speaking Old-Schoolers are cat lovers, did Vince roll his eyes at your cat PR?

(Laughs.) Vince is well aware that I have a lot of cat love. The specifics of the remaining Old-Schoolers that are laid out in episode three, we didn’t break any of that in the room. Before I wrote my draft, Vince was just like, “Let’s make them geographically diverse and distinct from the people that we’ve established in episode two.” So I was trying to come up with names and places and things like that, and in my first draft that Vince read, I put in one that said, “He speaks Turkish and loves cats.” And Vince liked it so much that he added, “He also loves cats,” to another character. So Vince definitely embraced it. He was like, “If we’re going to make the joke, let’s really make the joke.”

I thought my days of hunting for Better Call Saul and Breaking Bad Easter eggs were finally over, but you just won’t let me rest. You inserted a FionaCom envelope that established Helen’s last name of Umstead and their street name of 1208 CIelo Rosado Court. FionaCom is a phone company that was invented on Saul in honor of Peter Gould’s daughter.

Correct.

While a Los Pollos Hermanos truck in the Sprouts parking lot would’ve gone too far, was there ever a discussion about tucking a Regalo Helado truck in there?

It would’ve been fun. Obviously, FionaCom is a slight crossover …

Wayfarer is a much bigger one.

It is. But we don’t want to necessarily be so literal that people think Breaking Bad starts on the other side of this. We don’t want a crossover that makes it feel like these are two universes that are supposed to shine light on each other. It’s more, “Hey, isn’t this fun to see?” We have to acknowledge that we’re shooting in Albuquerque, and so there’s images that are going to cross over. But they are just little winks and nods to the fans that say, “We see you. We know you’re going to be looking for some of this stuff, and hopefully you’ll be delighted by it.”

Breaking Bad had X-Files Easter eggs, but we weren’t trying to say, “Hey, this is an X-Files episode, and something weird is going to happen.” Don Eladio’s name came from Raymond Cruz’s X-Files character, Eladio. Craddock Marine Bank from Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul started on X-Files, but we were just saying, “Hey, we love The X-Files. Wouldn’t it be cool to reference Vince’s long history with that show?” So that’s how those things play to me on Pluribus, but I could be wrong. Maybe we’ll discover that this is a prequel, but I would be surprised.

There’s an incredible Easter Egg coming up that is loosely tied to Bad and Saul‘s Lydia Rodarte-Quayle, and I’m not saying Laura Fraser shows up or that it’s something obvious like Stevia. Only a certain type of viewer will catch it. But I do want to use this as a shameless excuse to ask you about Lydia.

Sure.

She was going to appear on the final season of Saul until COVID upended that plan. When she met Walt at the Grove in Breaking Bad’s “Gliding Over All,” she mentioned that she had pitched the Czech Republic distribution plan to Gus before Walt killed him. Would we have seen her propose that same arrangement to Gus on Saul?

I honestly don’t know. Maybe. We had so many other issues. We had so many chickens coming home to roost. We had pitches for a lot of characters. We were like, “Oh, wouldn’t it be fun to see this person and this person?” We got in as many as we could, as many that had a light to shine on the current story. So I honestly don’t remember if we had a specific plan [for Lydia], but since we know what the pitch is from Breaking Bad, what would be the new light we can shed? We love to show scenes that were referenced elsewhere in dialogue, but it’s only on the condition that you learn something new about how an event went down. If it’s just visualizing it, then it’s usually not worth doing. But it’s worth doing if it’s something where you go, “Oh, that is why Saul would be worried about Lalo on Breaking Bad.”

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Pluribus is currently streaming new episodes every Friday on Apple TV. Read THR’s previous interviews with creator Vince Gilligan and stars Rhea Seehorn and Karolina Wydra.