Pluribus Just Did Its Own Version Of An Infamous Breaking Bad Gag (With One Major Change)

After everything that's happened, we just need a little space: This article contains spoilers for "Pluribus" season 1, episode 5.

The mostly one-sided battle between Carol Sturka (Rhea Seehorn) and the hive mind has reached an impasse. We've seen how far the world's interconnected population is willing to go to fulfill Carol's requests, and how far she's willing to go to find the secret sauce to break the global mind meld. In episode 5, the hive mind finally has enough with the protagonist's meddling, thank you very much. After giving Carol the cold shoulder for the first moments of the episode, it decides that it needs some space and promptly vacates every member of the collective from the city of Albuquerque.  

Because the hive is still dedicated to fulfilling Carol's needs and wishes but doesn't want to go anywhere near her, this creates a dilemma. In an attempt to solve it, the combined brainpower of the world's population settles on a hilariously repetitive voice mail service where Carol can leave requests, which will then be carried out by a laughably underpowered remote-controlled drone. This works as well as you'd expect: During its first garbage-carrying mission, the sad little drone becomes tangled in a street light near Carol's home, where it's left hanging.

With this, the drone becomes the "Pluribus" version of the infamous "Breaking Bad" roof pizza — a foreign object that becomes an amusing recurring fixture of the main character's domicile exterior after an offbeat scene strands it there. There's one major difference, though: Vince Gilligan learned from all those people pelting the real-life Walter White house with pizzas back in the day. Since Carol's hillside cul-de-sac was specifically built for "Pluribus," no poor homeowner has to deal with people flying drones into nearby streetlights.

If you don't remember the "Breaking Bad" roof pizza, a refresher: In the show's season 3 episode "Caballo Sin Nombre," Walter White (Bryan Cranston) is dealing with the fallout of his wife Skyler (Anna Gunn) finding out about his criminal activities, and vents some frustration by throwing a whole pie on the roof of his house after she refuses to let him share it with his family. The pizza's place of origin, Venezia's Pizzeria, went on to feature in a handful of episodes and its gimmick of not slicing the pies became a talking point in the raging "sliced vs. unsliced" debate. Less amusingly, the owners of the very real Albuquerque house that served as the White domicile ended up in a pickle when fans started flocking to see the place and some of them decorated it with substantial amounts of pizza. In 2015, the "Breaking Bad" creator himself had to beg fans to stop throwing pizza on the house's roof. 

"Pluribus" is nothing like "Breaking Bad" in many ways, and fortunately, the way the show handles its drone scene reflects this. After all, imagine people going roof pizza-level nuts with drones and garbage bags, and it's easy to see why a repeat incident would be less than ideal. Since Carol Sturka's "Pluribus" house isn't a real place but is built on the desert outside Albuquerque, this (probably) won't happen. 

In all fairness, the fake "Pluribus" neighborhood wasn't built to stop pizza history repeating — it had more to do with the fact that the many outlandish events set there would have been impossible to film in a real residential area. Still, it's a handy side effect that'll no doubt prevent a trash drone prank or ten.