‘Pluribus’ Writer-Producer Jenn Carroll Breaks Down Rhea Seehorn’s Fateful Choice

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[Thisstorycontainsspoilersfrom[ThisstorycontainsspoilersfromPluribus season one, episode seven, “The Gap.”]

In the harrowing series premiere of Vince Gilligan’s Pluribusyou might have caught the name “Jenn” being screamed 14 times during the laboratory outbreak of an extraterrestrial virus. Karan Sani’s Dr. Deshpande futilely tried to save his doctor colleague, Jenn, after an infected mouse bit her exposed hand, kick-starting a most unusual apocalypse. The name inspiration behind Blair Beeken’s donut-licking patient zero belongs to writer/co-executive producer Jenn Carroll, one of Gilligan’s most trusted collaborators since Breaking Bad.

Between post-production and the writers room, Carroll worked in a variety of assistant roles on Breaking Baduntil finishing the stretch run of the show as script coordinator. Then she began Better Call Saul as Gilligan’s official assistant, before stepping into a production role for the majority of the series, as well as the Breaking Bad sequel movie, El Camino. She eventually became an exec at Gilligan’s production company, High Bridge, which allowed her to be among the first to read the introductory episodes of what would ultimately be called Pluribus. To sum up how she’s described by her peers, if the Apple TV sci-fi series centers around a “psychic glue” that binds the global population together, then Carroll is the glue that binds Gilligan’s storytelling universe.

When the Massachusetts native worked in the trenches of Breaking Bad‘s later seasons, she formed a dynamic duo with another assistant to Gilligan and the writers, Gordon Smith. From conducting scientific research to writing bonus scenes for Blu-ray releases, they both gained invaluable experience en route to promotions on Saul. Smith made his TV writing debut on Saul season one’s sixth episode, “Five-O,” receiving an Emmy nomination in the process. Directed by Adam Bernstein, the standout episode of the first season shed light on Mike Ehrmantraut’s (Jonathan Banks) dark past in Philadelphia.

After Gilligan shared his top-secret project with Carroll, she made it clear that she didn’t just want to be his boots-on-the-ground producer; she wanted to be one of his writers, too. Today’s release of Pluribus‘ seventh episode, “The Gap,” marks her first foray into episodic television writing and, fittingly enough, the powerful hour — and my personal favorite thus far — was also helmed by “Five-O” director Adam Bernstein.

“I read the first draft of the first two episodes, and I called Vince to say, ‘I’ll produce this show, but I also want to be in the [writers] room. This could be my favorite show that’s ever been,’” Carroll tells The Hollywood Reporter.

While Smith and Bernstein shot Albuquerque for Philadelphia, Carroll and Bernstein got to turn Spain’s Canary Islands into the western coast of South America, chronicling Manousos “Manny” Oviedo’s journey to meet Carol Sturka (Rhea Seehorn) in New Mexico. The episode is meant to compare and contrast the only immune characters (“Old-Schoolers”) who want to save the world from the hive mind. Carroll’s episode proceeds to test them both in markedly different ways, as Manny is battling the elements of South America, refusing help from the Joined at every turn.

“They’re dealing with different struggles right now,” Carroll says. “Carol’s struggle during her isolation is such a mental and psychological one, while Manny’s is a physical one.”

After her overnight stay in Las Vegas, Carol is relieved she no longer seems to have to worry about being turned into one of the Joined. So she pumps the brakes on the world-saving business for some extended R&R, including traditional and unconventional golf, a dip in the Jemez hot springs, an elegant rooftop dinner, a Georgia O’Keeffe museum heist and some alcohol-fueled fireworks shows. Despite the fun and games, Carroll insists that Carol hasn’t given up her quest to save the world now that she appears to be free of being turned into one of the Joined. “This episode doesn’t make her less of a hero, but it does turn the burner down a little bit,” Carroll says.

Carol’s firework shows culminate in one of the series’ most unsettling moments so far. It’s been evident throughout her five weeks off that her loneliness and grief are still bubbling at the surface. And when one impending firework falls over in her direction, she not only repositions herself in front of the cannon-like tube, but she closes her eyes, resigned to whatever outcome it yields. Fortunately, the firework sped right past her into a neighboring home.

“It’s, ‘I don’t really care one way or the other.’ Forty days is a long time to be truly by yourself. I don’t think we can even imagine this level of solitary confinement until having gone through it,” Carroll says. “So Carol is definitely at a breaking point there, and we feel a real shift in her behavior.”

Below in the conversation with THRthe two-time Emmy nominee also discusses the real purpose behind revisiting some familiar locations Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul fans.

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Across Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul, El Camino and now Pluribusyou’ve pretty much worked every job there is to work for Vince Gilligan. You’ve been his shadow brain for 15 years. Now, with Vince’s longtime producer Melissa Bernstein off riding dragons, I figured you’d step right into her shoes, but I didn’t expect you to join the writers’ room on top of producing. How did this dual role come to be?

Admittedly, I was hopeful Melissa was going to join us. Melissa has been my mentor for a long time, and while I am very happy for her at HBO, we, of course, really wanted to keep working with her on this one. I was a little nervous when we didn’t end up having her as an EP, but Trina Siopy, Diane Mercer and I did the best we could to take different parts of what Melissa did so well on Saul and Breaking Bad and add them into our producing jobs. Luckily, we could also call her whenever we needed advice. We did get her back as a director [for episode eight] so she couldn’t get too far out of the family.

I was post-PA[asof[asofBreaking Bad season four]and moved into the writers’ room [as a script coordinator/writers’ PA]and then I became Vince’s assistant and later his development executive [at High Bridge Productions]. I had also been a producer on Saul. So I’m always looking for a new challenge and asking myself, “How do I build on what I’ve done so far? What else can I learn here? What’s a way to stay in the family and keep growing?” Vince is so supportive of that. He’s been an incredible boss and creative partner for so long.

I was one of the first people to read the script[forwhatwouldlaterbecalled[forwhatwouldlaterbecalledPluribus]. I read the first draft of the first two episodes, and I called Vince to say, “I love this show. I will move to Albuquerque for as long as you want. I’ll produce this show, but I also want to be in the [writers’] room. This could be my favorite show that’s ever been.” Once again, he was really supportive.

Vince and I, along with Gordon [Smith] and Melissa, had worked together on a lot of ancillary writing projects for Breaking Bad: webisodes, comic books, [Blu-ray bonus scenes]. I’d worked with Sony’s development team as a writer on projects. I’d ghostwritten other stuff for the universe before, so Vince knew that my enthusiasm was going to outweigh any lack of experience in the writers’ room.

From a scheduling point of view, Vince wanted to break up the show. He wanted to do the writers’ room, and then moved to Albuquerque to focus on production and post. That’s the benefit of time. That’s what Apple promised us when we started working together. And I figured, “I’ll just be wherever Vince is. If he’s in the writers’ room, I’ll be in the writer’s room. If he’s on set, I’ll be there too. Hopefully, it won’t be taking on too much, being both a writer and a non-writing producer on the show.” So it’s been a challenge, but a really fun one.

Your episodic debut as a TV writer is a special episode, and it’s directed by none other than Adam Bernstein. This is not the first time he’s directed a special episode by a first-timer. He directed Gordon Smith’s Emmy-nominated debut on Saul. Whose idea was it to dust off the “Five-O” playbook from Saul?

I think it’s the scope of the episode more than the first time writer of it. Adam would work well with every writer on our staff because he’s so talented, confident, experienced and thoughtful. He’s known Vince forever. He doesn’t get in his own way. He’s got such a great mind for editorial that any writer would be lucky to work with him. But if we had a first-time director, I would certainly hope to pair them with a more experienced writer like Gordon or Alison [Tatlock].

We had already broken most of the season by the time we got into booking the directors after the strike. We knew Vince was going to direct the first couple when we were starting to get our schedule together, and one of my jobs as a non-writing producer, along with Diane and Trina and Jeff [Frost]is figuring out who’s going to be directing the other episodes and where they slot into the schedule.

We knew how vast this episode was going to be and how we were going to shoot half of it in Spain and half of it in Albuquerque. So the one thing Vince said to me was: “I’d really love for this one to be directed by one of our big guns — an Adam Bernstein, Michelle MacLaren type.” Given how visual and emotional it is, we wanted to find the right director who would already have a shorthand for how Vince’s shows operate, so Adam was just such an incredible creative partner. I was very thrilled to get to partner with him as both a producer and writer of the episode.

Carol has abandoned her world-saving quest now that she feels safe from a belated Joining, and that’s disappointing considering she called out the rest of the Old-Schoolers for being traitors to the human race. Was she only ever concerned for herself?

Well, she goes through quite a journey in the first six episodes. She’s been burning the candle at both ends in trying to save the world and grieving the loss of her wife. There’s a lot going on, and then she finds out they need her stem cells to change her, something she doesn’t want. So we talked about how this episode doesn’t make her less of a hero, but it does turn the burner down a little bit.

She’s just found out that no one in the world wants to be around her. She’s totally in the right, in my mind, but none of the Others want to be around her. None of the other Old-Schoolers want to be around her. They’re having Zoom meetings specifically without her. So not a single human on the planet wants to be in direct contact with her or be within miles of her, and that needs to mean something.

So she goes into this episode with a lot of messy layers to her heroism. I don’t know that she even knows how she’s feeling as she leaves Vegas. But she’s determined to have a good time in this episode. She’s determined to make herself happy by herself. She is combating this feeling of loneliness that she’s been pushing down, and she’s got this level of almost subconscious rage. Adam and I talked to Rhea and to Vince about how she may not even recognize how angry she is, and we may not even feel it until she calls them back at the gas station to yitz them about the temperature of the Gatorade.[[Writer’s Note: I’ve been telling myself that this scene is an elaboration of Jesse Pinkman’s famous Breaking Bad line, “yo Gatorade me, bitch.”]

It’s hard to say [how she’s feeling] as we head into several scenes of Carol Sturka’s “big day off.” She goes to the hot springs, and she golfs alone on an overgrown course. She’s determined to be happy. Is she doing it for herself? Or is she doing it because those voyeuristic Others are watching her with a drone? She doesn’t want anybody to know they’ve gotten [under her skin]. So we talked about how it’s a whole stew of what’s going on in her head now that the temperature has been turned down on them turning her at any second.

Carol attends a lonely dinner at the rooftop restaurant of Hotel Chaco. This is the same location where Lydia Rodarte-Quayle aura-farmed in her Louboutins on 402 of Better Call Saul. How did you land back there?

It’s just a really nice hotel with a beautiful rooftop view. Albuquerque has changed a lot over the more than a decade that I’ve been going out there. And as somebody who doesn’t live in Albuquerque full-time — and certainly didn’t rent houses there when I first started going out there — I’ve stayed in almost every hotel you can stay. I’ve also stayed in almost every part of town over the years while assisting Vince, from uptown to downtown to the mountains. And one of the biggest changes in Albuquerque is the rise of nicer and nicer boutique hotels. It used to only be The Andaluz and now there are many options. So The Chaco is one where even I have stayed, and I was very familiar with it.

We originally talked about some other rooftop views closer to the mountains. There are many restaurants in Albuquerque that have incredible views, but The Chaco was very amenable to filming. Ultimately, we loved the idea of ​​being able to take the scene outside onto that beautiful deck and just see all around Carol. There’s no moving cars or anything else. There’s just beautiful lights flickering all around her in this very romantic scene.

As you mentioned, you also went back to the Albuquerque Country Club, which is where Saul Goodman was discriminated against in Better Call Saul‘s 601. Kim (Seehorn) met Kevin and Paige there in season five as well. Was this location also less about fans pointing at the screen and more about needing a golf course, especially one you have a good relationship with already?

Exactly. In my memory, we went to a few golf courses all over town with great views, but this is an episode that was tricky to schedule. We shot a lot of the episode in Jemez up on the Pueblo [that’s 50 miles northwest of ABQ]but there’s always a cost in travel time. So that particular country club is very film-friendly. They let us bring this bison onto the course, and they gave us weeks to allow part of the course in between two holes to get overgrown for our story purposes. Nobody mowed the lawn. So they were just so friendly, and they were very conveniently located in town so that we could maximize our days.

To that point, Adam has a very productive brain. We were scouting in the jungle on La Palma in Spain’s Canary Islands, and [designer] Denise [Pizzini]Adam and [DP] Paul [Donachie] and I trudged through the jungle with our location scout. Paul and I said, “Adam, around this corner and up this hill, the leaves are even bigger in the jungle. This is amazing.” And there was a moment where he said, “Guys, yes, I agree that it’s beautiful. But you know as well as I do, if we shoot someplace that doesn’t require a two-mile hike through the jungle, I’m going to get 10 more shots, and the episode is going to be better.” And we were like, “Of course!”

Carol takes a trip to the same Georgia O’Keeffe museum in Sante Fe that Jesse (Aaron Paul) and Jane (Krysten Ritter) went to Breaking Bad season three.[[Writer’s Note: Both were set builds.]Based on my questions about the other familiar locations, I have to assume this choice wasn’t meant to draw a line between Jane and Carol. Did O’Keeffe’s life and work, particularly “Bella Donna,” just align rather well with Carol’s story?

Yeah, it’s not a line between Jane and Carol. But there’s connective tissue in that Georgia O’Keeffe feels like an innately Southwestern reference, and we like to make things specific to New Mexico. For a lot of reasons, Georgia O’Keeffe felt like the right choice for Carol in particular. But maybe it would have been Frida Kahlo if the show was set in Mexico, for example.

Carol drinks and lights heavy-duty fireworks on her cul-de-sac out of sheer boredom. When one of them falls in her direction, she has enough time to position herself in front of it and let the chips fall where they may. Do you consider this to be a suicide attempt?

Is it more like ideation? It’s, “I don’t really care one way or the other.” How broken is she at that moment? 40 days is a long time to be truly by yourself. If you lived alone during the pandemic, there might be 14 other people in your building who are also living alone, and you can still see some people on the street. But with this, there is nobody in town, and there is no sense of when this period is going to end for her. I don’t think we can even imagine this level of solitary confinement until having gone through it.

Carol is definitely at a breaking point there, and we feel a real shift in her behavior. But it’s not like she is actively putting herself in harm’s way. Her rebellion has just gotten to this point. Her rebellion, from the beginning to the end of it, goes from small to quite large. So we want the audience to wonder, “Does she care what happens in this moment? Or is she just going to let fate decide?”

Rhea was talking to Bob Odenkirk in Interview Magazineand she said, “My character was almost suicidal to a degree that Vince and I realized we had to pull it back a bit.” Was this a scene that was pulled back somewhat, à la Jane’s death on Breaking Bad?

It didn’t go through that journey. This pretty much stayed the same from the point that we broke it all the way through to the end. If anything, it might’ve moved in the other direction. There was [once] a sense that the firework was wobbling to where it’s looking at her and then it’s not. But ultimately, because of the physics of space, the firework is looking straight at her, and she’s looking down the barrel of it. So I wouldn’t say it was quite as much of a change, but there’s still more episodes left in the show.

She sends a message for Zosia (Karolina Wydra) to come back, ending the standoff. The Joined played it perfectly. They knew that her loneliness would become too great. Do you imagine that the greatest psychologists within their hive mind generated this tactic?

I think it’s really hard to put yourself into the mindset of the hive mind. We’re living in a 2D world, and that is almost like a three-dimensional world. But when people watch the episode, I hope they feel like there’s a change of heart, if that’s what the Others were looking for. I hope that the viewers can see that there is a difference between the rebellions of act one and act four. She’s no longer trying to drown out the silence in the same way, first with the singing and then escalating it to the boombox. Hopefully, you feel that there’s a change in her because she is still our hero.

I initially thought that Manousos/Manny and Carol were two sides of the same coin, but he’s far more hardcore when it comes to his aversion to the Joined. Plus, she commits grand theft, while he leaves money and IOUs for whatever he takes. He has an unwavering code of honor. And the fact that he was willing to set fire to his treasured car rather than let the Joined put their hands on it, that’s some rousing conviction. How would you compare and contrast these characters?

They both want to save the world, but how are they both interacting with the world? How are they dealing with isolation? How does Carol get gas versus how does Manny do it? Carol pulls up to any old gas station and calls the Others to say, “Hey, turn on pump one.” But Manousos is siphoning cars and leaving his personal cash everywhere. And that’s a form of rebellion that is just as ridiculous as Carol’s form of rebellion. He’s refusing to acknowledge that the world is different, but like you said, his integrity and determination are so rigid. So they’re both heroic, but they’re dealing with different struggles right now. Carol’s struggle during her isolation is such a mental and psychological one, while Manny’s is a physical one.

We hoped that you would see that heroism as he went on his journey, which has two parts. There’s the driving montage to the Hermanos Gutierrez song [“Esperanza”] that’s heroic, determined, hopeful and vast, as he’s trying to get all the way to Carol. Then there’s the second part in the jungle after the car burning scene, which we resembled almost to Hernán Cortés burning the ships as he entered Mexico City [in 1519]. It’s a very different vibe, but the point is, he’s not going back. He is so determined to get to Carol, but the jungle is a physical limitation that he cannot overcome.

[Carlos-Manuel] Vesga is so wonderful, and I can’t wait for people to see him in this episode. His character is studious. He is an autodidact. He actually reminds me a lot of my father in a certain way. He’s thoughtful. He keeps his own counsel, and while he is an athletic guy, he seems like the kind of guy who takes long walks around Asunción. He doesn’t seem like a guy who goes hiking and rock climbing. When he enters the jungle, you want to think, “Oh no, this is going to break him.” The episode is ultimately about what breaks Carol psychologically and what breaks Manousos physically, because they both hit a certain limit.

And the quieter moments served both journeys so well.

We warned [composer] Dave Porter and [music supervisor] Thomas Golubić during our music spotting session. The only score in the episode is Manousos [collapsing] in the jungle. We needed it to mean something when you’re just hearing Manousos repeat his mantra over and over as he’s trudging through this impossible situation. We said, “This is a weird episode. Dave, you only have one spot in his episode. We’re so sorry, but when we get to this piece, we need it to feel like Manousos is on death’s door.” And he really delivered on that and took it to the next level.

Thomas had already collaborated with us on all of the songs for Carol to sing [a cappella]. We had to clear them early because she sings them to the camera, and we couldn’t change them in post. We also knew Thomas was going to figure out the perfect song for the first montage [of Manny driving up the coast]but then we needed it to get real quiet.

Besides writer and co-executive producer, you have one more unique title on this show. You’re the name inspiration behind the virus’ patient zero [Blair Beeken’s donut-licking doctor, Jenn].

Yes, I have a lot of jobs on this show, but being the name of patient zero was one that truly delighted me — until we got to production. (Laughs.) I was sitting there w with the headphones on, and we were shooting that [lab infection] scene all day. Karan Sani, who was so good as Dr. Deshpande, was screaming my name over and over and over for hours. It felt like its own delightful psychological torture to the point where I started to disassociate. We had a good time.

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