Vince Gilligan’s New Sci-Fi Show Has An Intriguing Breaking Bad Easter Egg
Never forget Flight 515.
For a long time, we didn’t know anything about Breaking Bad showrunner Vince Gilligan’s new series. We knew it starred Better Call Saul’s Rhea Seehorn, we knew it was called Pluribus, and we knew it had something to do with “a cure for happiness.” Even the first looks at the series were wordless clips of Seehorn’s character taking out her trash or looking at a sign in Vegas.
But now, Apple TV is releasing actual trailers showing just what is going on: Seehorn plays Carol, the sole human, or at least one of the few remaining humans, not absorbed into a hive mind. In the latest trailer, we see just how far this goes, including a connection to Vince Gilligan’s most beloved work. Check out the trailer below:
In the trailer, Carol is the sole passenger on a plane presumably being piloted by a member of the hive mind, and she chooses to sit in the far back of the cabin. But the most interesting part of this shot isn’t Carol’s seat selection, but the very seats themselves. The headrests are embroidered with the brand name “Wayfarer,” a fictional airline that may sound familiar to Breaking Bad fans.
Breaking Bad Season 3 was framed around a tragic plane crash, inadvertently caused by Walter White (albeit with like 4 degrees of separation). For obvious reasons, it couldn’t be a flight from an existing airline, so the flight was Wayfarer Flight 515.
This flight in Pluribus comes from the same airline as the ill-fated flight from Breaking Bad.
If this means Breaking Bad and Pluribus are set in the same universe, then it raises some big questions. First of all, how was Wayfarer able to weather the PR storm from the crash? But for Breaking Bad fans, there are even bigger questions: if this Albuquerque is the same one featured in the Breaking-Bad-verse, does that mean Carol has a lawyer doppelganger in the same city? Are there characters from Breaking Bad inducted into the hive mind? Will we see any familiar faces in the actual show?
Maybe I’m reading a little too much into this, and Pluribus is just set in another parallel universe where Wayfarer exists as an airline, but it could mean we’ll see more ties to the series that came before. Walter White may be dead and gone at this point, but who knows? Maybe Carol will ask the hive mind for some blue meth.
