Pluribus Sneaks In a Brilliant Gilligan-verse Easter Egg Honoring Better Call Saul's Darkest Moment
Poor Howard became the two-word verdict on a week of cascading misfortune, as a minor slipup snowballed into a very public fiasco and turned an ordinary man into the face of a system gone sideways.
Two episodes in, Pluribus is already playing to the hardcore Gilligan crowd. If you know your Better Call Saul and Breaking Bad lore, a couple of early deep cuts are sitting there, hiding in plain sight.
The whiskey tell
In the opening stretch, Rhea Seehorn's character, Carol, pours herself some Macallan. That is not your random prop whiskey. Macallan is a high-end bottle you are not grabbing off the grocery shelf, and in Better Call Saul it kept showing up. Most memorably, Howard Hamlin brings Macallan to Kim and Jimmy right before Lalo Salamanca murders him in season 6's Plan and Execution. A nice, dark echo.
Even deeper: Howard and Chuck celebrated a big win with Macallan, too. Shout-out to Twitter user JBMcCann82, who clocked the connection on November 11, 2025. That is the kind of detail only the obsessives catch on first pass.
And then there is the airplane
In the show's promo materials, Carol is seen flying Wayfarer. That is the same airline from Breaking Bad season 2, tied to the tragic mid-air collision over Albuquerque that Walter White indirectly set in motion. Subtle, but not accidental.
Gilligan wrote it for Seehorn
Vince Gilligan told GamesRadar+ he built Pluribus around Seehorn from the jump. His reasoning was not exactly coy:
We got to know her and enjoyed writing for her on Better Call Saul - so much so that I created this show just for her. I knew she would be good in it; I knew she was someone I could confidently count on and place a bet on in terms of making her the star of a TV show. I thought it was long past time for her to be a star.
So what is Pluribus actually about?
Seehorn plays Carol Sturka, an irascible author trying to deal with The Joining - an event where basically everyone on Earth merges into one blissed-out organism, leaving only a few people separate. Light, breezy stuff. It is a sci-fi series on Apple TV, and it drops new episodes weekly. If you are mapping out your watch, there is a full release schedule to follow.
- Macallan in Pluribus: Carol drinks it in the first two episodes. In Better Call Saul, it recurs as Howard and Chuck's celebratory bottle, and Howard brings it to Kim and Jimmy right before his murder by Lalo in season 6's Plan and Execution. Credit for the spot goes to Twitter user JBMcCann82 on November 11, 2025.
- Wayfarer airline: Carol is seen on a Wayfarer flight in Pluribus promos. Wayfarer is the airline at the center of Breaking Bad season 2's plane crash over Albuquerque, an incident Walter White indirectly causes.