Pluribus wrapped up its first season last week, and the creative team has revealed that the ending for the finale was revised in a big way after an Apple TV exec note.
Final moments of Pluribus season 1 were inspired by Apple feedback
If you haven’t yet seen the Pluribus season 1 finale, *major spoilers* lie ahead.
Pluribus ends its first season with a big ‘mic drop’ moment.
After Carol realizes that the Others will try to turn her against her will, she returns to Manousos to partner up on a world-saving venture—and has the Others deliver an atom bomb to her home.
The bomb’s arrival ties back perfectly to an earlier episode. But it turns out, it wasn’t in the creative team’s original plan.
Here’s the explanation from the official Pluribus podcast:
We actually came to that while we were working on the episode because we had delivered several scripts to Apple and they would gently push back and say, “We don’t know if this is a big enough ending for a season.” And we thought about it and Vince and I talked about it a lot, and we were like, “What about this? What if she asks for an atom bomb?” We had a series of somewhat softer endings that were interesting, but they were not quite as much of a line in the sand, and this felt like a line in the sand. We don’t know exactly what it means but. The folks we work with are really smart and there was an executive note that made the ending better, made it what it is. It worked out pretty good.
Speaking to Alan Sepinwall in a piece published at The Ringer, director Gordon Smith reveals that the first draft of the script had “a much subtler ending” where Carol returns home and quietly agrees to partner with Manousos. “It was like a secret handshake between them, like her way of saying, ‘I’m with you.’”
How long will we wait for the payoff of the atom bomb reveal? Season 2 of Pluribus was already greenlit before the first season ever aired, but it sounds like there may be a Severance-sized wait for the new season.
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