Vince Gilligan is having a great start to November with the premiere of his Apple TV+ sci-fi series Pluribus. Decades before the release of Pluribus and the acclaimed Breaking Bad, Gilligan started experimenting with film when he was gifted a Super 8 camera at a young age. This gave birth to the feature Space Wreck, a film he made starring his brother, Patrick. Gilligan stated (via IndieWire):
Space Wreck is a little film I made in 1979 with my brother Patrick, [who] starred in it. He was an astronaut who lands on an asteroid, and he’s investigating the wreck of a spaceship, and then this weird space mold gets on the bottom of his spaceship. I should reboot that. Maybe that’ll be my next project. Do a big-budget Apple TV version of ‘Space Wreck.’ That’d be fun.
Gilligan was always passionate about storytelling and filmmaking, eventually winning the Virginia Governor’s Screenwriting Competition for Home Fries. Space Wreck was just the start of a long and illustrious career in the world of sci-fi.
Space Wreck Was Born Out of Gilligan’s Love for Sci-Fi
If anyone's looking to brush up on their Vince Gilligan sci-fi before Pluribus, there's a bunch of X-Files you can just jump into if 200+ episodes is too much. Unsurprisingly, he was probably the best writer on the show (along with Darin Morgan and Glen Morgan/James Wong). pic.twitter.com/9p1Ut91VXT
Vince Gilligan’s enduring love for the sci-fi genre started in his bedroom, when he was just a kid (via IndieWire):
I always loved creating little worlds in my bedroom. I loved drawing robots and spaceships and then sculpting them out of model parts from various model kits. God, that was my favorite thing in the world to do, was just create spaceships and robots and stuff down in the basement of our house in Kimberly Hills, in Farmville, Virginia.
Gilligan “fell ass-backward” into a job at The X-Files, where he came into his own. He had never intended to get a job as a writer on the show, but managed to when he was pitching movies.
From X-Files to Pluribus: Vince Gilligan’s Expansive Sci-Fi Filmography
Vince Gilligan wrote and produced many episodes of this seminal Fox sci-fi series, contributing 30 episodes and serving in various production roles. According to IndieWire, Gilligan wrote the episode Soft Light in the second season of the Fox series and went to work on the spin-off The Lone Gunman, which ran for one season. He had pretty much cemented his role as an important creator on X-Files.
Gilligan also worked on the pilot for a sci-fi show called A.M.P.E.D. that shares a lot of similarities with Pluribus. The plot went as follows (via Backstage):
A group of police detectives and officers as they deal with a small but growing percentage of the population that is falling prey to strange genetic mutations, causing them to do destructive things to the city and those around them.
The series was unfortunately not picked up, and the creator ended up working on Breaking Bad. Vince Gilligan got his feature break when he co-wrote the Will Smith dark superhero movie Hancock. Here is a table of his sci-fi projects summarised in a table.
Vince Gilligan went on a general run with Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul for the better part of a decade, and now he has returned to the sci-fi genre in the Twilight Zone-esque show Pluribus.
What do you think of the unrealised project Space Wreck? Let us know in the comments.
Pluribus is currently streaming on Apple TV+ in the U.S.
