The route
The flight starts where the cold open leaves off — inside the covered bridge on the east edge of town, nose pointed west. It slips out over the creek, climbs hard above the treeline, and swings around to find the water tower standing over the south end of Plainview. It holds there a beat. Then it turns back, drops to street level, and runs the length of Main Street — past the gas station, the garage, the library, the post office — pulling up at the crossroad in front of the police station.
Nothing in that flight is a matte painting or a clever angle. The drone really does travel that distance, past those buildings, in that order, because the town is actually there — every storefront, every roofline, the water tower, the bridge, laid out on a real map with real streets. If you walked it, it would take you about nine minutes.
Why bother building a town nobody visits
Because the camera visits it constantly, and the camera is a terrible liar. The moment a shot cheats — a building on the wrong corner, a street that runs the wrong way, a water tower that moves between episodes — the town stops feeling like a place and starts feeling like a backdrop. Plainview has to hold up from every angle, in every episode, forever.
So the town gets built once, properly, and then every shot is planned inside it. Want to know what Sam sees from his garage? Stand there and look. Need the diner in the background of a shot on Main Street? It is already in the background, because it is already on Main Street. The town does the continuity so nobody has to remember it.
This is the skeleton, not the show
What you are watching is the underlying town — the bones. The finished cold open is dressed on top of this: autumn light, colour, the little blue drone with its one enormous eye tearing along ahead of the camera. Same flight, same streets, same water tower. This is just the version where you can see the map underneath.
More on how Plainview got built in the first place: Building a Town That Does Not Exist.