The Ringer-Verse - Ringer-Verse Recommends: December 2025 (Featuring ‘Pluribus’)

Episode Date: December 31, 2025

With various hosts scattered or taking time off for the holidays, Ben Lindbergh and Van Lathan toss out the typical Recommends format for this month and devote the whole episode to one show that hasn't been covered on The Ringer-Verse or ‘House of R’: ‘Pluribus.’ Ben and Van explore what made Vince Gilligan's Apple TV series a challenging yet fulfilling watch, discuss what sets the series apart from other sci-fi fare, and look ahead to a (distant) second season. Happy New Year! Host: Ben LindberghGuest: Van LathanSenior Producer: Steve Ahlman Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Hello and welcome into the ringerverse, your nexus feed for all things fandom. I am Ben Lindberg, senior editor at The Ringer and Buttmash host, joined as always by friendly Docks and Grumkin. We are your hosts here at Ringaverse Recommends, and we are bringing you the December 2025 edition, the final Ringaverse Recommends of the year. As you can see, if you're watching this episode, I'm not in my normal location. We are upstate. I set up by the window so that you could have. appreciate the picturesque background behind me. This is not fake, people. This is all real. It is actually

snowing lightly. The snow has accumulated on the branches of the trees. This is what's waiting for me after I finish podcasting. Priorities people. Podcasting comes first always. And we've got a good one for you today. Because we're traveling, because so many of the other Ringiverse and House of our hosts are traveling or taking some time off, and because this is a light nerd culture content month, We are eschewing our typical format, the cavalcade of recommendation clips. That'll be back in January. But this month, we are going with a single spotlight conversation about pluribus, featuring me and your friend in mine, Van Lathen.

We have been itching to talk about this show, the latest from Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul creator Vince Gilligan. It wrapped up earlier this month on Apple TV. By the way, last month's recommendation on Ringiverse recommends it, welcome to Dairy, finished strong. So do check that out and catch up if you haven't yet, but also catch up on Pluribus and enjoy our conversation about it. It's a fascinating, thought-provoking, profound, philosophical show, but it's also provoked some pretty polarized reactions, and we will get into all of that in our hopes for the future of the series, et cetera. You can, of course,

submit your nominations for Ringaverse Recommends for January and Beyond to Ringaverse Recommends at gmail.com. We always welcome them. We have so much. much on tap for next month on both of our feeds. We have Wonder Man. We have a Knight of the Seven Kingdoms. We have Star Trek, Starfleet Academy, and much more. So the Ringaverse content will keep coming, as will the Ringiverse recommends content. But now, let's get to our main conversation, me and Van, Dishin about Pluribus. This episode is brought to you by WeatherTech. Everyone knows winter is the MVP and making a mess. You don't need WeatherTech floor liners in the summer, unless you hit the beach or go camping, then you'd want a cargo liner or a road trip goes

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Ringiverse recommends its own little... I love the idea of us telling people what they should be watching and getting into because I always wanted to tell people what the fuck they should do. And now I get a chance to do that here on Ringaverse Recommends, Ben Lindberg. Let's get to it.

That's why we got into this line of work, I guess, because we think our opinions are good and we want to share them with everyone. So this is your first time having an actual dialogue on Ringiverse recommends instead of just submitting a clip. Right. And you already submitted a clip for Pluribus a month or two ago. So we know that you've been watching.

You've been checking out the show. So have I. And of course, there's been plenty of pluribus coverage around the Ringer network. Across the network, the website, our pals on prestige TV and the watch and beyond. But you and I haven't had much of a chance to talk about it yet. And I've been looking forward to this. So I guess we'll talk about the season as a whole, some of the highs, some of the lows, some of the lows, some of the questions we still have.

And I assume that you were in on this premise from the start or hyped for this show before we even knew what it was. Yeah, I didn't know what it was. I think I was in on the intrigue. The pilot was able to deliver a dramatic tension and narrative tension that I hadn't seen a pilot in a long time. Yeah. And, you know, it's funny.

A lot of shows are all premise now. I, if I look at this, I watched a trailer for a television show before I got here, and it was with Patrick Dempsey. It's called Memory of a Killer. The show is about Patrick Dempsey as a hitman, who's living a double life, who has early onset dementia.

Wow, just high concept. We're stacking all sorts of archetypes together here. So here's the deal. That is how most modern television shows are sold. They're sold with you knowing what they're going to be about. Like, we already know some of the scenes that are going to come in the Patrick Dempsey show. He's going to be in the middle of a kill. He's going to forget who he is.

He's going to become the hitman in a time where he should be the father, and he's going to be the father at a time that he should be the hitman. The scene with the doctor is in there. All of that stuff is there. We just want to see how the cat gets out of the tree, right? This show was completely different in that when I watched the trailer, no one had described to me what the show was actually about because no one really knew.

So that meant every scene had a very specific, dramatic weight to it, and it reeled me in. The energy of the pilot probably got me through three episodes of just blissful wonder about what's happening in this world. It's a long-winded answer of me saying that this was one of the first shows in a while that the actual narrative is what got me into it. For me, I was anticipating this before we knew a thing.

Obviously, it was top secret, everything under wraps, just these really cryptic, opaque teasers that gave nothing away. And all the interviews that were done, They hinted at things. They didn't divulge anything. We had a log line, but it wasn't nearly as detailed as the Patrick Dempsey show. You just explained to me.

Poor hitman. They can't ever just leave a single life. It's always a double life for hitman. I guess that's what society forces them to. Because how do you go to the movies? Yeah. Because the thing is, if you're a hitman, hitman is an occupation that it takes over your life.

How do you go to the movies? How do you go to the movies? What if your mark comes to the movies? comes to the movies. Sure. What if he's there? And then you got to kill him in the movie. That's the show.

Yeah. And sometimes it's a profession. It's not a vocation. It's something you're looking to get out of. Maybe leave the hitting behind if you can, but it's tough to get out. Once you've been in, you got that record. Anyway, we already know how that show's going to go is the point. We're summarizing it.

But in this case, they didn't tell us anything. And I think they could get away with that because of the pedigree associated with the talent here. We knew it was Vince Gilligan, creator of Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul, X-Files, everything else on his resume. Ray Seahorn, one of the best actors on TV. For me, Apple TV, Sci-Fi show. I mean, this was basically a show that was kind of cooked up in a lab to appeal to me. Just all of these ingredients. Gilligan, Seahorn, Apple TV, sci-fi.

I will watch any Apple TV sci-fi show, and most of them aren't as good as this one. And so I was sold. I was obviously going to tune in. And then they had to hook us because once you watch the first episode, it's not just the promise of, oh, what will Vince Gilligan come up with next? It's what is the show actually? And you're right. That pilot premiere hit hard because they really pulled out of the stops. It's, you know, just the post-apocalyptic scenario compressed into a single episode.

Familiarizes us with the entire premise, millions of people dropping dead, being converted into. to the hive mind. And I think that was kind of a double-edged sword. You're right, because the show could kind of coast on the momentum from that adrenaline-inducing first episode for a while. But maybe it also gave a false sense of the pace at which the series was going to move, right? Because it didn't quite keep up that pace. And how could it have after the world changes entirely in one episode? Yeah. You know, it's funny. The show actually litigates what the term apocalypse means. Because when we think about the apocalypse in shows and movies, what you really see is

the disintegration of technology, the disintegration of things that we take for granted now. Remember Book of Eli? Yeah. Yep. Remember what says people had too much, didn't realize it. and then you see somebody look at like a little towelette, they go crazy because it helps clean them, right? Right.

This show is asking is the death of what makes us human actually an apocalypse? Our individuality, which is the single most human thing that we have, does that lend itself to being called an apocalypse? Because everything else pretty much still exists. All the technology exists. All the infrastructure exists. Everything exists. the only thing that's changed is us.

And if the thing that makes us, us dies, are we in the end of the world? And that just blew my mind. That blew my mind watching it the way that it happened. Everything that happened in the pilot at the beginning in terms of them getting the signal and all of that stuff set the intrigue way high. And then after that, the whole pilot just had to chase that

until you get to a point of what's happening to the people. And if something happens to us, but everything else is still around here, is the end of our world, the end of the world. Right. It is usually about the breakdown of the infrastructure and the power goes out and you lose just your transportation and everything else. All the vestiges of civilization gradually decay. And then everyone devolves into roving factions and bands of survivors. We do a fallout pod sometimes together, you know, same deal. That's the typical trope of the apocalypse.

And here, nothing breaks down. Actually, everything's running better than ever. You know, everything's highly efficient. The powers on and off at the switch of a finger, a click of a finger. You call and the hive mind will do whatever you want. And arguably, the hive bind would consider this a utopia. For Carol, it's an apocalypse. For them, it's a utopia.

And the show at least wants to leave that as an open question for the viewer, which do you think it is? And I think it does a good job of that because there are people who are very much on team Carol and think, yeah, I would do the same thing. How are any of these people going along with the hive mind here? And there are also people who think Carol is terrible and they can't stand her. I don't know if they're in favor of the loss of individuality entirely, but there are people who think that Carol is not a sympathetic protagonist. But that's what the show is is trying to do is to get you to question everything, the nature of happiness, how important is individuality versus just kind of a collective peace and harmony, because fewer people are

dying. There's no war, you know, aside from the many people who perished in the initial joining, everything is harmonious after that. And the hive mind doesn't understand why Carol wants to change things back the way they are. So I think the show strives not to take a position on that because it wants us to question those things and put ourselves in that situation and wonder what we would do. Yeah, certainly. You know, also, we talk about connection, how we're connected. And social media and the internet is this gigantic irony in that it is the ultimate connector, but it makes you feel more lonely. That's kind of what the show is talking about. Everyone is connected, but can you be connected to someone,

can you be compelled to do that? Does connection only matter when you actually choose it? And that's a question that we're asking right now in our society. I have no choice but to get on to Twitter and have someone say, hey, Van, fuck you. Everyone can talk to me. I can talk to them. Are we talking about being connected or are we talking about the intentionality of human connection, like what it means to choose to be connected to someone, to let someone in to what you,

to have tolerance for somebody and all that. And even though they are peaceful, they are egalitarian, they are accommodating, they are environmentalists, they are pacifists, they are the highest ideal of human beings. They don't have a choice in being that way. So to us, to Carol, it doesn't matter if you don't have a choice in being that way. You are under the thumb of some type of oppression, and that right away means that you cannot be human. But man, even in the show, there's people that's testing it. My man, that's in Vegas.

Yeah. Like me and Kalika had a whole argument about whether or not what he's doing is ethical, right? And it just makes you ask all of these philosophical questions and kind of get into the guts of what it means to be a person. And then after that, it's just Carol versus the world. And you have to really, really sink into that character in order to fall into this show. And I think what you're saying, there's so many ways to interpret this and see society reflected in this show, in this sort of preposterous premise. And that's probably by design, but it is kind of a Rorschach test. There are people who see social media, as you said, everyone likens it to AI, of course, and how could you not?

So it's clearly resonating with a lot of things that we're all thinking about, even though Vince Gilligan will say, I didn't write it to be about AI. I didn't intend that. It's something that maybe subconsciously just comes to the fore or you play that up where people just receive it that way because these are pressing concerns for us. And so we sort of map ourselves onto that situation and figure out how we would act. And I think that we would all have that phase probably where we just went to Elvis's suite and just ordered like beautiful people to surround us at all times and play out bond scenarios and just kind of have some sort of bacchanal and orgy or whatever. Like you'd have to try that, right, in this situation.

But then how long would that actually be satisfying? because these people have no free will, as you said. You're manipulating them, essentially, and maybe that's unethical, or maybe it's just not satisfying because people aren't doing that of their own volition. And ultimately, you might feel pretty lonely. Carol certainly does. And that's one of the interesting things. I think throughout the season with Carol, with Minusos, just that longing for connection

and the rejection of the ultimate connection that the hive mind seems to have. And we see Carol go back and forth. you know, she's not as much of a hardliner as Menusos, who won't even talk to anyone or take anything from anyone. Carol, you know, she's turning her back on everyone, but then when they all leave her, she realizes she's lonely, she wants them back. And then she kind of cosplays a relationship with, with Zosha, and tries to talk herself into this being as satisfying as her former relationship. And then that gets exposed ultimately. So there's a limit to how much you can fool yourself into it, at least for our core characters here.

Yeah. People call Carol the worst person in the world, the most miserable person in the world. Yeah. That's what the marketing of the show called her. Right. Right. She is by far one of the most authentic characters I've seen on television in a long time. People call her miserable because she's regular and because we see her, right?

She is somebody who's attained a level of success, but she's attained a level of success in something that doesn't have any prestige, which is writing romance novels, which means that her success can be easily glossed over or ignored, right? If this show were about the world's best or even the world's most mediocre, MIT physicist,

we'd expect more from the character. And there would be nothing that the character could do to surprise us. I mean, Carol a romance novelist because that's something that can explain her being not destitute, her being a little self-absorbed, but it's also something that we can kind of laugh at.

But all of her misery, all of her questions, all of her lashing out, her pouting, decidedly human. What human beings are. This situation puts all of her flaws on front street. Every single thing about her that makes her an actual person, it exposes it.

And when we see ourselves, we don't really like that. And so by the time Minosos comes in, you have a militancy with his character that he's angry and he wants to kill the thing. and we're really not like that. We're not like that. We really, what happens is all of the structures that we exist in societies

that we don't like, we normally just complain about them. It's not like we do anything. He said, hey, special forces, I figured this out. Let's get to the thing. She starts that way. But when she gets lonely,

she just domesticated herself. So, like, even those, two characters are what we think we would do in the apocalypse and what we would actually do in the apocalypse. And it's just, it's not, it doesn't hit you over the head with it. But when you take a step back, it's really brilliant writing from Vince and the rest of the team. Yeah, because she's not being her authentic self pre-apocalypse.

She's successful. Right. She's doing something that doesn't satisfy her that she's sort of ashamed about. She is cynical about the whole genre. She looks down on her fans who venerate her. And she thinks that she could do better, that she could write this Great American literary novel. And maybe she doesn't actually have that in her.

Because as we learned over the course of the show, Helen actually didn't think that her book was any good, the book that is her true calling or so she thinks. And so maybe she's not cut out to do what she wants to do, what she thinks she's capable of doing. But she was kind of turning her back on what she wanted to do until this situation thrust her into that. And, you know, yeah, she's unpleasant to be around at times in this show to the extent that she inadvertently kills some of the hive mind and they have to just make themselves scarce so that she can't infect them with her negative emotions. But I don't find her at all unrelatable or unpleasant to.

spend time with because everything that she does in the show makes sense in context, I think, right? You know, it's hard to put ourselves in the situation. Of course, it's improbable. But when you consider the situation she's forced into here and everything that she's gone through, just, you know, we learn little bits about her past over the course of the series, but even the immediate past, the joining, losing Helen in this traumatic fashion, not knowing what's going on, being essentially cut off as everyone else is united. When you take that into account, I think all the just self-medicating, you know, drinking yourself to sleep, being just toxic to everyone, how else could you act in this situation? You know, if you want to preserve your individuality and fight back.

Carol, I think, is a very relatable character. Yeah. Early on, her rage makes her incurious, and that's what rage does. It makes you incurious. It makes you just lash out and you see a mark. You take that mark down and every, you become a hammer. everything becomes a nail. As the series continues to go on

and she sorts to acclimate to this society she's in, she becomes highly curious, curious about everything, about their way of life, about how they move, about what they want, about all of that. And she never likes the answers that she gets.

So she essentially is humanity's representative, even insofar as that she tries to rally the rest of humanity around her, the people that still have their free will. And they're not really with it. Yeah. You know what I mean?

They're like, hey, you know, that's still my son. Why don't you relax and like not make him go into a catatonic seizure mode, both catatonic and seizing up at the same time. Yeah.

And then by the time we get the competing narrative, the parallel narrative, That is when the show really finds its legs in terms of the first season. Obviously, people saw, maybe they saw, assuming. It's the tweet that I put out when I said that pluribus is testing. That was after episode seven, the one where Minosos is trudging through the jungle for much of the episode. Now, it's interesting the response to that.

Yeah. Because it did not say pluribus sucks or the season is not living up to. a standard that I thought that it should have. I said that it's testing me and the show does. This show assumes that you care about every single frame.

And most shows don't do that. Most shows give you a breather. Most shows give you something dazzling to distract you from the fact that an episode they put out doesn't have much to it. This one assumes that the intrigue

of this world will captivate you throughout the entire thing. And there are times when you're quick, look at my phone, what's going on here, who's going to say what type of brain gets the better of you, and you take your eye off the ball. At least it was for me. A couple things. So what you said about just the rest of the survivors, the individuals not being united in the way that the show reminds me of everything in real life. That reminds me of the pandemic. You know, it's kind of pandemic show, I think just the contagion aspect of it. And you'd think that in a situation like that, we'd all bond, we'd all pull together. It would bring us closer. Maybe that happens for a little while. But inevitably, it actually just fractures us further, right? Because we're placed under

stress and it turns out not to actually make us stronger. It just, it separates us. And so that's happening here. What you're saying, I looked at, I think the top reply to that tweet of yours. And basically someone said you were dumb. And you said, maybe, you know, like, you entertain the possibility. But that's the thing. I think there's a real, it's almost like a purity test applied to watching this show and appreciating this show where if you don't enjoy it, then I think people reach the conclusion that you are basically Twitter-brained and you lack the attention span to appreciate

the artistry that's happening here. because, as you said, this is not a show that you can just sort of second screen and glance at your phone. It's not that you'd miss plot so much, but you'd miss much of what actually makes this show so exquisite to watch. And so I think there is kind of this idea out there, at least, that if you don't enjoy pluribus, it's because your attention span is shot, you know? It's not the show's problem. It's your problem as a viewer because you are not watching correctly. And that might be true for some people.

Maybe they are watching in a distracted way and are not fully appreciating what's on the screen. Then again, maybe it's also a fair critique from time to time because this is a deliberately paced show. It does take its time. And I found that actually pretty pleasant, pretty soothing, pretty engrossing. But if it tested you and you failed the test or it failed the test for you and you said I'm out, I guess I get it, you know? I'm sticking with it, if only for Vince Gillingen, and I'm just enjoying it in general.

But I do understand why this wasn't for everyone, or at least why it's a different show from what people might have been led to expect by all the intrigue and the mystery surrounding it and how quickly it came out of the gate. So, you know, I don't know if people know this about me, but I'm willing to entertain the notion that I am dumb. Yeah. I am. I'm willing to be humble.

be like, people say stuff. Man, we used to talk about back in the day, different rappers. And when Common first came out, I wasn't fucking with common like that. And he was common sense then. And I would meet people and they would be like,

you know, you don't like common sense. You probably just don't understand this going over your head. And I'd be like, maybe. It's like, maybe, like, maybe it is. Put on silt the shaka. Something that I can understand. Maybe it is. you know Pluribus is what

Vince's third show his fourth show his fifth show yeah he's something like that he's worked on others but created yeah yeah so this one this is a good example of somebody's fourth show

because you're not getting something this high concept made unless people yeah unless people believe believe that you got the goods. Like if you walk in there first show, you're going to do the lone gunman or you're coming off the X-Files,

the X-Files, which is a heady show, but gives you enough aliens and conspiracy theories and things like that to get you through the first frame to the end of the show. With this one, you go in there and you tell people about this, and you let them know that there's going to be certain episodes and scenes where somebody is just digging,

somebody's just going through the jungle, all of that. That's very difficult to make. So this is by that standard, not for everyone. It's not. It's a high concept show from a television genius who has something to say, we're not sure what yet, about the current society that we live in,

and they're taking their sweet time saying it. It doesn't mean necessarily that people don't understand the show. It just means that some people are pluribus people. Some people are soprano's people. And then there are all kinds of people that are in between. Right. And for me,

when I watched it, to your point, it did change. It went from being something that was just even visually, really dazzling and well, it's always visually beautiful, but really

intriguing and suspenseful to something that you kind of had to hold the hand of the narrative for about four episodes. And I think the end of the season is much more of an achievement because you had to do that. But you had to do that. Yeah, I think there's a misperception or there was maybe that this was a mystery box show, that this was all going to be about slowly unveiling all the lore of this world, that it was going to be about the aliens and what do they want?

and where did this virus come from? And what will the hive mind do next? And we're all kind of Reddit-brained, and we're all just conditioned to theorize and speculate. I don't think this is that kind of show. I think this is a show that is meant to make you think about philosophy and your beliefs about life. I don't think it's so much a show that's meant to keep you coming back

to find out what's going to happen next, what's going to be the big reveal. In fact, I think the last episode, I wrote about this for the website, but there's a literal mystery box, right, at the end of the finale. But the mystery box remains a mystery for about three minutes, right? There's a big box. It's hanging off the bottom of the chopper. We don't know what it is. Manusos asks what it is.

And Carol just says, Adam bomb. That's it. Mystery solved. Now, there's still the mystery of what is she going to do with the atom bomb? What's her plan? And we can talk about all that, but this is not the kind of show that is going to make you. wait and wonder to find out what's in the box. The whole premise of this series and this universe was laid out in episode one.

And that's why I think the marketing almost did it a disservice because it was just so mysterious and intriguing and what's happening here. And then it was all just laid out for us from the get-go. And maybe that's why the marketing was like that. Because if they had just told us, hey, this is a show where, you know, Carol is one of the only surviving individuals and everyone else is a hive mind and there's an alien virus, then there wouldn't have been much to reveal, really. And so they hit us with all these reveals in the first episode.

After that, though, this is not a show really where you need to watch it the second it airs. I mean, you might want to, but it's not a show where it's like, I got to see this the second it goes up because otherwise, I'm going to get spoiled. What's the spoil we're going to be? It's like Minosos's months-long journey to Albuquerque continues, you know? Like, if you break it down on a purely twist-based level or, like, plot points, not that much happens over the course of the series. And even something that's set up to be a big reveal, like the HDP, the human-derived protein. So that's almost this like, I don't know where your mind goes when I say that.

I tell you something. Two things I'm going to say. The first is about that. Yeah. That is when I realized exactly what we were dealing with with a television show. That is one of the biggest fuck used to an audience I've ever seen a creator actually pull off. She finds this ghastly thing. Frozen human remains in a warehouse.

After she puts together this whole Agatha Christie-like mystery with juice boxes or whatever the fuck they are, very, very neat. by the way, they're very clean. Yeah. These, the high mind. And then all of that stuff, right, leads you to believe,

okay, we're in the shit now. Yeah. And then he brings out John Cena to explain it to you. Everything that you want, everything, every question you could ask,

the answer is unpleasant, but it's not ghastly? Yeah. And it's, it's given to you by such a familiar face that at first you don't know what to make of it, right? But this is a world where you'll have questions and they'll have answers. And that is the imprisonment of the world. The imprisonment of the world isn't in the fact that you don't know what's going on. It's in the fact that you do. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, you know, it's played up.

It seems like it's set up to be this big nefarious reveal. Oh, this changes everything. They're eating people. It reminds me, you know, the 70s sci-fi movie Soylent Green, where there's the discovery, oh, they're eating people. And then the last, the climax of the movie, oh, Soilent Green is people. And it's, you know, it's dystopian and it changes everything. Here, it seems like it's going to be that.

The end of an episode, Carol stumbles across this freezer. She finds the human remains. And then the next episode she sets out, she tells others about this. And they're like, yeah, we know. They told us already. You know, it's like, it's not, it doesn't actually change our understanding of anything, really. I mean, yeah, it's disquieting in a sense. But it's also logical.

It's entirely consistent with what we know about the others already. It's laid out there from the start. Just what they want, what they're all about. They stayed it up front. We want to convert everyone to the hive minds, including you. that's our prime directive here and we don't want to hurt anyone and so yeah, okay, they're converting

human remains of dead people into nourishment. That tracks you know and so it's this big like, you know, she doesn't have the actual board on the wall where she's connecting the red string and everything, but that's basically what she's doing with a whiteboard and ultimately it just doesn't amount

too much because everyone else is already aware of it. They're not hiding it. You know, they'll obscure things. They won't volunteer things, but they can, can't lie, right? You ask them about something, they'll tell you. And so that whole just sort of everything is a conspiracy, who knows how deep the rabbit hole goes. I don't know that it does go that deep in this show, which is pretty intriguing, I think, because we see Gilligan worked on the X-Files,

we see the big budget, we see Apple, we hear sci-fi, and you think it's going to be that kind of show. And, you know, there's a faction called The Others, but this is not lost. This is not remotely like lost for better or worse, probably both. While I was reading up on it, he's talking about the fact Gilligan talked about the Gilligan. Is it Gilligan? I'm calling him, Gilligan. Gilligan Island. Giligan's Island. Kids don't even know what that is. He talked about the fact that part of his inspiration

for the show was in the Twilight Zone. I always think about one Twilight Zone episode that it's like a very famous episode, deals with aliens. And it's not the, you know, eye the beholder, which is crazy when a lot of these episodes that deal with extraterrestrials

that are Twilight Zone episodes have some element of surprising them. There's something that you didn't realize. Yeah. In the fear episode, you didn't realize that the aliens were only this big and the guy who wasn't afraid of them

actually scared them. There's another one where you don't realize that this family that is trying to escape this earth-like planet, you think they're on Earth, the whole time. They're headed to Earth

to escape this nuclear Holocaust. But to serve man is the one that I think about. And that to me is part of, obviously, War the Worlds is as well, part of the template of alien stuff, right? And the reason why is because into serve man, the aliens

know what they want, but we don't know what they want. Yeah. Which is very central to the alien invasion thing, the whole deal. The aliens have been traveling for light years. They know what they want. Stephen Hawking said, if they're coming here in the first place,

they'd almost have to be nomadic killers. We don't know what they want. And by the time we find out, we're at such a disadvantage that all we can do is fight for our survival. Fortunately, it turns out that they're allergic to water. And they didn't know that Earth was full of water. Oh, it's full of water. We don't know. Like, what's going on? What's happening?

They get sick. Whatever happens. At the end of the serve man, we think the book is to serve us, but it's actually to serve us. It's a cookbook. This one is interesting because the aliens don't know what they want. The hive mind people, they don't even know if they're aliens. They don't know you'll ask them something,

and they'll smile and be like, we're not sure. But what we do know is the state that we're in right now is totally peaceful. it is insanely efficient and it's better for Earth. And we also know because we know everything about you, we know that you'll be happier if you're one of us. That is actually human.

That's not alien. That thought that you'll be better if you think exactly the way I do, if you do exactly what I do. That's not an alien thought. that is a very human thought. Just stop thinking what you're thinking. Stop trying to be who you are

and just come over to me, see it my way, and everything will be better for you. So watching Carol like exist in this and looking at the show, not as this thing that's happening to humanity

and just looking at it as something that's happening to one person makes the show incredibly profound. Like, it's just something else that's happening in her life. And the moment she stops trying to save the world and actually starts trying to live in it as it is, the show goes up a notch to me. Yeah. It's a character study. And that's why I think if you're expecting some War of the World's type showdown, you might be disappointed by the season or the series as a whole because it's just not that type of show.

It's about plunging a person, some people into this sort of situation and seeing how they would react. will they change and how would we act in this situation? And it is entirely about the profound twists come from Carol deciding that she wants to be alone or actually she doesn't want to be alone or now she wants to go up against the others. Again, that's where the real plot developments come more so than whatever's going on in terms of like alien species. I mean, it's kind of, it's radical for a sci-fi series. And this is another example I think of the show Pluribus just stating everything up front.

we know where the alien virus came from and how we see that. That's the first thing we see. Even before we meet Carol, that's always the question. It's right, the walking dead 15 years into that franchise, people are still wondering, where did this virus come from? Is there a cure? Right. And they're not really interested in answering that question, but people are always interested in the answer. And Plyrobus, of course, is interested in a cure. But there's no mystery about the mechanism here. And even though it's an alien invasion show technically, They're no little green men here, you know? And they're not going to be.

And they just state that up front, too. It's like, this is coming from 600 light years away. The motivations are inscrutable. We don't even know if these were the originators of the virus on Kepler 22B. Maybe this is just a wireless repeater. You know, maybe they're like Earth. We're building a massive telescope to broadcast this somewhere else. Maybe it's just a daisy chain across the universe from some original species or something.

But we'll never know and we'll never meet them. And that's the way it would work. You know, if we do make contact and discover life, and I don't know whether we ever will, I believe that there's life and intelligent life out there in the universe, just make sense or playing the probabilities. But I also don't know if we'll ever come across it because the distances are so vast. And that's what they stayed here. It's 600 light years away. We'll never know.

We'll never see them. But we know what we want now, which is just to convert everyone to our way of life, essentially. And so that entire, we're wired to be like, where are the aliens coming from? What do they want? How do we repel them? That's just not the type of show this is. And they tell us that from episode one. So it really does require kind of an adjustment in the way that you watch this thing.

But if you can kind of get on its wavelength, so to speak, then there's a lot to offer here. This show will make you think much more than any other series will. What about Minusos? Yeah. By the time he shows, if he shows up in episode two, he's a hero. Mm-hmm. But by the time he actually meets Carol, he's kind of a villain. Because at this point, Carol has started a relationship with Zosha, basically.

She has gone through the loneliness, come out on the other side of it, to kind of sort of be in community-ish with the hive mind. sort of, kind of. Her life is better with them in it, specifically Zosha being them, it's better. And then when he comes into the show, really comes into the show. I'm not talking about back when he was in his homeland in Paraguay,

but when he really comes into the show, he's so destabilizing that he looks like a threat to the piece that Carol has finally succumbed to. And you bristle at him. Yeah. Or do you bristle at Carol? Because she's now turned into one of the characters from the first meeting where they want to live in peace with the others, right? She has now changed.

And that's another example of the show, just kind of making you think and look at things through different lenses. You could say he's the villain. He's certainly, he's really disruptive. He's destabilizing, kind of cruel in a way. and yet he is very much aligned with what Carol's way of thinking was. He's answering her call that she sent out there, right? Her message in a bottle, her tape that she mailed out. And then he gets all the way to Albuquerque after nearly dying on the way.

And he finds that Carol has basically betrayed him, at least from his perspective. Now she's a collaborator. She's going along with the hive mind. And so you can kind of see it either way and either point of view is defensible. Now, I think Carol's kind of fooling herself. You know, she has constructed this facsimile of domestic bliss, what she used to have with Helen. You know, she's trying to get Zosha to use eye pronouns, right? Trying to make her conform to Carol's version of individuality.

And they're hitting the slopes. They're going skiing, you know, kind of mirroring the ice hotel that we see Helen and Carol with early in the series. And she can, you know, kind of fool her. herself into thinking, this is okay, and I can be happy this way. And then Manuso shows up, and he just completely punctures that mirage, essentially, because Carol is kind of convincing herself that she's in an exclusive relationship with Zosa, whereas she's essentially in an open relationship with the entire population of Earth. And so when Manusos has Zosha come over and just pumps her for information for hours, and basically Zosha just betrays Carol's confidence, then Carol

realizes, and she doesn't like it, but she realizes, okay. Everybody. Yeah, you know. For the streets. I thought, I thought this was going to go. I thought that scene was going to go different, Ben, I'm not going to lie. You thought they were going to. I thought she was going to get in there and Manusos was going to be going to work.

That's what I thought was going to happen in that scene. I thought she was going to go in there and Manuson. is going to be going full American cycle. Remember, like, you know. But look, so this is why I say about that. You're right. Everything that you're saying is right. By the way, it's clear in this dynamic, Manusos is the, he's the hero.

For sure, he's the hero. Here's the one thing that the team did, I think is pretty brilliant. They made Carol's battle against loneliness. Tell you why that's key to me. human beings don't respect people that can be lonely. So think about it. If we go back to the Twilight Zone, Burgess Merritt episode,

nuclear holocaust. All he needs is his books. He doesn't care about anything else that's happened. Everybody's gone. He's got books for an eternity. He can read until he dies, and he's okay with that. What does Serling do?

Crushes his glasses. Now he can't read. Guess what? It's wrong to want to exist with no other people. It's wrong. You should want people. You should care that everything is gone. You should care that all the children have stopped laughing

and all the baseball games have stopped being played. You should care about that. You should care about everyone else. It shouldn't be just that you get to sit and read books until you pass away, that's not being a human being. So he was punished at the end of that episode for that by stepping on the glasses.

Carol, in this situation, tries. She tries to not give a fuck that she's the only person on earth right now, especially since the hive mind is gone. She tries. She can't do it because she's too much of a person. She's too much of a person to not want connection that redeemed her in a way.

By the time she says, come back and you see the thing you feel emotionally for her because she tried not to be human and she couldn't do it. By the time when Nusos comes up there, all you know is that he was kind of okay being on his own. He was kind of okay

not even having a shred of interest in what was happening to all of these other people because he was able to put up a wall. he ate dog food rather than the food that they were offering him. There's something there. There's something there that makes you go, hmm, is he the asshole? Because he's clearly not.

He's clearly the one that's going, you know what we should do? We should figure out how to fix the world. But he's also a little maniacal. He would rather kill everyone than understand them. And when you're looking at these two people, it's a really devastating choice between submission, and isolation,

and it's done really expertly. I was fascinated with the finale, man. The finale, to me, is literally on par with the pilot in terms of it just burned my brain. Yeah, and it's a rude awakening for Carol to realize that all along, while she's been seemingly living with the others in harmony,

they're still been plotting behind her back. Yeah, they're trying to figure out they give her the, you know, smoke. Her frozen eggs, trying to get her stem cells, trying to convert her. Oh, you're talking about the eggs. Oh, yeah, the eggs, man. That was a nice little thing. They put the thing in there and the eggs and all of that stuff,

and she's because of the freezing of the eggs and they brought, they bring that right back. They didn't make us wait three episodes to bring that right back. It's, yeah, Chekhov's frozen eggs. Everything is there for us, you know? Like, it's, no one knows anything here. This is not based on any pre-existing source material. This is an original series, which I appreciate. and if you watch the show closely,

then it will tell you what's going to happen. We hear about the frozen eggs early on in the frozen... And the atomic bomb, you know, Chekhov's A-bomb, right? Like that comes up episode three, and then it comes back. Would you give me one if I asked? Yeah, we give you one, and then they do. So everything is really... It's there.

It's the text, you know, it's... The subtext, I think, is everything you're saying about the interpretation of the characters and their emotions and their motivations. But purely on a plot level, it's all there essentially on the surface. We don't have to go digging. And I appreciate that about the show.

But again, it may not be what everyone is expecting. And so I find that super compelling when she rebels against Minusos, she aligns herself with the hive mind. Then she realizes that they've been operating behind her back all along. She goes back. She's ready to save the world.

at all cost seemingly. And yeah, now there's the question of how exactly are they going to do that? And are they all sort of networked together via wireless signals? And has Minuso's come up with a way to disrupt that with the special frequency and all of that? And yeah, presumably they'll figure something out along those lines. But I'm just, I'm here more for figuring out how Carol and her thinking is going to evolve. And can she get through to the hive mind? because at times it seems as if the hive mind is almost dissatisfied, it's hard to tell because they're so manipulative, right? And it's, are they intentionally being manipulative or are they just trying to please her? When they kind of gas up her writing and they're hanging up, hanging on the edge of their seat with every word of every chapter she's writing in the new novel, you know, are they actually enjoying it or are they starved for any new information because they essentially have access to the sum of human knowledge? Nothing can suppress.

them and their advantages to that, but surprise is sort of the spice of life, right? So they're at peace. They're not killing each other, but are they fulfilled? Is this a life worth living? If you have no individuality, if there's no artistic appreciation. And I think the show leaves that up to interpretation, even in the finale, when we see the girl who decides to take the gas and inhale the cure as the hive mind would view it for her individuality and become one of them. There is something sad and dystopian about that, I think. Oh, the scene was heartbreaking. As soon as she's, yeah, like, she's petting the goat and the goat is so happy.

Yeah. And then as soon as she becomes one of the hive mind, great little shot. Yeah. Great little shot. The goats all alone. The goat's all alone. The goat runs after her. Hey, it's me.

It's your friend. No longer cares about that. Right. He was a human before, and after that she becomes something else, and that thing cannot connect to nature, cannot connect to this earth in the same way. Brilliant, little heartbreaking scene right there. Or as a director, it's fantastic, by the way. Or they were going to eat the goat, and not a ghost ghost.

Or is that just our limited perspective as people who haven't felt what it's like to be in the hive mind? That's what they would say, that everyone is extraordinarily. Happy, happier than ever before. She smiles when she wakes up, you know, and she walks away. And I guess they start just disassembling that village, which they were maintaining solely for her comfort, essentially. But, you know, that's us saying, oh, this looks sad. She's not able to enjoy the Goats Company anymore. But maybe she doesn't need the Goats Company.

She's reached a higher plane of existence. She's in companionship with 7 billion people, right? So it's... You know what the funny thing is? Kind of see it either way. You know what I can't? because there is no she. So, like, there's a they.

True. Like, and so there's no she. They smiled. And we don't know why. They could be smiling because of something that happened in Switzerland. Yeah. The goat liked her. Your dog loves you.

Your smell. Pretty much Bozeman loves everyone. But the dogman loves you, you, your smell. There's, like, there's no she anymore. She doesn't have any thoughts. It's they. Now, to your smell. Yeah.

To your point, the they could be better. Maybe the day is better. Maybe it is. But at the same time, there was a clear line. Even something else in that little scene. Before that, she has fear. Yeah. She's scared.

She's concerned. She doesn't know if it's going to hurt. I don't know if she wants to do it. After that, none of that. Resolute part of the day. And right away her and entire surrounding changed. It's just, there's so much stuff to talk about in the actual show.

And I will say this, he's also a badass fucking director. He's a fantastic director. Yeah. And that's something that people haven't really, I mean, maybe they have, maybe they haven't, but for the shows that he actually directed during this thing, they are really, really, really well executed. The finale is actually directed by Gordon Smith. but the show is really well directed. That's why I think that I maybe enjoy this show in the moment while I'm watching it even more than I do after the fact,

because if someone asks me to sum up what happened in an episode of Pluribus, it's a pretty short summary, usually. The synopsis of the actual episode makes it sound like not that much is happening. But if you watch it, a lot is happening. And it's all about the framing of the, you know, not to get to film Twitter here, but it's, It's the cinematography, right? And just all the little views and the long lingering shots. And there's a reason why we stick with these things and watch, you know, it could be more quick cutting and fast-paced and we got to get to the next development. But no, it's sort of slow and meandering and makes you kind of live in the world of these characters.

And just visually, it's always interesting. And I find the show funny, too, you know. It's not a comedy, but it makes me laugh often. and it makes me sad and it's poignant, just the whole range of emotions, really. And, you know, I think back to the beginning of Gilligan's other shows, and you have a lot of confidence that he's going to land the plane or land the helicopter. And, you know, I tend to think that that's actually overrated,

that it is more about the journey than the destination. And if a finale is somewhat unsatisfying, we still had a lot of fun along the way. But because of how Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul ended two of the most satisfyingly resolved shows ever. I have a lot of faith that he's going to figure out where to take this and that ultimately it's going to make me content and fulfilled. But in the early seasons of Saul and even Breaking Bad, I wasn't glued to my TV the way

that I was when we were approaching the crescendo of those series. You know, they kept my attention, but those shows both built. And I think, you know, the ratings improved and the reviews improved over time. And they just became must-watches because Vince just built up this world and this ensemble and all these characters that we cared about and didn't know what was going to happen to them and were on the edges of our seed. So I look back at the slower starts to those series. And I think he's right on pace to ramp up. You know, can he pull it off again and just deliver another Pantheon series? It's a tall order, but I think based on the way it's tracking,

there's just more to talk about with this show than there is with most shows. Even though more happens in a lot of other shows from moment to moment, could we have this kind of in-depth conversation about most shows that are, you know, packed with action? I don't think so. So there's just a lot of meat on this bone. You don't think we could cover a memory of a killer like this, me, you, Patrick Dempsey, Fox? Like, bro, I'm telling you.

that shit gonna be tight. Like, I'm telling you, bro, memory of a killer. Yeah. Patrick Dempsey, I challenge Joanna Robinson. I challenge Bill Simmons. I challenge Rob Mahoney

to cover memory of a killer. We'll see if that's prestige material. Fox fucking, he's losing his memory. Yeah. And he's still got to remember who to kill. All it is alien, hive mind, philosophical, gobbly gook, John Cena stuff.

That's one thing. We can have, me and you can take edibles and talk about this all night long. Memory of a killer is the type of show that I think we should be covering here at the Ringer. And I challenge all of you guys to get into it. You're saying the sight unseen based only on the trailer. You're so sold. But look, here's the thing about Plovis. Yeah.

All seriousness. Perfect show for the now. Mm-hmm. There are going to be people that make their television. and they are going to make their television tailored to what they feel like audiences want to see and how audiences watch and consume television now. And, you know, I've heard this before. I've heard people say that you've got to consider that people are watching this second screen

or something in the background and you have to make a show that people can watch and also do something else. But then there are going to be a bunch of people that rebel against that, the revolt against that. Yeah. That say story matters, narrative matters. and what also matters is making people a little bit uncomfortable while they're watching a piece of art

or consuming a piece of art to make sure that they've given enough to it to get the intended the desired, should I say, artistic effect from it. Like, I want to affect you with this, so I need something from you.

It's daring right now to ask anything of our audience, man. It's like, I love all of this stuff. You know that I love it, but I'm aware that I'm watching people feed me my toys from my youth. I get it. Like, they're giving me what I want. That's cool. That's part of it. I understand that. But the real trailblazers and the rebels of creating right now are the people that are going to buck that trend a little bit and make you want something new. Reorient your brain. Stop feeding you dopamine and start giving you story and theme and questions and all of that stuff.

I'm not trying to act like this is the most daring piece of art that's ever existed, but it is a the most daring one that I saw this year in terms of being on television. Yeah. And if you can convince Apple to give you hundreds of millions of dollars to tell that story, more power to you. There you know. I am really curious to see what happens in the next season. In terms of just the audience reception, first of all, you know it's going to be a while.

They're still figuring out the story. They haven't, you know, even scripted the thing, let alone shot it. So we're probably looking at two years minimum. I mean, maybe three, right? It could be a severance style gap. does the audience come back? Because just looking at the user ratings, looking at the ratings to the extent that we can tell,

the show had a huge launch, and Apple bragged about it being the biggest drama, you know, launch two-part premiere, but still big ratings for that first episode. From what I could tell, it was not really ranking on Nielsen and the other trackers for subsequent episode, so I'm not sure that it held the entirety of that episode.

And, you know, if that audience, maybe some people did bounce off it, the user ratings on IMDB or wherever else we're kind of dwindling until a rebound in the finale. So will people come back for the second season. I will. You will. But if we go three years here, you know, the other thing is, I guess I'm left wondering what will happen next. And most of my questions and curiosity is really about Carol and Minusos and just the interpersonal stuff, more so than what's going to happen with the atom bomb.

You know, I assume they'll figure out something. And in my mind, it's probably a deterrent more than anything, right? Like, you come for me, I'll blow up this thing and take all of you with me. Because otherwise, Carol doesn't seem like the type to just attack people and slaughter millions knowingly. Plus, it would be hard for her even to do that because the others are monitoring her at all times. And they can just clear out if they want to stay away from her. So maybe it's a fail safe more than anything. And so, you know, Vince has talked about this being a three, four season show,

more because everything is really laid out there and we seem to sort of understand what everyone wants and what they're trying to do. Can they keep this going? Even, you know, if it's nine episodes a season, under an hour, it's not that much screen time. But because it's not that kind of mystery box show, there's not that much on paper that I'm thinking, oh, they can, you know, get five seasons out of this thing necessarily. I don't doubt that they can figure out a way. Ben, they wait three years.

This show's dead. You think? I'm telling you guys right now I'm being serious if anybody's listening to stop doing that yeah like seriously

stop doing that I understand that it's it's a it's a heavy lift on a show that's this ambitious yeah they had to build a whole

bunch of shit and all of that stuff you know they talked about the fact that like he didn't want people showing up to homes in Albuquerque like they did

for breaking bad so they built a but I know that it takes a long time if they wait three years it's dead it's going to die. The show does not have, in my opinion,

the type of force and might not have the type of force. They're not a whole bunch of memeable scenes, but all of that, some. But to be able to, if they wait that long, no one is going to give a fuck about the second season of this show. Yeah.

Yeah, especially with a series like this where you know it's getting a season two. It's, you know, are new and obviously. You might as well get a head start. I mean, I'm sure they've been thinking about it, but yeah, you'd like to think them move up the timeline and the pipeline for these shows. And that's why people are trying to make, you know, prestige jurors, right?

Like the pit where you can kind of crank them out and come back every year, the bear style or slow horses or whatever else. But, yeah, the long breaks are kind of killing the momentum. And I just don't know if this is the sort of show that can sustain that interest because I'm not even sure it did for everyone over the course of a single season coming out weekly. The last thing I'll say, I kind of inevitably compare this to severance. just because it's another kind of high-concept sci-fi series on the same streaming service. I find severance to maybe be a better show in some ways.

And I really like Pluribus. I think it's kind of best of both worlds in actually delivering that intrigue and that mystery and that mystery box aspect. While not actually skimping on any of the other aspects, it's also asking interesting questions and making you consider selfhood and person and individuality and all of that. And it also has satisfying, you know, character arcs and relationships, which Plybos, it's tough. You know, Ray Sehorne is fantastic, but she's also sort of hog in all the screen time for much

of these episodes. We're seeing most of the story from her more limited perspective. And maybe now, you know, Manusos comes in, but there's no ensemble, right? It's not really a deep bench exactly here. And Plybis or Severance kind of gives you all of that, where it's kind of parceling out the mystery, what does Lumen want, what are these people doing? But it's also giving you all of those kind of deeper, more profound inquiries and also, you know, character stuff. And so for me, that hits on every level. And I feel like they know where they're going with that show.

That's always the risk. If it's lost, if it's X-Files, the mythology just kind of gets out of hand because they're just laying track as fast as they can to stay on schedule. And they don't even know where it's going. Severance, I feel like I know where it's going. They know where it's going and I have faith that they will actually deliver answers in the end. So to me, severance is probably the ideal, just in kind of giving me the substance that I get from Plyuribus with the moment to moment, week to week, edge of my seat, wondering what's going to happen next, you know, where it's like maybe Paradise, you watch Paradise, right? Yeah. Good show, really good show. And they just, you know, that's post-apocalyptic. That's just fast-forklypaclyptic. That's just fast-fork

where they just burn all that plot in season one, right? And they got more cooked up in season two coming back soon. But that's just full speed ahead, twists after twist after twist. And that's just not plurbus. But Paradise doesn't seem to have the same sort of weight and heft to it. So severance, I think, kind of gives me everything that I'm getting from all of these shows in one series, even though some people got frustrated with severance in season two because it's tough to please everyone. But I implore people to stick with Pluribus.

If you did fall off at some point this season, I think the finale justifies the investment of time, if not the actual moment to moment, which was worth it to me. Yeah, no, I think Plurbus, I think it was a fantastic first season. I think it had the same stuff in it that people talk about,

when they talk about shows that Vince has done in the past, that it might. Start off, establishing things a little bit more, moving a little slower. And then once the world is well defined, you'll be able to get more from it just for the average casual viewer. Severance is world building. It's quirky. There's just more there. So I could see how people would be more entertained by Severance.

Severance gets insanely heady, right? insanely heady, but it's giving you more. It's giving you, you feel like you're out of time a little bit when you're watching it. A lot of crumbus to follow. A lot of stuff going on there.

Like who's alive, who's dead, all that stuff there exists. So I see how people could be a little bit more engaged with it. As far as which show is better, I think this is better. It's just better. I think this is better. This was not always easy for me to watch.

It really wasn't. Like it really wasn't. At the end of the season, I feel more satisfied with this show than I have with the first season of a show in a little while. Band, thank you very much for Hopin' On Recommends. This was fun. Glad we got to talk about this show. Of course, man. A lot of fun.

All right. Our feelings for you haven't changed, listeners. But after everything that's happened, we just need a little space. So that'll do it for Ringervverse Recommends in 2025. Thanks to Steve Allman for producing. this episode. We'll be back next month with our regular format. All the recommendation, clips, the whole shebang. You can submit your nominations to ringaverse recommends at gmail.com. Thanks so much for following us throughout 2025. We've got plenty on tap on the ringerverse and

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