The Ringer-Verse - 'Silo' Season One and 'Secret Invasion' Episode Three | House of R

Episode Date: July 7, 2023

We do not know who built the pod, but Joanna and Mal are here to find out! The House of R takes a look at the breakout sci-fi hit 'Silo' for this week's podcast (06:48). Later, they dive into the third episode of Marvel's 'Secret Invasion' to uncover the latest mystery that surrounds Nick Fury (88:18). Hosts: Mallory Rubin and Joanna Robinson Social: Jomi Adeniran Senior Producer: Steve Ahlman Additional Production Support: Arjuna Ramgopal Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm Erica Ramirez, founder of Ili, and hosts of What About Your Friends, a podcast dedicated to the many lives of friendship and how it's portrayed in pop culture. Every Wednesday on the ringer dish feed, I talk to my best friend Stephen Othello and your favorites from within the ringer and beyond about friendships on TV and movies, pop culture and our real lives. So join me every Wednesday on the ringer dish feed where we try to answer the question TLCS asked back in the day, what about your friends? For adults with Crohn's disease or ulcerative colitis symptoms, every choice matter. Tramphia offers self-injection or intravenous infusion from the start. Tramphia is administered as injections under the skin or infusions through a vein every four weeks, followed by injections under the skin every four or eight weeks. If your doctor decides that you can self-inject trumphia, proper training is required.

Tramphia is a prescription medicine used to treat adults with moderately to severely active Crohn's disease and adults with moderately to severely active ulcerative colitis. serious allergic reactions, increased risk of infections or lower ability to fight them, and liver problems may occur. Before treatment, get checked for infections and tuberculosis. Tell your doctor if you have an infection, flu-like symptoms, or need a vaccine. Explore what's possible. Ask your doctor about Tramphia today. Call 1-800-526-7736 to learn more, or visit Trimfairadio.com.

Every outfit starts with a choice. What am I wearing underneath? Something comfortable? And let's be honest, something that keeps everything looking smooth. That's where Vanity Fair Laundrae comes in. Their new Smoving Wireless bra has four-way stretch fabric for all over smoothing, soft lightly lined cups for a natural shape, and no wire comfort that lasts all day. All over smooth, all-day comfort, Vanity Fair Laundee.

Find yours at Target today. Got to be hard for you to be fighting with him when deep down in your bones, you believe in what he's doing. 30 years, you still don't know how to be better than I? All right. make me understand. I'm not with Gravick because I'm with you. First, your Nexus podcast feed for all things.

Fandom, I'm Joanna Robinson. And joining me today for a grand experiment, if you will, I'm podcasting here today because I'm with you, Mallory Rubin. Hello, Mallory! How are you? Joanna, it is so wonderful to be here with you. I have not seen any sub-mer. Marines, nor any deep water of any kind. And so I am prepared to talk with comfort about both of the

shows on the table today. All right. We are here for a special hybrid episode of How Some Are. We will, yes, be talking about episode three of Secret Invasion. That will be something we will be doing at the end of this podcast. But we'll have check in. We got just over the last few weeks, we have received so many emails from you, our listeners, from you, our listeners, about the television series, Silo, 10-episode television series that just wrapped up on Apple TV Plus. Mallory and I said, bet.

And in the last 48 hours, we watched the whole thing. Yeah. So we can talk about it. The season of TV in a day and a half. We sure did do that. And so we will be talking. Had a blast, honestly. Had a blast.

Yeah, had a great time. Had a great time. And like for Mallory Queen of the Binge, this was just like an easy day at the office, I think. I was like sweating to keep up with her. But here we are at the finish line together. So we were talking about silo for, you know, like two-thirds of the show today. And then like one-third, one-third secret invasion. not as the plan. All right, so sometimes we make decisions midweek on what we're going to cover,

but sometimes we have a plan. So let's just talk about some program reminders of what's coming up. Over the weekend, Jess Clums will be back with another fantastic video about Secret Invasion. I'm loving her videos so much, and I'm so happy. She's here. Please check the amount if you haven't. Speaking of Jess, she and Ben Lindberg will be here with the gaming pot on Monday. You talk about Knights of the Old Republic, classic Star Wars game. Midnight Boys will be back Pew Poo on Wednesday to talk about both Secret Invasion but also

Mission Colon, Impossible Highfin, Dead, Reckoning, comma, part one. That's what the Midnight Boys are doing. And then Mallory and I would back on Friday to talk about both Secret Invasion, but also we'll be doing a best of the year so far.

Mid-year check-in. That's right. On House of Our Friday. So, Mel, if people want to, like, have they thought some feelings about best of the year? Yeah. How best to tell us what they think about that. Send us your emails. Send those emails on over to Hobbits and Dragons at gmail.com.

What are your favorite pieces of nerd culture this year, genre stories, TV shows, movies, games, comics, books, musical? anything, everything. Send us your Apple thoughts and feelings, as always, keep the emails coming. And while you're at it, while you're on your phone, while it's in the hand, follow the pod. Follow the pod on Spotify or wherever you get your podcast. Follow the ringerverse. And it has never been more true to say on the social media platform if you're choosing,

you know? Where will we be next? You can say. We're out there, though. You can find us out in the world. Are you like hashtag bring back peach? Are you going to bring... The way my heart stopped.

With joy, though, and glee, when I thought you were making, you were joining the peach campaign the other day when I saw your I'm a peach and thought it was I'm on Peach. Tweet. If only, we could be on Peach together. If only. As I said on Twitter, I would never steal your bit. Peach belongs to you. A bit is like an adventure. It must be power. It must be shared. I must be shared. I think if anyone were to ever actually resurrect Peach, it would be you in this moment. So just seize your moment. Now's the time. Threads, blue sky, gives a shit. It's all about Peach.

All right. Great stuff. Spoiler warning. Guys, we're going to talk about Silo. We watched 10 episodes of it. Yeah. We're going to talk about those 10 episodes that we watched. You can skip ahead to the last third.

If you just want to hear about Secret Invasion, you haven't watched Silo yet. maybe come back after you've watched Silo and listen to us talk about it. We're not going to talk about, we haven't read the books. We're not going to talk. Malina H. sampled the first book, but we're not, we have not read ahead. We don't know what's coming, et cetera. So we will not be talking beyond what is covered in the first 10 episodes of Silo. That is the spoiler warning, correct?

Yes, ma'am. Great. The founders deem it so. This is our pact that we have made with you, our listeners. All right. Wow, we can just make silo jokes now. Also, on the email front, I just want to say, I don't want to say like bullying works, but I just want to say like the persistence of silo, please cover silo, please, for the love of God, cover silo. Oh my God, Ian Glenn's wig. Oh, my God, Ian Glenn's accent, like emails that we got. It worked. It did. It paid off.

It was. It was always on the watch list. But it definitely felt like when the season wrapped. Okay. This is the time. This is the time. This is the. time to check this out and share this experience with all of these other people who loved it. Let's get into silo. We do not know why we are here. We do not know who built the silo. We do not know why everything outside the silo is as it is. We do not know when it will be safe to go outside.

We only know that day is not today. Alison Becker. On behalf of the people of the silo, I hope that you will claim. so that we will better see the world outside our sanctuary as it is, and thereby be reminded that here is safe and there is not. All right, that was a very emotional, David a yellow-o, and I just want to say that, like, David, his performance is Holsten Becker, who is a sheriff.

Yeah. Incredible. Of all the British actors in the show, I just, I just want to say I think he is the most innocent when it comes to a commitment to the American accent, except in that moment when he, like, starts crying. He says, Alesson Becker and, like, whoever he says that I was just sort of like, that's his one moment. So I wanted to include it, but also it was very emotional. And I loved it and like a great moment. Okay, so we are here to talk about Silo. A show that is based on the book series by Hugh Howie. And just some quick background on the book front in case people don't know. And this is like a. a pretty fun and astonishing story, success story, that Hugh Howey had because he originally published the short story or novella, if you prefer, Wool, as a self-published e-book on Amazon for 99 cents. And it essentially went viral. And people in the reviews were like, more, more and more and more of this world, more and more of this world. And so then he wrote Wool,

a full novel-length story. And he was like, hmm, what do you do when you kill off your main characters in your novella? Enter Juliet. This is Juliet's story now. So a full novel.

And then, you know, a couple other installments. And I just want to talk about this like triple crown of like success that he achieved because I was a bookseller. I think when will came out. I think that's right. And these were always like interesting stories for us to track as we,

looked at like the book industry, what was happening with self-publishing, what was happening with Amazon, et cetera, et cetera. So the fact that A, Hugh Howie was a bookseller to begin with, those were always stories that we love to track. We're like, bookseller becomes the best-selling author. It's the dream. He did it. Number two, the self-published on Amazon, it's just like incredible. And then his initial efforts were so popular that like Random House UK came calling, Simon & Schuster came calling, blah, blah. He sold, he very famously turned down a seven-figure deal for in order to retain the rights to the e-books, and he settled for like a six-figure.

And I think that was, the math was mathing for him in the end in terms of like how much money he made. Because by the way, now he lives in South Africa and like married a model in 2022 and like rides horses all day as far as I know. So like ultimate success right. Number three, sold the film riding horses all day. The Taylor Sheridan.

Yeah. He's a real horse girl, Hugh Howie. All right. Last, last and not least. sold the film Rice to 20th Century Fox in 2012-K. That didn't work out, obviously. Here we are. Decade later.

That didn't work out. But at one point, Ridley Scott was like, I'm going to make a wool movie. And that's just like, you know, instant payout for Hugh Howie. So this is just like an incredible story of a meteoric rise and just like an untraditional way into this world. Just for some context, there's like a couple other examples of these self-published phenomenon. I believe Annihilation was self-published before it became like, you know, a conventional

book. And then like 50 Shays of Grey was the iconic one, right? And so it was just this really interesting time. I think those all came out like around the same time. It's a really interesting time of like challenging traditional ideas of publishing, especially in these like genre or erotica spaces, et cetera, et cetera. So Mallory, any of, you? Any thoughts or feelings about About Uh-huh 50 shades?

No. Will Hugh Houd. Bad baby. That's just an incredible and downright aspirational origin story. I love it. I, as you noted at the top, have not read

the Silo series, but I have long intended to. I have had a copy of wool, not just the novella, but the longer collection of the initial novellas on my bookshelf for ages at this point, years and years and years. Adam got it for me. He read it.

He loved it. He highly recommended it. I kept hearing good things about it and seeing it pop up. It's like one of those things that I don't have a good explanation for never having gotten to but have a lot of regret that I didn't get to sooner. And as is so often the case, I'm turning for the first. that on its head and repositioning it as a nice reminder for myself and for all of us in this community that it's like never too late to discover a story and fall into it. Right. So I read the first chapter.

I was curious about how similar or different, the characters, the world building, the initial presentation of the facts and the mysteries felt. And the writing is gorgeous. Like absolutely beautiful, supremely evocative. I'm so looking forward to continuing and reading the entire series now before season two, unless season two, which we'll talk about shortly, it's like literally imminent and then it might take me a minute longer. But I'm really looking forward to reading this and learning more about the world. It's a world that I'm excited to revisit and spend more time on the printed page and

on the screen. I'm hyped. I read the first novella in full is on. Tor.com. If you Google just like wool excerpt, tour.com or tour.com, what a great website for book lovers. But you can just read that whole thing or, you know, support your local bookseller, buy the book. You know, I obviously, but like it's a nice sample, as you said. And I loved the writing. Like, I think there's something really beautiful in the writing that, like, for all its, you know, successes, this TV series isn't quite fully capture. And a lot of, I think it's because a lot of,

The best of his writing in the section that I read is descriptive. It's not in the dialogue necessarily. And so, you know, the world building is obviously there in the show. And, like, the production design is obviously, like, high quality. So, like, his vision of the world is well realized, I think, in this show. But you do miss some of those, like, lyrical embellishments that he makes, you know, like in that very, very opening section, just describing the way that the story. dares have been worn away from years and years of people climbing them, et cetera.

So that's as close as you're going to get to Book Reader Corner with Mallory and Joanna this book. But by season two, we'll be like, that wasn't in the book. I do have right back in our conference. I have a few of those based on interviews I read. So we'll talk about those a little bit, but like, yeah. So this silos 10 episodes, which ran from May 5th to wrapped up on June 3rd. 30th. It is July 7th as we're recording this. Super well received, right?

Yes. Yeah. Respectable, you know, 88, 89% on Rotten Tomatoes between critics and audiences. Your favorite website. Yeah, a completely accurate depiction of reviews. Stephen King is a fan, tweeting about Silo. Great. But has he posted a thread yet about Silo? No, but if you got an invite, you can go read his takes on blue sky. Number one drama that Apple TV has ever had. And according to Hugh Howey himself, which may or may not be the most reliable source of information, it massively exceeded internal expectations. So they thought it would be a decent-sized hit and it was like a big hit for them. So, season two has already started filming, according to everyone, right?

The plans for the future, Rebecca Ferguson, I think, has said that she's signed on for, like, two to three years of work on this. Graham Yost, who's a series creator who we're going to talk about in a second, has said he has, like, a four-season plan for covering everything here. Season one doesn't cover all of the first book. I don't know how far into the first book it is. but like basically Yost read through the first book and was like, here, this is where we want to end. This is our season finale.

And I'm given to understand that the second novel is a backstory novel. And I really doubt that we will, this is pure speculation, but I doubt we're going to just like leave Rebecca Ferguson for a season or two. So what I would expect is that they will sort of interlace any backstory that's in. book two, as you know, we saw a bunch of flashbacks in this episode, backstory from book two into maybe the plot of book three would be something that they might do to keep their star still in their show. Yeah, I like that as a line of speculative thinking, I will say, and this is a compliment to the show, I have lost my bearings completely for how to use star power and casting to

predict the prominence of the character moving forward because on the one hand, as we will talk about, I think we both, like literally instantly the second Tim Robbins and his attention, I am the villain, haircut, walked on the screen. We were like, well, he's the bad guy, in part because his initial time spent with us is him saying, did Allison remove these files on data recovery? You can't let people. get information, right? But the flip side of that, speaking of Allison, is Allison and Holston. I mean, you would think when you're just like looking at the cast of the show and certainly when you're in the first episode, these are going to be some of our central figures in the story.

And that is not the case throughout the rest of the season. So I think that's kind of fun into the show's credit that, you know, and obviously in the streaming wars era of TV in general right now, there are plenty of stories where a big name is there at the beginning and we think they're going to be a central figure and then they're not, you know, look in your way, mayor of Kingston. But what does that mean for Rebecca Ferguson? I don't know. I think you're right. She clearly seems Juliette, Jules clearly seems like our North Star.

And this won't be the last time that we talk about stars and constellations. Because I can't wait to talk about Lucas and his wardrobe. So we simply must return to that at some point. I'm just checking my watch. You got to the jacket way faster than I thought you would, and I'm impressed with you. Your watch, you promised me that watch at the end of this podcast, and I, like Patrick, will try to hold you to it. And I'll just- Patrick easily my favorite character, by the way. I'll just shrug and run the other way, as Juliet doesn't want to do.

All right. We're going to talk for a second about series creator grahamios, because this is, this is like one of my favorite guys of all time. Dude, same, as you know. So part of the reason we were like, we got to watch, right? I mean, a sci-fi series of stories that people recommend and seem like they love, and then a show that Cram Yost is shaping, featuring Ian Glenn and Rebecca Ferguson? I mean, why did it take us 10 weeks? I know.

We're a little like, what's wrong with us? What's wrong with us? Cram Yost, for those who don't know, has a long CV in Hollywood, long and varied. He worked on like Panda Brothers. He's worked on all sorts of things. But the crown jewel in his achievement is, the TV series justified. I'm not a lot of it lost.

Which Mallory and I absolutely adore. One of my favorite shows, like in my top five favorite shows of all time, personally. And then in his post-FX career, he was sort of bouncing around. He was like at a deal at AMC. And then he got to sort of wrapped into this like Sony deal over to Apple TV. So he's working on stuff for Apple TV. So he made Slow Horses a show that Mallory and I love and have been talking about a lot. recently because of Secret Invasion.

So Yost is in his, like, has moved out of his Western era into his British spy era. And he took that British mentality when it came to shooting this show because it's shot in the UK and casting the show because a lot of British actors are here. But this is ostensibly set in America. But Yose has said that he was like a book reader from the start, a will book reader from the start. and he's sort of been stepping around this project, like, way back, it was at AMC for a while. He's been, like, wanting to do this show for a really long time. So they finally made it happen.

Any, like, particular Yostian touch that you noticed in this? Like, what do you think, Mel? I think that one of the real surprises of the season for me, because I just didn't really know anything about the story or the world other than that it was dystopian sci-fi was how much of this first season was going to be like steeped in a detective story, right?

That mystery and that investigation. And so I think you feel can I imagine Raylan Givens sauntering up and down the stairwell in the silo? Like maybe maybe not, but I think... Not with his walk. That would be a hub in the stairs. He needs a little more room to maneuver

than a state of the race. The hips out need room to sway. Indeed. Indeed. But and that was really, so I think that like justified lawmen in pursuit of the truth. There is something foul and nefarious in the air. And part of that is like embraced and intrinsic to the world around everyone. And part of it is something that requires investigation and sussing out and parsing.

That felt very Yossian in a way that I really loved. I will say on that front, too, more broadly, to your point about, like, Yost identifying wherein wool to break the first season and that, like, this is the stopping point, this is where we want to end the finale, we want to pan out and show all of these other indents in the ground. I'll reveal to the viewers and to Juliet

that there are all these other silos, like, focusing the first season, because there are those big questions, That opening clip you played, like, we don't know why we're here. We don't know who built the silo. We don't really know what's going on outside. We never lose track of or stop thinking about those bigger questions, what happened in the world and why, who is trying to exert this control and why.

But so much of the first season is internal and focused on this silo, the people in it, the people who have died, who is killing them, and why. And so it's like a murder mystery as much as it is, a dystopian sci-fi tale early. now we will clearly build and widen into, I'm assuming, more of that dystopian, what happened to the world element. So I like that genre blend in season one and how it kind of promises a widening of scope moving forward. I think this is such an – because, again, Yose CV is, like, long. But if we take the two shows that you and I have enjoyed the most justified in slow horses and sort of put them in the blender together, I can see how, like, the governmental conspiracy aspect of slow horses, the like shadowy people in power and obfuscating the truth and all the sort of stuff like that,

how that's baked into this. And then on the justified front, it's not just the lawman stuff, though that is so clearly part of it. It's what I love specifically about justified. And if you've never watched it, now's the time to watch it. It's on blue. Watch it all. The revival series is coming. The elements of justified that I love the most that most people respond to.

It's not just that Rayling Givens is like as cool law. man, it's that he is oftentimes drawn back into crimes in his hometown. So it's all this history is baked into what we're doing here. So you've got like... We dug coal together. We dug cold together. We fixed a generator together. Exactly.

We fixed a generator together. Or like, you know, Juliet having to confront her history with her dad is very Raylo and Arlo Givens daddy stuff, like all this stuff. But what's interesting about the murder mystery, the George murder mystery, which winds up not being a murder after all. Story that Juliet is hunting down is, again, in reading interviews and something like that, I'm given to understand that that is show invented entirely. So, like, George, she has this relation with this guy named George's very background.

He did die. She is curious as to why he died or something like that, but it's not this whole, like, George is in the middle of everything and the driving force, like his death and all that sort of stuff. And I think also, and this is very common. with a lot of showrunners in the post-lost, post-West World Post, whatever era is like trying to create a puzzle box show. Like trying to, and my understanding of the adaptation of Wool specifically is that a lot of of the things that are held back as mysteries like the villainy of the Tim Robbins character

or like the reality of what the display is or all that sort of stuff like that. Those aren't mysteries in the book. They're just right there from the start. and as a, and I think with, honestly, with mixed success in the show, Yost and his writers, and I think with some push from the Apple TV execs, made it more of a mystery, more of a puzzle box, more of a theory show sort of thing. We were delighted to see Yost reference lost as sort of a mild inspo on where to hit the finale. And Hugh Howie also has been talking about.

I lost interviews a little less glowingly. And I don't know. What do you think of this, like, a mystery, like turning this story. Yeah. We won't know until we read the book ourselves fully, but like into sort of a mystery box kind of narrative. I think it's a, despite your correct point about the varying degrees of success, episode to episode and even across the whole season, I think it's a smart decision for the long-term structure and growth and expansion. of the show in the world, start small, focus in an insular way on the dynamic inside of this silo and the dynamics between these people. The George thing is an interesting example because

some adaptive choices work and some don't and we'll be able after we read the story in full to, I think, say with more certainty which worked and which didn't hear. I feel confident saying now that making George a more central figure of the story was successful because Ferdinand Kingsley was, I thought, magnetic. Like, I loved him. Absolutely loved him. He was delightful. Now, I wasn't surprised to get the video reveal that he actually loved Jules.

Like, I think that just felt the depth of their affection for each other felt so sincere in our scene with them that to attempt briefly to get us and alongside the character to doubt. that. I didn't buy that. Though, I think we have to ask ourselves if we're being fair, whether that would have been that sensation of like, is every mystery working would have been exacerbated week to week or whether it would have actually been more effective if we were watching

week to week to week because there's more room to theorize and speculate, which is, of course, something that we love to do in a week-to-week viewing experience that we were just downing and mainlining this. All that said, short story expanded to fill a long streaming wars TV season.

Not always a recipe for success. I think within that reality, they did well here to establish a template for the world. Ten episodes is a lot, though. It's a lot to have to, like, maintain. So this is something I wanted to talk about for sure, is that this idea of, and Yoss himself said in an interview, basically, that they patted out the story in order to fill 10 episodes. My question is, I have two questions why. One, we know that Yost wanted to end with this, like, reveal of other silos, but it's not

the end of the first books. So it's not, it's not, like, having to fill out. It's like deciding that they wanted to end it at this point in the book. So they're leaving some story on the table, right? And then also, this is always my question for a 10 episode season. Why 10 episodes? Like, I think this would have been, I liked this a lot. I had a great time watching it.

I think the world is really interested. I'm interesting. I'm really interested to see season two. I think if it had been six episodes, this would have been absolute killer, no filler. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, I think. I think so too. And, you know, if we use slow horses, which you already mentioned as a, and they're obviously

different stories, certainly different stories. There's a lot of world building to do inside of this universe that isn't necessary when you're plopping us into London with Gary Oldman in a filthy trench coat and solving a conspiracy crime. But part of what makes slow horses, I think you're effutably one of the five best shows on TV right now, just like top-tier, excellent adaptive storytelling is that it is so tight. And every time, there have only been two seasons so far, they're both six episodes. And when you get to the end of that six episodes, you feel without a doubt that not a second was wasted. And you cannot wait for the next season because you're like, I can't believe it's over.

I'm so desperately sad. But also that was perfect, right? It was perfect. So, yeah, yeah, it's maybe eight episodes six. I don't know what the right length is. I think you're right, 10 is a tad long. And yet we watched it in a day and a half and did so happily. We sure did do that.

Man, if you haven't watched Slow Horses and you're listening to this, check it out. Can I also say just for a minute here? We've talked about this before on pods, but I am digging the Apple TV lineup lately. I really am. They have a lot of good shows, which was not the case a few years ago. Let's talk about their commitment to sci-fi. Really quick, I do want to just on the Ferdinand-Kingsley front, I would say that like 85% were for me.

I think that video confession thing of like actually I loved you did a lot of damage to something that I think was just like really obvious to us. To your point. The way that, but I love the way that they shot the two of them in flashback where they're just sort of like. Me too. Touching each other. It's like so clear. Especially in that context of like you can't explore the world around you. So like that incredible.

animating a possibility of exploring another person the way they're tracing their fingers on each other's tattoos and stuff. I really love that. Beautiful.

Also, incredible tattoos in this show. And we should just shout out that Ferdin and Kingsley was also in our favorite episode of Sandman as Hobgadling and was phenomenal in that. So, you know,

great couple of years in genre for Ferdinand Kingsley and Kingsley's very handsome son. All right, so Apple's people on your tweet, you're like, This is a public service announcement to making sure everyone knows Ben Kingsley as a hot son.

She's great stuff. No, it's not just that he's hot. It's that he named him Ferdinand. That the name Kingsley is already like a lot, right? Like, Ben Kingsley, Tom Kingsley, John Kingsley, that's a name. You slap Ferdinand on the front? No, no. It's a lot to carry and he carries it well.

And very beardily. All right. So let's talk about Apple TV Plus and their commitment to sci-fi, which is a fascinating thing. Because outside of like some other hits like Ted Lass or whatever, there's this like real strong, big budget drive. You know, foundation is like a clear example of a show that they poured a lot of money into an IP that they were really invested in.

For All Mankind is one of their most critically beloved shows. There's C, there's invasion, amazing stories, Hello Tomorrow, Exclamation Point. And then, of course, our shared love. Severance actually has a lot in common with this show. I think it's, I was trying to, like, you pointed this out as, like, maybe a potential talking point, like the sci-fi, the blooming of sci-fi at Apple TV Plus, and I think it's interesting for a couple of reasons.

One, it came about, they, there aren't any, like, huge articles on this. There are, like, some niche, like, these are the best sci-fi shows, but, like, in notable contrast, to the coverage of Amazon chasing its game of Thrones. So, like, everyone else is chasing Game of Thrones and trying for fantasy. And Apple's, like, we're going to zag and we're going to do sci-fi. And no one has, like, talked to anyone in programming about. So, like, you know, variety. Hollywood reporter, of any fair, please talk to someone.

But I was, so I was trying to, like, figure out. I was like, who is this? Who is doing this over there? So I was, like, going down the, like, exec lists or whatever. And I zeroed it on Matt Cherniss, who was ahead of programming. because he came from WGN at this time. I don't know if you were covering TV in this way at the time, but there was this weird little blooming of really good shows over at WGN,

like Manhattan and outsiders and blah, blah, and WGN a network that, like, nobody cared about, suddenly became a place that, like, people actually kind of talked about for a little while. And there was a bunch of great genre, like outsiders, genre, like a bunch of great genre shows in that run. And so Matt Churness, who was the head of WGN, comes over as the head of, of programming at Apple. And I really think that, like, I don't know, because no one's written this article,

but I really think that he is the driver of this, of this sci-fi asance over at Apple TV Plus. What do you, like... I'm a fan. Yeah. I think that, like, one of the things I'm enjoying about the slate, and I'll say, like, I'm enjoying the Apple TV slate more broadly. We obviously talked about a slow horse already. I really enjoyed shrinking.

We don't need to discuss... Ted Lassow currently, though I have noted before to you that I am a big fan of the biscuits with the boss Jenny's ice cream collab and also have the exact same wardrobe as the titular Ted Lassow because I wear an incredible amount of Todd Snyder champion sweatshirts and Air Jordans. Anyway. Should we kick up your visor game? Do we need to work on that? It's funny that you mention that because Adam and I were doing some shopping. this weekend and he was like, could you, I could see you wearing a visor. Like, would have you considered a visor?

And I used to wear, I had a phase, I'll send you a picture, Joe. I had a phase in middle school where I wore visors. Like, for a while. I haven't done it since I was 13. Okay. Don't plan to do it again, but there was a stretch of my life where I did it. Painted with a picture. Is this like a, I play tennis visor?

Is this a green plastic ideal poker hands visor? Like, what kind of visor are we talking about? I had like a khaki, a khaki colored visor with, yeah, some red fawning. And I definitely, I would wear it to baseball games a lot. So it was the stretch where I was like going to Camden as often as I could to watch the Baltimore Rail. I was not sure if you're aware, Joe, that theos beat the Yankees 14 to 1 last night. And Gunner Henderson had four hits, including two home runs.

Just thought I could catch you up on that. Can you say the name on that? Yeah, there I go. Anyway, back to Apple TV. if they're interested in making a show about the 2002-3 Baltimore rails and their unlikely run to the pennant, I would watch.

What I love about the mix of sci-fi shows on Apple right now, and I haven't seen them all, I can't claim to have watched C, for example. But something like Foundation, which we've discussed here and there and asides before, you know, I was really looking forward to it.

I thought that the first few episodes were downright impenetrable. And then I actually quite enjoyed the second half of the season and was glad that I stuck with it and I'm looking forward to season two. And I will just say that any Lee Pace enthusiast in addition to any sci-fi enthusiast should give it a go. I'm really pissed. You guys didn't tag me into that Lee Pace threading black the other day. I found it after the fact that I was like.

Where was my dad? Kate went off to the side. Yeah, that's usually a shared thread with the three of us. Devastated. Honestly. Oh, boy. Well, there's always more Lee-based fodder out there for us. But, I mean, foundation, Isaac Asimov's Foundation, this is one of the pantheon texts in

sci-fi storytelling, right? And so you have a lot of pressure and a lot of hype around adapting something like that. And then you have original creations, right? like severance that are crafted a new, a world that is built for us in this way on TV. And then you have things like silo where there's like a passionate fan base, but this is also going to be the thing that gets in front of a lot of people for the first time. That's a really interesting mix.

Like I like that they're trying different things. It doesn't always have to be the biggest title. They're willing to make something original to and try to do all of those things at once. So I hope they keep doing it. Obviously making shows like this is very expensive. It requires a lot. That said, they're just like rocking with Timmy Shalamee and commercials for Apple TV. So I think they're able to keep doing it, which is great.

And I'm excited. I'm excited to see what they make next. Not cheap. Indeed. Have you heard the Dune is coming out? Have you heard that Dune too? Have you heard that Wanka is coming out? Winter of Shalemate.

Hot Chalemay winter. Okay. So listen. Yeah. I said a lot of great things about Silo, a show that we genuinely enjoyed watching. But we would be lying to you if one of the reasons, I'll just say for myself, one of the reasons I was very, very interested in watching Silo is I had heard nothing but astounding feedback about the various accents that are on display in the show. As he mentioned, this is a predominantly British cast. Rebecca Ferguson is Swedish.

There's a lot of Brits and a few Americans here, but like a lot of Brits. And all of the Brits are doing American accents. And all of those accents are, except for David O'allow, astounding. Very questionable. It's just frankly astounding. So if you heard last week's episode on Secret Invasion, where we talked about beloved Juliet Stevenson

and her line delivery of platitudes. Don't you be? Where you do a little section here? asking who wins the Juliette Stevenson Plattitudes Award this week from the cast of Silo. We have amassed a few audio clips here. We're going to decide together in real time. If you and I disagree, Steve gets the tie break. Oh, my God.

Okay. So we are going to start with everyone's favorite bad mom from Succession. The great Dame. Harry Walter is incredible on this show, by the way. Unbelievable. I love her on the show. I think she's fantastic. as Martha Walker,

who is a mentor figure to Allison. This is a gender swap character. It's a man in the book. But they made it a lady, a dame. Harriet Walter, here she is. I would like you to focus on the word lied. Steve, play this for me. Because Shirley came by last night.

She said, you stormed out yelling. He lied. I don't think I was yelling? You know what? Coming in here, sitting in that chair, using my tools. a privilege. And the only way you get to stay here is by telling me what in hell is going on. I think that's my- Holy shit.

I think that's my longest clip, mostly because I just wanted, I just wanted everyone to enjoy her lie delivery of all the word, all the I-N-G words with the apostasy, like sitting, lying. Absolutely sublime. Just extraordinary stuff. I assume you'll be waiting to return to the walk character in wig watch. Yeah. Speaking of wigwatch,

we're going to talk about Mr. Ian Glenn, Sir Jora Marmont himself. The house of our experience, our first shared love for anyone who doesn't know our origin story, and there are many different parts of it. This is the Jora Mormont is the foundational shared fashion. We are sister wives. He is our husband. Ian Glenn is very important to us. Nonetheless.

Let's listen to his love delivery of the word hours. It could take five or six hours for it to flush through her system. Got to get her back before the night and her starts his rounds. Fuck. Oh my goodness. Yeah. All right. Next up on the list.

Okay. Uh-huh. Wow. The delightful Sophie Thompson. This is Emma Thompson's sister. Have you guys never seen Sophie Thompson and things? She's fantastic. She's in my favorite Jane Austen Adaptation Persuasion.

She's phenomenal at many, many things. American accent may not be one of them. We get to hear her say the word children twice in this clip. Let's hear it, Steve. And he wanted children so badly. I knew he'd never have a chance with me, and he'd never go if I told them the truth. So I ran into him once when he was with his children. Oh, Gloria.

Darling, Gloria. sweet Gloria. Another wigwatch legend on this show. All right. Next, we only have a few more clips. Next, we've got the great Geraldine James who plays Ruth Johns

our dearly departed mayor of the silo. I actually had so many clips for her. It was really hard for me to pick one, but I have settled on this delivery of the word apartment. Steve will you play Geraldine James saying apartment. Why don't you grab a bottle of wine and take me

back to my apartment? Yes, ma'am. Those ours will really fuck them up, you know? Oh my God, that was fantastic. Absolutely fantastic. Holy hell. All right, we have no new candidates, but we're going to return to two of our faves

as we close us out. Let's hear Ian Glenn again. This is the word early. Steve, we play this, please? She showed real interest in machines from an early age. And last and I absolutely love it.

This is the quickie, but it like knocked me off my chair. Here is Dame Harriet Walter once again. And this is the word hello. Hello? Is anyone around?

All right. Rebecca Ferguson, we should say. Rebecca Ferguson was also all over the map, but like. A derelict should have duty to not have Rebecca Ferguson. This is some of your finest.

work, and yet Rebecca Ferguson has a number of first ballot hall of fame entries all on her own. What I was trying to justify to you before we started recording is that she's Swedish, so it's just like different. These are all Brits trying to hit their ours, and it's really funny. So, with the exception of, hello, hello? Man, remarkable. Who wins? It has to be the last clip.

the whole from our our beloved walk remarkable stuff I I want to thank you for the time and care that you put in

to the Juliette Stevenson Statenesson Platitudes Award I hope this remains an ongoing pursuit here at the House of R I have to say while I understand

I think this is very funny I think that the performances despite the accents are really great the cast is obviously great My hope is that we will be able to enjoy what I will refer to as the reverse Littlefinger. Littlefinger, of course historically, slipped into season after season, sometimes episode after episode, and frankly, sometimes scene after scene, an increasingly confounding accent. And my hope is that we'll go the other way here.

And season after season, episode after episode, these will start to sound a bit more uniformly American. My question watching early was why? Why not let everybody use their natural accents? This is so confounding. And actually, genuinely, all jokes aside, I thought initially, like, quite distracting. Like, it's wild.

But obviously, I understand the actual answer, right? If it's a century and a half in the silo underground and you don't have the exposure to cinema, you know, hearing other accents, etc., then the accents would fade and it would all coalesce into people sounding the same, I guess. But it's just very strange. It's very, very, very, very strange and highly comedic. Again, these are like some of my favorite performances in the whole show. show. Like, you know, they're all tremendous. Like, they're great. Absolutely tremendous. So no knock on them. We just, you know, we just had to do X-Equart. So, here we go. All right. We're not doing a deep dive, obviously, because we're not going episode by episode,

but I'm going to call this splashing around the silo, unless you're Juliet and you're deathly afraid of water, sort of like a middle of the pool sort of exploration of silo. We've already had some of these beats, but I want to start with this idea of, like, constructing a, world narratively and then like physically because this is one of those really interesting sci-fi confections where the stratification of society is built into the structure itself. We talked about this a lot in our coverage of Andor when we're talking about Corrason and the way that that is built up from, you know, like the higher you go, the more money you have physically sort of in the city.

Or the snow piercer train if you start at the back of the train. versus going all the way to the front of the train. I kind of thought that maybe the joke about Down Deepers Eating Babies was a Snowpiercer, shoutout. Please revisit that scene of Chris Evans talking about babies tasting the best. It is one of my favorite things that exist in the world. Okay. Other clear inspirations here, the fallout games. Hugh Howie has talked about how it wasn't an intentional thing, but he's like, but I did play that game.

So I think he was like, I talked to the creators of that game. That game also has to do with like silo, but it takes place outside of the silos, but silos are part of the fallout game. Handmaid's Tale on the like fertility plot line, their fertility front. And then Plato's cave in regards to the screen and like the allegory of the cave with Plato having to do with like, you know, if you did not take a class on Plato's cool or whatever, it's this idea of what if your entire worldview were just the flickering of shadows. on the wall. Right. And this idea of like, how can you know reality? What does that do to you to your understanding of the world?

The idea of preferring the shadows on the wall versus turning around and seeing the, like, what's on the outside of this cave. And something that I thought was really interesting in one of these Hugh Howie interviews that I was actually listening to this morning was, he said that the construction of the, the physical construction of the silo, which surely I think we would all agree, I mean, it's the name of the show, is like kind of the, kind of the, showstopper of this world. He's like, that's not where I started. I started with the screen.

He was like the idea of the screen and he said, what if you had one view of the outside and it was a dismal one? What would that do to your psyche? And he said that he was inspired in 2011 when he wrote this by like the rise of social media, the way in which we are just like constantly down our phones and like looking at the world through that screen. And oftentimes, especially on a place, you know, Twitter then was different than it is now. But even then we were talking about what if you just read bad news stories after bad new story after bad new story from around the world?

And what does that do to you if you're just sucked down into that and not living in the now enjoying the life around you, blah, blah? Mal, what do you think of these like building blocks of the silo world? I really, I love all of those callouts. I love the Plato's Cave callout in particular, and that idea of like curiosity and how central that becomes in, I mean, throughout the whole season, but the back half in particular, you know, think of a scene, like the conversation between Bernard and Lucas

and the way that somebody's curiosity can be weaponized against them, and the silo is designed in part to stamp that out of, people, but the way that your own curiosity fuels your view of reality, that question of what is out there when we learn about the flamekeepers. And I thought like one of the things that was really striking about that, because in theory, the thing that's striking is that there's this group of people who attempt to hold on to a true understanding of an awareness of the past. But part of what's striking about it really is how few people are a part of that, right? And how that has vanished and withered.

You know, in terms of other comps or things that it made me think of, you know, there are a number of different things that some aspect of the story connects to your point about the screens and technology. I mean, there's a very black mirror quality to the role that technology plays, both the presence of technology, right? IT as the big, bad, the people who control the flow of information, our access to it, what they can learn about other people, that people can never learn about themselves. it made me think a little bit of divergent in terms of like the sections and segments of society

and how people are divided into different roles and factions and what awareness there is of like the larger apparatus. Yeah, controlling that. It's somewhat in terms of the prestige TV era of like sci-fi shows and adaptations that just how they look and how they feel. and how you initially fall into a world. It made me think a little bit of like the early days of the expanse. The others, a couple of the other things that I thought of, and this was in like some smaller ways, but they were on my mind pretty consistently.

The stars, everything with Lucas and the constellations and looking out into the night sky at the stars, it made me think a lot of nightfall, speaking of Asimov. That, of course, is about the idea of like being driven mad, the site of something that is not a part of your everyday existence and that thus you like cannot comprehend. And it felt like that had to be like a reference even though Lucas's response and Juliet's response to it is quite different, which is like more of an awakening, right? And then the other thing that this made me think of a lot, and I know that this was something

that you wanted to talk about today, made me think of never let me go. And more specifically, Isigoro's use of language. Because the specific, the specific, and actually a little bit in a way too of Watership Down. Like any, one of my favorite things about a great fantasy or sci-fi story is when the language of the world is just a degree removed from how we speak. And I think this is like, yeah, one of the most successful. Yeah. So often, if you have too many or whatever, it can just laying like with a clang, you know what I

mean? And it just feels force. Yeah. Well, and then you're just you're in something completely new, a different space entirely. It can feel like cutesy and just sort of like just wholly false. And I really love the way it's folded into the story here. Yeah. It's like you feel that this is just a step beyond the way we speak today.

That this sprung out of our way of life and our existence. And when you're reading, never let me go. And you're like complete, you know, it's always like my favorite example. It's like the simplicity of that is the most harrowing and haunting aspects. Like what are these? words masking in how they're deployed, but also what do they tell us about the connection to our more like recognizable reality. So, you know, everything from like founders in Pact to syndrome and the way that they describe the deep down and the mids, etc., like the actual

language of the place itself, I thought all of that was like really, really successfully deployed on the world building front. As much as anything that's visual about the silo itself, that tells you, like, what you need to know about the fabric of their society. I think one really subtle one that I liked is this idea of the shadow, basically, like, your successor, your apprentice sort of thing. I really loved that. But also because, like, what's the idea of a shadow? It's like this thing you can't fully catch or see, right? It's just, like, working. It's this thing that you get with sunlight. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. They have, they have fake sunlight, but they don't have, like, real sunlight to cast a real shadow in this

The syndrome is completely show-invented, and I will say this is a thing. This is a thing that didn't really land for me. I'll be curious to see how it plays out over the course of the entire show. And if... Okay, so that's interesting because that kills one of my theories then. I was wondering if my assumption was that the syndrome was something that is happening to people inside of the silo because they are deprived of... Vitamin D deficient.

Yeah. of like the things that you would get above ground. But one of my other theories was, and this is very dark, maybe people had been, this was before the reveal at the end. And it's like, oh, actually the world has been,

in fact, been obliterated. Yeah. Maybe people were put into the, like, maybe the silos were like leper colonies. Like maybe people were put in there initially because something was wrong. And then, like, over time, people have come to survive

that, but I guess that can't be the case if that wasn't in the book. So there goes that. Yeah, the syndrome thing, I was waiting for, I was waiting to learn more about that. And that did not, that did not come. I really wanted Paul's character to work better for me than did. I really like this idea of like someone who was like letter of the law by the book and how it bumps up against Juliet's character, her methods and maybe what he can learn from her about how to be less rigid about the way that he views the world and stuff like that. and how he will react to having the wool pull over his eyes, etc., etc. I think watching him discover the Georgia book that was moving, but then some other things didn't work as well. Like you and I sort of agreed that the wife character was maybe our least favorite character in the show,

so those scenes didn't really work for us. So the syndrome, again, I'll just be curious to see how it plays out, but learning that it was a show invention, I was like, okay, all right, then I'll be very curious, why they felt like it was necessary to add that. We would not be ourselves when speaking about world building if we did not call out all of the hatches. Unbelievable. And literally we get to hear Rebecca Ferguson.

And by the way, I wrote in my notes, the glistening tattooed arms of Rebecca Ferguson enter the show. She says, only I go through the hatch. And I just, I lost it. I got so excited. We love a hatch. If you didn't listen to our Yellow Jackets coverage or have ever heard us talk about Lost, you might be lost here, but we love a hatch.

Love a Hatch. I was waiting for Cass Elliott to kick in. On the, you mentioned Black Mirror. Let's just like skip forward to this like idea of tech phobia that is baked into the concept here because this is something that Gramios shouted out like our current writer anxiety around AI, the WGA strike and all the negotiations they're doing, obviously came after they had put together this season and obviously came after long after Hugh Howey wrote his book.

But Yost, an interview, I believe, with Collider, said, ultimately be very afraid of technology. This is a cautionary tale. What happened to the world? Was it nuclear? Was it a disease? Was it AI? And that brings us back to the writer's strike.

I was not a high priority on her agenda last year, but then Chad GPT came out and I was like, oh my lord, it's not great, but it can learn. We've got to figure this out because AI is not the demon. It's how you use it. So as you mentioned, our big bad is the head of IT. It's a whole thing. And like the way in which tech these hidden cameras, like in many ways, the silo is a very

analog world. Like there are no elevators to restrict that idea of like upward mobility or organization. Something that Hugh Howie said in an interview was he was writing it around the time of the Arab Spring uprisings and how Twitter was used to organize a lot of those protests and how they would block out Twitter in certain sessions, certain countries in order to discourage, you know, right of assembly sort of thing. And so the idea that like you cannot take the elevator to all gather on floor 75 to have an uprising, right? You can't communicate that way. So it's a very analog world except that people in power have all this tech that the rest of the

population literally doesn't even know exists what's a camera, you know, blah, blah, in which to spy on everyone. Between Black Mirror, and I will just say, without spoiling anything, the upcoming Mission Impossible film, like, this is a real techphobic time in our mainstream pop culture. Any thoughts or feelings about that? Well, you know, part of the burning ember at the heart of sci-fi since the earliest days, certainly. So the quintessential experience there.

I liked the role that tech played in the story, in part actually because it's not, I would argue surely there as the villainous force and the force of ill. The fact that the way that our heroes, our characters who are fighting for truth and light and goodness, need technology because technology represents access It represents information.

So it gets back to that larger point, and you just read it in that quote, right? It's how it's used. Control and intention. So without the hard drive, without what they're able to, everybody's got a computer in their apartment. So in theory, they have technology,

but nobody can access the hard drive unless you're at a certain station or you have the password. Do you want to use this opportunity to say the word library in one of the accents from the show? That's literally one of, The clips that I gathered and didn't use lots of libraries.

Sensational stuff, remarkable truly. We're fortunate to be alive to witness this. But, yeah, like the, actually, I believe it was episode five where Walk mentions that the prohibition of any sort of, like, motorized elevation is one of the two things, along with magnification. That stands out to her that she's had lingering questions about from reading the pack. Yeah. I think like a minute before that I had said out loud,

why do you have elevators in this place? And of course, you know the answer, right? It's about control. I mean, think of the number of scenes that hinge on just literally a blockade on the stairs, inhibiting movement, forcing people who would otherwise have freedom to run through the bottleneck of some guiding design. And I need to read the book because I need to find out if this is in the book. or maybe if you've read the book

and you can email me hobbes and dragons at gmail.com and let me know. But I feel like the entire premise of that gets sort of smash as smithereens when it's revealed

that there's a un-monitored trash chute that you can climb up and down that many characters are aware of. It's not a secret trash shoot. Everyone knows about it. So why the stair blockade makes no sense then.

And, like, this is, like, I really liked this show, but there were, like, a few moments where I was like, this is an unforgivable plot. Usually I can let these things roll. But I was like, the trash shoot, I was like, no, you've made so much about the fact that they control the stairs. They can block it the stairs. You can't then at the, like, 11th hour introduce a trash shoot to me, especially when, like, Juliet can drop down 20 floors and not break every bone in her body. That part, I definitely had questions about how was Juliet alive after not just that, a number of falls or jumps from considerable heights. I guess the answer would be that one, you know, because of the suppression of curiosity and rogue ambition,

people would never think to go in, but also just the peril of it. Like they're putting these, the recycling is going through there. So there are these hard metal objects that could kill them at any point. So nobody would think to use it unless they had an absolute urgent need, like in this case. Like, I didn't get the sense when Juliet went in that people had been doing this routinely to skirt those checks. But then why not? There's smugglers everywhere. Yeah.

They don't recycle at night, right? You could climb it at night. Like, what are we? I don't. It's a fair point. Yeah. I also want to talk about story as it relates to this because so something, you know, reading again, only. the first novella, something that Hugh Howey says in that, is that in this world, only children

books had survived, that they got rid of all other books. In the TV adaptation, it feels like they've gotten rid of all books because the... Anything from the before time. Yeah. The presentation of relics in the show, I feel like nothing has survived. So this idea, I mean, we learn from like the watch, I guess, that some of these things can be like sanctioned and approved, but I would find it difficult in the world of the show to believe that children's books would be there because it would allow you to... The Georgia book revealed a picture book

almost wouldn't make sense then in that context because it's like anything that reminds people of what the world used to be just can't be a part of this universe. So to quote... Shout out Pez. To quote Tyrion Lanister, there's nothing that one more powerful than a good story.

Nothing can stop it. No enemy can defeat it. Almost impossible not to think of Tyrion. So let's talk about story because without books, without stories, we get a couple references to Juliet at oh, from the play, right? So, like, Romeo and Juliet as a concept exists. We don't really see any, like, theater.

One of my favorite moments, speaking of, like, sci-fi dystopia, one of my favorite moments of any film ever is a section of Rain of Fire when Gerard Butler reenacted Star Wars for, like, a generation of future kids who have never seen a film, but they're just, like, acting it out. Like this idea of our enduring stories, we have suppressed the before times if we believe Gloria. They put something in the water to make people forget the before times, like all this sort of stuff. But like, how does stories survive and emerge?

And I love the section when sort of unwittingly, like Juliet and Bernard are collaborating to create a narrative around the death of Mayor Johns and Deputy. And sort of like they're talking about their love story, which, by the way, absolutely devastated me. Harry said. But the story becomes their love and not about murder. There's this, you know, and so like the murder, the idea of story as propaganda rather than a societal enriching thing. But I'm curious to track stories as it goes forward. what new story has, what new story has Juliet created just by going over that hill and everyone

watching her do it? You know what I mean? And what story, if she survives this journey, what story can she bring back to everyone, et cetera? So yeah. Yeah. I'm really intrigued by that too. And, you know, it's one of my big questions about the story overall and where this is

heading and like what the bigger reveals are, in fact, about what happened. the reveal that the beautiful vista, green tree, lush grass, birds flying in the same V formation. I know a screen saver when I see one. Appleizers, there they are, right? Surprise when it gets some Apple TV product placement there. Our product will last a century and a half into the dystopian future so that you could use it to control your silo. the world outside is in fact a disaster. It is a barren wasteland from our glimpse of the end. The air is poison.

The air is poison, right? The fact that they've got that good supply tape on Julietette at the end is the only reason that she isn't killed by the nauseous air. Here's my question. Okay. The world is, in fact, the unsafe, uninhabitable, unsurvivable, unsurvivable healthcape that they want people to believe. So if that's true, if it's not a trick, and I thought that was a cool, like, oh, the thing you've been told actually is the twist, right? Why hide what caused it? Why not say, and this is what went wrong?

So that's, like, really fascinating. I think that's the mystery because, like, Julia being like, what's wrong with the truth? Like, if the truth is, the world is poison and that is actually the truth, then the mystery has to be, how did it get that way? Right. And why can't you know? what would be the danger of you knowing? What would make that threat? What would change that from being?

And so you know and can take that as caution to not let that happen again, to understand what went wrong and how we could try to build a better society moving forward, why we actually do need to stay inside what the peril was and is. And instead, say,

we need to have a society where nobody can know the truth, nobody can know their history, nobody can share those stories and pass down those tales and foster that sense of community like you're noting, that the sense of community

is inherently a real, risk and a threat that people have to be divided and kept apart, that curiosity, the most human and natural instinct to wonder about the world around you is a danger. That's a really fascinating question. Literally bred out of the population. Exactly, because it's such a risk. Yeah. Such a threat. Speaking of stories, let's talk about some classic archetypes. And this one is a real W for Mallory Rubin, right? Because Graham Yost and Hugh Howey joined Malay Rubin in the Reluctant Hero Club, right? Yose said in an interview, Hugh and I totally agree on loving a reluctant hero and loving someone who doesn't want to be the savior of the last 10,000 people on Earth, but maybe that's your destiny.

She, meaning Juliet, just wants to find out what happened to her boyfriend. That's all she wants. And then it becomes one thing after another, just a girl standing here before her dead body, try to figure out how that happened. A great Notting Hill nod from Yost. Incredible. Juliet gives us an iconic adult wanted. Adult, I want it. I don't want it. You are my queen.

Thank you, Steve. I was so hoping that you would do that. I looked into his eyes. I'm just curious, like, how, it bothered me less in this scenario. And I don't, I couldn't tell you why. But I'll try. And I think I think it's just because

well I guess when you pluck a Harry Potter out of under the stairs or a John Snow out of a bastard living at the wall sort of existence, the idea of being a king or the savior of the wizarding world

is not something they were brought up with or whatever but it is just like so out of left field for for Holson to name her his successor. And then she's just sort of like, what the fuck are you talking about?

I'm not even like, I've never even been a deputy. I'm an, I'm an engineer, right? And so, and what I like is that she reluctantly takes it, not because she's talked into it as her, like, duty, because she has an ulterior motive. She's like, okay, I'll wear your badge for the time it takes me to figure out what the hell happened to my very handsome boyfriend and his delightful beard. What happened? I would like to know.

And so I will wear your badge, your crown. I'll wear your crown until I figure that out and then I'm done. Yeah, it's a handy portal to a means to an end so that she can achieve her goal. I think the other thing that's like a nice little twist on my beloved reluctant hero archetype is that, and this is I think maybe another reason

why it worked for you is like the thing that she doesn't want, it's not power, it's not control, it's not being the one to make the decision. She actually does want all of those things. She does think she's the most equipped. She's like, you're my shadow, but I will punch you in the face

to keep you out of the generator because that's my realm. Go through the hatch. Yeah, exactly. And so I don't think that there's, like Juliet doesn't really doubt her viability. She has no interest in that life. The life of a sheriff, the life of law,

the life up there. And of course, part of what's compelling about it, too, is when we learn over the course of the middle episodes of the season, her origin story of like choosing to head down, not only into the deep down and that part of the silo, but too mechanical to this like way of life where she could fix things with her hands and make an impact. But she says many times that she thinks her work as an engineer, her work in the generator, is the single most important job in the silo. And so that is, and I want it. I want to be the one keeping them alive. a different way. So that's a nice little twist. I think that's part of it too. Yeah, but she's not plucked from a miserable existence. Like, you think someone living at the bottom.

The life she chose. Yeah. She loves it down there. She loves working on that machine and she's fantastic at it. I will say another thing, again, I did like this show. Another thing that didn't really work for me, it was the lengthy, is the generator going to fail sequence and is our main character going to die? And I guess, like, if you just watched Rashida Jones and David O'Yello die, you could be like, does Rebecca Ferguson die in episode three, but I was like, no, she most assuredly does not. So, like, apparently this was like, that was a huge show invention and it was like very, very heightened and dramatized for the show to try to create a, like, exciting action piece. But I was like, I don't know, it didn't, it didn't really flow for me.

And especially like how bumbling her shadow was, I was like, if he's that much of a bumbler, why is this like the person to go up with her? Anyway, it's, that's a mind thing. Okay, let's talk about some other archetypes. beyond the reluctant hero. We've got a mentor figure in Dame Harriet Walter, which I absolutely loved her in this role. Got a classic bad dad who is not so bad, it turns out, in Ian Glenn.

I thought he was, like, actually tremendous in some of his monologues. And, like, whenever Ian Glenn cries, I think you and I tend to, like, get teary-eyed ourselves. So there's just like a couple of speeches he gave where he was tearing up. And I was like, oh, no, it's up back of my jaw. feelings. He was absolutely wonderful. I loved him. I thought that both Ian Glenn and Harriet Walter were sensational. I wish we had gotten even more time with their characters and their scenes with Jules were just lovely. Like easily some of the highlights of the season. How many of the

emails, the silo emails were specifically about Ian Glenn's wig? As you know, give it a percentage. I think 25%. And as you know, one of the emails we got was just simply titled Emergency Wigwigswig Watch. Incredible. I want to talk about Rashida Joe. I really am interested in this Allison. That's our version of Call the Banners, you know, an email. Emergency Wigwitchf. Subject Line Emergency Wigwatch. I want to talk about Allison quickly because I think the short story, the novella that I read, which is, you know, the thing that went viral, the thing that put Hugh Howie in the map, I think it is incredible start to finish.

And I think the story of Allison Holst & Becker is just an incredibly perfectly, poignantly written. story. I thought Rashida Jones was fantastic. I thought David O'Ello was fantastic. And I think that the character of Allison, I really, we're going to talk about secret evasion in a second. And like that, you know, may or may not have ended with another like female lead being shot at the end of the episode. We have, we have our questions about that. But like, there are so many stories like this where the wife dies and the husband is like motivated by his grief to do something or another. And what they forget to do is make that wife character an actual character. And what I love about Alison Becker and this is just like there's, like, her pursuit of all of

this is so much her own story. Her story about wanting to be a mother. Her story about wanting to know the truth. Her story as like someone who is technically proficient, like all this other stuff like that. Like she's got all these like interesting, driven by her own story and motivations, blah, blah. And then she does. She's the one who cracks the hard drive, not George.

Right. And then she dies and then, yes, her death is caught up in what happens next with Holston, et cetera, et cetera. But, like, it's not the reason she dies. The reason she dies is not to push his story forward. And that's sort of the distinction between, like, a female character dying. Not every female character dying is affidging. And so there's this dead wife trope that I hate and this was not that. And I really appreciated that.

And I thought that Holston, when he goes out, again, His pursuit of the truth is tied up in his love for her, and it is this almost like chivalric love. It is like remarked upon. He loved her more than X, Y, and Z. And the way that he just, like, goes up and dies by her side is tremendously poignant. I think this, I think the show starts out on such sure footing, because of the strength of that story, you know?

Yeah, absolutely. Their relationship was absolutely magnetic and really sucks you in in a strong way in the first episode, which, you know, in some ways is like the... I liked a lot of the later episodes too, but in some ways, is the strongest episode of the entire season.

And one of the reasons that I thought his eventual decision to go out in his pursuit of that truth was so impactful is because, like, he actually, despite the strength of their relationship and the depth of their love for each other, has a lot of doubt, doubts her, wonders what has gone wrong,

does not believe her, tries to talk her out of the things that she is thinking and feeling and seeing. And it isn't just like a kind of quick and easy, everybody immediately buys in. And she's wrong. Like, yeah, well, I mean, you know, just fucking heart-wrenching. Absolutely.

Absolutely heart-wrenching. They were great. I'm sad that I guess that's it. I mean, maybe we'll get some more flashbacks in the past because we do spend quite a bit of time in the past in this first season. So maybe we'll spend more time with our characters later. I don't know. I would love to. Anything you want to talk about before we get to like the sort of the final twist and then up over to Secret Invasion?

There are some like flashbacks, mixed feelings about the flashbacks. Yeah. I like, yeah, go ahead. I think we're on the same page with this, which is like when the flashbacks are actually in more of a lost mold of taking us into a. different part of the timeline. Juliet and her mother, Hannah, and the rabbit. And the rabbit, yeah. Wonderful.

Absolutely wonderful. Everything with constructing the magnifying lens and the glass and the Raiders and the apartment. Like it tells us so much about their family dynamic, that threat of technology, the need for control, the fear of the Raiders, which impacts our other scenes with other characters and other family units completely when we're in the Sims household later, etc. those were really great and I actually like would like more of those so that we know more about the lives and the past of all of these characters. As is always the case, like when we get a call back to something that happened minutes ago or an episode ago, it just doesn't feel necessary.

I think the one that stood out to me the most was like when Juliet sends Lucas the note in the cafeteria and we need to, the show thinks we need to be reminded of what the W is when our entire time with those two characters together is a, about looking at the constellations and the shapes they make. It's like, we're good. We got it. Yeah, I think also like, yeah, some of the stuff with the tape was a little funky for me in that regard. Starring role for tape in this show. Yeah, big, big moment for tape. Also, like, in terms of, like, with all the filler that we had in this season,

the fact that, like, we only glance at Walk's story and sort of, like, why she's agoraphobic and all this sort of stuff like that. Like I'll be, hopefully we'll, we'll learn more about that in the future. All right. Final twist. As you mentioned, like the revelation that the display is a lie. And again, I just really love that the cake is lie. I love that everyone was wrong.

That it's, it's, is like a double twist. It's really fun. It's revealed right at the beginning of the book. And so they save it for a twist at the end of the book. end. And then... Good, good choice. The reveal of the silos everywhere is their big lost season one moment.

So suppose for the end of lost season one. Gramio said, we also wanted another big question with the additional silos, which is something like the hatch and lost. What does all this mean? That feels like a great thing to kick off another season. Hatch! Hatch! Hatch! You gotta make your own kind of music.

You have some fruit for your blender? Amazing. I'll meet you on the exercise bike. Wonderful. Wonderful. You know, I don't believe in exercise. But I do love a smoothie. Anything you want to say about the final reveal, how it all ends, etc., etc.? I thought it was great. I thought it was devastating. I really enjoyed the twist being actually the thing you were seeing was the truth all along. Brutal. I like that the answers spark more questions.

but those new questions are also still connected to breadcrumbs and questions that we had all 10 episodes, you know, this recurring quest for this massive door under the water down and the deep down, beneath the deep down. I thought it was interesting. I don't know if you felt this way too. It seemed to me that when Juliet was describing the door to Bernard, he was like, he had a look on his face like,

he maybe didn't know what she was talking about, which was intriguing to me. Like, what doesn't Bernard know as the person? who has all of this knowledge relatedly, this is not specifically about the actual twist at the end, but when the image, when they're trying to hack into all the screens and show the image of the outside

that they think is the true outside to everyone, and Bernard tells everybody in the control room, including... Sims. Robert, including Sims to turn around in terms of their relationship, their dynamic, Sims' quest to become Bernard Shadow.

That was really fascinating to me, like, what does he know and what doesn't he know? the tunnel, you know, you go back to like the first time that George and Allison successfully booted up all of these files and they have this image of this tunnel. Like, what is this mean? Where does this go? Again, I have not read these books, so I have no idea. My assumption is that that will connect to another silo.

Yeah. And so like one of the things I'm wondering about because our guy Lucas, this is where I will quickly say, so another, he was recently in Black Mirror. So that was fun to have just seen him twice. You had some, we were talking pre-pod, you had some questions about how they've been able to keep their pharmaceutical industries going for all this time in the silo. And I sold you that my question was, how have they managed to continue producing this 2003 hipster quality, like, carhart work in progress, corduroy shacket level wardrobe on Lucas. Astonishing stuff. I also think that Juliet's wardrobe is incredible.

These like sweaters, they're just wonderful. a lot of questions, but from a position of awe and respect and adoration, about how they have maintained this manufacturing of this very hip supremely modern now fashion. Lucas sent to the mines.

So... Where are the mines? We didn't see, but we get these little tantalizing nuggets, right? This is the punishment. This is being imprisoned. We hear Bernard very quickly mentioned the idea of, like, iron, or

so something that is fueling the ongoing sustainability of the silo. But if they are, they call it to mine, Joanna. If it's deep, deep, deep underground, will that, now we know there's like no light. You can't see. That's part of the damnation. How can it be deeper than where the groundwater is, though? Like, haven't we seen the bottom of the very bottom of the silo is where the groundwater is? Maybe it's off to the side somewhere.

It's just like a side lobe? Sign mine. Side loo. Got the silo and the side loaf. Maybe he'll discover a tunnel somehow. I mean, now that he's down there. Maybe he'll mine his way to another silo. But like here's what I think is fascinating.

The Lucas character makes bag for me, though Avi Nash is very, very fun to look at. So that's great. But the, I just have some quick notes for George. And these notes also apply to Dumbledore. If you're going to die and you've got something very important that someone needs to know. Yeah. Just a little more precision. Cryptic clues are not the way to go.

Not cryptic clues. He's like, Juliet, you followed all my clues. And then even in that video when he's like, you follow all my clues, he's like, I know you're worried about the water, but it doesn't matter. And I'm like, say more. Say more, George. But doesn't the water matter? Could you say it with your mouth? That would be great.

But obviously, like, her fear of water and having to overcome that to perhaps fend the door, et cetera, is obviously going to come into play. I still have questions about the magnification because I know, like, I know they read library on the hard drive. Like, there's some moments where they're, like, reading little, but, like, is there something else

that magnification will reveal in the future? I don't know. I guess, like, my thought for most of the season was that it would be about that, like what they would be able to read and learn if they could see small print, serial numbers that allowed them to then unlock something else, information.

Maybe, you know, we get that moment with the camera, with walk about the wiring, like wiring being so small. So maybe it would allow them to learn how to craft more technology of their own, perhaps. I guess because we saw a magnification

in a medical context with Hannah, with the rabbit, seen and that idea of like the heart and heart repair, I wonder if there could be something. I don't really know how science works. How strong does the magnification need to be to see like microbes or something in the water or in the food supply and learn that they are in fact the memory eraser microbes in the water? If that's happening, maybe something there. I don't know. Got to be something, right? I cannot wait to find out. Maybe it's also like, like more of a, again, like the control thing, you know, if you can get on an elevator,

if you can get on a lift, you can do whatever you want whenever you want, ease of movement, speed and haste of movement and assembly. If you can read really small stuff, then. If you can learn how to fix a hole in your heart, then you don't need us anymore. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, them going after the rabbit was very interesting. Yeah. Also, I'm really, by the way, I'm really glad.

There's that scene where Juliet is, like, running away from common and a bunch of the other. judicial enforcers in the like sparsest cornfield you've ever seen. And I was like, I was like, if she gets away from them in this absolutely patchy cornfield where they can clearly see her, I'll have some notes. But she did it. That's okay. All right. Anything else we want to say about Silo?

I don't think so. I'm looking forward to season two. I'm really looking forward to reading the books. So we'll, uh, maybe we'll circle back at some point with a little House of Reeds check on our progress. I think, you know, we're determined to be caught up by season two, whenever that should be.

And as always, we reserve the right to say at any point that we didn't get to it and we'll get to it later. But right now, we have so many intentions. It's a fervent conviction. We already read,

we should say, I don't think we've said, but like we already read Percy Jackson. You said we were going to read it. You and I both read it in Europe. I'm having the time of my life reading Percy. The time of my life. We're doing our homework.

It's happening. This episode is brought to you by Nass Energy. Every ounce of dirt, sweat, and gears, every checkered flag and trophy raised, every lap, every race, every hard-bought place. They're all jammed inside every can of Nass energy, high-performance energy for burning the midnight oil in the garage, and pedal to the metal human horsepower for the streets. Go ahead, crack open a can of Nass energy and get after it. Want to support your gut health?

Take Activya's gut health challenge by enjoying two Activio Yogurt today for two weeks. and see if you feel a difference. With billions of probiotics and 20 years of scientific expertise, Activia is one of the easiest and tastiest ways to start your gut health ritual. Try Activia today. Enjoying Activia twice a day for two weeks as part of a balanced diet and healthy lifestyle may help reduce the frequency of minor digestive discomfort, which includes gas, bloating, rumbling, and abdominal discomfort.

This episode is brought to by Whole Foods Market. Spring is here, so celebrate it with fresh, juicy, seasonal produce and some very tasty, limited time flavors. New Whole Foods, Market Peach, Apricot, Rose, Italian soda. Perfect for a picnic or brunch, as is their trending mango, Yuzu, chantilly cake. But if you're on the go, new 365 strawberry pretzels make a great sweet snack. That sounds delicious. Get savings with yellow sale signs storewide and everyday low prices on 365 brand items.

Enjoy the fresh flavors of spring. save at Whole Foods Market. All right. Let's move over to Secret Invasion Episode 3. Quick one. A little Bobby Baratheon. Quick one. Just a check-in.

Just not a deep dive today. Just to check in. You ask me, Talos, choice between having my story told in ink and oil paint or having it written in blood, I choose blood all day long. Yours and everyone else's, huh? Yeah. Brive. All right.

Let's, we're not deep diving. As Molly mentioned, we're going to wait around a wee bit in the shallow waters of the secret invasion episode three. We're going to break convention usually we go chronologically. We're going to start with the Gaia thing, right? It makes sense to start there, right? So Amelia Clark, essentially our female lead of this series, gets shot in the chest in scroll form and falls to the ground. um howevskis

if you have seen any trailer footage you know this is not the last that we see of Amelia Clark uh in this show so there are two options as I see them yes number one and this is my favorite until I've decided

to switch to the other side but originally or actually it might be both I like the idea of I mean only because we haven't gotten to no Gaia that well at all I'd not really emotionally invested in her journey. So it was like, what if Guy is actually dead? Yeah. And they send another scroll in her place to embed with Fury and Talos. And that young woman we met last week where Gravick was like,

this is all because of you or whatever. And you mentioned that, you know, she is, this character has a name. I'm like, she could, you know, double for Gaia. And that way, a fun acting project for Amelia Clark is to get to pretend to be someone pretending to be someone else undercover, you know, double agent sort of stuff with Yuri and Taylor's. Option two is, though we did not see it, that Gaia has, you know, followed Gravick into the Super Scroll chamber and all by her lonesome, fired up the machine and gave herself extremist healing powers. We did see Gravick heal his own.

hand from the knife wound. So we see her on the ground. She shot. There's blood spreading on her chest, but listen. And she reverts back from human form into scroll form. That could be a fake out

on her part. She could be like he's looking for me to revert into scroll form. So I'm going to quickly do that. It's not like you went and checked for a pulse. I think for Amelia Clark

in the interest of screen time, she's probably hoping both of these things are true. I get to be both a double agent and surprise I'm not dead I don't no matter what

this is obviously not the last we're going to see of Amelia Clark either way you slice it I'm not delighted by this as a story beat how do you feel about it Mallory don't love it

I think that for the it's mostly because either way like for the reason that you said we just haven't really learned much about the character, and I think that because after Fury Talos, Talos Gaia is being positioned for us as like the driving relationship at the heart of

the story. And we don't know really anything about her or what's driving her. So it's just not as impactful as a result of that. Now, if she is in fact dead, I think I'm leaning. Those are my two potential guesses as well. Either she's, I guess again, maybe it's three. Maybe she's just faking her death because she can go back into scroll form and buy some time. I think it's more likely either those other two.

Has the extremist juice can heal and then go just fight for the other side. Or the Kreega, I like the idea of Krega for the hand. being the one who impersonates Gaya's form. That feels inside of the show that we've gotten so far, like the more likely path that she is, and I don't know, I thought I would buy either, but that she is in fact dead, which would be a huge bummer, and that a member of Gravick's army will assume the Amelia Clark form to infiltrate Talos's camp. I've been thinking, too, about, like, some of the nuggets you shared in the first episode

break down about like these emotional wallups that are supposed to be coming. Talos learning later on that his daughter had in fact died. Seems like from the show, again, the show we've gotten so far, like, I think they would present that to us as like, oh my God, this is the shred your heart reveal of a lifetime. And it would be very sad for Talos, certainly, but also like, I don't know. I think a lot of things in this episode, there were some stuff in the episode that I really enjoyed. I liked the Talos and Fury scenes a lot.

Ben Mendelsohn is just like making him Neil out of every moment that he has. He's wonderful. Wonderful on the show. The English breakfast interruption, the car ride where he's going on and on about how he basically those little birds network that he's been facilitating this entire time is like

how Varis became master of wishvers, how Fury, Rose, and Shield. Like, I really liked those scenes. And then I think you have things like the Gaia shooting and like the Priscilla. I'm jumping all around, but because we're only doing a quick check-

It's all kind of connected. Like, the Priscilla Fury kitchen scene to me was so emblematic of how the show has fallen short, I think, because it's something that the idea that you would learn more

about Nick Fury's life and the central relationships in his life would have been like one of the real animating sources of excitement heading into secret invasion. But what ends up happening is that it's just the third episode in a row where we got a version of the same lecture, right? Where were you?

Characters are telling Fury, you left, you weren't here, you couldn't handle it. And this is the third episode in a row, but also the character we have the least history with. So it's like the one that, in theory, you know, oh, this is your wife. This is like your life partner. It should be the most damning.

But it felt the most inert because we don't have any connection to their shared experience other than like end of episode of episode two and then the 98 flashback in the diner. Speaking of inert reveals, we should say. So at the very end of the episode, Priscilla goes on this like extremely long journey to get a gun. like a real real big effort just to get a gun at the end of the day. But also a phone call and she gets a phone call and the voice on the other end of the line is without question. Unmistakably. Don Cheatel as Rody.

So the question is, is this meant to be, this is the first thing that has happened that makes me doubt that Rody is to scroll because of how anticlimactic this. reveal would be of Rody as the scroll. Now, let's let's be real. The majority of these people do not watch these Disney Plus shows watching them like and then watching every like listening to every podcast and blah blah blah. So it's possible that a lot of people watch this and did not clock that that is Rody because they haven't spent years rewashed, Mallory's face, haven't spent years rewatching

all the Marvel movies, etc. or you know, the great works of Don Cheadle. but I think that this is just not how if this is the big if Rodey is a scroll is this how they're going to do it like I so now it makes me feel like it's somewhat impersonating

Rodey but that is not just what a scroll is I don't know Yeah exactly because then what does that mean does that imply that there are two Rodees out in the world that there's real Rody and then somebody impersonating Rodee or and that Rodee is not like Rodey Prime is not in a fracking

pod? Is that the theory? And I do think it's possible that we'll see a few different characters who are in that kind of scenario where more than one version of them is out in the world. We've already seen that. We saw Gravick impersonate Fury at the Unity Day bombing with Fury 10 feet away. It's not like that's an impossibility. 15 gravics also. Right. Just like every graphic is an art enthusiast. And if you have the chance to spend a day at the National Portrait Gallery

or really anywhere adjacent to it. National Gallery is right there. Trafalgar Square. Lovely. I also would enjoy hanging out as a graphic in the cafe in the National Portrait Gallery, though I like less sugar

in my espresso than he does. No sugar, please. No, he likes a little espresso and a sugar. I would love to go to the National Portrait Gallery and be surrounded by 15 Kingsley Benedears. That would be a fine time of the National Gallery. Wonderful. Wonderful. Another sugar moment. Where are we on like what we think is going on with the sugar?

The fact that our attention was drawn to it yet again, you know, we're officially in check off sugar. Yeah. Territory here. So I was, you know, your initial theory was that at some point a graphic would fail to do that and it would be the tell, right? Or strike that reverse. it where let's say Gravick is playing Nick Fury and he dumps a bunch of sugar in his coffee or something like that and Taylor's and Taylor's clocks it you know yeah like so because those are I think the main possibilities either somebody on the Taylor's Fury team I'm with you Joe is pretending to be Gravick at some point and it's just like not interested in sugar five heaping seconds worth of sugar pours and an espresso shot and that pings or the

reverse, I think, is also likely. Though this is where I get to, like, one of my other questions. Like, okay, this is another moment where when they've infiltrated Bob's Portsmouth compound, shout out Portsmouth. Great place. That does not, we got an email about this.

This is not what Portsmouth looks like. Not at all. Not even. Not at all. A single frame. Portsmouth is lovely. If you ever have the chance to spend a day there, I highly recommend it.

It's great. Beautiful. I once had a very hungry seagull steal the fish and ships right out of my hand as I sat on a bench by the open sea. Portsmouth to me. Yeah. Dirty sea birds will come steal the food run out of your hand. This was on my Jane Austen trip. It's not idyllic Tudor mansions in a beautiful suburban neighborhood. Inside of that. Yeah. Expansive abode. where young Zachary is, just jamming on video games. I wonder if Zachary listens

to Limburg and Jessica here at the Ring Reverse talking about gaming. We get another tip that, okay, Fury knows something's up. Taylor's been caught because of the utterance

of the word Nick. Nobody calls him Nick. This is part of the drive that Fury and Carol share back in Captain Marvel as they're entering Pegasus compound. And that is eventually how inside of Pegasus

Fury realizes that Talos is impersonating Keller because he calls him Nicholas. So on the one hand, it's like, okay, we call back to something that we know is a tell. Great. We had other moments where characters who we don't think are scrolls call him Nick and we believe that that would just be a thing that they said and then moments where Nick has been the signal that something's amiss. Okay.

The reason I mentioned that in the context of the sugar question, do we buy that the scroll army assembled by Gravick, a person who has known Nick Fury for three decades doesn't know this and wouldn't be mindful of that. And like, the second, so if it's scroll Bob

impersonating Talos's voice to do that, I'm like, he should know not to do that. If it's Talos and he says that, that guy should be aware that Nick Fury is coming in the door in a second. It's just like little things like that, especially because of your points in episode one about the spy craft of it

and how, like, that was one of the things that could have made the show work. I'm thinking back to you and like we get once again only one, but it is a wonderful scene with our gal Sonia. This just killed me. The owl with the eye patch. Sublime. There are a lot of things to critique about the secret evasion of our, this was absolutely remarkable. Ben Mendelsohn, Olivia Coleman, innocent, innocent, dashing little eye patch right now. Yeah. Just sensational.

I, as you know, thought in episode one that Sonia was aware, and I was happy to be wrong, right, but was aware this lens was there and was staging these conversations. You thought that was unlikely. Turns out she didn't know. I discovered the lens later is looking at it and this scene is telling Fury, hey, you fucked me over. I found this little spy lens that you had. We're supposed to think that Sonia Fowlesworth is a highly capable character.

One of the few people in the world, not only out of necessity, but out of respect, who Nick Fury would trust. I'm sorry, but an MI6 agent who has Nick Fury, like the spy, not just a spy, as people like to say, the spy, in her chambers, touching every one of her possessions, doesn't think that he left something there. That's just weird to me. That's the kind of stuff that really takes me out of the story. And I don't know why, like, all the characters are making mistakes like that. It's disorienting. The Nick thing is so fascinating because there have been so many characters in the MCU who have called,

Nick Fury, Nick, including like Tony Stark and et cetera, et cetera, that's like, for them to return to this thing that was already sort of riddled with flat holes to make it again a point. But if we accept this as the truth of this six episode TV event, then we have to go back to last week because Rodi definitely called him. He says that's what this moment right here, right now is about Nick. So like, is that meant to be in the world of these six episodes, our indication that that Rodi was a scroll. Again, this is the most, I've ever doubted that that was the case because of the weird telephone reveal. But again, like, the show is making choices.

Like, if, if Gaia gave herself extremists and that's like... We saw a kingpin in a pixelated blurry photo on a cell phone. I don't... I think that that was just like the reveal that Rodi is a scroll, that's how we got it. All right. Thank you for giving me that terrible flashback to that Kinpin. I'll bring that up again, but that's a thing that happened in our very recent past. I do think it's still possible, though, that there are further reveals to come with

Rodi about his intentions. I don't necessarily think we have to assume yet that he's working for Gravick. There could be factions within factions within factions. Like, if Priscilla and Roady are up to something and Gravick is in the mix, who knows what their intentions are? This is part of the still the promise and potential of the show, but also part of how it can really tie itself into knots, is that everybody can be running two, three, four games, games within games within games.

You're right, because I've seen some people tied up in this idea that there are like two furies running around, like a scroll fury and an on scroll fury. And I'm like, how are they going to explain that at the end? Like, we only have three episodes to go. You have to be so careful with like an impersonation show or impersonation plot. This is like the faces man problem that we talked about. Last but not least, I want to make sure to mention before we go. And Mallory, you would be more excited about this if we were further along in our Doctor Who

rewatch. but the actor Tony Curran, one of the all-time gingers, who we saw in holographic form in episode one. In the conversation that I thought was staged. That wasn't. Well, I mean, I wasn't sure that Gaia was informing for Taylor's and then she was. So, you know, mistakes were made on both sides. Tony Curran is not only in the holograph form in episode one, but on the dossier that Sonia is looking at in this episode.

I love him. I'm a big fan. He's like top-tier ginger for me. So he plays Vincent Van Gogh on a very famous episode of Doctor Who. That's where most people know him from. But he's fun wherever he shows up. He's shown up in like Daredevil and the Flash and like all kinds of fun ring or verse properties. But he's coming. We only have three episodes left. So I don't know what he'll be doing. But he's on his way. So when are we going to get back to our guy, President Ritson? I know. I was like, we had one hallway stroll. Two whole weeks without known cellist Dermot Mulroney? Like, what are they doing here? Maybe he's been there with us in the score. You know, that's the true secret invasion is that he's been part of the score with this work. That's a jealous. Who could say?

Before we go, just one last mention of the fact that Amelia Clark is still wearing a wig, and I'm not sure why. I have no idea why. It might just be like a convenient thing. She didn't want to do her hair every morning. I don't know. That's what Juliana Margulies did on The Good Wife. So, you know, there was no plot reason.

She didn't want to have to do her hair every morning. And maybe she got used to that with her Colise wig. And she's just like, you know what's better than sitting in the hairstyling chair? Slap a wig on me. I'm used to it. There's no time to style your hair if you're coming up with these super convincing, believable excuses for Gravick that it was Brogan who ratted out the same house and not you. I'm just like a really good liar.

So don't worry about it. And then Easterks, we're not going to do like a full rundown, but, you know, we get a Black Widow Drake off. mentioned. I liked that. That was cool. I thought that was really fun. Shout out from Priscilla. This should put Drake Coff's man on their heels.

Little envelope slide. A little bloody fingerprint on the envelope. I love a bloody fingerprint. What's your take on? Has Priscilla been embedded this entire time as a way to keep eyes on Fury? Or did she actually like

fall for him and her current agenda is motivated by that resentment of being abandoned by him. I'm still not totally sure that she's really an opposing force. She seemed very uncertain about the gun. Like, my read just, again, I don't think the script is helping me, but based on performance, my read is that she is interested in the graphic agenda, especially since Nick Fury like opted to leave the planet,

etc., as she mentions. But she's not gung-ho about it, and she's very uncertain. And, like, going to get the gun, she's like, a gun. I grow airplants in my beautiful, well-appointed home. What am I doing here?

So, yeah, we'll see. Yeah. I mean, obviously it would be, you know, again, it would, I think, land more impactfully if we had more time with that character

and their history and their relationship together. But certainly if... one of the people, not only who had that direct tied to Fury, like his romantic partner, but had been another person who was a part of that group since the very beginning, you know, part of his spy network,

that initial crew at the Taylor was swearing in, was one of the people, one of the people who had lost faith in him and his ability. That would be a hard thing for him to carry. She, of course, is also the one who brought Gravick in, so, like, there is a reason to believe in, like, the Priscilla or Vara graphic tie. You know what else is a small thing,

but I thought was interesting in terms of like, I am enjoying tracking the morality on the Nick Fury front and just in general, like with the spycraft and the missions and how people are making choices and what they can justify to themselves. There was that little moment. I wish we were getting more things like this in the show because I think it's compelling when Fury asked who the human form like was that Vara slash Priscilla had adopted?

Like, who was she? And it becomes, it just becomes a part of their flirtation. That depends. You know, yeah. Yeah. And like, to me, what was fascinating about that is like, wait, you took this person's life and nobody cares, including Nick Fury, right? Because that's part of what is necessary for their work to just steal people's

identities and lives. That's the currency of their existence. I wish we were, like, living inside of that a little bit more. Yeah. Real Wonder Woman 1984 energy there. Don't worry about it. Your boyfriend, Steve Trevor, is back. Don't worry about the life of the man that he is stolen from him.

Okay. I think that's it for Secret Invasion episode three, unless there's anything that you want to talk about. Well, I'll just throw out my subtitle because I do think it requires one more acknowledgement. The full English. That's a beautiful plate of breakfast. And so we must remark on it once more.

full English abandoned needlessly, demeaning dog food remark lingering, fowly in the air alongside still pleasing fried egg and grilled tomato aroma. Absolutely bizarre comment from Nick Jerry. What the fuck are you talking about? It looked wonderful. I hope a full English. Me too. All right. Well, that does it for this week's episode of the Ringerverse, in which we discussed both all of

10 episodes of Silo and episode 3 of Secret Invasion. Man, and the next week we're going to talk about six months of content, you know? Usually we spend two hours on three minutes of TV where it's a real twist for us these couple weeks. I can't wait to hear what's on your best of the year so far this next week, Joe. Can't wait to talk about some of the things we've loved. Yeah, I'm excited to hear from our listeners if there's any, like, especially I'm always looking for like good book recommendations, et cetera, et cetera, in the genre's

So if there's anything new that you've been reading that might not be on our radar, Hobbits and Dragons at gmail.com. As we mentioned here on the feed, there is so much going on at all times. Check out Jess's video this weekend. Check out the gaming pod next week. Come back for the Midnight Boys, Pugh, to talk about the ongoing endeavors of Tom Cruz to kill himself for our own cinematic enjoyment, A.K. Wish was possible

and Secret Invasion, Mallory and I will see you next Friday. Be well. Bye!