'Silo' Season One and 'Secret Invasion' Episode Three
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Hi, I'm Erica Ramirez, founder of Illy and host 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, Steven 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 TLC asked back in the day, what about your friends?

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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 me better than I am? All right, so make me understand. I'm not with Gravik because I'm with you. Hello, welcome into the Ringiverse, your Nexus podcast feed for all things fandom. I'm Joanna Robinson and joining me today for a grand experiment, if you will,

Um, 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 submarines 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 House of R. 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 check in. We got... Just over the last few weeks, we have received so many emails from you, our listeners. Steve.

from you, our listeners, about the television series, Silo, 10-episode television series that just wrapped up on Apple TV+. Mallory and I said, bet. And in the last 48 hours, we watched the whole thing. Yeah. So we can talk about it for you today. A season of TV in a day and a half. We sure did do that. And so we will be talking. I just had a blast, honestly. I had a blast. Yeah, I had a great time. I had a great time.

And like for 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 talk about silo for for, you know, like two thirds of the show today and then like one third one third secret invasion. That is 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 programming 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 them out if you haven't. Speaking of Jess, she and Ben Lindbergh will be here with Gaming Pod on Monday to talk about Knights of the Old Republic, a classic Star Wars game. Midnight Boys will be back pew-pew on Wednesday to talk about both Secret Invasion, but also...

Mission, colon, impossible, hyphen, dead, reckoning, comma, part one. Yeah.

That's what the Midnight Boys are doing. And then Mallory and I will be back on Friday to talk about both Secret Invasion, but also we'll be doing a Best of the Year so far. Yeah. Mid-year check-in. That's right. On House of R Friday. So, Mallory, if people want to like, if they have thoughts and feelings about Best of the Year, how best to tell us what they think about that?

Send us your emails. Send those emails on over to hobbitsanddragons at gmail.com. What are your favorite pieces of nerd culture this year? Genre stories, TV shows, movies, games, comics, books, musicals.

Anything. Everything. Send us your Apple thoughts and feelings as always. Keep the emails coming. And while you're at it. Yeah. While you're on your phone, while it's in your hand. Of course. Follow the pod. Follow the pod on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Follow the ringerverse. And it has never been more true to say on the social media platform of your choosing. You know, where will we be next? Who can say? We're out there, though. You can find us out in the world. Are you like hashtag bring back peach?

The way my heart stopped with joy, though, and glee when I thought 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. It 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, and then 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 – Maller and I each 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.

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. So, you know, it was always on the watch list, but it definitely felt like when the season wrapped. Okay. This is a, 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.

All right. That was a very emotional David Oyelowo. And I just want to say that like David, his performance is Holstenbecker. He was a sheriff. Yeah. Incredible. Yeah.

Of all the British actors in the show, I just want to say I think he is the most innocent when it comes to commitment to the American accent. Except in that moment when he like starts crying. He says, Alison Becker. And like whoever he says that, I was just sort of like, that's his one, 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 Howey.

And just some quick background on the book front in case people don't know. And this is like 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 ebook on Amazon for 99 cents. And it essentially went viral online.

And people in the reviews were like, more, more, more of this world, more, more, 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 before.

I think when we'll came out, I think that's right. Um, and, and these were always like interesting stories for us to track. As we looked at like the book industry, it 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. Um,

And then his initial efforts were so popular that like Random House UK came calling, Simon & Schuster came calling, blah, blah, blah. He sold, he very famously turned down a seven-figure deal for, in order to retain the rights to the eBooks. 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 like South Africa and like married a model in 2022 and like rides horses all day as far as I know. So like,

Ultimate success story. Number three. Sold the film. Wow, riding horses all day. The Taylor Sheridan. Yeah. Goodness. He's a real horse girl, Hugh Howey. All right, last but not least, sold the film, Right to the 20th Century Fox, in 2012. Okay, that didn't work out, obviously. Here we are, a 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 Howey. 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'm thinking, I believe Annihilation was self-published before it became like, you know, a conventional book. And then like Fifty Shades of Grey. Okay.

Of course. 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 thoughts or feelings about- Erotica? Uh-huh. Fifty Shades? No. Well, he would have a-

Bad baby. That's just an incredible and downright aspirational origin story. I love it. 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 years.

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 that on its head and repositioning it as a nice reminder for myself and for all of us in this community that it's 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. 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, is 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 in both 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 Tor.com or Tor.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 it's,

you know, successes, this TV series isn't quite fully captured. 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, it's not like in the dialogue necessarily. And so, you know, the, 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 stairs 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. By season two, we'll be like, that wasn't in the book. I do have a right back in our comfort zone. Yeah.

a few of those based on interviews I read. So I have, we'll talk about those a little bit, but like, yeah. So, so this silos 10 episodes, which ran from May 5th to wrapped up on June 30th. That is July 7th as we're recording this. Um, super well received, right? Um, yes. Yeah. Respectable, uh,

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. Right.

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...

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 where we break. 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. I like that as a line of speculative thinking. I will say that,

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 a character moving forward. Because on the one hand, as we will talk about, I think we both, like literally instantly, the second that Tim Robbins and his attention was

villain haircut walked on 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 and to 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 Kingstown. 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 mean, 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. Patrick, easily my favorite character, by the way. I'll just shrug and run the other way, as Julia doesn't want to do. All right.

We're going to talk for a second about series creator Graham Yost, because this is like one of my favorite guys of all time. 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 Graham Yost is shaping featuring Ian Glenn and Rebecca Ferguson. I mean, why did it take us 10 weeks? Exactly. We're a little like, what's wrong with us? What's wrong with us?

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 his, the crown jewel in his achievement is the TV series Justified. I've known him a lot. Which Mallory and I absolutely adore. One of my favorite shows, like in my top five favorite shows of all time, personally. And then,

And then in his post-FX career, he was sort of bouncing around. He was at a deal at AMC. And then he got sort of wrapped into this 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 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...

But Yost 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 sitting 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? Yeah.

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 walk on the stairs. He needs a little more room to maneuver than a state-of-the-art single stairwell. The hips out need room to sway. You know what I mean? Indeed, indeed. But... And that was really... So I think that, like, justified...

uh 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 I will say on that front too like more broadly um

And to your point about like Yost identifying where in 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. And 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 like genre blend in season one and how it kind of promises a, a widening of scope moving forward.

I think this is such an, because again, Yost's CV is like long, but if we take the two shows that you and I have enjoyed the most, Justified and 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 this 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 Hulu. 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 Raylan Givens is like his cool lawman. It's that he is oftentimes drawn back into crimes in his hometown. So it's all this history.

history is baked into what we're doing here. So you've got like, we dug coal together. We dug coal 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 other stuff. But what's interesting about the murder mystery, the George murder mystery, which winds up not being a murder after all, um,

that Juliet is hunting down is, again, in reading interviews and stuff 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. It'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-Westworld, 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 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... Are earlier. Those aren't mysteries in the book. They're just right there from the start. And as a...

I think with honestly with Mick's success in the show um

Um, 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. Um, we were delighted to see Yost's reference Lost as sort of a mild inspo on where to hit the finale. Um, and Hugh Howey also has been talking about Lost interviews a little less glowingly. Um, and...

I don't know. What do you think of this, like, a mystery, like, turning this story, 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, um,

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 here. I feel confident saying now that making George a more central figure in 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 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. 10 episodes is a lot, though. It's a lot to have to maintain. So this is something I want to talk about for sure, is that this idea of

And Yost himself said in an interview, basically, that they padded 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 that's not the end of the first book. 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? 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. And there's a lot of world building to do inside of this universe that isn't necessary when you're plopping us into space.

London with Gary Oldman in a filthy trench coat and solving a conspiracy crime. But part of what makes Slow Horses, I think irrefutably one of the five best shows on TV right now, just like top tier, excellent shows.

adaptive storytelling 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, a tad long. And yeah, 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 quickly. I do want to just, on the Ferdinand Kingsley front, I would, I will 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 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 incredibly animating scene

a possibility of like 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. Great stuff. In this show. And we should just shout out that Ferdinand Kingsley was also in our favorite episode of Sandman as Hobgadling and was phenomenal in that. Tremendous. Great couple years in genre for Ferdinand Kingsley. And Kingsley's very handsome son. All right, so...

You're like, this is a public service announcement to make sure everyone knows Ben Kingsley has a hot son. 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, oh,

A lot, right? 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+, and their commitment to sci-fi, which is a fascinating thing. Because outside of some other hits like Ted Lasso or whatever, there's this real strong, big budget drive for...

You know, Foundation is like a clear example of a show that they poured a lot of money into. And IP that they were really invested in. For All Mankind is one of their most critically beloved shows. There's Sea. There's Invasion. Amazing Stories. Hello Tomorrow! And then, of course, our shared love, Severance. Severance actually has a lot in common with this show. Yeah. Mm-hmm.

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+. And I think it's interesting for a couple reasons. One...

It came about, 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 it. So, like, you know.

Variety, Hollywood Reporter, Vanity 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 list or whatever. And I zeroed in on Matt Shurness, who is the head 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, blah. And WGN, a network that nobody cared about, suddenly became a place that people actually kind of talked about for a little while. And there was a bunch of great genre, like Outsiders is a genre, a bunch of great genre shows in that run. And so Matt Chernis, who was the head of WGN, comes over as the head of programming at Apple. And I really think that...

I don't know because no one's written this article, but I really think that he is the driver of this, of this, uh, sci-fi essence over at, um, Apple TV plus. What do you like? I'm a fan. I, I think that like one of the things I'm enjoying about the slate and I'll say like, I, I'm enjoying the Apple TV slate more broadly. We obviously talked about slow horses already. I really enjoyed shrinking. Um,

We don't need to discuss Ted Lasso 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 Lasso because I wear an incredible amount of Todd Snyder champion sweatshirts and Air Jordans. Anyway...

Should we like kick up your visor game? Like, do we need to work on that? You know? 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 for a while. I haven't done it since I was 13. Okay. I don't plan to do it again, but there was a stretch of my life where I did it routinely. Paint us 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? No, not green plastic. I had like a khaki colored visor. What?

With some red fonting. And I definitely, I would wear it to baseball games a lot. This was the stretch where I was going to Camden as often as I could to watch the Baltimore Royals. Not sure if you're aware, Joe, that the O's beat the Yankees 14-1 last night. And Gunnar Henderson had four hits, including two home runs. Just thought I'd catch you up on that. Can you say the name of that? Yeah, there you go. Anyway, back to Apple TV. If they're interested in making a show about the...

2023 Baltimore Royals 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 in 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, 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 thread on Slack the other day. I found it after the fact and I was like, where was my tag? I know, 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 Pace 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 anew, 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 too 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 and

It requires a lot. That said, they're just like rocking with Timmy Chalamet 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 that Dune is coming out? Have you heard that Dune 2? Have you heard that Wonka is coming out? Winter of Chalamet. All right.

Shallow May 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 show.

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 Oyelowo, very questionable. It's just frankly astounding. So if you heard last week's episode on Secret Invasion, where we talked about the lovely Juliet Stevenson and her line delivery of platitudes. Don't you be one of those students who gives me up.

We're going to do a little section here asking who wins the Juliet Stevenson platitudes 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. Okay. Oh my God. Okay. So we're going to start with everyone's favorite bad mom from succession.

The great Dame Harry. Harry Walter is incredible on the 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 Alison. This is a gender swap character. It's a man of the book, but they made it a lady, a Dame Harry 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, that's 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 longest clip, mostly because I just wanted everyone to enjoy her lie delivery of all the ING words with the apostrophe, like sitting.

Absolutely sublime. Extraordinary stuff. I assume you'll be waiting to return to the Walk character in Wigwatch. Speaking of Wigwatch...

We're going to talk about Mr. Ian Glenn, Sir Jorah Mormont himself. Patron saint of 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, Jorah Mormont is the foundational shared passion. We are sister wives. He is our husband. Ian Glenn is very important to us. Nonetheless...

Let's listen to his delivery of the word hours. It could take five or six hours for it to flush through her system. Gotta get her back before the night nurse starts his rounds. 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. If you guys have never seen Sophie Thompson, I think 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 and knew he'd never have a chance with me and he'd never go if I told him the truth. So I ran into him once when he was with his children. Oh, Gloria. Darling Gloria.

Sweet Gloria. Another wig watch 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 one.

Delivery of the word apartment. Steve Lee 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 R's will really fuck him 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 this out. Let's hear Ian Glenn again. This is the word early. Steve, will you play this, please? She showed real interest in machines from an early age. Oh,

And last but not least. 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. Is anyone around? All right.

Rebecca Ferguson, we should say, Rebecca Ferguson was also all over the map, but like... A dereliction of 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 R's, and it's really funny. So, with the exception of holo,

Hello? Man. Remarkable. Who wins the Julius Stevens Planet Tuesday? It has to be the last clip. The whole while. From our beloved walk. Remarkable stuff. I...

I want to thank you for the time and care that you put in to the Juliet Stevenson Blattitudes 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 was... 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, et cetera, 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. Like, they're all tremendous. Like, they're great. Absolutely tremendous. So no knock on them. We just, you know, we just had to do accent quarter. So here we go. Hmm.

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 constructing a world narratively and then 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 before.

in our coverage of Andor when we're talking about Coruscant 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 Snowpiercer train if you started 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 downed deepers eating babies was a Snowpiercer shout out. Please revisit that scene of Chris Evans talking about babies tasting the best. It is one of my favorite things that exists in the world. Okay. Other clear inspirations here, the Fallout games. Yes.

Hugh Howey 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 silos. But it takes place outside of the silos. But the silos are part of the Fallout game. Handmaid's Tale and the fertility plotline, the fertility front. And then Plato's Cave in regards to the screen and the allegory of the cave with Plato having to do with, you know,

if you did not take a class on Playdoh in school or whatever, is 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 Howey interviews that I was actually listening to this morning was that

He said that the construction of this, 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 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 constantly down our phones and looking at the world through...

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 news story after bad news 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, blah. Mal, what do you think of that?

these like building blocks of the silo world. I really, I love all of those call outs. I love the Plato's cave call out 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 that like the way that your own curiosity fuels

Your view of reality, that question of what is out there when we learn about the flame keepers. 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, 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, right?

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, was

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 being driven mad by the sight of something that is not a part of your everyday existence and that thus you cannot comprehend anything.

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, is.

Made me think of Never Let Me Go and more specifically Ishiguro's use of language because 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.

I think this is like, yeah, one of the most successful. Yeah. Because so often if you have too many or whatever, it can just lang like with a clang. You know what I mean? And it just feels forced. Yeah, well, and then you're just in something completely, completely new, a different space entirely. It's going to feel like cutesy and just sort of like just wholly false. Yeah.

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, completely.

You know, it was 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 and pack to, to syndrome and the way that they describe the deep down in the mids, et cetera, like the actual language of the place itself is,

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, lurking. It's this thing that you get with sunlight. Yeah. They have fake sunlight, but they don't have, like, real sunlight to cast a real shadow in the silo. 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...

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. Like the things that you would get above ground. But one of my other theories was...

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 it did. I really like this idea of like someone who's like letter of the law by the book.

and how it bumps up against Juliet's character and 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, et cetera, et cetera. 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 this 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. Um,

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 one's like,

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 may 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

that is baked into the concept here because this is something that Gremio shouted out. Like our current writer anxiety around AI, you know, the WGA strike and all of the negotiations they're doing obviously came after they had put together this season and obviously came after Hugh Howie, long after Hugh Howie wrote his book.

But a Yost 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. AI was not a high priority on our agenda last year, but then chat GPT came out and I was like, oh my Lord, it's not great, but it can learn. We 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 Howey said in an interview was he was writing it around the time of the Arab Spring earthquake.

uprisings and how Twitter was used to organize a lot of those protests and how they would block out Twitter in certain sections, certain countries in order to discourage

you know, right of assembly sort of thing. And so the idea that like, you could not take the elevator to all gather on floor 75 to have an uprising, right? You can't communicate that way. Um, so it's a very analog world, except the 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. Um,

Between Black Mirror and I will just say, without spoiling anything, the upcoming Mission Impossible film, like this is a real tech-phobic time in our mainstream pop culture. Any thoughts or feelings about that, Molly Rubin?

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, purely there as the villainous force and the force of ill. The fact that the way that our...

our heroes, our characters who are fighting for truth and light and goodness, and

need technology because technology represents access or represents information. So like, and it gets back to that larger point and you just read it in that quote, right? It's all, it's how it's used, like 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. Right.

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. Libraries. Sensational stuff. Remarkable, truly. We're fortunate to be alive to witness this. But yeah, like the, 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 pact. I think like a minute before that I had said out loud, 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. Okay, 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, hobbsanddragons at gmail.com and let me know. But I feel like the entire premise of that gets sort of

Smash the smithereens when it's revealed that there's a unmonitored trash chute that you can climb up and down that many characters are aware of. It's not a secret trash chute. Everyone knows about it. So why the stair blockade makes no sense then. I really liked the show, but there were a few moments where I was like, this is an unforgivable thing.

Usually I can let these things roll. But I was like, the trash chute, I was like, no, you've made so much about the fact that they control the stairs, they can blockade the stairs. You can't then at the 11th hour introduce a trash chute to me. Especially when Juliet can drop down 20 floors and not break every bone in her body. That part, I definitely had questions about how is Juliet alive after not just that, a number of falls or jumps from the stairs.

It's considerable heights. I guess the answer would be that, one, because of the suppression of curiosity and rogue ambition, people would never think to go in, but also just the peril of it. 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 plan.

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 the checks. But then why not? There's smugglers everywhere.

They don't recycle at night, right? You could climb it at night. Like, what are we? I don't know. 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 exist.

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. The presentation of relics in the show, I feel like nothing has survived. So...

This idea, I mean, you know. 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. That's what I'm saying. It 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 Lannister, there's nothing 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 from the play, right? So like Romeo and Juliet as a concept exists. We don't really see any like theater references

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

But, like, how does story 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 the deputy. And sort of, like, they're talking about their love story, which, by the way, absolutely devastated me. Very sad. 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 story as it goes forward. What 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? Yeah. I'm really intrigued by that too. And it's one of my big questions about the story overall and where this is heading and what the bigger reveals are, in fact, about what happened because the reveal that

The beautiful vista, green tree, lush grass, birds flying in the same V formation. I know a screensaver when I see one. Applevisors, there they are, right? Surprise me to get some Apple TV product placement there. Our product will last a century and a half into the dystopian future so that you can use it to control your silo. The world outside is, in fact...

A disaster. It is a barren wasteland from our glimpse of the very end. The air is poison. The air is poison, right? The fact that they've got that good supply tape on Juliet at the end is the only reason that she isn't killed by the noxious air. Here's my question. Okay, the world is in fact...

the unsafe, uninhabitable, unsurvivable hellscape 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 Juliet 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, what would make that threat? Well,

We'll 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 can 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 that in 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 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. It's it's a that's a really fascinating question. That is being literally bred out of the population. Exactly. Because it's such a risk. Yeah. Such a threat.

Yeah. 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 Mallory Rubin in the Reluctant Hero Club, right? Yeah. Yost 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 a dead body trying to figure out how that happened. A great nodding hill nod from Yost. Incredible. Juliet gives us an iconic moment.

I don't want it. I don't want it. I don't want it. You are my queen. Thank you, Steve. I was so hoping that you would do that. I'm looking to 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 it's just because...

Well, I guess when you pluck a Harry Potter out of under the stairs or a Jon Snow out of, you know, 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 Harry.

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 engineer, right? And so, and what I like is that she,

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 will wear your crown until I figure that out. And then I'm done.

Yeah. It's a handy portal to 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, this is, I think maybe another reason why it, it, 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. Only if I go through the hatch. Yeah, exactly. And so I don't think that there's like Juliette

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 to mechanical, to this like...

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, just in a different way. So that's a nice little twist. I think that's part of it, too, that 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 Oyelowo die, you could be like, does Rebecca Ferguson die in episode three? But I was like, no, she most assuredly does not. So like,

they apparently this is 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 my thing okay let's talk about some other archetypes beyond the reluctant hero um

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

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 a back of my jaw feeling he was absolutely wonderful I loved him I thought that both Ian Glenn and

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... Like, give it a percentage. I think 25%. And as you know... In the flashbacks, I should say. One of the emails we got was just simply titled, Emergency Wig Watch. Emergency Wig 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 with subject line emergency wig watch. 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 Howey on the map, I think it's an incredible start to finish. And I think the story of Allison Holstenbecker is just an incredibly perfectly poignantly written story.

story I thought Rashida Jones was fantastic I thought David Oyelowo was fantastic and I think that the character of Allison I really we're gonna talk about secret invasion 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 what 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

And what they forget to do is make that wife character an actual character. And what I love about Alison Becker in this is just, 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, blah. And then she dies. 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 a fridging. 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 life.

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 like the way that he just like goes up and dies by her side is tremendously poignant um just i 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 uh

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 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? 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? 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, sort of the final twist and then hop over to Secret Invasion? There are some, like, flashbacks, mixed feelings about the flashbacks. Yeah, I think... 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 in 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, et cetera. 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 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 that sort of stuff like that, like, I'll be, hopefully we'll learn more about that in the future. Yeah.

All right. Final twist. As we mentioned, like the revelation that the display is a lie. And again, I just really love that. The cake is a lie. I love that everyone was wrong. That it's like a double twist. It's really fun. Revealed right at the beginning of the book. And so they save it for a twist at the end. And then. Good choice. The reveal of the silos everywhere is their big.

season one moment. So spoilers for the end of lost season one. Grammio said, we also want another big question with the additional silos or 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 got a wrong 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. Um,

Anything you want to say about the final reveal, how it all ends, et cetera, et cetera? 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 in 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? Um...

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 does 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. Yeah.

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 told you that my question was, how have they managed to continue producing this 2023 hipster quality, like Carhartt, 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. So I have 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, send 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 mention the idea of iron, ore. So something that is fueling the ongoing sustainability of the silo. But if they are, they call it tomorrow.

Come on. 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? Side blow? Side mine. Side blow? Side mine.

Got the silo and the side loaf. Maybe he'll discover a tunnel somehow. I mean, 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. I mean, Ash 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, Juliette, you followed all my clues. And then even in that video when he's like, you followed 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. Why doesn't the water

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 find 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 allow 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 magnification in a medical context with Hannah, with the rabbit scene 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...

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.

cannot wait to find out maybe it's also 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 yeah you don't need us anymore 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 didn't. That's okay. All right. Anything else you 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-in 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... Can't wait. We should say, I don't think we've said, but like we already read Percy Jackson. We said we were going to read it. You and I both read it in Europe, I think. I'm having the time of my life right now.

Reading Percy. We're doing our homework. It's happening. This season on Naughty Island. When we were new, they spoiled me. They even gave me a phone. But then it's like I didn't exist.

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Okay, fine. It's a lot of sweat. But with HubSpot's AI-powered marketing tools, launching benchmark-breaking campaigns is easier than ever. Get started at HubSpot.com slash marketers. All right, let's move over to Secret Invasion, episode three. Quick one, little Bobby Baratheon. Quick one. Just a check-in. Just not a deep dive today, just a check-in. You asked 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? Bright.

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, Emilia Clarke, essentially our female lead of the series, gets shot in the chest in Skrull form and falls to the ground, um...

And Howevsky, if you have seen any trailer footage, you know this is not the last that we see of Emilia Clarke 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 know Gaia that well at all. I'm not really emotionally invested in her journey. So it was like, what if Gaia is actually dead? Yeah. And they send another Skrull in her place to embed with Fury and Talos. And that young woman we met last week where Gravik 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 Emilia Clarke is to get to pretend to be someone pretending to be someone else undercover, you know, double agent sort of stuff with Yuri and Talos. Option two is, though we did not see it,

that Gaia has followed Gravik into the Super Skrull chamber and all by her lonesome, fired up the machine and gave herself Extremis healing powers. We did see Gravik heal his own hand from the knife wound. So we see her on the ground. She's shot. There's blood spreading on her chest. But listen. And she reverts back from human form into Skrull 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 gonna quickly do that it's not like you went and checked for a pulse i think um for amelia clark uh 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 um i don't no matter what this is obviously not the last we're gonna see of amelia clark um

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 it's mostly... Because either way, 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 Skrull form and buy some time. I think it's more likely either of those other two. Has the Extremis juice can heal and then go just fight for the other side. Or...

The Kriega. I like the idea of Kriega for the handshake being the one who impersonates Gaia'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 would buy either, but that she is in fact dead, which would be a huge bummer. And that a member of Gravik's army will assume the Emilia Clarke form to infiltrate Talos's camp and,

I've been thinking too about like some of the nuggets you shared in the first episode breakdown about like these emotional wallops 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, the shred your heart reveal of a lifetime. Um, and it would be very sad for Talos certainly, but also like, I don't know. Um,

I think a lot of things in this episode... There was some stuff in the episode that I really enjoyed. I liked the Talos and Fury scenes a lot. Ben Mendelsohn is just, like, making a meal 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, you know, he basically...

Those little birds network that he's been facilitating this entire time is like how Varys became master of wish first, 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 we got a Priscilla Fury kitchen scene to me was so emblematic of how the show has evolved.

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... 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 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 extremely long journey to get a gun. Like, 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 Cheadle as Rhodey. So the question is...

Is this meant to be... This is the first thing that has happened that makes me doubt that Rhodey is the Skrull because of how anticlimactic this reveal would be of Rhodey as the Skrull. Now, 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 roadie because they haven't spent years rewatch mallory's face haven't spent years rewatching um yeah all the marvel movies etc or you know the the great works of don cheadle um right but i think that

This is just not how, if this is the big, if Rhodey is a Skrull, is this how they're going to do it? Like I, so now it makes me feel like it's someone impersonating Rhodey, but that is not just what a Skrull is. Yeah, right, exactly. Because then what does that mean? Does that imply that there are two Rhodeys out in the world, that there's real Rhodey and then somebody impersonating Rhodey or, and that Rhodey is not like, Rhodey Prime is not in a fracking pod? Is that...

Right. 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 Gravik impersonate Fury at the Unity Day bombing with Fury 10 feet away. It's not like that's an impossibility. We saw 15 Graviks also. So, you know. Right. Just like...

Every Gravik 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 Gravik.

in the cafe and 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 Benedeers. That would be a fine time at the National Gallery. Another sugar moment. Where are we on 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 Chekhov's sugar territory here. So I was, you know, your initial theory was that at some point,

a Gravik would fail to do that and it would be the tell, right? Or strike that reverse it where let's say Gravik is playing Nick Fury and he dumps a bunch of sugar in his coffee or something like that. And Talos clocks it, you know? Yeah. Like, so, because those are, I think, the main possibilities. Either somebody on the Talos Fury team, I'm with you, Joe, is pretending to be Gravik at some point and it's just like...

Not interested in five heaping seconds worth of sugar pours and an espresso shot. And that

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. Okay.

remotely. A single frame. Portsmouth is lovely. If you ever have the chance to spend a day there, I highly recommend it. It's great. It's beautiful. I once had a very hungry seagull steal the fish and chips right out of my hand as I sat on a bench by the open sea. That sounds like Portsmouth to me. Yeah. Dirty seabirds will come steal the food right out of your hand. This was on my Jane Austen trip. My Jane Austen trip in college, Jo. 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 Lindbergh and Jessica here at the Ringiverse talking about gaming. We get another tip that

Okay, Fury knows something's up. Talos has 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've had other moments where characters who we don't think are Skrulls 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 mention that in the context of the sugar question, do we buy that the Skrull army, assembled by Gravik, 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. Um,

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 is like killed me. The eye patch. Sublime. There are a lot of things to critique about Secret Invaders of Var. This was absolutely remarkable. Ben Mendelsohn, Olivia Colman, innocent. Dashing little eye patch right now. Yeah. Just sensational. Yeah.

I, as you know, thought in episode one that Sonya 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 in 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 Sonya 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.

And 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 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 plot holes to make it again a point is

But if we accept this as the truth of this six-episode TV event, then we have to go back to last week because... With Rhodey. Rhodey 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 are indication that that Rhodey was a Skrull. 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...

Like if Gaia gave herself extremists and that's like... We saw Kingpin in a pixelated blurry photo on a cell phone. I don't... I think that that was just like the reveal that Rhodey is a Skrull. That's how we got it. All right. Thank you for giving me that terrible flashback to that Kingpin moment. I'm sorry to 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 Rhodey about his intentions. I don't necessarily think we have to assume yet that he's working for Gravik. There could be factions within factions within factions. Like if Priscilla and Rhodey are up to something and Gravik 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 Skrull Fury and an On-Skrull 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 um rewatch but the actor Tony Curran one of the all-time gingers um who we saw in holographic form in episode one in the conversation that I thought was staged that wasn't um well I mean I wasn't sure that Gaia was informing for Talos and then she was so you know we mistakes were made on both sides um

Tony Curran is not only in the holograph form in episode one, but on the dossier that Sonya 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 in 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 Daredevil and The Flash and all kinds of fun ringerverse 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. 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 no cellist Dermot Mulroney? Like, what?

What are we 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. I'm so jealous. Who could say? Before we go, just one last mention of the fact that Emilia Clarke 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 Julianna Margulies did on The Good Wife. So, you know, there was no plot reason. It's just she didn't want to have to do her hair every morning. Um...

And maybe she got used to that with her Khaleesi 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 Gravik 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.

We're not going to do like a full rundown, but you know, we get a black widow, Dracov. I like that. That was fun. That was really fun. Shout out from Priscilla. This should put Dracov's man on their heels. Little envelope slide. A little bloody fingerprint on the envelope. I love a bloody fingerprint. What's your, what's your take on, has Priscilla been embedded this entire time in

as a way to keep eyes on Fury? Or did she actually fall for him and her current agenda is motivated by that resentment of being abandoned by him twice? 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...

interested in the Gravik agenda, especially since Nick Fury, like, opted to leave the planet, et cetera, 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 air plants 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 the...

that character and their history and their relationship together. But certainly if one of the people, not only who had that direct tide of to fury, like his, 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 tail of swearing in was one of the people, one of the people who had lost faith in him and his ability to,

that would be a hard thing for him to carry. She, of course, is also the one who brought Gravik in, so, like, there is a reason to believe in, like, the Priscilla or Vara Gravik 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 spy craft 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 was.

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 what, 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 um don't worry about it your boyfriend steve trevor is back don't worry about the life of the man that is uh 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 uh because i do think it requires uh 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 foully in the air alongside still pleasing fried egg and grilled tomato aroma. Absolutely bizarre comment from Nick Fury. What the fuck are you talking about? Looked wonderful. Wonderful English.

Me too. All right. Well, that does it for this week's episode of The Ring of Verse, in which we discussed both all of 10 episodes of Silo and episode three of Secret Invasion. Man, and then next week, we're going to talk about six months of content, you know? Usually we spend two hours on 40 minutes of TV where it's a rough...

A real twist for us these couple weeks. I can't wait to hear what's on your best of the year so far list next week, Jo. 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 sphere. So if there's anything new that you've been reading that might not be on our radar, hobbitsanddragons 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 to talk about the ongoing endeavors of Tom Cruise to kill himself for our own cinematic enjoyment. A game which is possible in Secret Invasion. Mallory and I will see you next Friday. Be well. Bye. Bye.