Ringer-Verse Recommends: September 2026

The Ringer-Verse

In this September 2026 edition of Ringerverse Recommends, Ben Lindberg explores the current landscape of prestige sci-fi on Apple TV+. The e

Key takeaways

• Alex Kirshlar highlights how 'Silo' Season 3 uses a dark, subterranean aesthetic to reinforce its themes of social hierarchy.
• The discussion notes that 'Silo' Season 4 is already filmed and scheduled for release in July.
• The hosts identify 'multiverse fatigue' as a potential risk for shows like 'Dark Matter'.
• Ben Lindberg observes a significant reduction in live-action Star Wars volume on Disney+ compared to the 2019 era.
• The 'Lego Star Wars: The Mandalorian' special is recommended as a nostalgic, high-quality way to revisit the franchise.

Main topics

• Apple TV+ Sci-Fi
• Silo Season 3 and 4
• Dark Matter Multiverse

Notable quotes

I love rules. I love a format.

Conclusion

A comprehensive guide for sci-fi fans navigating the era of prestige s

Transcript preview

Speaker 4 (0:07) Hello and welcome into the Ringerverse, your Nexus feed for all things fandom. I am Ben Lindberg, Senior Editor at the Ringer, host of Button Mash, and of course, doing double duty as host slash MC of Ringerverse Recommends. This is our monthly roundup of all things nerd culture that we haven't had a chance to cover in depth on the Ringerverse or House of R. This is our edition for September 2026. It's been a busy month. We've had Lanterns coverage. We've had Resident Evil. We've had an enormous number of video games, and that onslaught continues on Button Mash. And so, as always, a number of excellent releases have fallen through the cracks, and we'll be covering as many of them as possible. Now, last month, in one segment, I had Adam Naiman on, and the theme was Dogs in Danger, as we talked about the end of Oak Street and the Dog Stars and Coyote vs. Acme. That will not be the theme this month. I considered covering Brad Pitt's new dog in danger movie, Heart of the Beast, which looks very much like the dog stars. But no, we're not doing that. It's not nerd culture. No dogs in danger, as far as I'm aware, really, on this episode. However, we do have a lot to get to. So one theme will be Apple TV sci-fi. And as usual, we have a cornucopia of Apple TV sci-fi series. And we're going to get into a bunch of them. Silo season three, which had a very big finish this month. We'll talk about Silo as a whole. We'll start in very accessible territory, and then we'll move into spoiler territory toward the end. I will be talking to Alex Kirshner, a pal of mine and a podcaster and writer about Silo. It's a favorite of his. Then I will be bringing on two other guests, Scott Tobias and Keith Phipps, who write and podcast together very often. And we will talk about dark matter. We'll also give our tier list of Apple TV sci-fi projects. Just what's in our S tier? What's in our A tier? What are the shows that we've watched and we've liked or we haven't watched? And what do we think of Apple TV? as a whole, which has a whole lot of huge critical darlings, not as many mainstream hits. We will also get into Star Trek, Strange New World, season four, the penultimate season, and we'll assess the state of Star Trek at the 60th anniversary of the franchise. We'll also talk about Hope, the big budget South Korean sci-fi flick, which is a monster alien movie. A little knob to practical magic, too, at the end of that second segment. But we have a trio of occasional Ringer freelancers here, Alex, Scott, and Keith, who will help me out here. As always, I solicit your nominations and recommendations for next month. You can email us your comments or your suggestions for other properties to cover in October and beyond at ringerverserecommends at gmail.com. I'll be back at the end of the episode to remind you of that address and also give you a bonus recommendation of my own for this month. But right now, let's talk silo, followed by Dark Matter, Star Trek, Hope, Speaker 3 (3:07) and more. All Speaker 4 (3:09) right, with me now is the esteemed Alex Kirshner, my former podcast on a beloved podcast that is no longer with us, sadly, Hang Up and Listen, where we got to talk about sports, but rarely did we get... get to talk about Apple TV, sci-fi series, or silo specifically. And so that's what we are here to do today. You probably have read Alex somewhere. He's all over the internet, including The Ringer, but also Slate, The Athletic, SB Nation regularly. And of course, he is a college football expert, and you can hear him on the Split Zone Duo podcast. Alex, welcome. I'm glad to give you a platform for your silo takes that have been pent up for so long. Two Speaker 3 (3:49) most exciting moments of my career in podcasting. Number one, being told that I would be hosting a weekly sports podcast at Slate with the co-host of Effectively Wild, my favorite baseball podcast. And number two, getting a text from the same telling me that I had the opportunity to talk about Silo, a show that I love and that I understand from Reddit has seemingly hundreds of thousands of fans, but that I have yet to encounter Speaker 4 (4:12) a fellow fan from in real life. So this is good. This is exciting. I was having the same issue. I mean, this is not like one of those network shows that's one of the most popular shows in the country, but no one you know, maybe depending on which bubble you're in, has ever watched it. This is not like Tracker or something. It's still, it's Apple TV. It's a ostensibly sort of prestige, semi-prestige sci-fi series. And it has a sizable audience by Apple TV standards. It makes the Nielsen rankings, et cetera. But I wanted to talk about season three on this episode. And I was just scouring all the possibilities and ringer colleagues and other people I know. Do you watch Silo? Anyone watch Silo? I'm like knocking on doors. Anyone, will you talk to me about Silo? And everyone either was like, oh, I watched a few episodes. I fell off in season one or I, you know, they lost me in season two or something. And then like manna from heaven, I see that you posted your New York Times top 10 TV shows of the century. And lo and behold, Silo was one of them. And I think you were probably the only person I saw on my timeline who included Silo in their top 10 shows of the century. And I thought, ah, my solution. Alex can come talk to me about Silo. So make the case for Silo, if not as one of the 10 best. TV shows of the century, though, by all means, make that case if you can. But as a show that you recommend and that people should check out or come back to if they fell off at some point. Speaker 3 (5:41) Let me pitch you on this. It's shot extremely dark. It looks like they're underground, but in such a way that it actually fits the plot Speaker 4 (5:50) of the show. That's true. Can Speaker 3 (5:51) I Speaker 4 (5:51) sell Speaker 3 (5:51) you Speaker 4 (5:51) on that? There's not a ton of that. It's not the best pitch. It's super dark and sometimes I can't actually see what's happening on screen, but it makes sense because it's subterranean. I mean, yeah, I have that issue sometimes where I'm like, is it supposed to be that dark? And usually I don't have that issue. You know, when there were Game of Thrones episodes that no one could see, my TV was fine and I was like, this is a skill issue. Your brightness is off or something. But in Silo, there are scenes where I'm like squinting and peering and, you know, there's like a whole. extended stretch of season two where Juliet is in another silo, silo 17, not her silo, silo 18. And there are no lights in there, really. And so it should be pitch black. And it kind of is, which is tough for a viewer, but thematically makes sense. Speaker 3 (6:41) In a relatively spoiler-conscious way, my pitch about silo is that the world building in this show is just way more interesting than you would think it would be when you get the idea of underground society. You would think there's only so much that can really go on underground because it's challenging for mammals to survive down there. But I think that Silo is a really interesting encapsulation of the way that we humans order societies and the way that we try to control information. that has passed among us and the way that social hierarchies form. And on top of that, sort of bolted on top of all of that, it's just a really interesting mystery about why did these people find themselves in... at least 18, at least 18, giant metal tubes underground. And why are they there? And can they ever get out? It's a really interesting caper that is set in a world that has a lot to say about the actual above ground world that we inhabit together. Speaker 4 (7:54) Yeah. Now, I think one of the things that initially I wasn't fully sold and I stuck with it, and I'm glad I did, but it's one of those I know too much or I've seen too much. Now, I haven't actually read the series that Silo is based on. So none of that is spoiled for me. And it's a fairly faithful adaptation from what I understand. But I've just seen so many shows like this. I mean, post-apocalyptic shows, survival shows, sometimes literally in silos. You know, it's like, now maybe this is on me because I'm watching Fallout and I'm watching Paradise and then I'm watching Silo. And there's a lot of overlap and a lot of commonalities. And I don't know if this is just I'm getting old and I've seen too much sci-fi. It's just almost every time I watch a show, I'm like, oh, right, this is like this show, right? This is maybe there are only, I don't know, eight premises for sci-fi series. And then you kind of riff on them. And so I don't know if you've seen those shows, but if you're watching Paradise and Fallout and Silo all together, it almost blends together because it's like. some of the same big questions about what happened to society and everything's going wrong and we're trying to survive and we're coming up with some, you know, subterranean, we're preppers for a doomsday that actually arrives. There's a lot there that if you just now watch Silo, having seen some other shows, you'll say, yeah, this feels familiar. Speaker 3 (9:13) I think what differentiates Silo from other apocalyptic shows that I have watched, and I'm just going to use The Last of Us as the example because this is the one that's freshest in my head that I've been watching in its HBO Max run for the last few years. The difference with Silo, I think, is that there is a... There is a more prescribed form of chaos that is enveloping this world. Typically in a post-apocalyptic thing, some awful chaos has befallen the world. And as a result of that, humans are at each other's throats in different ways. And not only do you have to fear the great beyond, but you often have to fear your fellow man who is fighting with you for food or for shelter or for weapons or what have you. What I think is really interesting about Silo's premise, and I don't think that this really gives much away beyond the premise of trailer one, is that there's a really big, not just what happened mystery here, but what is controlling it? Like, what is God? What is this thing that we're all in? You know, in something like The Last of Us, it's pretty clear what we're all in. We're in a hellscape caused by a fungal infection that... enveloped the world and it became the Lord of the Flies. What I like about Silo is that, like you, Ben, I love rules. I love a format. I mean, I've seen you prepare podcast notes before. And Silo has rules. Silo has governing principles, the pact that governs this little subterranean, big subterranean world. And it asks questions from the jump about where does this come from? Why are we doing this? that I think are a bit different than what we would usually see in a world is over catastrophic show Speaker 4 (11:05) or movie. Yeah. And I find that it's kind of, you know, prestige adjacent, but also feels a little bit distinct from that. I mean, you know, some incredible cast members, obviously Rebecca Ferguson stars as Juliet. Tim Robbins is here as the head of IT, which is a pretty important position in silo world. Common is also in this cast. There are some, you know, some recognizable names and people you've seen and faces you know. And, you know, actors with real pedigree. The writing is not always the strongest in terms of dialogue and also some, you know, plot points that kind of just... They're there and then they're not. And then you think, wait, what happened to that? And I guess they just sort of dropped that. And sometimes there's a little bit of like, wait, why does this happen? Is this plausible? Although I will find that over the course of the series, the number of times that I've thought, wait, this doesn't make sense. Why would they do it this way? Why don't they just do that? At some point, it is usually explained. I'm not going to say they've thought of everything and they address every possible nitpick. But once you get to the end of season three, which is where we are, season three ended earlier this month, the curtain is pulled back enough that a lot of the questions that I had along the way or some of the skepticism was sort of settled to my satisfaction, which is refreshing. Speaker 4 (12:27) I appreciated that too, because Speaker 3 (12:29) this is a show that I suspect has struggled to gain the same. Speaker 3 (12:37) rabid following, or at least not rabid following, but I think it's struggled to gain the same numbers and following as like a severance because it really takes a while to even get what you're looking at. And we don't like it when TV writers are up their own colons about being mysterious. I feared that in season three, they were going to keep with that. And we were going to still be left wondering, not only were a lot of things resolved in season three. But also, God bless the producers of this show, speaking of a way that it's very different from Severance, which is in the same Apple TV sci-fi family, they already shot season four, the final season. I've seen the Speaker 4 (13:14) trailer for it. Speaker 3 (13:15) Yes. I know when it's coming out. Next July, right? Yeah. And so you don't have to worry, you know, if you were to go through and meander your way through Silo for, I don't know, a month or two or three or four or eight to get through it. You don't have to worry. in the Severance way about the indefinite delayed gratification because it's coming. You can already see the trailer for it. Deeply refreshing. I understand this used to be how they made TV, but it isn't really anymore. And it's nice to see. Speaker 4 (13:45) Yeah. And we know that there is source material and that there is an end to this story, which I don't know and have avoided looking up. And people have generally been pretty considerate about not spoiling. I guess it helps that, again, this isn't the most popular show, though it's semi-popular, at least by Apple TV standards. And so I have faith that this is going somewhere and that it's all going to be resolved in a pretty timely fashion and we won't have to wait. And that's all good. I think, you know, some of the along the way, there's some meandering and there's some, you know, we're stuck in this setting for a long time. That's... Part of the problem, I guess, and it's hard to get around it, at least for the first couple seasons especially, you are just stuck in silos, you know, and the silo looks like a silo and it's very much drab, monotonous scenery, which is appropriate. They're stuck in a silo. It's pretty utilitarian, but it's not exactly a feast for the eyes. There's just a lot of, you know, cement and a lot of small, rounded rooms. a staircase that they're traipsing up and down. And so if you're expecting visual variety or a feast for your eyes or the sort of thing that you get from Pluribus or even Severance or, you know, some other Apple TV sci-fi series, you're not really going to get that here. I mean, it looks more or less convincing. I wouldn't say it looks low budget or anything. It's just the same sets recycled. Speaker 3 (15:10) Yeah, I remember reading that there was one particular silo episode. that cost tens of millions of dollars to make. There was a number floating around, and we never know these things for sure. That was a $40 million silo episode. And the thought did cross my mind, $40 million on what? Speaker 4 (15:30) Yeah. Maybe to build the silo set in the first place, but then you get a lot of use out of that. I don't know. Speaker 3 (15:38) But they have... They have succeeded in building a really convincing world, probably in part because they haven't had to be too adventurous in the set design. It really does all look pretty similar. And you have to put up with a bit of a delay until you understand what is going on. But I found that particularly in season three, this is a great pitch, obviously. Watch 16 hours or 20 hours of TV or whatever before you get to it. As they start to unravel the mystery, I have found it to be... severance level gripping as they have unspooled it for me and fed it to me like a little baby piecemeal. It took a while, but I am lapping it up as it goes. And I'm looking forward to season four as much as I've looked forward to a new season of anything in a while. Speaker 4 (16:27) Yeah. And let's stray into spoiler territory here. Just be warned, everyone. If you're planning to watch this and you haven't checked it out, you may want to skip ahead slightly. We'll timestamp the episode description. But if you know you're not going to watch or if you are watching or if you were watching and decided not to keep watching and you don't mind hearing a little bit about what happened, then listen on. Season three, the end of season three specifically, has been extremely well received. And that kind of broke containment in a way where Silo felt like the show that some people were watching maybe, but... maybe with episode nine and 10, the last couple episodes of season three, there was real buzz about Silo for the first time since season one. I mean, those episodes, like the finale of season three is a 9.6 user rating on IMDB right now. That is like a really acclaimed episode because they really did reveal a lot, things that we had been waiting three seasons. And there's still some mysteries and there's still intrigue. There's a big, you know, confrontation that's set up for season four. There's plenty more material, but this really did deliver, you know, they made us wait. They did kind of hem and haw and string us along a little bit, but ultimately they got there. And I felt like my time had been worth it once they lifted the lid. Speaker 3 (17:45) Yeah. In the penultimate episode of season three, where they started to do the revealing that they really carried out more in the finale. There's a maybe five to seven minute stretch of this episode where two of the main characters from the before times are about to be dragged into the silos unwittingly. And you start to recognize that this is happening in this pregnant period of a handful of minutes. Literally. Before it actually happens. Literally. Helen, one of the main characters, is pregnant. Speaker 4 (18:23) Yes. Speaker 3 (18:24) With Daniel's child. Speaker 4 (18:26) And Speaker 3 (18:26) you see what's happening and there's not a lot of mystery that things are going to be okay or whatnot, but it just knocks me on my ass, really. It knocks me backward. It hits you in the chest is what I meant to say. And as we sort of start to get the payoff in the finale of season three, where it turns out that there is one... central node of the silo system that has people puppet mastering the rest of these silos. And in some cases... mass murdering members of certain silos and trying to control communication between the different silos so that they don't know that there are other silos. It just becomes really haunting, but also satisfying because you start to understand the board that you've been seeing. We come to understand that there are in fact, many more than 18 silos. I believe it's around 50. I didn't go back and check the number, but it's a lot of silos. And I think some of the Acting performances here are just excellent. Like so, so good. I, it's hard to even pick a favorite one. Speaker 4 (19:39) Yeah. I do feel for poor Tim Robbins who has to croak all season long because he has been burned in a fire. And so he is talking like this all season long and he actually does croak. spoiler, in the finale. So he's put out of his misery, but he has to perform the entire season in that voice. So kudos to him. Ben, you Speaker 3 (20:02) visit Los Angeles a lot. Ringer's got a big staff footprint out there. Speaker 4 (20:06) I wouldn't say Speaker 3 (20:06) a lot. From time to time. Yeah. Sometimes. I live there. I've been away for a little bit, but earlier in the season, I was walking across the street in the Silver Lake area of Los Angeles. And Ashley Zuckerman, who is the very good Australian actor, I believe he's Australian, who plays Daniel, one of these protagonists. Actually, I think he's born in Santa Monica, California. Anyway, has an accent. Always plays Speaker 4 (20:35) some sort of congressional staffer of some sort in every show. He Speaker 3 (20:41) does. He's so good at that in succession too. But he gracefully observes traffic laws and stops for me as I'm crossing. at a crosswalk. And there's like a code in Los Angeles. I've only lived there for a little while that you're not supposed to make a fuss, make a scene with a screen talent from Hollywood. And I observed that, but I did do a little double take and I wanted to stop and put my hands up in the crosswalk and ask if he could pull over to discuss his performance in this season. He was that good in this thing. I didn't do it. Don't worry. I observed the code, but the number of good performances here. I mean, we didn't even talk about Rebecca Ferguson. People apparently hate Common's performance. Speaker 4 (21:22) Yes, I've gathered that. Speaker 3 (21:24) As Gibbs, he's kind of an enforcer in this show. I personally think he's good, but I just think that's because the character has taken on his... His aura, which is to say very short-spoken, doesn't have a ton to say, gives off sort of an emotionally hurt vibe about him. I think it works great with the character. Yeah. Speaker 4 (21:46) Alexandria Riley, who plays Camille, who sort of is the heel for much of this season and then has a face turn. She's, you know, you love to hate her for much of the season, which is her job. She's quite magnetic. Zuckerman, by the way, born in Santa Monica, but moved to Melbourne or Melbourne. Australia. So you were right both times, I guess. Yes. But yeah, I mean, there's some, I guess it's just like, this seems like it should be a homogenous society, even though everyone came from different places originally. That was hundreds of years ago and they've all been born and raised and contained. And so why does it seem like they're still from different places in the world? I wonder that sometimes about Rebecca Ferguson's accent. I think she does a great job, but like you compare her season three accent to her season one accent. She's not really bothering to do sort of a standard American accent anymore. And you kind of wonder like, you know, she's switching around and it's like, how did she get that accent when, I mean, her father is Ian Glenn in the show. So I don't Speaker 3 (22:44) know Speaker 4 (22:44) where he got his accent. You know, some of that stuff is probably better not to think about why people sound the way they do. But on the whole, I think it's a good cast. I do find that, you know, I'm interested in the big picture stuff and a lot of the character stuff, but less so in the love interests. And they do stick a fair amount of that in and it always feels awkward to me. Not that I don't want these characters to find love, but it's just like they're shipping Juliet and Lucas and it's like, where did that come from? And then like Juliet's bestie Shirley and Knox, who was like Juliet's mentor and there's just no chemistry there and like... Juliet and Shirley never even really read as straight to me. So I was just kind of confused by the whole thing. Like I thought maybe they would be together, but they're actually best friends. That whole aspect of the show, I'm not that into. And there were some frustrating aspects. Like, so the beginning of season three, I guess very end of season two, there is this flashback separate timeline and they do merge finally at the end of season three, which is very exciting because they've been separated on screen and by centuries. And I found that that was a welcome exit from the silo because we've been stuck in the silo for two seasons. Now to go back to before whatever happened happened and to be out in the open air, that was like a nice respite because, you know, you feel like the characters in the silo who are like looking at these hand-me-down magazine pages and pictures of trees and hearing about birds. And then to actually get outside was a really nice, refreshing change of pace. The downside of that, though, was that we were following these characters in the past as they're kind of piecing together what's happening and there's some sort of disaster impending. Meanwhile, they kind of have to just tread water in the silo waiting for that to catch up. So there's this whole storyline where Juliet has amnesia and she has to remember everything. And so that kind of puts everything on hold. And we know more than she knows. that drags on for a bit and it kind of just killed the momentum. And then sometimes, you know, you'd get like the cutting. Some episodes I think works well. You just have like half in the silo, half in the past. Sometimes it's cutting back and forth and it's just a little bit disjointed. Ultimately, I think it pays off. And I was happy to have the past timeline and that actually felt more gripping to me. But that was a little bit of an impediment. From what I understand, the book that that's based on is actually pretty divisive and people... didn't love that and their romance and that character and everything, but I thought they made some changes in the show and that works for me. Like I like the Daniel and Helen relationship and their sort of, you know, thriller story, which now is overlapping. And, you know, from what we saw of the season four trailer, there's going to be more of those characters and it'll all come together and be worth the wait. But it definitely, you could feel kind of the, you know, we're juggling plot lines for the beginning of this season, especially. Speaker 3 (25:36) I think the central tension of the show that the Daniel and Helen storyline fits into pretty well, exemplifies pretty well, is the crushing burden of human pain and what is it worth to try to prevent people from feeling pain. And that materializes in different ways. It materializes literally in the creation of the silos. Like, should we just throw people underground and see how it goes? Because we could have... seeds to replant humanity in the event of some apocalyptic event happening. But also the amnesia, the memory drugs, the memory loss drugs that some of these characters take are initially conceived, we learn in the third season, by a mad scientist sort of doctor whose baby daughter died in his arms. I wouldn't want to remember that, would I? I'd like to be unburdened from that. And he starts experimenting on... combat troops who have been through major ordeals. Can I spare you from your post-traumatic stress? And, you know, I think the show is sometimes a little bit heavy handed and like the answer is pretty obvious. I mean, God, no, we shouldn't try to shelter human beings from the worst pain because to do that also means sheltering them from everything else that it means to be human. But. And that's, I think, the moral, philosophical premise of the show at a root level. And when it merges, I think it's going to drive