Red Rover

References

• Red Rover
• The Red Rover
• Grover
• Anarcho-syndicalism
• Johnny Mercer
• Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story
• Almost Plausible: Flag
• Tag
• Spokane, Washington
• Gonzaga University
• Hide-and-Seek
• War of the Worlds
• Ice Cube
• The Thing
• Gray Goo
• Maximum Overdrive
• Emergency Position-Indicating Radio Beacon
• James Bond
• Moonraker
• Mars Rover
• The Fault in our Stars
• Deep Blue
• Garry Kasparov

Transcript

[Intro music begins]

[Shep]
“Come over here-“

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Shep]
“And get me.” That’s good. You’re full of good suggestions today, Thomas.

[Emily]
Thomas is on top of it today.

[Shep]
Yeah.

[Thomas]
Well, thank you. Thank you.

[Shep]
I just want to hear your version of this story.

[Thomas]
It’s pretty similar to yours, I think.

[Shep]
But with all the good suggestions. Okay.

[Intro music]

[Thomas]
Hey there, story fans. Welcome to Almost Plausible, the podcast where we take ordinary objects and turn them into movies. I’m Thomas J. Brown and linking hands with me are Emily-

[Emily]
Hey, guys.

[Thomas]
And F. Paul Shepard.

[Shep]
Happy to be here.

[Thomas]
Today, our movie plot will be based on the children’s playground game known in the US as Red Rover. It has a whole bunch of different, possibly racist, names, depending on where you grew up. But the basic idea is that two rows of children line up, link hands, and then take turns calling on someone from the other team to run at them full speed and try to break through. Why do adults let kids do this? This sounds really dangerous, now that I’m, you know, in my 40s and my knees hurt.

[Emily]
Because it was so much fun.

[Thomas]
It’s one of the few playground games that I never played. I don’t think I- actually, for this, I looked up what the rules were to, like, satisfy in my brain that I did in fact know. I think it was one of those things I never learned what the rules were. I just sort of have like a vague sense of “I think this is how it works”. And then I looked it up in Wikipedia and yeah, I was right. But I’ve never played it.

[Emily]
I played all of them. I once initiated a game of Red Rover for my entire middle school’s lunch period. I mean, we had two, so it was half the middle school that played it, and the principal and the vice principal came and moderated it for us. They let us do it. They just made sure we followed safety rules.

[Thomas]
How many kids would that have been, roughly?

[Shep]
12,000.

[Emily]
Want to say the school had 700 kids So we’re looking about 350.

[Shep]
I have no idea what you guys are talking about. So this is a, this is a children’s game?

[Emily]
Yeah.

[Shep]
Okay. Remember, I was raised in the forest by wolves. My friends were trees. So no, I have not played this apparent children’s game. I thought that we were adapting the James Fenimore Cooper novel, The Red Rover. Is that not what we are doing?

[Emily]
Nope, nope, nope.

[Shep]
Well, then my pitch is not going to make sense.

[Thomas]
I feel like Shep growing up, the only Red Rover he knew about, besides perhaps this James Fenimore Cooper novel, which I should probably read, sounds great.

[Shep]
1827! It’s a classic! It started the sea novel wave.

[Thomas]
Well, the- “wave”, excellent choice-

[Shep]
Yes.

[Thomas]
Of words. It sounds right up my alley then. So-

[Shep]
Yeah.

[Thomas]
But I was thinking maybe Red Rover is like a scary story you’d heard like, “Oh, don’t go to night or the Red Rover will get you,” you know.

[Emily]
That’s the Red Grover.

[Thomas]
Oh. It’s that-

[Shep]
Oh, gosh, a Red Grover would be terrifying.

[Emily]
That’s a Red Grover. Yeah.

[Thomas]
You’d be a communist Grover. And I like the idea of an anarcho-syndicalist Grover. Just like, trying to, like, burn down the state.

[Shep]
This episode has taken a turn.

[Thomas]
Well, let’s get it back on track.

[Shep]
What are we even talking about?

[Thomas]
It is Emily’s turn to pitch first. So, Emily, let’s hear what your pitches are.

[Emily]
All right. I have two today, so here we go: a mockumentary that focuses on the Australian men’s professional Red Rover team’s bid for their first ever world championship.

[Thomas]
That sounds too real.

[Shep]
This is, like, adults playing Red Rover.

[Emily]
Yes, yes. Adult Australian men in rugby shorts playing Red Rover.

[Shep]
Okay.

[Thomas]
I see why you want to do this one.

[Shep]
Yeah, this all makes sense now.

[Emily]
Right, like, tan Australian men in rugby shorts trying to break on through something.

[Thomas]
With those muscly quads.

[Emily]
Oh yeah, come on, tell me you don’t want to see this movie. Who cares what happens? There’s a plot, maybe, it doesn’t matter.

[Shep]
How does it work with teams? How does it work? Explain.

[Thomas]
Do we need to go over the rules of Red Rover?

[Emily]
You have two opposing sides, two lines, so if-

[Shep]
Yes. Okay.

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Shep]
Got it.

[Emily]
You did did teams-

[Shep]
Yeah.

[Emily]
The Australians are one side the Americans are on the other. You call over-

[Shep]
Oh, so it’s us versus them. Okay.

[Emily]
You call over their players. They have their names on the front instead of the back because that makes more sense.

[Thomas]
Oh, yeah. Smart, smart.

[Shep]
This all, this all tracks.

[Emily]
And then you call them over and if they break through… then… you go to their- those two players go to their line, right?

[Shep]
But now you’re playing against your own team.

[Emily]
Yeah, I mean, that’s the hard part, right? We could change the rules for professional Red Rover, where it’s at this international level.

[Thomas]
Could just be a point system.

[Emily]
Yeah, it could be a point system or if you break through those players are off the field.

[Thomas]
Hmm.

[Emily]
And it’s whoever’s chain remains wins. I mean there’s lots of ways we could work this out.

[Thomas]
I feel like we could spend an hour just coming up with rules for professional Red Rover.

[Shep]
The rules for professional-

[Emily]
For professional International Red Rover, yes.

[Thomas]
Well, let’s put a pin in that idea.

[Emily]
Okay.

[Thomas]
Just for now. And we’ll-

[Emily]
Just say, it’s a great pitch for a different monetary opportunity.

[Thomas]
Even if we don’t do it for the episode, I feel like we’re going to spend the rest of the night coming up with what those rules are after the recording.

[Shep]
Ha ha.

[Thomas]
So.

[Emily]
Yeah, I can see our future this weekend.

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Emily]
My second one is a slasher film where the villain taunts his victims by calling them and leaving a message “Red Rover, Red Rover, send Stephanie on over,” before killing them in some, you know, really gross gruesome way.

[Thomas]
That’s good. The Red Rover has that double entendre with “red”.

[Emily]
Yep.

[Thomas]
We’ve got, like, the blood red-

[Emily]
Yeah.

[Thomas]
And the game. So yeah, I think that’s-

[Emily]
A solid pitch, I think.

[Thomas]
Yeah, yeah.

[Emily]
That’s a Hollywood winning pitch right there because they really don’t care what the plot is.

[Thomas]
That’s one where you’re doing the elevator pitch and they’re, like, “Stop you’re, you’re hitting oil,” like-

[Emily]
“I’m sold!”

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Emily]
All right, Shep, what are your pitches tonight?

[Shep]
Well…

[Emily]
Or do I want to throw it to Thomas? Do you need it do you need a minute?

[Shep]
Well, I did have one that was a modern reimagining of James Fenimore Cooper’s classic sea novel. So, you have, like, a disgraced naval officer who infiltrates the crew of a legendary pirate captain known as the Red Rover, only to discover, like, that the pirate’s true goal isn’t treasure, but exposing a corrupt admiralty. Ad- ad- admiral- Admiralty? How do you pronounce that?

[Thomas]
Admiralty.

[Emily]
Admiralty.

[Shep]
Admiralty, (thank you), that destroyed them both, right? So, it’s near future. You have corporate-controlled shipping lanes. You have autonomous AI-controlled warships. So, the warship is called the Red Rover. Oh, no, the warship is called the Rover. And then the captain is the Red Rover. He’s a legendary hacker pirate. Whatever. Anyway, Thomas, why don’t- I’ll- I’ll- Come back to me.

[Thomas]
Okay.

[Shep]
Pass.

[Thomas]
Pass. Okay this is like you attempted to run through Emily and my’s line and you failed. So.

[Emily]
Yep.

[Shep]
Ha ha. I get that now.

[Thomas]
Me too. Okay, I actually have, I have three. One of them’s pretty short. We’ll start there because, I don’t know, I was trying to be cute with it. We’ll see. So when a clumsy girl barrels through a Red Rover chain and flattens a stranger on his first day of college, it’s the start of an epic romance. But like any good game, getting back to her is going to take a running start.

[Emily]
Done. Let’s do it. Wrap it up.

[Shep]
That’s the tagline on the poster? Is that-

[Thomas]
Right. Yeah.

[Shep]
And of course this is the, this is the college-level-

[Emily]
Yeah.

[Shep]
Red Rover teams.

[Thomas]
Right. Yes. Yeah. At the collegiate- This is another one we’re going to spend the whole time working out the point system. And then I have one that sort of echoes a bit of Emily’s slasher film, some similarities there. John Mercer is a retired soldier quietly living in suburbia, but that life is interrupted when he answers a phone call from an unknown number. A gravelly voice on the other end of the line says, “Red Rover, Red Rover. I call Johnny over.” John springs into action, grabbing his gun, his go bag, and his family. John was involved in Operation Red Rover, a mission where his platoon broke through enemy lines to extract a high-value target. But during the mission, something went catastrophically wrong, and now someone is coming for him.

[Shep]
Okay, and this is not John Mercer the songwriter.

[Emily]
Johnny Mercer? No.

[Shep]
Okay.

[Thomas]
My final idea: A group of five kids ruled the playground until a crushing Red Rover loss cost them the school championship. It’s another one where we’ve got to figure out rules for this game.

[Shep]
So complicated.

[Thomas]
Thirty years later, Danny’s life is falling apart when his old friend Scotty proposes a rematch at their high school reunion. It sounds fun until they learn that the opposing team now runs a CrossFit gym. With just two months to train, Danny’s out-of-shape crew is badly outmatched. But on game day, he realizes the other team is just five individuals, while his group still plays as a unit. That difference is enough to squeak out a long overdue victory.

[Shep]
Okay, spoilers for the ending. You’re, yeah, okay. So, uh, this is a bunch of adults playing a children’s game seriously. Thomas, have you seen the movie Dodgeball?

[Thomas]
Oh no. I have, yeah.

[Shep]
Okay, it sounds kind of Dodgeball-y.

[Emily]
That might have been an inspiration for mine.

[Thomas]
I mean, they’re all basically, any of those, sort of, like, sports underdog things. They all have the same sort of vibe to them. So.

[Emily]
But mine has Australian- tan Australians in rugby shorts.

[Thomas]
All right, those are what I have, Shep. Did we leave enough time for you to-

[Shep]
Okay.

[Thomas]
Come up with another one?

[Shep]
When an alien AI implants itself into a Mars base’s Red rover-

[Thomas]
Ah.

[Shep]
It begins calling over and corrupting the other rovers one by one, forcing a small team of scientists to fight a digital war across the Martian surface before the AI reaches the Blue rover, the only one with a clear transmission path back to Earth.

[Emily]
That’s pretty cool.

[Thomas]
And then, does it turn out that this is a rover from the future and it’s creating, like, a time waves and-

[Shep]
Oh yeah, what was that? Flag?

[Thomas]
Flag, yeah, it’s our Flag episode.

[Shep]
Yep.

[Thomas]
Very good episode.

[Emily]
I was just going to ask “What movie is this? I’ve never seen this one.”

[Thomas]
It’s one of our episodes where I’m like, “Oh, that movie was so good.”

[Emily]
Sounds really good.

[Thomas]
And then I’m like, “Oh, wait, no, that was this is a thing we came up with.”

[Shep]
The scene where he’s trying to catch up to the rest of the team-

[Emily]
Oh, and he disappears.

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Shep]
He goes down in under the into the gully and then never comes back up.

[Thomas]
Yeah. Yeah.

[Shep]
Heartbreaking. Heartbreaking. It’s worse on a second watch when you know he’s not going to make it.

[Emily]
It was beautifully shot.

[Shep]
Every time, you think “This time, maybe, this time he can maybe make it.”

[Emily]
No.

[Shep]
He’s so close!

[Thomas]
Because you can see him. He’s right there.

[Shep]
Yep.

[Thomas]
Crushing.

[Emily]
Cry every time.

[Thomas]
All right. Well, those are all of our pitches. Which one do we want to go with?

[Emily]
You two choose. You’re men.

[Thomas]
Yeah, well, like, half of these are adults playing Red Rover.

[Emily]
True. And we have decided that might get us stuck in a space of determining logistics.

[Shep]
What are the rules?

[Thomas]
I think it depends, right? Like, if we do the rom-com one-

[Emily]
Oh, that one doesn’t-

[Thomas]
It doesn’t necessarily have to be competitive. It could just be people playing that game.

[Emily]
Yeah, just playing in the quad. Being goofy.

[Thomas]
Yeah. So that one, we don’t have to work out rules or anything like that. And I feel like maybe with the, the Dodgeball one, we don’t need to figure out rules.

[Shep]
The Dodgeball one.

[Thomas]
You know which one I’m talking about.

[Shep]
I do. I know exactly which one.

[Thomas]
We wouldn’t need to figure out rules there. They’re just playing standard playground rules.

[Shep]
There are a lot of those. It’s, there was the Dodgeball movie there was the Tag movie.

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Emily]
Tag is based off of a true story.

[Shep]
Yeah, from, from Spokane.

[Emily]
Yeah, Gonzaga grads.

[Shep]
Yep.

[Thomas]
Typical.

[Shep]
Typical. Classic Gonzaga grads!

[Thomas]
I like how both of Shep’s are, like, rogue AI type of-

[Shep]
I didn’t have a lot of time!

[Emily]
And clearly didn’t ask AI its opinion. Because I don’t it would just throw itself-

[Shep]
The AI is like “Yeah, AI is evil!”

[Emily]
So, I like the sci-fi one and I like the go-bag one. I also like the rom-com, but I know we’ve done a lot of rom-coms.

[Shep]
What? Us? Okay, so I have the sci-fi one, Thomas has the go-bag one.

[Emily]
I enjoy both of those.

[Shep]
Emily has to be the deciding vote.

[Emily]
No, no! Uh uh! No.

[Shep]
Yep, this entire episode is going to depend on your opinion.

[Emily]
All right. Coinflip.com. Heads is go-bag, tails is sci-fi. And it is… tails.

[Shep]
Okay.

[Thomas]
Sci-fi. Okay. So, Shep, do you have a sense of why this rover is corrupting the other ones?

[Shep]
Yeah, so okay, so you have a small aging research base on Mars. It’s in the future far enough that, like, we’ve had Mars bases-

[Thomas]
Okay.

[Shep]
Long enough for this one to be old. And you got five rovers, or however many, and they’re all specialized for different things. I was thinking five, so you can give them different colors and give them different-

[Thomas]
Hm.

[Shep]
Basically personalities.

[Thomas]
Right.

[Shep]
Because they’re, they’re all automated. So, you have Blue, which is communication, and then you have repair which could be Yellow, and mining which could be White, and material analysis which could be Green, and then you have exploration which is Red. Then you have a meteor shower. Meteor shower comes and damages the base’s, you know, perimeter sensors, right? So, the base can’t detect what’s out further than the inner sensors. Uh, and one of the meteorites is actually a dormant alien probe, and it’s found by the Red rover, because the Red rover does the exploration, so it’s on a solo recon mission to a remote crater, finds the probe, and the probe’s AI awakens and uploads itself into Red rover’s system and takes it over. So, the Red rover is now trying to reach Earth. It’s trying to expand and control and so it knows “If I call the other rovers over and get them into broadcast range, I can infect them.” So, it mimics base commands to lure them within range of being infected, like, “Hey, Green rover, come over.” And then it joins the Red rover’s team as it were.

[Thomas]
Mhm.

[Shep]
So, it begins calling the other rovers over. The humans in the, in the base, the crew, realize what’s going on because Green stops responding to their commands. They lock down the base, but they can’t stop the rovers from communicating with each other because they have a short-range mesh network.

[Thomas]
Hm.

[Shep]
And they realize that they, the corrupted AI’s ultimate goal must be to reach the Blue rover which has a transmitter powerful enough to send a signal back to Earth. If Blue is corrupted, it’s game over man. So the humans send out an overriding command on all frequencies, mimicking the AI signal which was mimicking them, calling all rovers-

[Thomas]
To the base.

[Shep]
To- well, to- not to the base but, like, to a spot, like, a crater they could rig with EMPs.

[Thomas]
Mm.

[Shep]
The, and the corrupted rovers come over, they trigger the EMP, but the Red rover shields itself with the other rovers and escapes. It’s damaged but it’s functional, and the humans lose track of it. But they know it’s out there somewhere, hiding and waiting for an opportunity. And now it’s Hide and Seek, if we want to do a sequel.

[Thomas]
Hmm. A Hide and Sequel?

[Shep]
A Hide and Sequel. Okay, well now we have to make this movie just so we can make the sequel and call it Hide and Sequel.

[Thomas]
So, does it turn out that the alien probe is actually a human probe from the future and they’re trying to send a message back to Earth?

[Shep]
And warn them about the Flag and, don’t come, and-

[Thomas]
And then, yeah, the scientists are like, “But how did the alien AI get into our systems? It makes no sense.”

[Shep]
None of this is written in stone. It could be not a meteorite crash, it could be- Because that’s kind of coincidental, like, why did it happen right now while there’s a human base in this area? It could be something that crashed into Mars millennia ago-

[Thomas]
Hmm, yeah.

[Shep]
And then is discovered by the exploration rover. Doesn’t have to be AI at all, doesn’t have to, like, it could be whatever. That was just one idea. If you guys have other ideas-

[Emily]
I like that idea, though.

[Shep]
That’s also fine. That’s also fine. It’s like, how do you incorporate the game Red Rover?

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Shep]
And so that’s why I was thinking that it’s a, it’s a corrupted rover and it’s calling other rovers over to join its team, basically.

[Thomas]
So, we need a reason why the other rovers have to go to the Red rover, why the Red rover can’t just go to the other different rovers.

[Emily]
Is the Red rover immobilized for some reason?

[Thomas]
Oh, yeah, maybe it calls the Yellow one over first to repair it.

[Shep]
Ah, that makes sense, that’s logical. But then after it’s repaired why doesn’t it go over-? Maybe the base has defenses.

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Shep]
So, it can’t get to the base. If it could get to the base that would be ideal because the base also can transmit to Earth. But if it can’t get to the base, if it can get to the Blue rover that’s good enough.

[Emily]
Why wouldn’t it just go to the Blue Rover first?

[Shep]
Because it’s, it’s damaged and it needs to call the Yellow rover over to repair it.

[Emily]
Okay.

[Shep]
So, it calls the Yellow rover over, and the Yellow rover stops responding to the base and they realize “Oh something has gone wrong,” and then they move the other rovers further away.

[Emily]
Oh.

[Shep]
Or something like that.

[Emily]
So, why doesn’t it go for Blue next?

[Thomas]
How smart is this AI? Because it could realize-

[Shep]
Oh!

[Thomas]
It could realize that, like, “Oh, I’ve got to play it cool.” And so it sends the Yellow rover back to whatever it was doing, but it’s already corrupted.

[Shep]
So, you have given me a good idea. What if it’s not smart? What if it’s not smart?

[Thomas]
Hmm.

[Shep]
It’s dumb. The rovers are autonomous but they’re not powerful computers.

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Shep]
But because they have a mesh network, as more of them gather onto the team-

[Thomas]
Mm.

[Shep]
It gets smarter. So if the humans can break up the team somehow, if they can get the corrupted rovers back on their side, it also makes the group of rovers less intelligent. So why doesn’t it go for Blue immediately? It’s not smart enough yet. It doesn’t know to.

[Thomas]
Yeah, that makes sense.

[Emily]
That works.

[Thomas]
So, perhaps initially it calls Yellow over because all the rovers know if you need repairs, you call the repair rover. For whatever reason, Red is damaged or something.

[Shep]
It got overloaded by the alien probe.

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Shep]
It was very powerful. It tried to stuff all of itself into the Red rover and the system couldn’t handle it.

[Thomas]
Fried something.

[Shep]
Fried something.

[Thomas]
So, it calls Yellow over. Yellow fixes it, but because Yellow is now in proximity, it gets corrupted as well.

[Shep]
Yes.

[Thomas]
And now, crucially, the AI realizes, “Oh, with two of them, I have more processing power. I can be smarter. I can be faster, (whatever).”

[Shep]
Yes.

[Thomas]
And it can read through what it knows, and it knows, “Well, there are three more rovers I can call upon.”

[Shep]
Oh, maybe the rovers themselves aren’t powerful enough to hold it and so it’s trying to get them over to where the probe is.

[Thomas]
Hmm.

[Shep]
So, that’s why it can’t just go to Blue.

[Thomas]
Yeah, there you go.

[Shep]
It needs Blue to come to it. That does fuck up the ending with the EMP.

[Thomas]
Well, I feel like maybe there’s got to be, like, a critical mass, like with three rovers, that’s enough to get it out of the crater or whatever. So now it can rover around, but those three have to stay in mesh proximity to each other so that it can communicate and process across all three. Maybe one of them has, like, greater processing power because of its job.

[Shep]
Oh yeah. What was the analyzing one?

[Thomas]
Green.

[Shep]
Green. Green, material analysis.

[Thomas]
Yeah, so maybe that one has, like, more GPUs than the others or something like that because it’s doing that sort of analysis type of stuff.

[Shep]
Yes.

[Thomas]
Heavy computation, whatever.

[Shep]
All right, we got it!

[Emily]
Perfect.

[Thomas]
So, I feel like the Red one breaks, it calls the Yellow over, and then the Yellow stops responding, and the humans are like, “Uh oh! The fixing rover is broken. Now what?”

[Shep]
Yeah, that’s not ideal.

[Emily]
“Who fixes the fixer?”

[Thomas]
And so there’s got to be, there’s got to be, like, a contingency. Like probably somebody just has to go out there manually. So they send, you know, Jeff or whoever, out to go check up on it. As he’s going there, he sees Yellow coming back and he’s like, “Oh, I guess it’s fine now.” And they check and “Oh okay, they’re, they’re responding (or something).” But really what’s happening is Red has sent Yellow, like, they’re trying to create, like, expand the mesh, basically, so that they can reach out to the next closest one, which happens to be either White or Green. And then it creates that mesh and it can call the other one over. And so now the humans are like, “Why do these rovers keep going back and forth between this one crater and wherever they were?” And that’s when they really get clued in. They’re like, “Okay, something weird is going on.”

[Shep]
So, what if they’re trying to get- so the mesh range is short.

[Thomas]
Yes.

[Shep]
So, what if they’re trying to get a line from the probe to the rovers? So they’re making lines of rovers, like the game. And so it’s trying to reach White or whatever. And so it lines up the rovers, each one just in mesh range.

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Shep]
Linking one after another.

[Thomas]
And then what are the humans doing to try to actively stop this? Are they able to jam the mesh or broadcast noise across the mesh to mess with it?

[Shep]
Uh, what are the stakes? Like, so far, the probe hasn’t seemed dangerous.

[Emily]
Right.

[Thomas]
Hmm.

[Shep]
I think that the Yellow rover should kill Jeff.

[Emily]
What is the- what’s the goal of the AI?

[Shep]
All I had was “reach Earth”. If you could come up with a good goal-

[Emily]
Okay, so what is it gonna do when it reaches Earth that makes it dangerous?

[Thomas]
Oh, it eats data.

[Shep]
Oh no!

[Thomas]
Shep understands that reference.

[Shep]
It’s so dumb.

[Thomas]
It’s so dumb.

[Shep]
Why are movies so dumb now? I say that, but I’ve watched like old 80s movies recently, been on a kick of old 80s movies.

[Thomas]
Oh.

[Shep]
It turns out a lot of them are just really dumb as well.

[Emily]
Yeah.

[Shep]
And we’ve forgotten-

[Emily]
No.

[Shep]
How dumb movies were, because we only remember the good ones.

[Thomas]
It’s that “Was it great or were you 8?”

[Shep]
Yeah, yeah.

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Shep]
Yes.

[Thomas]
War of the Worlds, the new War of the Worlds with Ice Cube.

[Shep]
Yeah, it makes no fucking sense.

[Thomas]
It doesn’t, it’s terrible.

[Shep]
Sorry. It makes no sense. It’s so stupid. So what is the probe doing and why does it want to reach Earth?

[Emily]
Yes. That is my question I have posed to you, the creator of this story.

[Shep]
No, no, no. Not the story. I created the pitch. We have to create the story as a team.

[Emily]
What?! This is the first I’m hearing of this.

[Shep]
So, this could be a thing that the scientists or the crew on the base are also trying to figure out.

[Thomas]
Right.

[Shep]
Why is it trying to reach the broadcaster? Why does it try, why is it trying to send a signal out? Maybe it contacts a different base first.

[Thomas]
On Mars?

[Shep]
On Mars.

[Emily]
Oooh.

[Thomas]
And that one, it’s, like, an older base that no longer is powered or something. It is unable to transmit to Earth, or it’s running on, like, minimal power, so it’s only part of that mesh.

[Shep]
I was thinking like The Thing, where in The Thing, the Thing had been at a different Arctic research station-

[Thomas]
Hm.

[Shep]
And basically killed everyone and is making its way-

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Shep]
To this other station. Now, its goal was to, like, rebuild its ship and escape Earth. So maybe it tried to get to the, like, we don’t even know. Maybe it’s this Red rover is not from this station. It’s from the other station.

[Emily]
Oooh.

[Thomas]
Hm.

[Shep]
And those, that crew tried to fight it off and failed, but blew up their own transmitter. So they can’t even send out a warning to the other stations. Although you’d probably send that first before you blow it up. So I can immediately see the flaws in my suggestion. No, no, no.

[Thomas]
Maybe, maybe the AI accidentally blew up the transmitter, it overloaded it trying to extend the broadcast range all the way to Earth.

[Shep]
But now it’s smarter.

[Thomas]
Right.

[Shep]
So, maybe it used the material in that base for something. Like, what is it trying to do? It’s trying to get to more material, and there’s lots more material on Earth. And it’s, like, ruining the habitats. It’s making it inhabitable to humans because it does not care about the humans at all.

[Thomas]
Right.

[Shep]
It wants to make all the paperlips out of all the material.

[Thomas]
Is it gray goo thing? It has one job and it’s trying to do that job. And “I found some materials that I can do, that I can use to do that job.”

[Shep]
Right. So if it gets to Earth, human life is over. Basically, that’s the premise. Somehow, for whatever it’s doing, it would be catastrophic to human civilization.

[Thomas]
All right, well, let’s take a break here. And when we come back, we’ll see how the humans react to this incursion into their Martian base in our story about Red Rover.

[Break]

[Thomas]
All right, we’re back with Red Rover on the Red Planet. So we said that at some point the humans in-, that we’re sort of focusing on, in this Martian base that we have, they figure out, not just that something’s suspicious, but they somehow figure out that the AI is malicious. Is there a particular way they figured that out? I was thinking earlier before the break, perhaps instead of an asteroid impact crater where the Red rover goes, they have sent the Red rover- because the Red rover is exploration one, maybe they’ve sent it to this other base because they’ve stopped hearing from this other base.

[Shep]
Ooh.

[Thomas]
So, like, “Oh, we’ll send the Red rover (because it’s a long distance one, has more battery life or whatever). We’ll send it over to check on the other people.” It goes over there, gets infected, and now it’s maybe calling other rovers over to it. Maybe there is some physical thing there that it wants to attach to the Red rover, but it can’t do that. It needs the Yellow rover who has the, like, welding capabilities or whatever to come over and attach the thing to it.

[Shep]
Or if it can’t attach it to it, just needs to make that mesh line.

[Thomas]
Right.

[Shep]
From that base to this base.

[Thomas]
Yeah, that’s true. Yeah.

[Shep]
I like this idea a lot. So, like, the other base, the crew on that other base found some relic on the planet and they were, because they’re scientists, they’re investigating it and it infected their systems.

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Shep]
So, this all makes perfect sense. It fixes so many problems that I was thinking of with what I had suggested previously. It’s perfect. So, the Red rover goes over, it gets infected, and it’s trying to get the other rovers over to form that mesh line-

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Shep]
From where the relic is, which is in the other base, and this base, which can broadcast, or the Blue rover, which can broadcast. Either is a win condition for it.

[Thomas]
Hmm. Yeah, and like we said, no one rover can carry the entire AI code or whatever, so it needs to sort of live stream itself over the mesh to the other base to get over there.

[Shep]
Yes. Yeah.

[Thomas]
Yeah, that works. So how do the humans realize something’s going horribly wrong? Not just going wrong, but going dangerously wrong?

[Shep]
They have to have, like, their own vehicles-

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Shep]
That are not autonomous rovers.

[Thomas]
Yeah, that makes sense.

[Shep]
So, a couple of them, our protagonist and plucky sidekick whatever, can go over to the other base and discover what’s going on and maybe disconnect one of the corrupted rovers and break off that line, which gives them, like, some hope that they can keep this thing contained.

[Thomas]
Mm hmm.

[Shep]
Except even when they break it off, that rover, the Red rover, keeps sending a signal and getting it to come back over.

[Thomas]
Do we want to have it where they break off that connection? So, what I imagine is they’re driving toward the other base and they pass the Yellow rover and they’re like, they come up to, they drive up to the Yellow rover, which is just sitting there. And they’re trying to figure out what’s going wrong. And it just, it will not move. And they’re like, “That’s so weird. Well, maybe we can figure it out later.” They keep going. They find the Red rover. Same deal. Like, nothing seems to be wrong with it. It’s just sitting there, not moving.

[Shep]
Right, they can see that it has power.

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Shep]
But it’s not responding to their remote commands.

[Thomas]
Right. And so then somehow they figure out like, “Oh, there’s some, some something at this old base that’s controlling them (or whatever).” So they cut that off. And then the two rovers kind of snap back to what they were doing previously and they go back to the base. But a little piece of that AI, just enough, is still on board the Red Rover. And it’s learned something now about the humans and how the humans are getting in the way of its plan.

[Shep]
Yes.

[Thomas]
And so now it starts a sort of autonomous rebellion among the other rovers.

[Shep]
Right, it’s just a logical calculation. Look, I need to broadcast to Earth, and these creatures are interfering with that directive. So these creatures need to be dealt with. Now it’s a horror film. We went back to the horror stuff.

[Thomas]
Yeah, I mean, is this just Maximum Overdrive on Mars?

[Shep]
Yes.

[Thomas]
So, the, the rovers are taking out or trying to take out the humans. So I think they do need to kill someone. We need to set stakes.

[Shep]
Yes. Oh, gosh. I thought of something dumb.

[Thomas]
Okay.

[Shep]
But here, okay, I have to share it because that’s how this works. The team that gets sent out to the other station, this is who dies first.

[Thomas]
Okay.

[Shep]
You have Jeff and you have whomever.

[Thomas]
Right.

[Shep]
So, our protagonist is not these two guys. It’s the captain of the station or whatever.

[Thomas]
Right. The mission commander.

[Shep]
The mission commander.

[Shep]
So, they discover the relic-

[Thomas]
Mm hmm.

[Shep]
And see that it’s transmitting to the Red rover, which is transmitting. Now that they know frequencies, they can decode this thing, the string that’s traveling along their mesh network to the Yellow rover. And so they interrupt that signal at the base. And then there’s something, there’s something alive enough in the Red rover and the Yellow rover that they go to the exterior base and the two of them attack those two guys and apparently kill them. And that sets the stakes.

[Thomas]
Mm hmm.

[Shep]
But later, we get a broadcast from Jeffrey. Jeffrey is still alive in the other base. Obviously, the twist being, it’s not Jeffrey. It is the probe.

[Emily]
Mhm.

[Thomas]
Hmm.

[Shep]
I think that’s maybe too obvious? But if you don’t see him and you just get the radio transmissions, he could be manipulating the crew.

[Thomas]
It could even be something where, like, everybody has some sort of emergency broadcasting. You know how, like, when you go sailing, there’s a thing you can activate and it calls, like, the Coast Guard and it gives your GPS position. And that’s kind of all they know: Emergency at This Place. It could be something like that.

[Shep]
Ah, that’s even better because it doesn’t have to, like, mimic-

[Thomas]
Right.

[Shep]
Jeffrey’s voice or anything. They just know Jeffrey is sending a distress signal saying, “Hey, I need help. Come over here-“

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Shep]
“And get me.” That’s good. You’re full of good suggestions today, Thomas.

[Emily]
Thomas is on top of it today.

[Shep]
Yeah.

[Thomas]
Well, thank you. Thank you.

[Shep]
I just want to hear your version of this story.

[Thomas]
It’s pretty similar to yours, I think.

[Shep]
But with all the good suggestions. Okay.

[Thomas]
So, they must go, right? I mean.

[Shep]
Yeah, you can’t leave someone behind.

[Thomas]
You were talking before about how, like, oh, they find the relic and they realize that it’s transmitting. I like the idea that it requires line of sight transmission, so they just, like, shut a door. They’re like, “There we go. Problem solved.” I was also thinking, like, Jeffrey and the plucky sidekick, they’re scientists. They find this incredible thing, this relic. They want to study it. It’s like, it is, it’s, the relic is inadvertently exploiting the curious nature of the scientists. How do they die? Do the other rovers kill them? Does the Yellow rover come over with its welding torch and…

[Shep]
Oh, yeah, because it’s got tools. It’s got to be the Yellow Rover.

[Emily]
I like that.

[Shep]
The Yellow Rover is disassembling-

[Emily]
Humans.

[Shep]
The base.

[Thomas]
Oh.

[Shep]
And like, “Oh, we have to get out of here because this is going to decompress.” And so they go to the-

[Thomas]
Yeah. So they’re in the base. They’ve taken their helmets off.

[Shep]
Yes.

[Thomas]
Like, environs still work and everything’s great. But yeah, now the, there’s a, would you call it a hull breach? What would you call it?

[Shep]
Yeah, it’s the…

[Thomas]
If you had to have, like-

[Shep]
Yeah.

[Thomas]
So, yeah. They’re like, “What’s going on?” They’re scrambling to get their helmets back on.

[Shep]
Right. So I was thinking they make their way to the airlock. They’re trying to get out to get to their little self-driven, not self-driven, manually driven thing.

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Shep]
But when that airlock opens, the Red rover is just right there waiting for them. So, we don’t see them die or we don’t see one of them die. We see the other one die.

[Thomas]
Yeah, I feel like when that initial breach happens, the one isn’t able to get their helmet on in time.

[Emily]
Mm.

[Thomas]
Oh, maybe. Okay, so maybe one of them survives and escapes, but one of them dies, quote unquote “dies”. Like we think they’ve died. We don’t know for sure. Because we’re following the one who escapes. I don’t know where I’m going with this. I think what we need is we see the one die for sure. And then it’s implied the other one dies. But the audience doesn’t actually see it happen.

[Emily]
Oh.

[Thomas]
That’s Jeffrey. So that later, when the digital alert comes, the audience goes, “Oh Jeffrey might be okay. He made it out.”

[Emily]
“He wasn’t dead.”

[Thomas]
Right. So it’s a surprise for everyone when it turns out, “Oh no, he dead. He very dead. He’s been dead for a while now.”

[Shep]
Yep.

[Thomas]
So, we haven’t utilized… We talked about the Green rover having more processing power, and we haven’t talked about the White rover at all.

[Emily]
No, what does the White rover do again?

[Thomas]
It is mining.

[Shep]
Oh, it was the mining rover. Ah, this is the one that can dig a hole and put EMP bombs in it.

[Thomas]
Oh. I do like the idea of a scene where you’ll see, like, the White one comes up to a spot and it digs a little hole and then it backs away. And then, like, the Yellow one comes up and does something, like, puts something in the hole and backs away. They’re all sort of working together to set up this trap.

[Shep]
Hmm, yeah.

[Thomas]
We can sort of see that way that like, ah, they’re all in sync with each other. They’re all working together. How are we going to show that the rovers have been corrupted? they have, like, blue lights that change to red lights?

[Shep]
It’s such a classic for a reason because it’s so visually obvious immediately.

[Thomas]
Right.

[Shep]
That all audiences get it.

[Thomas]
Right.

[Shep]
So, if we don’t want to go with that trope, what do you replace this perfect system with that makes it obvious? Actually, we don’t want it to be super obvious.

[Thomas]
Yeah, it just needs to be the kind of thing that, like, the audience can understand, “Oh, this rover has been taken over by (whatever).” It’s not behaving the way it’s meant to behave without the humans in the story being like, “Hey, Red rover’s not behaving the way it’s supposed to behave.” Like, how do we show, not, tell? A thing that is entirely digital and happening among machines.

[Shep]
Right.

[Thomas]
I think that’s why the blue light, red light thing is so popular.

[Shep]
Yep.

[Thomas]
Maybe this isn’t a problem that we need to figure out, but what I imagine is maybe we see at the beginning of the film a little bit of the rovers doing their thing and it’s slow, smooth, careful movements. And then when it gets taken over, it becomes more erratic in its movements.

[Shep]
Oh.

[Emily]
Yeah.

[Thomas]
It moves faster.

[Shep]
Yes.

[Thomas]
Because the AI is, like, trying to get a sense of “How do I control this thing? I’m trying to get used to it.”

[Shep]
Right. Not its normal body.

[Emily]
Mmhmm.

[Shep]
So, it’s, the arms are jerky.

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Shep]
The wheels are jerky. They shake. The whole thing shakes a little bit.

[Thomas]
Yeah. Yeah.

[Shep]
Not a lot, but enough that when it’s clear that that’s what it is, if you watch it again, it’s like, “Oh, I see. I see when that one’s corrupted. It looks like it’s fine, but it’s not.”

[Thomas]
Could be something like that.

[Shep]
I like that. Because if it’s not moving, you can’t tell.

[Emily]
You can’t tell. Yeah.

[Thomas]
Yeah. Oh, yeah. So then that makes that moment when the first two humans come across Yellow and Red and they’re just sitting there and you’re like, “What’s going on?” Like, no one knows in that moment. The audience isn’t sure. The explorers aren’t sure. And then it turns out they’re bad. They’re gonna get you.

[Shep]
Yep.

[Thomas]
And then I think at that point, the audience hopefully understands you can’t trust them. Once we’ve seen one of them has been corrupted, you can’t trust it from that point on.

[Shep]
Yep.

[Thomas]
What kind of a trap do the rovers set? We talked about them working together to set a trap for the humans.

[Shep]
The rovers set a trap for the humans? Did we talk about that? I had one where the humans set a trap for the Red rover.

[Thomas]
Oh, yes. Yes. The humans, they want to stay safe, so they stay in the hab. They have some sort of a perimeter set up that Red and Yellow, because they’re corrupted, they cannot get through this perimeter. So they send White out to bury an EMP, and then they’re going to maybe use White as bait to get Red to come to them. And so Red starts coming, and they’re like, “Oh, it’s totally fucking working.” But as soon as Red connects to White’s mesh, it immediately learns everything White knows, and it’s like, “Oh, it just buried an EMP right over there. So I won’t go over there then.” And it maybe corrupts. It corrupts White at that point and brings it over to its side. So now the humans have, in an attempt to stop Red and Yellow, have now lost a third rover, and they only have Green and Blue left. Their two most powerful rovers, but.

[Shep]
Okay, I want to modify that a little.

[Thomas]
Okay.

[Shep]
They have to use White because it is the weakest of the three remaining rovers. They want bait to get Red over.

[Emily]
Mmhmm.

[Shep]
And White is the only one they can risk. But White also knows that it buried a bunch of EMPs.

[Thomas]
Hm.

[Shep]
So, as Red is coming over, White is moving away. It’s trying to maintain what they have calculated-

[Thomas]
Hm.

[Shep]
Is the maximum range for its mesh network, right? It’s keeping White out of range and luring it to follow it directly over the EMP. And when it gets close enough, they’ll trigger it.

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Shep]
However, this is where it’s revealed that as more rovers get connected, it gets stronger, smarter. Its range increases. And so it’s following White and it’s close enough that it can connect, even though it’s further than their previous calculation, because their previous calculation was how far away Yellow was from Red.

[Thomas]
Right.

[Shep]
And so this is a reveal to them and the audience that as more connect, it gets stronger and its range increases. So they weren’t being dumb. They were being smart. They didn’t leave White within broadcast range.

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Shep]
They were moving it out of range, but it was in range because they didn’t know how far the range was.

[Thomas]
I like that.

[Shep]
Because otherwise they’re scientist and they did something very stupid.

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Shep]
Which is leave White close enough, which knows where the EMPs are. No, they did it smart, but they didn’t have all the facts yet.

[Thomas]
When the rovers connect to White, their range immediately increases significantly. Does that allow them to snag Green at that moment as well?

[Shep]
Would it, would White allow them to increase significantly? Yeah, I mean, it gives all the range around White.

[Thomas]
I guess that’s what I mean. It, like, it boosts the range, the effective range.

[Shep]
Right.

[Thomas]
Or is there some sort of firewall, EMP wall, whatever, some sort of a barrier that’s protecting the base? Although I don’t know why you’d bother doing that if you’re the only intelligent species on a planet and you’re ostensibly all on the same team. That’s always like, I see that where it’s like, “Oh, we built a self-destruct into the base.” Why? When would you ever think you might need to use that? That makes no sense.

[Shep]
Look, if James Bond invades our, our base, we need to have some defenses.

[Emily]
They’ve seen Moonraker.

[Shep]
So, are the defenses there already, or do they put the defenses there when they discover that something is taking over the rovers? So it could be something that they’ve added.

[Thomas]
Yeah, a frequency jammer or something.

[Shep]
Something.

[Thomas]
Maybe it gives them, like, a sphere of safety around the base. And they have Green and Blue inside of that sphere. So when they figured something was wrong, they automatically called back, or immediately they called back White, Green, and Blue. Because they know something’s going on with the rovers. Let’s bring them back.

[Shep]
Right. Let’s bring all the rovers back, and all the rovers other than the two that are corrupted come back.

[Thomas]
Yeah. So now they only have Green and Blue, but they’re inside the bubble.

[Shep]
Right.

[Thomas]
So now…

[Shep]
Why would you ever let them out?

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Shep]
Yeah. This is a dilemma.

[Thomas]
Yeah. So they need to be under threat still. The three rovers have to be doing something that is going to be very problematic. Maybe they have, like, a rocket on a launch pad nearby. That’s, like, their return to Earth rocket. And the rovers are going over and starting to mess with it. And they’re like, “Whoa, that’s, like, our only way home.” So that gives them a reason to either they physically come out or they come up with a plan to try to use, maybe they’re going to sacrifice Green. And so they give it a little data shield thing and send it out with an EMP on it. And then you have some movie science where-

[Emily]
Yeah.

[Thomas]
The EMP will be blocked by the shield. So they have to take the shield down and do the EMP after the shield is down. But the second the shield goes down, the other rovers take over Green and stop the EMP from detonating. I don’t know. No, because the scientists aren’t stupid. They wouldn’t make the EMP be an automated thing. They’ve got a button. They’re going to push a button. So they’re going to push button one to take the data shield down and immediately press button two to do the EMP. But as soon as they take the data shield down, I mean, we’re talking many, many milliseconds between button press one and button press two. Computers are very fast. And so as soon as the data shield goes down, they connect to Green. They know what’s up. And so the computers just put the data shield back up. The EMP gets blasted. It nukes Green. But hey, we’ve got Yellow. So then the data shield goes back down. Yellow fixes Green. Is that too convoluted for a four quadrant film?

[Shep]
I mean, I wouldn’t have any milliseconds between. I would have the fire signal-

[Thomas]
Right.

[Shep]
Going so that whenever the shield goes down, it’s already going.

[Thomas]
I guess I imagine it as, like, one burst.

[Shep]
Hmm.

[Thomas]
And not, like, a continuous stream.

[Shep]
So, the EMP going off is the finale, right?

[Thomas]
Yes, that’s true. We need to establish early on that EMPs exist and what they do so that anyone who is not technical in the audience understands what this means. When they’re setting this trap up for the rovers, they get it. Do the scientists use one of the rovers? It must be Blue because we’ve got to have them lose Green at some point. Raise those stakes. So do they use the Blue rover as bait for the EMP thing? They’ve disabled it, physically removed its wheels, taken off its broadcaster or whatever. They’ve stripped it down in some way…

[Shep]
Okay, I don’t know if this messes everything up.

[Thomas]
Okay.

[Shep]
But I looked at Mars rovers such as Curiosity, and they all have multi-layer insulation blankets-

[Thomas]
Right.

[Shep]
Of reflective metalized layers to prevent, to protect the sensitive electronics from electromagnetic interference, like solar radiation-

[Thomas]
Right.

[Shep]
The harsh Martian environment, like, they’re all already shielded from EMPs.

[Thomas]
Right. Because there’s no atmosphere on Mars protecting from-

[Shep]
Right.

[Thomas]
Solar flares and yeah EMPs and stuff. That makes sense. That makes sense.

[Shep]
Does, does Mars have a magnetosphere?

[Thomas]
I don’t think so.

[Shep]
I don’t think so. So-

[Thomas]
Well, why would you Google that? You’ve ruined everything.

[Shep]
So, the goal is to get close enough to remove the physical shielding. If they can get close enough and remove the physical shielding, the rovers will eventually die. And if they can fire an EMP, they’ll die immediately.

[Thomas]
Mm hmm.

[Shep]
But they have to get that cover off. So you can’t just bury an EMP unless the shield is over the top and not, uh, the bottom. If they can get the rover to drive over the EMP, they can fire it up the bottom. Because that material’s expensive.

[Emily]
Yeah.

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Shep]
Costs a lot of money to fire rockets into space. And every kilogram is, you know, ten times more expensive. So they shielded the top because that’s where the radiation is coming from.

[Thomas]
Right, if the rover’s upside down, you’ve got bigger problems then.

[Shep]
Right.

[Thomas]
Okay.

[Shep]
So, that’s the weak spot, is its underbelly.

[Thomas]
Okay. Yeah.

[Shep]
Yeah.

[Thomas]
Okay. You’ve fixed it.

[Shep]
But that means you can’t just have Green fire off an EMP from wherever.

[Thomas]
Right. Right.

[Shep]
It has to be under the rovers to disable them.

[Thomas]
Well, somehow they’ve got to lose Green for some reason. Maybe they have some initial plan to try to stop them and it doesn’t work. I feel like the AI is not super smart yet. It’s once it gets Green, then it gets really smart.

[Shep]
Right. Oh!

[Thomas]
So, its processing power is limited up to that point.

[Shep]
Right. You have to introduce earlier in the movie the, like, faults in-

[Thomas]
Our stars?

[Shep]
AI chess. The Fault in Our Stars, like, it’s almost on point because we’re talking about a space mission. So you earlier establish that computers are easy to beat at chess.

[Thomas]
Hmm.

[Shep]
Because they’re smarter than people, but they fall for traps.

[Thomas]
Hmm.

[Shep]
Right? That was the controversy over Deep Blue beating Kasparov was Kasparov was like, “It didn’t do what a computer would do when it’s playing chess, which was fall for these traps.”

[Thomas]
Hmm.

[Shep]
Because he kept putting traps out and it kept not falling for them. And that had not happened before. And so it was implied that there was a human on the other side-

[Thomas]
Hmm.

[Shep]
Recognizing the traps. So obviously now losing Green is the plan. It’s not a thing that happens on accident. It is they are luring the Red rover into a mistake where it seems like it’s gaining a piece by capturing Green, but it is exposing itself in some way, in some predictable way-

[Thomas]
Hmm.

[Shep]
That the humans could have laid a trap for it.

[Thomas]
And the trap is that Green is really expensive to maintenance? Or- Yeah, what would be a trap? Is this, like, a, an immediate trap? Like the result of the trap happens immediately? Or is this like a “Oh, but unbeknownst to Red, some nanites got on it, and in three days, it’s going to be real sorry that it came over here?” You know, like, do we spring this trap late?

[Shep]
No nanites.

[Thomas]
No.

[Shep]
No nanomachines. No. Now that they know that it gets more powerful and its range increases when it has more computational power, they know what will happen, what its capabilities will be once it has Green. Once it has Green, it will be able to detect a “flaw”. I’m putting this in quotation marks, a “flaw” in the human’s defenses and take advantage of that. And that’s what they’re counting on. So they expect it to take over Green and become smarter and stronger and go, “Oh, aha, now that I’m smarter, I’ve seen the gap in your armor.” And, and it follows a predictable path, which they’re waiting for it to do.

[Thomas]
Okay. And then do they take it down at that moment?

[Shep]
Yes.

[Thomas]
Okay.

[Shep]
So, that’s where it has, where they have laid some other under EMP or something. Something that the audience will understand.

[Thomas]
I like the idea of going back to closing the door. It’s like they’ve put Blue in a garage and Red rolls in there and then they shut the door and it’s like, “Hey, good luck getting out with your wheels.”

[Shep]
Also, if it’s shut, it doesn’t have access to the rest of the mesh and it loses its capability.

[Thomas]
Yeah, the garage happens to be a Faraday cage.

[Shep]
Of course, it’s shielded.

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Shep]
The whole base is shielded. If they can get it inside the base, oh yeah, if they can get it inside the base, it thinks it has won but really they have won.

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Shep]
So, that’s the goal. Get it inside the base. Close the shields.

[Thomas]
Do we then see that Red is the controlling one? Like, Red is infected, but it’s just controlling the others. If you separate Red and Yellow enough, like, put enough distance between them that they can’t talk to each other, Yellow just goes back to normal. For whatever reason, Red has more onboard memory. Ah, of course, Red has more onboard memory because it goes around autonomously and explores. So, it’s gathering data and it’s storing all that data and then it comes back and tells you what it’s found. The other one’s just kind of, like, Yellow goes and does one job and comes back. You know?

[Shep]
Yes.

[Thomas]
White goes and digs a hole. Like they don’t need as much storage as the other ones have.

[Shep]
Yes.

[Thomas]
And so they can’t hold pieces of the AI but Red can. And so Red allows the AI to sort of move around. So yeah, if you can separate them… So yeah, I like that plan of getting Red in a shielded structure and locking it in there. Do they have, like, a promotional cardboard cutout of Blue and they put it in the garage? Red would have really good cameras and sensors, though, so.

[Shep]
Right, because it’s the exploration one.

[Thomas]
Exactly, yeah. I mean, I think the specific details of how do they get it in the garage, we can leave up to the writers. We know that that’s how they cut it off from everything else. And then presumably in the garage, it’s just going to run out of power at some point.

[Shep]
Well, how much of a button do you want on the finale?

[Thomas]
Yeah, what is the specific finale, I guess?

[Shep]
I mean, I had the Red rover running off over the horizon and hiding somewhere.

[Thomas]
Hmm, right.

[Shep]
So, maybe just getting cut off from Red is enough to disab- to give the humans time to disable the other rovers. So if Red can escape at that point, it’s fine. It has no other rovers to build its mesh with. It is isolated and on its own. So it’s much less of a threat, although it still is a threat.

[Thomas]
So, is the plan after Red leaves? Is the plan, they’ve already lost two people, at least.

[Shep]
Yes.

[Thomas]
So, is the plan to just leave Mars? Pack up and go, or not even pack up, just, like, destroy everything we can, don’t give Red anything to work with, take anything that transmits, put it in the rocket and get the hell out of there?

[Shep]
Ah. Okay, that’s good because you don’t see Red escaping the base. You have Red trapped in the base, and then the humans make their escape immediately, right? Maybe they can disable the other rovers on their way out, but, like, the priority is get on the rocket and leave the planet. And so you can have, like, an after-credit scene where the next team, which is sent to deal with the Red Rover, gets there and the Red Rover is missing. So they know that it, they just know that it’s out there somewhere.

[Thomas]
There’s, like, a rover-shaped hole in the garage door, and-

[Shep]
Yeah, yes.

[Thomas]
“Ruh-roh.”

[Shep]
Yep.

[Thomas]
Okay.

[Shep]
Because getting the humans, the remaining living humans, to the rocket and leaving Mars feels like a victory.

[Thomas]
Right.

[Shep]
Except it’s not really.

[Thomas]
Right.

[Shep]
Because it didn’t end the threat. The threat is still out there.

[Thomas]
Well, we’d love to hear your thoughts on today’s episode about Red Rover. Was it a breakthrough episode, or did we just hold you back?

[Shep]
I get those now. I get the jokes.

[Thomas]
Let us know by leaving a comment on our website, reaching out on social media, or sending us an email. Links to all of those can be found at AlmostPlausible.com. You know, podcasts are a lot like playground games. Both of them are better with more people. And you can very easily help get more people listening to Almost Plausible. All you have to do is leave a five-star rating wherever you listen to the show. Thank you to those of you who already have. And don’t forget, when you leave a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts, if you include a written review, we’ll read it on a future episode. Red Rover, Red Rover, Emily, Shep, and I are calling you over to the next episode of Almost Plausible.

[Outro music]

[Emily]
Okay, heads is go-bag.

[Shep]
Yeah, we can’t see your screen, so whatever you decide.

[Emily]
I know. I’m saying, I’m telling you what-

[Shep]
Okay.

[Emily]
I’m gonna announce what it is-

[Shep]
Okay. Got it.

[Emily]
After I decide one it is. Heads is go-bag.

[Shep]
Got it. Got it. Heads is go-bag.

[Shep and Emily]
Tails is sci-fi.

[Emily]
And it is tails.

[Shep]
Okay.

[Thomas]
Sci-fi okay.

[Emily]
Do you need me to share screen to show you that I-

[Thomas]
No.

[Shep]
No, because I don’t care if you use the coin flip. I just wanted you to make the decision. It’s worse if you share your screen, and show that you didn’t decide anything.