‘Ponies’ Creators Unpack Those Finale Twists and Tease “More Complicated Loyalties” for Season 2 and Beyond

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Tania Hussain is an Executive Editor at Collider responsible for creative, editorial, and managerial duties. In addition to leading content ideation and development, she works to generate innovative and compelling ideas for feature articles and reviews with her editorial team across Features, Resources, Lists, and News. She has helped cover and ideate content for major events for Collider, including the Toronto International Film Festival. Tania has also conducted more than 100 interviews since her start in the business almost 16 years ago. Some favorites include Joel McHale, Charlie Cox, John Krasinski, Jennifer Garner, Tina Fey, Bob Odenkirk, Sophia Bush, Andy Richter, Jordan Schlansky, Jamie Dornan, Yeardley Smith, Arielle Vandenberg, and a reasonable toss-up between Cookie Monster and Kermit the Frog.

Editor’s Note: The following contains spoilers for the Season 1 finale of PoniesIn the explosive Season 1 finale of Peacock’s newest spy thriller series, Ponies doesn’t just raise the stakes, but it detonates everything we thought we knew. After Bea’s (Emilia Clarke) cover is blown in the penultimate episode, she and Twila (Haley Lu Richardson) are suddenly sprinting through a concert hall, hiding in plain sight among Elton John’s entourage while fighting to stay alive and evade the sinister KGB officer Andrei Vasiliev (Artjom Gilz). Between an episode that keeps tightening its screws like Sasha (Petro Ninovskyi) left hanging by a thread and a tender car-side confession between the women, the season’s biggest shocks land like full-on body blows.

But among the long list of the show’s biggest revelations of the season, discovering that mid-level CIA analyst, Ray’s (Nicolas Podany) wife, Cheryl (Vic Michaelis), has been the mole at the Embassy the whole time is a shock audiences won’t catch early on. Not to mention, Andrei rewrites the “enemy” narrative by sharing with Bea and Twila that the Americans were involved in Sasha’s sister’s, Galyna (Sophia Shkliaruk), death. But the biggest stunner might be that Bea is denied the truth one more time. As she and Twila are stuck in a raging inferno at the Embassy, Dane (Adrian Lester) and Emilé (Pál Mácsai) confirm that Bea’s husband Chris (Louis Boyer) is very much alive, with Bea’s very stunned grandmother Manya (Harriet Walter) being the first to meet him.

In an exclusive interview with Collider, Ponies co-creators and executive producers Susanna Fogel and David Iserson walk through the series’ most telling spy-movie DNA, as well as unpacking all those shocking shifts to Season 2, including how the eight-episode series was always built for a multi-season arc, which makes Episode 8 less of an ending and more the moment that the real game finally reveals itself.

Chris Being Alive Turns ‘Ponies’ Into a Different Kind of Spy Story

The explosive finale rewrites who can be trusted in ‘Ponies,’ leaving Bea in the dark as every assumption collapses.

COLLIDER: Congratulations on Ponies! What an incredible show — but before we get into the spoilers, I love the feel and vibe. It is very authentic, down to the smallest of details. Were there any specific spy films or Cold War thrillers that you guys kept returning to as tonal touchstones while shaping the series?

DAVID ISERSON: We had a little syllabus that I put together for the writers' room. The big ones were Three Days of the Condor, which I love for many reasons. We took Robert Redford's coat, and that's the coat that Chris [Boyer] wears in the pilot that he uses for comfort. We had it copied. I love that one just because it is smart, capable, but unlikely. He is not a trained spy, but he is thrust into this conspiracy and is capable, and that felt like it really connected to our characters' journeys.

I know this is another Peacock show, but I really like the original Day of the Jackal movie, [and] The Parallax View. I watched a lot of Inglourious Basterds because I just felt like there were some great things to learn about how to build themes that I think ultimately diverged a lot from what Christoph Waltz was. But it was a good sort of template for conversation and just the feeling of somebody who is cunning and out for his own self-interest in this very villainous government piece. I'm sure you looked at a lot of other things for the visuals. The other thing is, we looked at ‘70s television shows because that's where we took our aspect ratio.

So the reveal about Chris being alive is huge, and looking at it from Dane's perspective, he's been positioned as his protector from the first episode to now. But the finale makes him look like someone who has compartmentalized things a little bit more ruthlessly? Was that reveal designed to break the audience's faith, or are we going to just have a complicated relationship with him now?

ISERSON: I don't think that was designed to break our audience’s faith in Dane, but we are playing with that idea. Dane was walking into that room, and we didn't have him walking into that room knowing that Chris was alive, or he wasn't sure. It was surprising to him. I think we drop breadcrumbs that he finds things out off-screen from Emile [Mácsai] leading up to it, so he's not going in like, “Who is this?” But we were trying to hold that a bit, and he was going into that room to see if that was true.

Chris would have betrayed Dane, too, but I do think that we are kind of breaking our feelings about Dane, and our feelings that he isn't necessarily always on the right side or always knows what's going on. The story that Andrei is weaving, and that we see a little bit in the flashback, when Galyna’s death is revealed, is that the CIA was behind that. We are sort of left to wonder if Dane knew about that. So yeah, it's a question of how dirty everyone else's hands are.

When Bea and Twila are sort of captured at the end, that reveal that Chris is alive isn't actually given to Bea as yet; she has no idea, but her grandmother, Manya, knows. Why did it feel important for the truth to land adjacent to Bea rather than with her at this point? At that moment, I felt like she was losing a little bit of her freedom again because everybody around her knows — and there's an emotional thesis to the show where she's always denied the truth at every turn, and that's something that I thought was so interesting.

SUSANNA FOGEL: We like to play with the idea that these women, as empowered as they are or feel that they are, are still being used by somebody as a pawn in something. Even Bea, a feminist when we first meet her, a wealthy, educated girl who probably marched in multiple protests when she was in college, is still in a somewhat traditional marriage where kids are planned out, and she'll probably default into that before it's ever her turn to have her career be first. It just kind of goes that way, despite what she wants to believe about how autonomous she is. So we like constantly playing with the idea that they never fully become empowered in as simple a way as they want to think that they are, which is something that I think is generally a thesis about women in life, even in 2026, talking about the subtle ways that they're still treated like they're not the star of the story or the star of the movie of their own life. There's someone else using them in a way.

So with the Manya reveal, we do intend for Bea to find this out and then be in a situation where she's grappling with how much she is still a person that would have done anything to resolve that question and to have Chris back? How much does she still relate to that version of herself? But also, we liked the idea that there's somebody in her world that we've come to care about that has information that multiple governments are incentivized for her not to share with Bea. So, even the idea of complicating the relationship between Manya and Bea, if Manya has the secret, and she's threatened, she can't divulge that to Bea, and Bea may suspect something, or Manya is also ultimately somewhat in a position to potentially be manipulated with that knowledge she has. It was exciting to think about continuing the thread of the Bea/Manya piece of it, and not burn that reveal to be so early that then it's just the love story that she's grappling with. We'd love to have Harriet [Walter] back, and we'd love to bring Manya back. It's interesting to us to think about her relationship with Bea and how close they've become in Episodes 5 and 8.

Simu Liu and Melissa Barrera in The Copenhagen Test

Going into Season 2, what's the most dangerous thing about Chris being alive for Bea, emotionally or even for the mission and entire team? Because now, seeing where they are, at the end of the episode, we know that she's going to, again, be manipulated into a situation with the reveal that Andrei gave.

ISERSON: When we were talking about Chris being alive, it's a tricky thing for us as writers because when we were meeting writers on the show, when we were talking about the show at the very beginning, people understand that as a spy genre thing — the person who you think is dead is really alive. We understood that, and we understood that that reveal was going to matter emotionally, and maybe that piece of it may be something that the audience might have an inkling of. But I think what feels like it is something new to explore is to really live with that, and to really have a character in a television show have to grapple with this.

So for Bea, first of all, we don't know the circumstances. We don't know what Chris is living and hiding deep in the Soviet Union, what that means about his loyalties, what that means about why he's getting there. We do know that he's charming. We do know that he is charismatic. We do know that he can tell a story. So presumably, Bea and Chris, when she finds out one way or the other, and somehow connects with Chris again, this is going to upend her. She's learned that the CIA is doing some terrible [things]. It's not just: Andrei is bad, and CIA is good, which I think she obviously knew on a lot of levels, but Andrei’s reveal, in conversation, really underlined that.

So the question is, if you were to ask her at many points in the series what her wish is, it would be that Chris wasn't dead and that her life was back as it was. I think she's gone through a journey where she's no longer defined as a wife. She's no longer defined by Chris. But I think we as people, and Bea as somebody we really relate to, really do fall into these traps of how do we define ourselves to other people? What is the story that we tell ourselves? It's going to be very hard for Bea, as somebody who says, “The great love of my life is Chris. The thing that made my life into something I didn't want it to be was Chris's death,” and if there is a possibility, no matter whatever that possibility looks like, of Chris coming back in her life, having a way of explaining it all away, being able to find some sort of future with Chris, is it going to be something that she can justify saying, “No, go away. I'm going to keep doing this, working for the CIA, a company that I am finding very morally flawed?” It really puts Bea in this really complicated, emotional place, and character place that we're really, really excited to dig into more.

FOGEL: Also, just to add to that, in terms of Bea not trusting necessarily, she's learned a healthy mistrust of people, and that would have to include Chris. As Chris tells the story of what happened, we will and should, along with Bea, be doubting that, just because he's not a reliable narrator anymore, just because we've twisted what we thought. So I think it's interesting to explore, also, the ways that, if he was lying to her for any reason except that he was under extreme duress, to put her through having to grieve him, to put her through that hell, even though unbeknownst to him, he was turning her into a stronger person, that's such a betrayal of her emotionally. So if he says, “But I had to do it for these reasons,” can she trust that? So, it's just interesting to play with interrogating what that relationship is and was when she thought it was cozy and safe and knowable.

Cheryl’s Twist Isn’t Just a Betrayal — It’s a Thesis for ‘Ponies’

The creators explain why Cheryl works as the last-suspected villain, and how ego and “history repeating itself” shaped her twist.

Speaking of safe, revealing Cheryl as the mole turns that whole safe, domestic world into a very compromised space on the show. I love how we see the second wave of feminism come to light — it’s very underscored here. Why did you want that portrayal to come from the home front and not from a colleague inside the CIA?

FOGEL: One thing that we really liked is we wanted to push it further than just that all the women are underestimated, and all the men are… We like the idea that even our characters would never have thought that Cheryl was capable of that. They themselves, and maybe the audience even, are not expecting it to be a woman who's hiding in plain sight in a domestic way. Like, we think she's sort of like the Regina George, the office bitch, but ultimately, she's a different type of villain, even more than we think. So, we like the idea that we're like, “Oh, shame on us for thinking Bea and Twila are the only empowered women with secrets in the world.”

So, there's part of us that wanted to do that, and also one thing that we've talked about a bit is that within her marriage, it sort of makes her more perilous that at the end of in the finale, when she has that fight with Ray about him not trusting her and not believing her about Eevi, she's like, “You've got to trust me. You’ve got to believe me more.” And he's like, “You’ve gotta be open with me.” She's asking him to share more with her and trust her more, just as we know that he shouldn't. So then we're holding that dramatic irony, and we're like, “No, Ray, you're such an earnest guy who wants your marriage work, and you're so whipped.” And that's going to be a big problem for the whole government. We like the idea of mashing up the personal with the global.

I love the spies stories and the Mata Hari, honeypot sort of themes, and I was reading that TIME magazine article about the CIA and housewife covers and how they gave them tasks. I'm sure you guys have read all that stuff, but normative invisibility as camouflage is very interesting to me. Was Cheryl meant to embody that, not weaponized seduction but weaponized dismissal? Because that's exactly what you were saying before — people underestimate her just because she's the wife of somebody. That goes back to the first wave of feminism after the ‘50s, where women were in the workplace, and then afterward, they started being a little bit more passive. Were you guys thinking of that sort of commentary? Because it is so important now, to have these conversations about women being at the forefront of their own empowerment and independence.

FOGEL: We've been talking about history repeating itself a lot.

ISERSON: When you write a historical show, you're like, “Oh, yeah, we’re already there.”

FOGEL: You start working on it, and you're like, “This is a time capsule.” And then you're like, “Oh, we're still talking about women's equality.”

ISERSON: I'll go back a little bit. I read something about the four ways that you can compromise somebody in espionage. They call it MICE. It's money, ideology, coercion, and ego, and most of the time, it's ego. Most of the time, it's better if they're ideologues, if they're just like, “I'm an American, but I actually believe in the communist cause.” That is somebody who is probably less likely to turn back again. But ultimately, you have people who are in a position where they have access to things, and they feel like they're just not treated with respect or taken seriously, and it is flattering for a foreign government to say, “Hey, we see you, and we see what you're capable of.”

We talked a lot about this with Vic [Michaelis] and Nick [Podany], about who Cheryl is. We thought that Cheryl was somebody who met Ray in college. He is this brilliant, charming, sweet man, who she thought was going to be a senator, and he, instead, is kind of a mid-level CIA person who is the most morally sound person in our show, and he just wants to do the right thing at every turn, and will make compromises as a result. She thought she was going to be Jackie Kennedy, and instead, as she's talking about, is trying to kind of make the best of it in Moscow, where she's gotta dye her own hair, like this, “This sucks.” When we wrote that scene, because we're portraying her so much through Twila’s eyes, and Ray’s, through the show, and Vic is so funny…

ISERSON: I think she also embodies a version of the arc that Bea and Twila are going through. All our characters are, and honestly, it’s the arc that we go through in life. So we thought it was going to be one way, and we find ourselves in a place, like, “Oh, this is not how I planned it.” And she reacts in a way that is villainous.

Will we learn who the babysitter, Evie [Clare Hughes], was this whole time in Season 2?

FOGEL: We love her — we will dig into who she was. It's a thing we’re still figuring out. We like the idea that, as a red herring, Cheryl's the kind of woman who's going to be threatened by a younger, hot babysitter. She's the kind of woman who will just be petty about that, even if she wasn't the mole. We're like, “Okay, great. We're going to distract everyone with ways that Cheryl is a relatably petty mean girl.” But with Evie, honestly, there are a couple of versions of it that we could explore, and we haven't really delved into it deeply, but initially, we were like the simplest layer of it is that she's innocent. Cheryl pushes her under the bus and uses her to frame her. But there's also maybe a twist that we come up with where it's like, yeah, she was actually...

ISERSON: We always had Clare play it both ways, because I do feel like that is how we wanted the audience to see it, that she could just be somebody who is seeing that Ray is doing something suspicious and exciting, and her life is not exciting, and she wants to know what it is. I think we also are intrigued by the idea that even if Cheryl is the mole, it's not like she is aware of what else the KGB is doing, and the KGB is so labyrinthine that there's no way that everybody knows…

FOGEL: That everyone knows everyone.

ISERSON: …that Cheryl is the mole, so if they had the opportunity to put somebody who is reporting back to the Soviets into Ray's apartment, they would.

FOGEL: And for that matter, we can also play with the idea that maybe somebody was on to Cheryl, and who is that person? Maybe Evie was a plant to smoke out Cheryl, a plant from any number of people who suspect that she's not doing as good a job covering it up. So there are ways we could go that we're still talking about what's going to be the most fun to watch. But the mystery will be revisited, yeah.

‘Ponies’ Has Its Most Complicated Ingredient for Season 2

Season 2 shifts Bea and Twila into a leverage game with Andrei, with one surviving “chip” and a CIA operation in shambles.

But talking about Bea and Twila’s relationship, I love that scene in the car between the two of them when Twila opens up about her past, but that last scene where they're holding hands and the camera goes to them sets such a tone for the next chapter. But as it goes, if Season 1 was basically about becoming operatives, with Andrei knowing the truth, Season 2 feels like they might be used as bargaining chips. Does that shift the way you write them now for Season 2, when they're no longer really driving the action, but they're being acted upon?

ISERSON: I don't think they are bargaining chips. I think they have bargaining chips. The idea is that they feel they've gotten one up on Andrei. They take all these shampoo bottles, these shampoo bottles burn up. They think all is lost, but we do see that Twila has one, so that they may still be able to leverage Andrei, which is the thing that they feel they have a lot of power over.

FOGEL: It’s their only recourse, if they get out alive, that they would have.

ISERSON: Yeah. I don't believe that their cover is blown because the KGB firefighters see them in the office. They still have ample cover as secretaries in the office. It really is a question of what Andrei does, and whether Andrei sees that his own ambitions may actually improve if he does cooperate with Bea and Twila, or if he goes back to his superiors like, “Hey, I know what the CIA is doing.”

FOGEL: I think it's about how soon they're going to be able to reunite with Andrei and tell him what they have on him, so that he knows that it's not just that their cover's blown and that's it. They both have a chip on each other. So, it's going to be interesting to see what games they play with each other and the governments that get involved in that.

ISERSON: Also, at that point, the CIA operation in Moscow is going to be a shambles. The KGB has taken a lot of documents, and there's stuff in there that they are going to be able to use in a very, very dangerous, damaging way. So, it is kind of all hands on deck.

FOGEL: And Andrei, at that point, if he's incentivized to cover up his own double-crossing, is going to say that he's incentivized to try to block that information from getting out. So, in a weird way, like David was saying, it's going to still be a mix of him having to, against his will, cooperate with the girls, but there's all this tension in there. And they still do have chemistry, which is complicated, too.

ISERSON: And he is a murderer.

FOGEL: But they have murderous chemistry.

‘Ponies’ Ends Season 1 by Blowing Up the Idea of a Clear Enemy

The creators explain why ‘Ponies’ rejects a clean enemy, framing espionage as a “dirty game” where every side gets compromised.

The revelation that the Americans killed Sasha’s sister, I feel like it destabilizes a lot of things. How important was it for you guys to end the season with the idea that the enemy is largely a manufactured narrative, which is still happening everywhere we're looking?

FOGEL: It's interesting talking about this because we didn't want to just do a like “US good, Russia bad” show, less because we want to humanize everyone in Russia and more because we don't want to say that Americans are just the sum of their country's politics, especially now. Just for me, someone who made a movie about reality winners and whistleblowers, who also considered herself a patriot and was in the military, but that is considered enemy number one by Trump, it's like, we wanted to complicate and problematize the idea of what all these governments are doing because they're all getting their hands dirty, and it's not so simple. They can't have a pure ideology about what they're doing, and they can't valorize America after what they've learned, especially that. Other things along the way, but they're all kind of playing a version of the same dirty game. So it feels like it's up to each person individually to decide what their own ethics are and what their own line is moment to moment, but that seems like it's hard to recover from that.

Then there's the question of, like you said, what did Dane know? Did Dane authorize that murder? Was that a tactic that they were too naive to realize that the U.S is using those tactics all the time? Was that an exception? And what moral line do you draw? If it's one time, if it's three times, if it's all the time? We're interested in showing anybody who is dealing in these kinds of politics as compromised on a level. We definitely didn't want to do some “America first” thing just because, like you said, we're living in a time that it's complicated to even have an American flag in your house if you're a liberal person who doesn't like the stuff the government's doing. It feels weird to me. I'm American, you know what I mean? Even though we are Americans, it all feels so loaded and coded.

James Bond sits tied to a chair while Raoul Silva tenderly plays with his shirt collar.

ISERSON: Just to add one more thing on to it, Dane has that conversation with Bea early on in the season where he is kind of explaining that we don't need spies, that we only do it because they do it. And if none of us did it, everything would be the same. And I think that that's true. It wasn't my idea, that idea I saw in a John Le Carré book somewhere, but I definitely put it through Dane's filter when we made it part of our show. But I think that's the truth. Once you get into the truth of what everyone is doing, you realize that everyone is risking their lives on a very macro level for something that is ultimately purposeless. But at the micro level, you are doing something for you. You are figuring out what matters to you. The best spy movies are ultimately when they become personal, when you are doing something that just matters to your own moral code or your own emotions or your own love.

So, for Bea and Twila, it still is going to be that they are at the precipice of the greatest conflict of their time between the two most powerful countries in the world, and they're in it. They're right in the center of it, even though nobody quite knows that they exist. Both sides only kind of want balance. We also live in 2026, so we know how that story ends, at least in the immediate. So it is a constant question for Bea and Twila, and it allows their motivations to change because they change. They're different people at the end of the season than they were at the beginning, and in Season 2, they’re just going to have to re-ask themselves these questions about what personally is in this for them and what are the stakes for them, and I think that becomes exciting.

FOGEL: Also, they've discovered something they love to do with their lives. They've discovered a purpose. They like this job. And then when they realize more and when they uncover more and more of the moral problems of the job that they maybe were naive to at the beginning, or when they were less involved, then they have to ask, “Okay, but what's the alternative? Do I leave this job? For what?” And then it's also a moral question of, “What's my own personal line, given how well-suited I am to this role that I'm playing and how much it's changed me as a person and how much I found my autonomy?”

‘Ponies’ Sets Up Sasha as a “Valuable Asset,” Not a Person

Season 2 will dig into what happened to Sasha, and whether Bea can keep the lie that turned him against the Soviets.

I wanted to know, also, about Sasha. I feel like it's deliberately unresolved, but we're going to find out what's happening to him in Season 2 — right? He didn't die. So, he's on the verge of almost death. Are we going to be able to see a little bit more there? For Bea, having grieved Chris, which is going to add another complication when we find out that he's back — now she's in a love triangle or even a love quartet. Well, not with Andrei, obviously…

ISERSON: Andrei’s part of the triangle in some way. [Laughs]

FOGEL: It's funny, in each of those relationships, the power dynamic is so different from, really, each of those dynamics. But yeah, we definitely want to explore what happened to Sasha, what he's been through, whether and how he could be compromised.

ISERSON: The people who took him take him very coldly, and they don't tell her where they're taking him, and we don't know what else happened to him. We don't know if he's going to be shoved right back into his apartment in Moscow, where his cover is blown, where he's surely going to get killed, or somewhere else. He has a skill set, and he has a lot of information. He is a valuable asset. The government doesn't care about him because he is a really sweet person whom Bea has grown attached to. They need him for entirely different reasons.

FOGEL: He doesn't have utility to them.

ISERSON: Yeah. And we love that he's also somebody working for the Americans and is not particularly pro-American or feels one way or the other.

FOGEL: He’s really turned because of this lie.

ISERSON: He became anti the Soviet Union because of what he believes they did to his sister. If the truth ever comes out, if he finds out the truth, what is that going to do for somebody who really sees himself as a good man and is a good man?

FOGEL: Also, Bea now has this secret that is at the heart of Sasha's whole point of radicalization. She knows the reason he thinks he's collaborating with the Americans, and she knows that it's based on a lie. What is the argument for and against telling him that it was all a lie? They need to use him and keep him in the dark about things? It's interesting to explore their level of trust. They’d just sort of gotten to a place of slightly more trust, albeit within this world. So, I don't know, does she keep that from him? And how does that drive a wedge into their relationship?

ISERSON: She does care about him. She has lied to him in the past.

FOGEL: Is it a noble lie not to tell him the truth, or is it sort of like she owes him the truth?

‘Ponies’ Season 2 Isn’t Confirmed — but They’re Planning Like It Is

Season 2 isn’t confirmed, but the creators built ‘Ponies’ for multiple seasons — and tease “more kissing” and “more complicated loyalties.”

There's gonna be a can of worms for Season 2, because obviously, with Chris being back, I'm sure Twila is going to wonder what really happened to Tom because Tom's dead to everybody else, but is he really dead? [Laughs]

ISERSON: Tom is dead. I want to reveal that to Collider. Tom is really dead. [Laughs]

And it definitely looks like we're getting Season 2? I know it's probably not been announced yet...

FOGEL: We would love it. We’re planning for one.

ISERSON: Yeah, we are planning for one. We are putting everything together to do it. But I will just be as transparent with you as I can: We do not know.

Was there ever a version of the ending that offered more emotional resolution?

ISERSON: No. We always pitched this as an ongoing television show, which, for a while, was kind of out of vogue, but now I think it is back. We didn't see this as a closed story from any version of it. When we approached our actors, it was hard to cast a show with famous people. It's much easier to say, “Oh, we need to be there for six months.” So, all the actors knew that going in, and when we sold this show to Peacock, we told them the whole story, covering multiple seasons. It changed, but there are things that we will hold on to from the beginning.

FOGEL: For us, this friendship and these girls are the pleasure of the show. As David was saying, when you're trying to entice people to sign away seven years of their life, you're like, “I promise it’ll be worth it.” Or 12 years of your life. When you're talking about different ways to keep a show feeling fresh, even in the spy genre, there are so many ways we could reset in future seasons. It feels like we’ve done a lot of twists and turns with Cold War stuff with the KGB. Where could they go? Do we ever have an episode where they leave Russia? They have international jobs now, so we've talked about doing a lot there, too.

It's good to always will the good things into existence, so when Season 2 comes out, if you guys could summarize in one word or two words what fans can expect from that, what would you say we should be looking forward to?

ISERSON: More kissing. [Laughs]

FOGEL: More intrigue and more complicated loyalties. We've woven as tangled a web as we can, and now we want to just keep tangling it and making it more complicated. We asked the question in a very simple way at the beginning. These women are on a mission that is, on the surface, about their husbands and this mystery, but ultimately it's about empowerment and finding themselves and finding their ability to connect to another person whom they can learn from. But then that gets turned over and over and over throughout the season, and we just want to keep on turning it.

ISERSON: Also, when Bea finds out, what is she going to do?

Ponies is now streaming on Peacock.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.