‘The Circle’ Producers Loved Watching “Frustrating” Ride or Die Twist Do Its Thing

There’s only one thing you can expect from a season of The Circle, and that’s the unexpected. Whether it’s the Spice Girls sliding into the Circle Chat or hackers and clones stirring up chaos, players have to go into the Circle ready for anything. Season 6 of The Circle, now unfolding in weekly batches on Netflix, is no different. The Circle is going to Circle, after all! And this season’s back-to-back twists are definitely keeping the players on alert. First they had to deal with an invasive AI, and now they have to ride — or die — alongside a player not of their choosing.

Ride or Die is one of the most strategically complex twists we’ve ever seen on The Circle. The twist started out simple enough: The Circle presented all of the players with seemingly innocuous series of options. “Fight 1 bear or fight 100 chickens?” “Cozy night in or wild not out?” “Phone photos get leaked or Google searches get leaked?” The players responded, totally unaware that they were taking The Circle’s version of a personality quiz. Then, going off of their answers, the Circle paired the players up into Ride or Die duos. After almost seven episodes of bonding, scheming, and aligning, the players now have another alliance to consider — and it’s very much one they did not pick.

This was all by design, of course, as Circle showrunner Susan House told Decider. The Ride or Die twist actually twisted into existence from a previous season’s twist. “One of the previous story arcs was with Xanthi and Brett, and I think we all felt like that worked really well and that was fun,” said House. In Season 5, Xanthi and Brett were blocked in Episode 1 and given the chance to return to the game playing together as a catfish. They created Jennifer — and made it all the way to the finale. This inspired the Ride or Die twist for Season 6: “Once we started talking about it, we realized all the different ways it could be really exciting.”

While we’ve seen players form unlikely duos in the past — like Brett and Xanthi in Season 5, and Lisa and Jack in Season 2 — the Ride or Die twist differs because all the team-ups are between players who are still in the game, and who are also still playing an individual game. Yeah, they have a Ride or Die now, but they are still in their own apartments playing their own game. They don’t know if they’re paired with a catfish or not. Kyle’s paired with “Paul,” who’s really Caress, but they were already Circle bros so this twist is fine with them. But “Olivia” (a.k.a. Brandon) is paired with Myles, the one player in the Circle that she absolutely did not trust — and the feeling’s mutual.

Circle co-executive producer Niall O’Driscoll told Decider that these variables are exactly what they had in mind when coming up with the twist: “We liked that idea of your fate being sealed with another player and how frustrating and funny that could potentially be as well.”

“It can go in so many different directions,” added House. Like, who could have predicted that Lauren and Autumn — two players with very few feelings either way about each other prior to the twist — would end up in such a contentious partnership? But that’s exactly what happened when Lauren absent-mindedly threw Autumn under the bus during a game. Now these two’s fates are intertwined, and Autumn can’t trust her ride or die.

And all of that happened before the Ride or Die twist clarified what the “or Die” part means: if your ride or die gets blocked, you get blocked too. I mean, is it really a twist if the twist is in the twists name? It is literally Ride or Die. Players were so plucked by the “ride” part that they forgot about the “die” part.

But hey — it’s unexpected, unpredictable, and unbelievably messy twists that make The Circle feel like The Circle. And as O’Driscoll told us, the producers have just as much fun as the audience while watching these twists play out. “It was just really exciting. We were so happy to be back making the show. It felt really fresh and exciting. There’s obviously always a layer of the unknown with all of these, but we do testing and proper development with all of them. But yeah, it was it was exciting.”

The Ride or Die twist continues to twist in next week’s batch of Circle episodes, dropping on Wednesday, May 1.