pods->row() doesn’t return meta fields

I understand that pods->row() isn’t supposed to return Relationship fields (or Image / Video / File fields) but it seems its not returning meta fields either.

$episodes = pods('episode');
 $params = array( 
	'limit' => 10, 
	'where' => "CAST(premiere_date.meta_value AS DATE) < CURDATE()", 
	'orderby' => "premiere_date.meta_value DESC" 
	); 
$episodes->find($params);
if ( 0 < $episodes->total() ) {
	while ( $episodes->fetch() ) {
	    get_template_part('template-parts/episode-ArchiveCard','', $episodes->row());
	}
}

with the above code, when i do a var_dump($args) inside the episode-ArchiveCard.php template, the array doesn’t contain any Episode metafields. Only the wp_post default fields.

Am i doing something wrong ? Is this the expected behavior ?

Thank you!