In its first season, Apple TV+’s Silo (based on Hugh Howey’s trilogy of novels) was a slow but tantalizing mystery about a towering subterranean bunker in which 10,000 survivors of an unknown apocalypse reside, and throughout its return engagement, premiering Nov. 15), it suffers from some of the same shortcomings that plagued its maiden run, including a pace that vacillates between sluggish and static.
Worse, however, is that the more Graham Yost’s series reveals about its secrets and scenario, the less it makes sense. While Rebecca Ferguson’s steely magnetism once again keeps things from devolving into utter torpor, it’s a lethargic adventure whose entire premise is ultimately revealed to be founded on fundamental illogicalities.
Picking up where it left off, Silo finds Juliette (Ferguson) wandering outside her underground domicile. What she discovers is a wasteland pockmarked with craters and other silo entrances very similar to the one she exited, including a nearby one that’s littered with corpses and boasts an open door. Inside, the place is abandoned and in severe disrepair, although it’s apparently still free of the atmospheric toxins that Juliette was shielded from by her protective suit.
The premiere charts Juliette’s investigation of this space with virtually no dialogue except during intermittent flashbacks to the heroine’s childhood in the silo’s “Down Deep,” where she meets Shirley and is destined to toil as the chief engineer of the Mechanical detail, and the show’s silent focus on the protagonist’s problem-solving is a compelling way of drawing us close to her.
After struggling to build a bridge that lets her traverse a chasm separating the silo’s staircase from its I.T. area, Juliette meets Solo (Steve Zahn), a cagey shut-in who’s locked himself in a giant vault. Solo is incredibly wary of Juliette. Nonetheless, they gradually strike up enough of a rapport to allow her to learn that this silo was destroyed by a rebellion that came on the heels of a member successfully leaving it. This is terrifying news to Juliette, since it indicates that her departure from her home will beget a catastrophic revolution, and she swiftly determines that she must return post haste. The issue, however, is that her protective suit is destroyed, meaning she needs to devise a new means of staying alive on the trek back—an obstacle that Solo doesn’t really want to help her overcome.
Juliette and Solo’s storyline is initially captivating, no matter that Silo is committed to dramatizing it in almost total darkness; rarely has a series seemed less concerned with making its action visually lucid than this one. Yet more frustrating is that the duo is soon saddled with completing a collection of tasks that are uninteresting in general and drawn out to interminable lengths.
For virtually the entire season, Ferguson is stuck dawdling about in an abandoned silo with only Zahn’s unhinged weirdo for company. Her disconnection from the rest of the proceedings’ characters and dilemmas—compounded by the claustrophobia of her setting and the inertia of her circumstances—quickly proves a grave narrative miscalculation. The headliner remains this streaming affair’s charismatic center of attention, so consigning her to the periphery eventually drains it of the very personality it desperately requires.
With Juliette roaming Solo’s murky and dull home, Silo focuses on its original setting, where mayor Bernard Holland (Tim Robbins) fears that, per the prophecy of The Pact, the silo’s de facto bible, Juliette’s historic escape will inspire revolt. He has good reason to fear insurrection, since many in Mechanical—such as Shirley (Remmie Milner) and Knox (Shane McRae)—have grown restless with being kept in the dark about the nature of their home, their lives, and their world.
Bernard tries to quell mounting civil unrest with lies about Juliette’s triumph (he pins it on a new brand of tape used to seal her suit), but that just temporarily keeps the peace. Thus, he’s compelled to take devious measures in concert with his right-hand man Robert Sims (Common) and Judge Meadows (Tanya Moodie). The greater he tries to gain control of the situation, though, the less he attains, until he’s finally orchestrating false-flag operations to manipulate the populace, and assassinations and frame-jobs to pin the blame for the silo’s troubles on Shirley, Knox, and their fellow agitators.
Silo partakes in us-vs-them, upstairs-downstairs class warfare, yet because it never depicts the silo’s well-off denizens (except for Bernard and his government ilk), the effort falls flat. If this hampers much of the action involving Shirley and Knox, it’s still a less vexing shortcoming than the saga’s faulty conceit. The goal of the mutiny fomented by Shirley, Knox, and their insubordinate co-conspirators (such as Harriet Walter’s Martha) is to attain the truths they suspect are being kept from them—and have been suggested by Juliette’s leave and rumors that the wasteland is more bountiful than their views of it imply.
This is understandable, if misguided, given that the series has made abundantly clear that the outside world really is a hazardous nightmare. Consequently, this begs the question that hovers over the entire tale: Why are the powers-that-be keeping the past (and its books, relics, and knowledge) from the silo’s inhabitants, considering that teaching them about it would prevent them from rioting or trying to escape the silo, both of which spell certain doom?
Simply put: Silo’s baddies are perpetrating a conspiracy to keep their charges docile and obedient even though said scheme undercuts their purposes, and doing the opposite—namely, being upfront with them about everything—would allow the villains to achieve their ends.
Yost distracts attention away from this bedrock flaw with lots of minor dilemmas involving dull secondary characters, making most of this sophomore outing a slog toward an inevitable clash that could have been avoided with a bit of transparency and common sense. Still, he drums up moderate intrigue via clues about new mysteries regarding historical silo figures, and Robbins’ malevolent Bernard and Common’s ruthless Sims continue to be engaging figures amidst a sea of bland nobodies.
Ferguson’s preordained reunion with her A-list co-stars will undoubtedly do something to re-energize Silo. Far less certain is whether the series can figure out how to explain away all its loose threads and inconsistencies before it drowns beneath them.
