Apple TV loves to spend oodles of money on prestigious sci-fi projects like “Dark Matter” and “Foundation,” but their best in this subgenre by some stretch is Graham Yost’s riveting “Silo.” The first season of this adaptation of the books by Hugh Howey played like a timely riff on philosophical sci-fi noirs like “Blade Runner,” stories that take big ideas to say something new about relatable themes. It was layered in mystery, conveying its willingness to take risks right in its premiere, when it dispatched high profile actors David Oyelowo and Rashida Jones to reveal that the real star of this show would be the phenomenal Rebecca Ferguson, playing an engineer who discovers everything she knows is a lie.
If you didn’t see season one, go back and watch that first, because we need to get spoilery (and it’s one of the best shows of 2023). At the end of season one, Juliette Nichols (Ferguson) was basically pushed out of the Silo by the deeply corrupt Bernard Holland (Tim Robbins) and shallowly corrupt Robert Sims (Common). After seeing footage of Allison’s departure from the Silo, Juliette became convinced that the Powers That Be had lied and that it wasn’t as dangerous to leave as the residents had been led to believe. When she actually did walk the hill outside the exit, she discovered that there was a lie embedded in a lie. The footage was a fake vision given to Allison before the faulty heatsuit she wore led to her demise. The world has actually become a desolate hellscape, but Martha Walker (Harriet Walter) had prepped Juliette’s suit enough that she could still walk over the gray horizon.
What now? How do you keep going with Juliette out of the Silo? The second season of “Silo” wisely doesn’t just spin Juliette back into the Silo to battle Bernard and Sims again, which might have been narratively tempting but would have reduced the impact of the first year. Juliette does not just return to the Silo. Without spoiling much, it’s not long before Juliette is forced into another shelter, where she finds a single survivor, played perfectly by the great Steve Zahn. He tells her about how all the other residents were inspired by someone who left their Silo to try and do the same, leading to the piles of skeletal remains outside the door. Juliette realizes that this could be the fate of her Silo and her role in it, as false hope can lead to mass carnage. She vows to return to stop the destruction of a people, exchanging one lie for a deadlier truth.
As the two-hander plays out across the landscape, the second season also centers a growing resistance in the Silo as people grow increasingly convinced that Juliette lived and that her expulsion wasn’t above board. Much of the plotting there centers on Knox (Shane McRae) and Shirley (Remmie Milner), emerging leaders of a movement that Bernard knows he needs to destroy.
It’s a season about narratives and who controls them. It’s also about how the way rebellion grows through kernels of truth. In the last season finale, Holland told his lackeys, “What you have just seen, you will unsee.” Of course, he learns that is impossible, but the writing is even richer than that in that it digs into the idea that even what we see, leading us to what we think we know, can be wrong. It’s not so much about what’s true and false as how those beliefs can be used to control people and shape society. It’s an incredibly rich, smart show.
Having said that, it lacks a bit of the momentum of season one as the writing often seems to spin around these ideas without the same propulsive plotting to drive them. Luckily, whenever it feels like it’s starting to repeat itself, one of the performers will find a character beat to ground the philosophical meandering. Robbins and the rest of the crew in the Silo are solid, but the season belongs to Ferguson and Zahn, who finds a perfect balance of fascination at seeing another actual human being and the paranoia and fear that have worked their way into every fiber of his being. Isolation makes you lonely but also destroys your communication skills and trust in mankind. Zahn and the writers get that.
Apple TV has become one of those services that is crowded enough now that it can be difficult for even its best shows to break through the noise. Whenever people tell me they’re considering a free trial—and I think everyone should, given the overall batting average of the company—I always encourage them to prioritize “Silo.” It’s not a show that can be easily cut up into viral videos, and it’s not as flashy as some of their more high-profile offerings. Still, it’s what people always tell me they miss from the heyday of Prestige TV: Character-driven writing that doesn’t treat its audience like idiots.
If the first season felt like an allegory for how we all wanted to escape the nightmare of the pandemic, the second asks an even scarier question that we will all have to answer with more urgency in the coming months: What now?
Six episodes screened for review. Premieres November 15th.