New Apple TV+ series Silo packs what may be the last people on earth into a huge, mysterious structure. Like Snowpiercer pointed straight up, this show offers a look at the hierarchies and conspiracies of silence that lead to cataclysmic turns of events.
This shaggy dog post-apocalyptic story — with an all-star cast spouting a lot of silly sci-fi lingo and exaggerated futurespeak — gets off to a compelling start this week.
Silo season one opener recap
Season 1, episodes 1 and 2: “We don’t know why we are here. We don’t know who built the silo. We do not know why everything outside the silo is the way it is. We do not know when it will be safe to go outside.” So intones Sheriff Holston Becker (played by David Oyelowo) as he heads to work, passing horticultural and livestock stations in the vast converted silo he calls home.
With his Deputy Marnes (Will Patton) present, Holston lets himself into a jail cell, says “I want to go out,” and then lies down on the bed inside. This seems to upset Marnes greatly. So what does it mean?
Flashing back a bit, the silo had a lot more people in it. (Indeed it looks, if I don’t miss my guess, quite purposely like the Mars of Paul Verhoeven’s Total Recall.) Holston had just gotten his wife Alison (Rashida Jones, who’s all wrong for this part — way too chipper and contemporary) pregnant and everyone at the silo knows about it because everyone knows everything in here. Alison hates her boss, Bernard (Tim Robbins). Despite the insane circumstances in which they find themselves, Bernard remains a humorless, by-the-book stick in the mud.
Alison wants to probe more deeply into the history of the planet before these few surviving people were cordoned into the silo. All she or anyone else knows is the official story: Some “rebels” were quelled, and servers with the history of the world on them were destroyed in the fight.
Who created the silo and why?
Alison meets up with a like-minded computer engineer named George Wilkins (Ferdinand Kingsley) who has an old hard drive he can’t crack open. He thinks it holds crucial information about the creation of the silo and the doomed rebellion. They find, among other incriminating things, a blueprint for the silo, complete with an access tunnel no one is supposed to know about.
Alison suggests he burn the drive and forget he ever saw it. But of course, after a few days pass, she’s curious and comes right back. They unearth footage of the outside world that suggests all isn’t as toxic and grim as the leaders of the silo claim. The further Alison goes down her rabbit hole, the less she wants to have a baby with Holston.
One day Holston comes home and finds her sitting in a pool of her own blood. She’s manually cut out the birth control module implanted in all of the women of the silo and she leaves to go rant in the nearest dining hall.
“None of this is real!” she says. “They’re keeping us in here! There are blue skies out there!” And then she says the magic words: “I want to go out.” Apparently, when you say that in the silo, they put you right in jail and then oblige your request.
The police investigate Wilkins but find no evidence of the hard drive. So Alison bears the punishment alone; she is sent outside into the toxic air. Holston, as sheriff, performs the banishment ritual through his tears. Before she goes, she tells him to look for a signal. If she gives it to him, the world is actually not toxic and horrible. She does it, then tries to walk away, but collapses and apparently dies.
Searching for the silo’s secrets
Photo: Apple TV+
Two years later, Wilkins is murdered and Holston must investigate. However, the only witness to the crime is a little hard to reach. She’s an engineer named Juliette Nichols (Rebecca Ferguson) who works on the generator that powers the silo. She was sexually involved with Wilkins, to say nothing of being his close friend.
Just before he died, Wilkins tried to tell Juliette something, but members of the Judicial — law enforcers of a higher order than the sheriffs and deputies — saw him looking nervous. Before he could get the words out, he was dead. Juliette tries to convince Holston that it was murder, not suicide, but he’s wary at first.
What’s up with the boring machine?
She takes Holston to a secret passage deep in the bowels of the silo, replete with graffiti from before the rebellion. It leads to a tunnel down to a walled-off section underground with a huge boring machine stashed inside. Juliette reasons that it was used to build the silo. Wilkins used to spend time down here with all the relics from the past he squirreled away.
Among them is the hard drive he decoded with Alison all those months back, plus all of her notes about what they saw on it. Juliette and Holston squabble about what to do with it, but eventually he relents and says that if he digs deeper into this and finds something, he’ll send her a sign.
Flashing back to the future: When Holston himself goes outside he sees for himself that it’s beautiful and lush out there. But, of course, he can’t make anyone understand the situation. He starts suffocating at the same interval where Alison died, but he takes his helmet off, something no one’s ever been seen to do after banishment.
Juliette watches in agony, and when it’s done and Holston has fallen to his death, she runs screaming to the generator room. “He’s a liar!” she says. But then she finds out that before he died, Holston wrote in his will that he wanted her to take over his job as sheriff.
Shopworn sci-fi slang can’t stop the exciting pacing
Photo: Apple TV+
I gotta be honest. I expected a little better from Silo creator Graham Yost. Maybe “better” is the wrong word, though … perhaps “cleaner” hits the mark. Yost is a great writer (we’ve seen him around these parts producing Slow Horses, but his best work is probably Justified), and when the chips are down, Silo is excitingly paced and engrossingly constructed.
It’s the texture that feels rote and silly. I get that everyone wants to write classic sci-fi. But the trouble is that everyone sort of reaches for the same couple of classics, and the speech and slang found therein. People in the silo spend “credits.” Risky behavior is met with a stern, “They could send you out to clean for this.”
“Thank the Founders!” is the constant refrain of the faithful, who once a year get a brief respite from work for Freedom Day, which sounds an awful lot like Life Day, the holiday celebrated by Wookiees on The Star Wars Holiday Special. I didn’t read Hugh Howey‘s book on which Silo is based, but I can’t help but feel like somebody could have edited some of this stuff to make it less goofy.
Silo isn’t all that complicated as far as high-concept sci-fi goes, but it has a “hit the ground running” approach to exposition. So be sure you’ve got your antennae up when you start it, or you might miss something.
Not exactly epic in the directing department
It’s also a little silly that they got Morten Tyldum to direct the Silo pilot. He’s best known for directing The Imitation Game, a movie that looks like it directed itself. He’s presumably here because he made the inexplicable hit movie Passengers, in which Chris Pratt dooms Jennifer Lawrence because he wants to screw someone on a spaceship to the Crab Nebula or whatever. Dreadful, dreadful stuff, but it made its money back, so Tyldum stays in the prestige game.
He does nothing remarkable in Silo’s first two episodes, though in fairness he doesn’t screw up majorly or anything. It’s just TV direction, which is what he does in his theatrical features anyway. Still, when your reference points are Blade Runner, Total Recall, Snowpiercer, Nineteen Eighty-Four and The Postman, it would behoove you to find a director at least equal to the guys who made those. That did not happen.
Apple TV+ has a mixed record when it comes to sci-fi series. And it is still way too early to determine if we’ve got a successful slow burn like Foundation or an embarrassing misfire like Extrapolations on our hands. But I’m willing to take the gamble and see what happens next on Silo.
★★★☆☆
Watch Silo on Apple TV+
The first two episodes of Silo premiered today on Apple TV+. New episodes will arrive on Fridays.
Rated: TV-MA
Watch on: Apple TV+
Scout Tafoya is a film and TV critic, director and creator of the long-running video essay series The Unloved for RogerEbert.com. He has written for The Village Voice, Film Comment, The Los Angeles Review of Books and Nylon Magazine. He is the author of Cinemaphagy: On the Psychedelic Classical Form of Tobe Hooper and But God Made Him A Poet: Watching John Ford in the 21st Century, the director of 25 feature films, and the director and editor of more than 300 video essays, which can be found at Patreon.com/honorszombie.
