TL;DR – The sophomore season suffers from some significant pacing issues, but when it clicks together, it is like no other.

Disclosure – I paid for the Apple TV+ service that viewed this series.

Silo Review –

As it is the end of the year, it is time to catch up with all the shows that I didn’t get a chance to finish during the year, and the first on my list is Silo. Conceptually, I love this show, the brooding treatise on humanity, control, and rebellion. However, I dropped out halfway through. Well, today, I go back to see why.

So, to set the scene, after being set up by Bernard Holland (Tim Robbins) and Robert Sims (Common), Juliette Nichols (Rebecca Ferguson) was forced to go outside and ‘clean’ in the season finale. However, thanks to some work from Martha Walker (Harriet Walter), Juliette’s suit was fitted with tape that actually worked so that the poisonous air would not leak in. It is here that she discovers not only is there still a barren, poisoned world on the surface, but their Silo is not the only one. Not knowing how long the tape will last, she runs to the next Silo over, only to discover thousands of dead bodies spilled across the ground. But there is no time to wait as she escapes death by entering a dead silo. Now, from here, we will be looking at the season as a whole, so there will be some [SPOILERS] ahead.

Production

One thing that stands resolute throughout the season is just how good the production on this show is. The abandoned Silo with all its layers of humanity that once was, is both familiar to what we know, but also different because society evolves slightly differently over the years since the divergence. Add to that the layer of unscrubbed history and decay, and you get a vivid look into a world gone wrong. We also see that reinforced in the original Silo, where the people from down below have to use their ingenuity to get their message across. For example, reusing paper to send their message of protest via a missile.

Politics

The other space that is both interesting and at times frustrating is how they explore politics, and I am going to focus on the season rather than the suggestive tag the season finale ends on. One of the main concepts of the show is that this Silo found a way to stop the 20-year cycle of rebellion that seems to happen elsewhere. Thus, it has been 140 years since the last full-scale rebellion and all the history from before that has been carefully hidden. What the show explores is how they didn’t remove the idea of rebellion; they just kicked the ball down the corridor of time until an odd spark would ignite it again. Compounded because the layers of falsehood have created multiple vectors for people’s fears and anger, and hidden the truth that people may need to make correct and not ‘kill everyone in the Silo’ decisions.    Because it has been 140 odd years, it means that there is no real institutional memory on how to fight a rebellion or to stop a rebellion, bar the guidelines in the Pact, which means that everyone is working with limited experimental information. I liked this part because it breeds overconfidence in people who should be significantly more cautious. Bernard Holland (Tim Robbins) is working with more information than anyone else, but the years of peace have not prepared him for what he must do and in his almost all-consuming desire to save the Silo, his actions instead lead it to ruin. Robert Sims (Common) should be one of the main political forces, but he does not have what it takes to get the job done. In fact, the only person in the Silo that seems to have any real political sense is his wife, Camille (Alexandria Riley).

Unfortunately, it does start to stretch credibility that even those without any real political sense and history would also act as stupidly as they do at times. One of the main twists at the end of the season is that Martha Walker (Harriet Walter) gets co-opted by Bernard to work against the rebellion by threatening her ex-wife Carla McLain (Clare Perkins). It was so clearly a trap that it was like seeing the snare right in front of you and continuing to walk into it. Everyone is also dumbfounded as to who the mole could be when it was so blatant that even a fool could tell. They try to mitigate this in the season finale, but it is still a drag.

Pacing

On that feeling, one of the main issues with the season, and I think why I dropped off, is the pacing. This season was always going to be a bit of a tough sell because you had to isolate your main character, Juliette Nichols (Rebecca Ferguson), from the rest of the action. Narratively, this is important for the rest of the show, but it does come at the cost of the strength of this season. I am not sure they successfully navigated cutting back and forth between the two Silos in a way that felt compelling. Unfortunately, this is compounded by the almost artificial ways that Juliette is forced to stay in her Silo so she could appear when needed in the final moments of the finale. Trying to keep both locations going at the same time loses the momentum of both plotlines and it just becomes an anchor on the season, grinding things to a halt. Thankfully for the end, things do pick up in the final episodes when we find our pace again. But that middle is such a slog to get through.        

Recommendation  

In the end, do we recommend Silo: Season 2? While I am not sure it quite hit the same heights as the first season, there were some significant pacing issues throughout. When the season did fire, it was a delight to behold. The characters remain interesting, and there are still enough hooks with the world that I do want to know more of its history and what its future could be. Which makes the show good but very uneven. There is still enough to let me recommend it, but with an asterisk that I would understand if you too dropped out halfway through. Have you watched Silo: Season 2? Let us know what you thought of the episode in the comments below.

By Brian MacNamara: You can follow Brian on Bluesky at @Tldrmovrev, when he’s not chatting about Movies and TV, he’ll be talking about International Relations, or the Solar System.

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Credits – All images were created by the cast, crew, and production companies of Silo
Directed by – Michael Dinner, Aric Avelino & Amber Templemore
Written by – Aric Avelino, Jessica Blaire, Remi Aubuchon, Katherine DiSavino, Jeffery Wang, Graham Yost, Fred Golan, Cassie Pappas, Sal Calleros & Jenny DeArmitt-Stran
Created by – Graham Yost
Based On – Silo by Hugh Howey
Production/Distribution Companies – Nemo Films, AMC Studios, Apple Studios & Apple TV+
Starring – Rebecca Ferguson, Steve Zahn, Common, Harriet Walter, Chinaza Uche, Avi Nash, Shane McRae, Remmie Milner, Alexandria Riley, Clare Perkins, Rick Gomez, Billy Postlethwaite & Tim Robbins with Iain Glen, Ashley Zukerman, Jessica Henwick, Ross McCall, Caitlin Zoz, Christian Ochoa, Sacharissa Claxton, Chipo Chung, Tanya Moodie, Olatunji Ayofe,  Matt Gomez Hidaka, George Robinson, Georgina Sadler, Sara Hazemi, Orlando Norman & Lolita Chakrabakti and Reggie Absolom, Brandon Marinas, Díana Bermudez, Stuart Milligan, Jay Rincon, Maria Teresa Creasey, Zheng Xi Yong, Oscar Coleman, Akie Kotabe, Taj Kandula, Jon Chew, Ross Armstrong, Lia Goresh, Angela Yeoh, Robyn Lovell, Gabeen Khan, Alice Bounsall, Khairika Sinani, Carryl Thomas, Kieron Jecchinis, Caitlin Innes Edwards, Stefan Trout, Nari Blair-Mangat, Uche Abuah, Helene Maksoud, Nathan Clough, Mickey Mason, Fahad Shaft, Amelie Child-Villiers, Ida Brooke, Peter Parker Mensah, Finn Guegan, Brian Bovell, Pippa Winslow, Nick Haverson & Kosha Engler
Episodes Covered – The Engineer, Order, Solo, The Harmonium, Descent, Barricades, The Dive, The Book of Quinn, The Safeguard & Into the Fire