Ivan Radford | On 10, Nov 2024

Silo: Season 2 premieres on 15th November 2024. This review was originally published in January 2024 and is based on Season 1.

“We do not know why everything outside the Silo is as it is. We do not know when it will be safe to go outside. We only know that day is not this day.” Those are the fateful words recited by anyone who goes outside in Apple TV+’s sci-fi series Silo. The show, set in a bunker hundreds of feet below the surface, is a thrilling slice of dystopian TV – a mystery wrapped in a conspiracy buried beneath a ruined planet. Or, at least, that’s what we can gather from everyone in the Silo. The subterranean civilisation is bound together by one unbreakable rule: if you see you want to go outside, you have to go outside. And you can’t come back.

The 10,000-strong population is a melting pot of tensions, frustrations and suspicion – as you’d expect from anyone who’s been living underground for an untold number of years. Responsible for keeping the order is Sheriff Becker (the always-brilliant David Oyelowo), along with the mayor, Ruth (Geraldine James). The sheriff lives with his wife, Allison (Rashida Jones), and they’re excited to be trying for a baby – something that has to be explicited permitted by the authorities, with a birth control device deactivated. But when their journey towards parenthood doesn’t go as expected, Allison starts to ask questions about not only their situation but also everything else.

Oyelowo and Jones are superb, giving us a window on to this unusual society that’s emotional as well as functional. That character-first approach to exposition and plot remains true throughout the show’s whole first season, grounding every twist and turn in a way that draws you closer and closer. They instill a depth to the everyday interactions and routines that we witness and make sure we care even when the show begins to widen its scope and also focus on Juliette (Rebecca Ferguson).

Juliette is an engineer and therefore keeps the Silo running. Situated on the lower floors of the bunker, she highlights the top-down class structure of the Silo. While that might recall such dystopian tales as Snowpiercer and High-Rise, Silo – based on the trilogy of books by Graham Yost – has a point and purpose that’s all its own. As well as the inherently unequal nature of human civilisation, Silo drills into the politics of the personal and the collective, of the need for truth and also for denial – and, perhaps most of all, of the need to understand one’s past to make sense of one’s future.

Because nobody in the Silo knows where they came from or how they got where they are – all those kind of historical documents were destroyed (tellingly) in an uprising years ago. Relics from the past, even innocent reminders of the old world, such as Pez dispensers, are banned. Questions about the past are forbidden. There are radios, computers and CCTV, but no phones or even lifts to get people from floor to floor. And the most treasured and reliable source of information is the camera that feeds into the TV screens in the main cafeteria. Whenever anyone is sent outside, they are given a cloth to wipe the sensor on the camera so that people can watch for any change in the desolate, post-apocalyptic landscape. They’re not forced to clean – but they all do. And that ritual is as crucial to the Silo’s survival as the levers that Juliette pulls.

And so the stage is set for a fascinating journey, which is all the more mesmerising because of how plausible and realistic the whole thing is. The production design is immense, managing to conjure up a retro-futuristic junkyard of corridors, stairs and grimy rooms that is simultaneously vast and claustrophobic. The varying parts of the Silo all feel distinct but are united in their lack of daylight, with everything enveloped by a steaming, grinding, clanking dimness that’s engrossingly grim.

Rebecca Ferguson is perfectly cast as Juliette, a formidable and resilient figure who has her own vendettas and questions to pursue. As she starts to rob shoulders with judicial enforcer Sims (an intimidatingly stern Common) and tech chief Bernard (the wonderfully unlikeable Tim Robbins), her curiosity only grows stronger – and, because we’re so invested in this web of relationships, deceit, machinery and memory, our curiosity follows suit. It doesn’t let up even come the flawless finale’s riveting pay-off – and, with a second season already on the way, there’s a reassuring promise of concrete answers to come. And probably a load more questions too. Come armed with a shovel, because once you start Silo, you’ll want to keep digging.

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