Apple TV’s “Silo” returns for bold second season | TV/streaming

Apple TV loves to spend big on prestigious sci-fi projects like “Dark Matter” and “Foundation,” but their best in this subgenre is by some measure Graham Yost’s riveting “Silo.” The first season of this adaptation of the books by Hugh Howey played as a timely riff on philosophical sci-fi noirs like “Blade Runner,” stories that require big ideas to say something new about relatable themes. It was layered in mystery and conveyed its willingness to take risks right in its premiere, when it sent high-profile actors David Oyelowo and Rashida Jones to reveal that the real star of this show would be the phenomenal Rebecca Ferguson, who plays a engineer who discovers everything. she knows is a lie.

If you didn’t watch Season 1, go back and watch it first, because we’re going to have spoilers (and it’s one of the best shows of 2023). At the end of season 1, Juliette Nichols (Ferguson) was basically pushed out of the silo by the deeply corrupt Bernard Holland (Tim Robbins) and superficially corrupt Robert Sims (Common). After watching footage of Allison’s departure from the silo, Juliette became convinced that the Powers That Be had lied and that leaving was not as dangerous as the residents had been led to believe. When she actually walked on the hill outside the exit, she discovered that there was a lie within a lie. The footage was a false vision given to Allison before the faulty thermal suit she was wearing led to her death. The world has indeed become a desolate hellscape, but Martha Walker (Harriet Walter) had prepared Juliette’s suit enough that she could still walk across the gray horizon.

What now? How do you keep Juliette out of the silo? The second season of “Silo” wisely doesn’t just spin Juliette back into the silo to fight Bernard and Sims again, which might have been narratively tempting, but would have reduced the impact of the first year. Juliette doesn’t just return to the Silo. Without spoiling too 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 to do the same, leading to the piles of skeletal remains outside the door. Juliette realizes that this may be the fate of her Silo and her role in it, as false hope can lead to mass bloodshed. She promises to return to stop the destruction of a people and trade a lie for a deadlier truth.

As the two-hander plays out across the landscape, the second season also centers on a growing resistance in the Silo as people become more and more convinced that Juliette was alive and that her deportation was not overboard. Much of the plot centers around Knox (Shane McRae) and Shirley (Remmie Milner), new leaders of a movement that Bernard knows he must destroy.

It’s a season about narratives and who controls them. It is also about how rebellion grows through kernels of truth. In last season’s finale, Holland told his lackeys, “What you just saw, you don’t want to see.” Of course he teaches that it is impossible, but the scripture is even richer than that because it digs into the idea that even what we see leads us to what we think we know can be wrong. It is not so much about what is true and false as how these beliefs can be used to control people and shape society. It’s an incredibly rich, smart show.

That said, it lacks a bit of the momentum of Season 1, as the writing often seems to revolve around these ideas without the same propulsive plot to drive them. Luckily, when 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 strike a perfect balance between the fascination of seeing another real person and the paranoia and fear that has worked its way into every fiber of his being . Isolation makes you lonely, but also destroys your communication skills and trust in humanity. Zahn and the authors understand that.

Apple TV has become one of those services that’s crowded enough now that it can be difficult for even its best shows to break through the noise. When people tell me they’re considering a free trial—and I think everyone should, given the company’s overall batting average—I always encourage them to prioritize “Silo.” It’s not a show that can easily be edited into viral videos, and it’s not as flashy as some of their more high-profile offerings. Still, that’s what people always tell me they miss from Prestige TV’s heyday: 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 one poses an even scarier question that we will all have to answer more urgently in the coming months: What now?

Six episodes shown for review. Premiere November 15^th.