An Unforgivable Waste by Rebecca Ferguson

In its first season, Apple TV+ Silo (based on Hugh Howey’s trilogy of novels) was a slow but tantalizing mystery about a towering underground bunker housing 10,000 survivors of an unknown apocalypse, and throughout its recurring engagement, premiering November 15), it suffers from ​​some of the same are missing. that plagued its maiden run, including a pace that teeters between sluggish and static.

Worse, however, is that the more Graham Yost’s series reveals about its secrets and scenarios, the less it makes sense. While Rebecca Ferguson‘s steely magnetism once again keeps things from devolving into complete torpor, it’s a languid adventure whose entire premise is ultimately revealed to be based on fundamental illogicalities.

Picking up where it left off Silo finds Juliette (Ferguson) wandering outside her underground domicile. What she discovers is a wasteland of craters and other silo entrances similar to the one she left, including a nearby one that is littered with corpses and boasts an open door. Inside, the place is abandoned and in serious disrepair, though apparently still free of the atmospheric toxins that Juliette was shielded from by her protective suit.

The premiere charts Juliette’s investigation of this space with virtually no dialogue except during periodic flashbacks to the heroine’s childhood in the silo “Down Deep”, where she meets Shirley and is destined to toil as chief engineer of the mechanical detail, and the series’ silent focus on the protagonist’s problem-solving is a convincing way to draw us close to her.

After struggling to build a bridge that lets her cross a chasm that separates the silo’s stairwell from its IT area, Juliette encounters Solo (Steve Zahn), a stuffy cage that has locked itself inside a giant vault. Solo is incredibly wary of Juliette. Nevertheless, they eventually get enough of a report to allow her to learn that this silo was destroyed by a rebellion that came on the heels of a member successfully leaving it. This is terrifying news for Juliette, as it suggests that her departure from her home will spawn a disastrous revolution, and she quickly decides that she must return post haste. The problem, however, is that her protective suit is destroyed, meaning she has to devise a new means of staying alive on the trip back – an obstacle that Solo doesn’t really want to help her overcome.

Juliette and Solo’s story is initially captivating, regardless Silo is obliged to dramatize it in almost total darkness; rarely has a series seemed less concerned with making its action visually clear than this one. Even more frustrating, the duo are soon saddled with a collection of tasks that are generally uninteresting and drawn out to interminable lengths.

For pretty much the entire season, Ferguson sits and tumbles around an abandoned silo with only Zahn’s unhinged weirdo for company. Her separation from the rest of the run’s characters and dilemmas—compounded by the claustrophobia of her surroundings and the inertia of her circumstances—quickly proves a serious narrative miscalculation. The headliner remains this streaming affair’s charismatic center of attention, so relegating her to the periphery eventually drains it of the very personality it desperately needs.

With Juliette roaming around Solo’s dark and boring home, Silo focuses on its original surroundings, where Mayor Bernard Holland (Tim Robbins) fears that Juliette’s historic escape, according to the prophecy of the Covenant, the silo’s de facto bible, will inspire rebellion. He has good reason to fear rebellion, as many in Mechanical – such as Shirley (Remmie Milner) and Knox (Shane McRae) – have grown restless at being kept in the dark about the nature of their homes, their lives and their world.

Bernard tries to quell growing civil unrest with lies about Juliette’s triumph (he sticks it to a new brand of tape used to seal her suit), but it only keeps the peace temporarily. Therefore, he is forced to take cunning precautions in consultation with his right-hand man Robert Sims (Common) and Judge Meadows (Tanya Moodie). The more he tries to gain control of the situation, the less he achieves, until finally he orchestrates false-flag operations to manipulate the population, and assassinations and frame jobs to blame the silo’s problems on Shirley, Knox, and their co-agitators.

Silo engages in us-versus-them, top-down class warfare, but because it never depicts the well-to-do residents of the silo (except for Bernard and his government ilk), the effort falls flat. If this hampers much of the action involving Shirley and Knox, it’s still a less annoying shortcoming than the saga’s misguided conceit. The goal of the mutiny instigated by Shirley, Knox and their disobedient co-conspirators (such as Harriet Walters’ Martha) is to obtain the truths they suspect are being kept from them – and has been suggested by Juliette’s leave and rumors that the wasteland are more abundant than their view of it suggests.

This is understandable, if wrong, given that the series has made it abundantly clear that the outside world really is a dangerous nightmare. Consequently, this raises the question that hovers over the entire narrative: why are those in power keeping the past (and its books, relics, and knowledge) from the silo’s inhabitants, given that teaching them about it would prevent them from rioting. or are you trying to escape the silo, both of which hold certain doom?

In short: Silo‘s villains conspire to keep their charges docile and obedient, even though said plan undercuts their purpose, and doing the opposite—namely, being upfront with them about everything—would allow the villains to achieve their goals.

Yost distracts from this bedrock flaw with plenty of minor dilemmas involving boring secondary characters, making most of this second outing a slog toward an inevitable clash that could have been avoided with a bit of transparency and common sense. Still, he delivers moderate intrigue via clues about new mysteries concerning historical silo figures, and Robbins’ villainous Bernard and Common’s ruthless sims continue to be engaging characters amid a sea of ​​bland nobodies.

Ferguson’s predestined reunion with her A-list co-stars will no doubt do something to re-energize Silo. Far less certain is whether the series can figure out how to explain away all its loose ends and inconsistencies before it drowns under them.