‘Silo’ Season Two Episode 1 Recap: “The Engineer”

Silo

The engineer

Season 2

Section 1

Editor’s assessment

4 stars

****

Photo: Apple TV+

Almost 20 years ago, the first season of Lost ended with one of the most striking, tantalizing images of early 21st-century television: a handful of plane crash survivors on an unknown island staring down a deep hole in the ground, carved out by… well, someone. Fans had to wait until the Season 2 premiere to find out that there was a person named Desmond living in that hole who passed the time by listening to vintage pop music. Fans then had to wait until the season two finale to find out that Desmond was once a castaway himself, forced by circumstances to join the last remnants of a world-saving cult.

Silo‘s first season also ended with a flourish. Juliette Nichols (Rebecca Ferguson) – a skilled mechanic who, through a series of strange circumstances, had become the top lawyer of a massive, post-apocalyptic underground facility – was exiled by her political enemies and sent to the surface, where people usually keel over dead within a few minutes from the poisoned air. Instead, thanks to an extra-safe spacesuit, Juliette was able to keep walking out of the crater where the silo was buried and into an open field where she found a dozen other craters, each with their own silos.

In the season 2 premiere, Juliette explores one of the silos where she finds a man living alone and – like Desmond on Lost — listening to vintage pop music. Like Desmond, this man greets his visitor by threatening to kill her.

I won’t go too far with this comparison because Silo is a very different show than Lost. It’s more cerebral and more narrowly focused, less thick and epic. Silo is based on a series of novels, novellas, and short stories by Hugh Howey about a civilization that has lived in decrepit survival mode for so long that several generations have come and gone, leaving behind mostly people who know nothing about how their world used to be. The first season of Silo was about introducing viewers to this society by having Juliette take on a new job and investigate a series of murders that took her – and us – through all the different levels and classes of the silo.

Season two promises to open up the story quite a bit as Juliette can begin to discover why her silo is disconnected from the other silos and why it may be drifting from what their original mission might have been. Last season, we learned that Juliette’s silo had at least one person, Bernard Holland (Tim Robbins), who knew a little about the program’s history and felt it was his duty to keep it a secret, lest his silo’s occupants become restless and do rebellion – which had happened before. But since Juliette feels no such obligation to suppress the truth, she could once again be our surrogate this season and discover everything we need to know about Silo universe.

It would be welcome since some of the best moments in Silo‘s solid first season was when Juliette or someone else stumbles upon what are referred to as “relics” from Earth’s distant past, which to these people look almost incomprehensibly exotic. The most amazing of these relics was a children’s book about things tourists could do in the US state of Georgia. Rafting trips, aquariums, planetariums… all of this seems like science fiction to someone who has only ever lived in a giant concrete tube.

Anyone who’s read Howey’s books knows that these silos have numbers, but since the TV series hasn’t introduced that idea yet, for the purposes of this recap, let’s just call the two we’ve seen so far “Juliette’s Silo” and “the second silo.” The season premiere begins with a flashback to what happened to the second silo, which is filled with long-dead bodies and debris, when Juliette arrives. In a long sequence, we see how the citizens of the second silo took up arms against each other after destroying the system of stairs and bridges that had previously connected the different levels. Eventually one faction opened the airlock to attack outside where they all died.

Juliette has to push past those bodies just to get inside where she finds a facility that was once laid out much like hers before this society collapsed. One of the large viewing screens in a common area – which in Juliette’s silo is how the residents keep an eye on the ruined wasteland outside – is totally frayed and has “LIES” scrawled across it. To move from one area to the next, Juliette plans and executes the kind of maneuvers you might find in an escape room or video game. She has to use whatever she can find – barrels, scrap, rubble – to build little paths and move them into place.

All the sequences that show Juliette doing her best Indiana Jones impression – improvising and exploring – are truly amazing. This entire silo is a relic, and walking through it gives the same charge that the season 1 relic scenes did. Experienced prestige TV drama director Michael Dinner (who had previously worked with Silo creator Graham Yost on Justified) and the show’s cast keep the action tight, tense and easy to follow as Juliette survives several potentially fatal setbacks and just keeps going. The second silo is a fantastic piece of set design – visually known via Juliette’s silo, yet in ruins. Every time this episode returns to her perilous journey, it’s a knockout.

Alas, that’s not all “The Engineer” is about. About a third of this episode takes up looking back at Juliette’s childhood in her silo, covering the early days when she left her pleasant middle-class obstetrician father, Dr. Pete Nichols (Iain Glen), to be apprenticed to master mechanic Martha Walker (Harriet Walter). We see how the older employees in the department worked her hard and showed her no sympathy – and how she respected them all the more for it. We also see how she developed an early interest in the silo’s half-forgotten secrets, many of which can be glimpsed in fragments at the lowest levels.

These scenes are all fine as they are, and even poignant at times. The sequence in which the young Juliette (played by Amelie Child-Villiers) repairs a mechanical toy dog ​​works on several levels: as a reminder of the childhood she left behind when her mother died, as an example of how she will doggedly pursue it , she will even when everyone tells her not to, and as a demonstration of her facility with problem solving. There are undoubtedly echoes between these moments and what we see with the older Juliette in the other silo.

But the biggest weakness with Silo‘s first season is that once it got past its excellent and mostly self-contained first episode, the storytelling began to falter and slide throughout the remaining nine. Season 1 is filled with moments of genuine wonder and has dramatic twists galore, right up to the harrowing final shot. But could it have been much tighter? Hell yes. It’s not the best sign that the season two premiere already has such a divided focus.

That said, the episode has a gem of an ending. As mentioned earlier, Juliette finds someone in the second silo: an unnamed and mostly unseen man (played by Steve Zahn), who tempts her towards his locked chambers with the sound of the song “Moon River.” He gives a brief warning: if she tries to open his door, she’s dead.

But he also says something that reminded me again of the best of Lost – and the best of Silo so far. He explains that he understands why she might want to open his door because “You see a closed door … what’s on the other side?” It’s good when a mystery box show like this understands human nature. Keep showing us new doors, absolutely. But don’t keep them closed for too long.

• While I’m not sure we needed the extended flashback to Juliette’s early days as a mechanic, there are several good moments in these scenes which explore more of the cultural differences between life in the “middle” of the silo and in the ” the deep.” For example, Walker explains to Juliette that people at the lower levels prefer plain speech to bureaucratic euphemisms. (“If a pump doesn’t work, we don’t say, ‘It may not be working at its expected capacity,’ we say, ‘It’s broken'”).

• Another fun piece of graffiti in the second silo: a wall-sized propaganda poster that reads “THANKS EXTRA FOUNDERS” with the “thanks” crossed out and replaced with “fuck”. It sure looks like these folks were pretty upset about the conditions in their silo! I look forward to finding out why.

• Welcome to season two coverage of Silo! Season 1 had its ups and downs, but overall was promising enough that I hope we can look forward to ten straight weeks of new mysteries and new discoveries. Plus, Steve Zahn! Follow along.