Forty-five minutes following Rebecca Ferguson around as she explores an impenetrably dark subterranean structure in silence, with the exception of the occasional understated “okay”? I can’t help but feel that the first episode of Silo’s second season might have been a tougher sell to Apple in a pre–Dune 1& 2 world. But Ferguson is a star now, and one of the ways you can tell is how she carries this episode when most of the time all you can really see is her face, and barely at that. She’s got the kind of face, with its command of the screen and the audience’s attention, that can pull it off. That’s a star in my book.
For those catching up with writer-creator Graham Yost’s adaptation of Hugh Howe’s Silo novels, Ferguson plays Juliette Nichols, the rogue engineer-turned sheriff of the eponymous underground dwelling place for the 10,000 people who represent all that’s left of the human race. What happened to the world above has been lost to time due to the destruction of records in a rebellion decades past…or has it? Juliette’s investigations during the first season lead her to believe that the Silo’s authorities are keeping its people in the dark, and the surface world is perfectly safe.
So much for that theory.
But as we saw in the Silo Season 1 finale, there’s a secret up there alright: There are many other Silos, each potentially housing another 10,000 lost souls. In the episode’s prologue, we witness a disastrous rebellion in one such Silo, like the one that members of Juliette’s Silo did way back when. It’s not disastrous because it’s unsuccessful, though — it’s disastrous because it is. The rebel leader leads his people cheering into the wasteland…where they remain as corpses where they dropped dead of whatever killed all life up there to begin with.
When we return to the present, we link up with Juliette, who’s been banished from her Silo for her crimes against the state. But she figured out that the tape used to seal the suits of people expelled from the Silo is bogus in some way, so she swapped it out for the real stuff and hasn’t dropped dead as expected.
Instead, she makes her way into the still-open Silo at the heart of that other rebellion, racing down as far as she can to avoid the surface’s contamination when the tape on her suit tears. In a memorable bit of business, she has to smash open the glass face-shield on her helmet so she can breathe again, then frantically douses the suit with decontaminant before starting to literally tear it off of herself.
It’s these kinds of practical challenges that Silo specializes in — one of the reasons it stands out in a crowded science-fiction field just on Apple TV+ alone. Juliette is a practical, physical, handy heroine, a mechanical genius blessed by both determination and tremendous upper body strength. I guess a deeply troubled childhood (her mother killed herself) and upbringing in the mechanical bowels of the Silo are good for something.
What they’re not great for, unfortunately, is generating enough light to see what the heck Juliette is doing. I’m usually not the type to complain about murky streaming-TV scenes; I’m the guy who saw everything in that one episode of House of the Dragon just fine, thank you. But as counterintuitive as it sounds, you need to light the darkness, not just hit a sort of digital blue-grey mute button on the imagery. Too much of the show’s excellent physical set pieces, as Juliette struggles multiple times to ford a broken bridge and explore the rest of the new Silo, are half-lost in the gloom.
Not that the outcome was ever in doubt: Juliette is, after all, a problem solver. Though she nearly drowns in a subterranean lake into which she comes close to falling a second time during her subsequent attempt to get across on a jerry-rigged platform, she manages to make her way across. Then the sounds of “Moon River,” of all things, beckon her deeper inside to a closed door, through which peers a living man. Whoever this guy is, he’d hoped she’d hear the music…but she might have overstepped a bit as a result.
“So one thing,” he says, like a genial person forced to report some dispiriting news. “Uh, you tried to pen the door. I get it! You see a closed door: ‘What’s on the other side?’ I understand. Thing is, you do that again, and I’m gonna kill you.” The window closes, and the episode ends.
Interspersed through all this are flashbacks in which a young Juliette (Amelie Child Villiers) learns the ropes of the Silo’s Mechanical section with the help of her tinkerer mentor Walker (Harriet Walter) and her best (and only) friend Shirley (Ida Brooks). The flashbacks are notable mainly for an exchange Shirley has with Juliette in which she accounts being abandoned in the dark by some of her buddies. How did she get out? By moving slowly but surely until she found her way.
“I couldn’t do that,” Juliette says, impressed.
“Sure you could’ve,” Shirley replies, blasé. “What else you gonna do, die?”
There’s a message there not only about Juliette’s own experiences in the new dark Silo, but the show itself. Silo celebrates the simple determination of people to move forward no matter what.
Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.
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