This article includes spoilers for the third season of “Silo.”
When the production designer Nicole Northridge joined the Apple TV series “Silo” ahead of its second season, the producers warned her that the show had “quite a big” scope. Anchored by an enormous three-story set inside converted refrigeration warehouses in Hoddesdon, England, the series centered on a community of 10,000 people living in a 144-story underground bunker.
Then it got bigger.
By the time the Season 3 finale premiered on Friday, what started as an insular tale had morphed into a saga that spans several silos, a few centuries and multiple TV genres.
“It was very challenging and extremely exhausting,” Northridge said. She joked, “I’m still coping with the trauma.” The season finale seemingly expanded the show’s aperture even wider and included multiple revelations that set up the final season, which will arrive in July 2027.
To make the just-concluded third season, the creative team essentially shot two shows simultaneously, each with its own cast and crew.
One is the postapocalyptic Silo 18 story, anchored by the reluctant leader Juliette Nichols (played by Rebecca Ferguson), which viewers have been following since Season 1. The other is a tense political thriller set approximately 350 years earlier in a version of the United States that looks similar to our current reality (despite being largely shot in England). It follows the congressman Daniel Keene (Ashley Zukerman) and the journalist Helen Drew (Jessica Henwick) and explores the origins of the Silo program.
Each episode of Season 3 jumps between the two timelines. Then, at the end, the exterior story line goes underground and another dimension is added. In the season finale, viewers learn about the central silo (Silo 1, of course), which is filled with people from the “before times” who have been kept alive cryogenically and awakened only periodically — and are now living at the same time as Juliette and her colony.
“This has been the most complicated thing I’ve ever worked on,” said the showrunner Graham Yost, who has also been an executive producer on “Justified,” “The Americans” and “Slow Horses.” But, he added, “It’s been the best experience I’ve ever had.”
“Silo” is based on a book trilogy by Hugh Howey. The third season follows the second novel, “Shift,” which is set in the distant past and unravels the mystery of how the silos came to be. (Season 4, which has already been shot, follows the third book, “Dust.”)
But Juliette doesn’t appear until the very end of “Shift,” and making a season of “Silo” without its central character — and Ferguson, the top-billed star — wasn’t an option.
So, they created a new story line that would give Juliette something to do in Season 3: suffer from amnesia, caused by drugs she is forced to take, and slowly piece everything back together.
“I saw some comments of people saying, ‘Juliette’s memory loss is boring,’” Ferguson said. “I thought, Oh, that’s a shame. I hope they don’t give up. It actually serves a purpose.” As the season unfolds, it is revealed that Juliette’s amnesia is connected to the silos’ origin story.
In Season 3, Daniel’s sister, Charlotte (Jessica Brown Findlay), a U.S. military pilot, is administered similar memory-loss drugs that cause her to forget what happened on a deadly mission in Iran that was thwarted by Iran’s nanotechnology weapons — a rapidly advancing global threat that can turn people into “gray goo.” Eventually, the drug is used to suppress Charlotte and Daniel’s memories completely.
When Zukerman was initially cast, Yost told him only that his character was “this guy that gets sucked into the vortex of the mystery of who built the silos,” the actor said.
In the penultimate episode of Season 3, however, an explosion occurs in Georgia, near where Daniel and Helen, his now-pregnant wife, are touring the site of 50 silos built by a trillionaire named Per Stensen (Colin Hanks), purportedly to save humanity from the nanotechnology threat. The lovers are separated, and Daniel is ushered safely inside the command center of Silo 1.
Then, in the Season 3 finale, we learn that Daniel is being cryogenically kept alive in Silo 1 and has no memory of his past life. He has been assigned a new identity as Troy, an enforcer who carries out brutal missions to keep the other silos in line, including the mass killing of Silo 17 rebels that was alluded to in Season 2. The outside air the silo dwellers think is fundamentally toxic is actually being intentionally poisoned by Silo 1 via drones. The drones can also shoot and kill escapees.
Despite the series’s intricacies, Yost said there was no master guide to help the creators keep track of the world-building, apart from Howey’s books. Some story lines evolved along the way — like giving the head of judicial, Robert Simms (Common), a wife, Camille (Alexandria Riley), and child.
“I wish we had a bible,” Yost said, referring to the TV practice of creating a reference document to keep track of characters, plots and themes. “There’s a lot of people who were defenders of the realm — costumers, production designers, everyone took part. We would stop and go, ‘Wait a second, can we do that? Let’s back up. Let’s make sure that tracks.’”
And no one knew whether this season’s two-timeline structure would be exciting or a mess.
“We didn’t know it was going to work until we saw the episodes,” Yost said. “And we didn’t really know it was going to work until people — fans, but also a certain number of reviewers — said it worked.”
Inside Silo 18, further Season 3 twists include the discovery that Bernard (Tim Robbins) was still alive — until he sacrifices himself to save the silo — and an unexpected turn from Simms, who becomes Juliette’s ally.
Though the story expanded in the third season, the cast members playing Silo 18 characters still had to shoot exclusively inside the dark, windowless interior sets of their bunker.
“I love sunlight,” Common said. “I love air. I love water. I love nature. I have so much compassion for anyone who has been deprived of seeing the sun like that consistently. It truly affected me.”
On breaks, some crew members used the set’s spiral staircase as their own gargantuan StairMaster. Common and others used the silo’s pipes to do pull-ups. Ferguson said the set “kind of becomes your second home.”
Season 3 ends with yet another revelation. Troy speaks to Juliette as the monotone Algorithm — Silo 18 residents (and the audience) had been led to believe it was a computer dictating orders and determining their fate, but it is actually voiced by people in Silo 1. Troy is also told Helen’s name, suggesting he may find a way to reconnect with his past in the final season.
“We had to answer as many questions as we could in Season 3,” Yost said. “What you’ll find in Season 4 is that there are a few more mysteries to unspool.”
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