Apple TV's 'Silo' returns with bold second season

Apple TV is happy to spend tons of money on prestige sci-fi projects like Dark Matter and Foundation, but by far the best in the subgenre is Graham Yost's riveting Silo. The first season of this adaptation of Hugh Howey's books played like a contemporary take on philosophical sci-fi noirs like Blade Runner, stories that need big ideas to say something new about relatable themes. The film was full of secrets and showed its willingness to take risks right from the premiere when it sent A-list actors David Oyelowo and Rashida Jones to reveal that the real star of this show would be the phenomenal Rebecca Ferguson, who plays an engineer who does everything She knows it's a lie.

If you haven't seen the first season, watch this first because we have to spoil ourselves (and it's one of the best shows of 2023). At the end of the first season, Juliette Nichols (Ferguson) was essentially pushed out of the silo by the deeply corrupt Bernard Holland (Tim Robbins) and the superficially corrupt Robert Sims (Common). After watching footage of Allison's exit from the silo, Juliette came to believe that those in power had been lying and that leaving the silo was not as dangerous as the residents were led to believe. When she actually walked down the hill in front of the exit, she discovered that there was a lie embedded in a lie. The footage was a fake vision given to Allison before the faulty thermal suit she was wearing resulted in her death. The world has actually become a desolate hellscape, but Martha Walker (Harriet Walter) had prepared Juliette's suit so that she could still walk across the gray horizon.

What now? How do you move forward with Juliette from the silo? The second season of “Silo” wisely doesn’t simply send Juliette back to the Silo to fight Bernard and Sims again, which might have been narratively compelling but would have diminished the impact of the first year. Juliette doesn't just return to the silo. Without giving much away, it's not long before Juliette is forced into another shelter where she finds a sole survivor, played perfectly by the great Steve Zahn. He tells her how all the other residents were inspired by someone leaving their silo to attempt the same thing, which resulted in the piles of skeletal remains outside the door. Juliette realizes that this could be the fate of her silo and her role within it, as false hope can lead to a mass massacre. She vows to return to stop the destruction of a people, trading a lie for a deadlier truth.

As the two-hander plays out across the landscape, the second season also encounters growing resistance within the Silo, as people become increasingly convinced that Juliette survived and that her expulsion was unjustified. Much of the plot there revolves around Knox (Shane McRae) and Shirley (Remmie Milner), aspiring leaders of a movement that Bernard knows he must destroy.

It's a season about narratives and who controls them. It's also about how rebellion grows through kernels of truth. In last season's finale, Holland told his lackeys, “What you just saw, you won't see again.” Of course, he learns that this is impossible, but the line is even more meaningful than that, because it explores the idea one that even what we see can be wrong, leading us to what we think we know. It's not so much about what is true and false, but about how these beliefs can be used to control people and shape society. It's an incredibly rich, smart show.

However, it lacks some of the momentum of the first season, as the lyrics often seem to revolve around these ideas without the same driving plot driving them forward. Luckily, whenever he feels like everything is starting to repeat itself, one of the actors finds a character beat to support the philosophical twist. Robbins and the rest of the crew in the silo are solid, but the season belongs to Ferguson and Zahn, who find the perfect balance between the fascination of seeing another real human and the paranoia and fear that has embedded itself in his every fiber of his being . Isolation makes you lonely, but it also destroys your communication skills and your trust in humanity. Zahn and the authors understand this.

Apple TV has become one of those services that has become so crowded that even the best shows can have a hard time cutting through the noise. Whenever 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's easily broken down into viral videos, and it's not as flashy as some of its better-known offerings. Still, that's what I always find people 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 asks an even scarier question that we will all need to answer even more urgently in the coming months: What now?

Six episodes were screened for review. Premieres November 15th^Th.