Warning: Spoilers for “Silo” Season 2 Episode 1 Ahead!
Life in the far future nightmare of “Silo” is not exactly a real rosy place to be, as some inexplicable calamity has required humanity to exist in elaborate 144-level underground bunkers where everyone is administered psychotropic drugs in the water supply and asking too many questions might get you exiled to the toxic environment outside where you’ll die within minutes. No fun at all!
A rebellion in Juliette Nichols’ (Rebecca Ferguson) own home Silo 18 roughly 140 years prior to the events depicted led to the burning of all literary material and the scouring of computer hard drives that might have offered some explanation as to what happened to Earth and precisely why nobody can leave without perishing.
Season 2 of Apple TV+’s addictive sci-fi series starring Rebecca Ferguson, Tim Robbins, and Common just returned Friday for anxious viewers to learn the fate of Juliette after she was booted out of the silo where she saw dozens of other silos in the distance.
Due to some slight-of-hand with the correct heat tape grabbed from Maintenance instead of Bernard’s (Tim Robbins) nefarious IT Department, Juliette’s suit was protected from whatever poisonous vapors, toxic compounds, or irradiated air exists in the aftermath of a horrific unnamed apocalyptic event.
Written by series creator Graham Yost, “Silo” Season 2’s premiere episode titled “The Engineer” begins a century earlier inside the neighboring Silo 17 where the sheriff leads a rebel crowd storming vault doors leading to a slanted corridor and out into supposed sunshine. The folks at Silo 17 surge outside after overpowering the IT guards and joyously flood into the wasteland. With the bunker’s generator set to flood the silo’s lower levels, they had little choice but to exit their concrete home.
Flash forward to present times and a tattered green freedom flag marks the tragic outcome of that ill-fated riot and a cratered graveyard of thousands of wild insurgents who foolishly believed that being outside was better. This is the calamity Juliette discovers after striding over the hill into the killing fields of Silo 17.
Where most folks would have just given up, slumped over, and expired due to the extreme difficulties trying to get inside Silo 17, she’s a never-say-die sort of individual in the classic heroic sense. Deciding to step inside a dead silo where a mass exodus has occurred decades ago without a clue as to why they fled might not be the best decision, but with her air supply running dangerously low and who knows what infectious agent in the atmosphere, she has little choice but to staggers down the yawning rampway over morbid piles of crunchy dead bodies.
Once inside after considerable difficulty and her survival suit’s oxygen quickly running out, Juliette secures the silo doors, decontaminates herself, and must smash her helmet with a crowbar to take it off. She’s able to breathe normally inside the tomb-like Silo 17 and explores the crumbling levels in flickering darkness.
What follows is a series of sequences where Juliette tries to bridge the gap between levels where the revolution unfolded to reach IT and failing several times. This reminds us of every video game where players attempt to leap onto a ledge, swing across water, or jump a chasm, but the technical nature of the hop, skip, or climb is severe, which leads to hours of frustration and a sprint for your phone or laptop to try and acquire a cheat code or clue to help get you past the frustrating test.
Well, imagine that relentless anxiety times one-thousand! Eventually through trial and error Juliette manages to get up to the IT and Judicial level, escapes the flood zone and passes corpses that seem to have died recently. Suddenly she follows the sound of music leading to a locked vault door. After trying to hack the electronic keypad to open the hatch, bleary blue eyes appear in the narrow window, attached to a voice that threatens to kill Juliette if she attempts to open the doorway again.
Back in Silo 18, the seeds of rebellion are surely germinating after citizens witnessed Juliette surviving what no one has survived before. Bernard must quell the mounting rumors before a full panic ensues that will threaten the entire survival community.
Will Bernard follow The Founders’ insistence on consulting the silo bible called The Pact, or will the truth burn brighter? Will the water levels rise in Juliette’s home silo and will the same fate as Silo 17 happen here? And just who is that crazy blue-eyed dude holed up in the locked vault? All these mysteries and more lie ahead!
New weekly episodes of “Silo” Season 2 air exclusively on Apple TV+ on Fridays.
