The debut in just a few days’ time of Silo‘s highly anticipated second season is as good an opportunity as any to offer up the following reminder about the show’s streaming home, Apple TV+.
While it’s true that Apple’s streamer has a tiny fraction of the subscriber base of major streamers like Netflix, there’s really no other streaming service that provides top-tier sci-fi programming as consistently as Apple does, with shows like Foundation, For All Mankind, Severance, and Silo all ranking among the best titles in the genre that any streamer or network has released in years.
Ahead of Silo’s Season 2 premiere date of Nov. 15, it’s debuted with a perfect 100% critics’ score on Rotten Tomatoes, a nice improvement over Season 1’s score of 88%. That gives the show an average critics’ score of 94% for the moment — near perfect, in other words, and much closer to an appropriate score for the show than the completely insane audience score of 66%. Seriously, I think some of the Game of Thrones fans must have wandered over to Silo or something, expecting big explosions or action-packed scenes. What it offers is thoughtful, slow-burn sci-fi, and it’s one of my favorite shows on TV at the moment.
That’s thanks in large part to Rebecca Ferguson’s Juliette, an engineer by training who’s essentially an extension of the audience. The questions she asks about the silo that the last of humanity is living hunkered down in as a result of the apocalypse-scarred wasteland aboveground — they’re the same questions we would ask if we were in her shoes. She’s also sharp, brilliant, and resourceful, believing that anything broken should at least be studied before it’s thrown out. And that includes the situation that’s relegated humanity to its desolate silo.
The show is based on Hugh Howey’s New York Times bestselling series of novels, and the last thing we saw in Season 1 was Juliette having been cast out of the silo in order to “clean.” It was essentially a death sentence, since we’ve seen others go outside and wipe off the silo’s viewing windows before they collapse and presumably die. Juliette, however, not only doesn’t die. She’s stunned to see what looks other silos within walking distance around her, which immediately suggests all sorts of other possibilities about the show’s narrative (what else that we thought we knew might be wrong?)
I’ve started watching press screeners for Season 2 from Apple, and let me just say that the world of Silo is about to get a lot bigger real fast. Juliette, for example, makes her way into another silo, one that appears to be completely abandoned even though it looks exactly like the one she came from. There’s a grand total of one guy with a crazy look in his eyes hiding behind a protective door, and he threatens to kill Juliette if she tries to open it. Long story short, I can already tell that the end of Season 2 is going to make me have the exact same reaction that Silo Season 1 did — that it’ll end, and I’ll race to get my hands on more of Howey’s books, desperate to find out what happens next.
