My favorite scene, one of the best non-thriller scenes in the entire series in fact, has little do do with any of this. It’s just Bernard, stuttering and stammering and awkwardly telling Judge Meadows that he has to measure her for her surface suit. He does this with obvious sensuality, implying a whole universe of emotions between the two characters who were once so close, and giving actors Tanya Moodie and Tim Robbins a moment of serious displaced sexiness. In a way, it’s an echo of the later sit-down between Solo and Juliette: a man and a woman in intimate company, each glad for the presence of the other despite the dire circumstances. These are lovely notes for the show to play; considering the likelihood we’re getting an old-fashioned “Juliette does some engineering and some death-defying” sequence next episode as she goes diving for those firefighter uniforms, let’s enjoy the loveliness while we can.

I reviewed this week’s Silo for Decider.

All over the Silo’s brutalist concrete expanse, graffiti has begun popping up reading “JL” — Juliet Lives. 

Might it have been nice if she lived in this specific episode? Sure. Robbins, Common, Moodie, and Walter are lively screen presences, but Juliette’s steely glare is the show. I completely understand the decision to bifurcate these two storylines, for the time being anyway. Still, no doubt writer Fred Golan and director Michael Dinner knew they had an uphill climb, or upstairs in this case, facing them with this episode. There are defects in the script beyond that to be sure: Shirley’s rebelliousness is fairly rote, and I heard the word “tape” more in this 45-minute episode than in the hundreds of hours of TV I’ve watched all year long. 

But — much like this review! — this episode has a task to perform: It has to reintroduce the world, the story, the plot (from the big picture to the nitty-gritty storytelling mechanics), and the characters to the audience. All episode one had to do was show Rebecca Ferguson Indiana Jonesing herself through an abandoned Silo. The degree of difficulty was higher here, in other words, and for fewer rewards. If the task was just to refresh my memory and recommit me to the story, mission accomplished.

I reviewed this week’s Silo for Decider.

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.

I reviewed the season premiere of Silo for Decider.