On the opposite side of the ledger from Troy is Juliette. The show has smartly selected a storyline for her final act, one that will push her two most compelling characteristics to their limits. By taking on Silo 1, she has gone from criminal to dissident to rebel to revolutionary, the apotheosis of her endearingly defiant spirit. The question of how to pull it off — how to get there undetected, how to take down its defenses, how to take out its leadership caste, how to shut down the Safeguards for good — will meanwhile push her problem-solving skills to their absolute limit. This is exactly what you want from this character.

And this episode, a series high point, is exactly what I wanted from this show. The savagery that starts the episode is hard to watch but absolutely necessary, a reminder that the exciting sci-fi dystopia is built on a mountain of corpses, with a billionaire technocracy allied with a radical and egomaniacal right-wing politician deciding who lives and who dies. This is a very real story playing out across our all too real world at this very moment.

I reviewed the season finale of Silo for Decider.

Why are they in the Silos? Why can’t they leave? Why can’t the Silos communicate with each other? Why is there a genocidal Safeguard in place? Why would the sainted Founders do any of this if they really cared? Why?

Based on the events of the Before Times material, in which nefarious forces set off a nuclear explosion and force everyone into the Silos forever, I have a feeling we’re about to find out. At the very least, we’ll get a big enough chunk of the information to make the still-missing pieces a tantalizing lure for the fourth and final season of the show. Either way, it’s tremendously satisfying to see both our heroes and our villains, whoever they wind up being in the end, getting so close to their respective finish lines. We’re on the verge of finding out Why, the only question worth asking.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Silo for Decider.

Silo continues to be some of the most pound-for-pound satisfying storytelling on television. In this episode, the flashbacks serve up a heaping helping of Answers — though pointedly they have little to say about why the hell Stensen felt the need to turn his Silos into giant gas chambers with the flip of a switch, a haunting mystery in itself. The future returns us to our home for half of Season 2 and a much-beloved supporting character, wraps up the Orla Kent case, and keeps up the confrontations between Camille, Robert, and Juliette, which have been dramatic gold for all three actors involved. To me, this is the baseline of what TV should be. If you’re not at least this competent and compelling, give the job to someone who’ll do it right.

I reviewed this week’s Silo for Decider.

Robert talks Camille down by saying their son should be spared having two murderers for parents. Clearly he’s feeling guilty for using the boy’s school jacket to help smuggle IDs needed for the aborted bombing; Camille caught him so easily you’d almost think he wanted to be caught. Once again, actor Common makes Robert’s moral and emotional dilemmas seem truly painful for him to endure. This is not a man used to honoring his own conscience.

I reviewed this week’s Silo for Decider.

What a pleasure it is, watching Apple TV’s Silo’s investment in Camille Sims — and in Alexandria Riley, the actor who plays her — pay off. 

Making someone who’s not part of the cast’s core the chief antagonist for the show’s third season is a risky move. Camille’s been around since early on, but she’s hasn’t had the importance of a Knox or a Shirley or a Sheriff Paul. Nor does Alexandria Riley have the star cachet of series leads Rebecca Ferguson, Tim Robbins, Common, Harriet Walter, Steve Zahn when he’s around, or Rashida Jones and David Oyelowo for a hot minute way back when. 

Yet here Camille is, generating the story’s main conflict, acting like a true conflicted but hubristic arch-villain. She’s having arguments with the AI that runs the Silo, with its messianic hero Juliette Nichols, with her increasingly estranged husband Robert Sims, even with her troubled son Anthony. She’s helping the Voice in the Vault deceive Juliete, while also staying a step ahead of the Voice by taking the initiative and dosing the whole damn Silo with the forgetting drug “Vitamin D+” hours before the Algorithm orders her to. 

As a politician, she’s an all too familiar type. She’s always turning the ratchet to the right, to more extreme extralegal sanction, to duplicity as policy, to ceding decisions to an AI program that tells her what a great job she’s doing to calm her down. Her apparently sincere belief that she’s going to turn the minds of everyone in the SIlo to Swiss cheese For The Good Of The Silo somehow makes her conduct more infuriating than if she were merely a cynic or a sociopath. She’s a portrait of a person mistaking doing their worst for doing the best they can.

I reviewed this week’s Silo for Decider.

Hot damn, this is the kind of episode you build mystery boxes for. This obviously pivotal episode of the third season of Silo is titled “Memory,” for multiple reasons. In part, it’s because we are afforded glimpses of the past we skipped over in the transition between seasons. In part, it’s because with the help of her friends, Juliette begins, at last, to remember.

I reviewed this week’s Silo for Decider.

It’s time to talk about the past. Or, rather, the present. It’s time to have a tough conversation about the pre-apocalyptic flashbacks, is what I’m saying. 

On some levels, they have a lot going for it. This is the storyline that will ostensibly answer the big question, Why are they down there?, and as such it has undoubtedly held my interest. It’s charmingly acted by Jessica Henwick as investigative journalist Helen Drew and Ashley Zukerman as idealistic freshman congressman Daniel Keene. (They’re very good-looking people.) But man, the material is like styrofoam packing peanuts, designed to transport you safely from point A to point B, nothing more. I hate those things.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Silo for Decider.

When portraying a functionary in a dystopian regime, it helps to have resting scowl face. Actor Denise Gough, for example, made the most of what she has called her “downturny mouth” as the sneering Imperial officer Dedra Meero in Andor. Richard Burton’s hard-bitten hangdog looks made his O’Brien in the film version of 1984 seem possessed of some terrible wisdom that burns from within. 

To this list, we can add Alexandria Riley and her character, Camille Sims, on Silo. For a long time I struggled with Camille, wondering why she was so much less sympathetic even than archvillains like Bernard or her own husband, Robert Sims. Even when she was helping Juliette before the rebellion and her exile and return, something in her eyes just defies empathy. She has the face of someone who’s about to explain to you why they had to betray you, and will be irritated that you don’t understand.

This, of course, is all by design on the part of the writers, the filmmakers, and the actor. In fact, Camille’s fundamental dislikability is made canon in this episode, by no less an authority than the Algorithm itself. Why was she chosen by the AI that runs the Silo to become the new head of IT and guardian of the Silo’s terrible secrets? “Your ability to lie,” the program says placidly. Her manipulative nature, her willingness to play both sides of any given conflict, is ironically how the Algorithm knew she could be trusted.

I reviewed this week’s Silo for Decider.

Ironically, given the nature of the titular structure, Silo’s lore does not run that deep. I’m fond of pointing out that rather than take the usual mystery-box approach, keeping the core question in the dark as you add more and more questions to maintain momentum, Silo keeps it simple. There’s really only one mystery here: Why are they down there? Everything else flows directly from or to that central gap in the narrative.

But it’s not just the mystery plot, Juliette’s often interrupted quest to get to the truth, that reflects this welcome simplicity. As a result of that storytelling decision, all the backstory, the fake history, the world-building, the lore must also point in the direction of that one big question. In a lore-heavy episode like this one, we see the benefits of that approach. The information still opens up new vistas of understanding, but the camera, so to speak, is always focused on the exact same landscape. We just see it more clearly now.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Silo for Decider.

The last we saw Juliette Nichols, she was on fire. Played by Rebecca Ferguson, Juliette is the working-class hero of the post-apocalyptic bunker called the Silo and the protagonist of the series. Expelled by former mayor Bernard Holland (Tim Robbins) for investigating the Silo’s secrets, she survived the poison atmosphere of the outside world long enough to make it into a different Silo entirely. Its few residents helped her make it back home, leading to a fiery confrontation with Bernard just outside the original Silo’s airlock before her storyline cut to black.

Three months later, it’s a whole new world down there. Juliette has been elected mayor. Hell, some people seem to view her as a kind of messiah. In addition to miraculously surviving both the poison air and the fiery reentry chamber, her return to alert the Silo residents that it was deadly to go outdoors ended the facility’s brief civil war. 

What’s more, her actions exposed Bernard’s schemes to society. Though he himself died during the fire, his surveillance camera system is being dismantled, his abuse of the governing Pact has been curtailed, and the Pact itself is being rewritten by Sheriff Paul Billings (Chinaza Uche). Now there’s a whole governing council comprising representatives of every level and department in the Silo: Juliette, Paul, Judge Robert Sims (Common), and his wife Camille (Alexandria Riley), Juliette’s handler and chief of staff.

There’s just one problem: Juliette doesn’t have the first clue how any of this happened.

Silo‘s back, and I’m reviewing it for Decider, starting with a look at the season 3 premiere. Woo!

Brutalist architecture is misleadingly named. When people think of the stark, colossal buildings that are the hallmark of the style, they think brutal as in overpowering. In fact the term comes from the french word brut, meaning “raw,” referring to the style’s tendency to display rather than mask its raw materials, its concrete and steel.

Brutalism is often associated with such massive construction projects as low-income housing or government buildings, and for good reason: It’s a postwar style that emerged from the social-democrat consensus following the conflict, and was embraced by left/liberal governments on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Only when the tail end of the Cold War and its conservative ascendency shook that consensus did these buildings take on the vaguely sinister air with which they are often associated to this day. 

The reason for that is simple, as anyone who’s ever seen a crumbling castle or haunted house can tell you. When a system dies, the buildings constructed by that system for the greater good become symbolic instead of the system’s collapse. City halls become sites of faceless bureaucracy. Monuments become gravestones. Shelters become tombs. 

[…]

The Silo — the Silos, plural — are brutalist in their construction: the concrete is unadorned and enormous in scale. They’re brutalist in their purpose: They were built to safeguard 10,000 souls apiece, recreating society in miniature. 

But they’re also “brutalist” in the misnomer sense: They are the site of authoritarian oppression. If indeed they ever really were built to safeguard anything, all they really exist for now, as Lukas and Bernard and Juliette and Jimmy all learn, is to seal off the lives of those within forever, lethally if need be. 

The Silos are the brutalist paradox transmuted into sci-fi plot form. Are these massive structures the only hope for humanity? Or are they indeed better thought of as haunted places, places of deceit and domination, because whatever world they once existed to protect is long dead? 

[…]

Silo asks a provocative and timely question, one reflected in the controversy of the architectural style upon which it’s based: Are structures of protection really structures of oppression? And when the time comes, will we be able to tell the difference?

I reviewed the season finale of Silo for Decider.

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” I’m thinking about this line from 2001 author Arthur C. Clarke a lot while watching Silo these days.

I reviewed this week’s Silo for Decider.

The Pact is what has kept things in line all these decades. It may well stop a catastrophe even now. But it led to this catastrophe too, with its lies and deceptions and bias toward the Up-Toppers. Does such a document deserve to govern a people who have outgrown it? Do its handmaidens in power deserve to rule us? I mean, them? 

I reviewed this week’s Silo for Decider.

The fascinating thing about all this is that we’re spending the season rooting for the Mechanicals to win, even though we know everyone will die if they do. That’s the whole point of the Juliette plot, after all: She’s in a race against time to get back to the original Silo and warn everyone not to come out after her, because the surface world really is poisonous. It goes to show you how much the structure of genre narrative can trigger our sympathies, even when intellectually we understand our sympathies are dumb as hell.

I reviewed this week’s Silo for Decider.

Juliette Nichols is an engineer by trade, helping to power the Silo. But what her job really does is power Silo, the show. Thanks to her background of mechanical know-how and pragmatic problem-solving, the show can serve up one seemingly insurmountable problem with a so-crazy-it-just-might-work solution after another. Then all it has to do is sit back and point its camera at a sweaty Rebecca Ferguson and a bedraggled coworker or two, and the result is some of the tightest, tensest action setpieces on television.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Silo for Decider.

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.

The latest episode of the Boiled Leather Audio Podcast takes a look back at the year in television, as Stefan and I review my picks for the ten best shows of 2023. Listen here or wherever you get your podcasts!

BLAH takes a look at Silo, 2023’s most no-nonsense sci-fi show, in the latest episode of the Boiled Leather Audio Conversation, now available for our Patreon subscribers!