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!

9. The Idol (HBO/Max)

Fuck what you heard. The Idol, 2023’s most hated show, is far and away the TV I’ve thought, and argued, about the most this year. Hype and backlash cycles notwithstanding, Sam Levinson and Abel “The Weeknd” Tesfaye created a sleazy, lurid, funny, fucked-up, incredibly straightforward satire of the starlet factory à la Paul Verhoeven. Unlike, say, Succession, which spoofs the ultra-wealthy without simultaneously trying to feel like Dallas or Empire, The Idol sends up the sex-and-drugs world of pop star Jocelyn (Lily-Rose Depp in the year’s most underappreciated performance) and her grifter svengali Tedros Tedros (Tesfaye in the year’s second most underappreciated performance) while also embodying it. 

The two leads act out their intense and at times humiliating material without a net, but they’re buoyed by a Greek chorus of comedic performances by the likes of Hank Azaria, Rachel Sennott, Eli Roth, Jane Adams, and Da’Vine Joy Randolph (who turns on a dime to deliver genuinely affecting material whenever called for). All of these terrific actors perform in front of a backdrop of lush retro synths and strings courtesy of Tesfaye, Levinson, and composer and super-producer Mike Dean, appearing as himself. In a sane world this would have just been Pop Starship Troopers — gnarly, nasty, sexy, fun, appreciated by those who get it and basically ignored by everyone else. It couldn’t sustain the discourse around it, and shouldn’t have had to, when its meaning was so plain to see, and enjoy

I wrote about the ten best television shows of 2023 for Decider. I’m enormously proud of this list. The variety I’ve seen across TV critics’ best-of lists this year can be nothing but good for both TV and criticism, and I’m glad to have contributed in my own way. Anyway, I believe in all these shows and think they’re worth your time.

I can’t remember the last time a show had me gasping and howling and pointing at the screen the way “Outside,” the finale of Silo’s crackerjack first season, did. Actually, no, that’s not strictly true. I can’t remember the last time a show that wasn’t professional wrestling had me gasping and howling and pointing at the screen the way this episode did. Silo is the most purely entertaining drama of the year, and these drum-tight 40-odd minutes demonstrate why.

I reviewed the season finale of Silo for Decider. What a fun show!

Let’s first focus on the man who appeared to be the show’s big bad before Bernard revealed his true nature: Sims, the Judicial commandant played by Common. Actually, Sims is just “Rob” to his friends and family, who from his boss Bernard to his wife Camille (Alexandria Wiley) appear to view him with legitimate love and respect. Of course, Bernard’s willing to look past all that when he reprimands Rob for sending unauthorized guards to escort Camille and their son to his apartment, but be that as it may: The point is that this jackbooted thug is just some guy, a guy with a wife and a kid and a tiny apartment and dreams beyond his station. Kind of like literally everyone else in the Silo, in other words.

It’s up to Common to pull off this contrast, and he does so using the same tools that make him intimidating. Take his black-leather-jacket-and-turtleneck wardrobe, for example. On one hand, it’s secret-police chic. On the other, the cut and styling are reminiscent of the 1970s-indebted clothing often worn by musicians who emerged from the same conscious-rap/neo-soul circles Common himself did as a hip-hop artist back in the day. Scary but sexy, that’s our Sims.

Common’s made two separate careers out of using his voice, and that helps him here too. Like George Clooney, he’s blessed with pipes that make him sound handsome as well as look it, and that mellifluous baritone makes him an attractive figure as well as a convincingly caring parent and spouse. But any guy who can speak that softly and still sound that commanding is a perfect villain from an aural perspective, and that’s a big part of what makes him believable as a guy who will stop at nothing to acquire his target, runaway Sheriff Juliette Nichols.

I reviewed the penultimate episode of Silo season one for Decider.

The best way I can describe Silo is this: Imagine you’re a baseball player and your thing is that you’re a monster home run hitter, like pitchers are afraid of you, you get intentionally walked a lot, when you take the field they play “Iron Man” by Black Sabbath. You are one home run away from breaking the record. And for some reason, the league has given you a choice: You can take your chances with the best relief pitcher in the game…or you can simply set a tee on home plate, put a ball on it, and knock it out of the park, easy-peasy lemon squeezey.

Silo is a show that always chooses the latter option. It’s not here to impress you with its high degree of difficulty. Why would it, when it’s so much easier to keep things simple and just deliver on what you set out to do, over and over and over?

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

Ah, the simple pleasures of Silo. It’s a show I look forward to watching and writing about every week, because it’s a show that, to paraphrase the Sex Pistols, knows what it wants and knows how to get it. Its aim is to explore a central mystery — who’s keeping everyone inside this Silo and why — and it does that. Its technique is to use the fundamental building blocks of suspense filmmaking — cat and mouse games, races against the clock, a drip-drip-drip of clues — and it does so with skill and panache. If this sounds like I’m damning it with faint praise, then I’m misspeaking, because it really is a formidable achievement. Lots and lots and lots of science fiction shows try and fail to achieve what Silo makes look easy.

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

“What if everything you know to be true, everything you’ve been told by the people you love, was in fact just one big lie?” Good question, George Wilkins! And the beauty of it is that like so much of Silo, it has a double meaning. The surface one, the obvious one, is your bog-standard dystopian Everything You Thought You Knew Was Wrong boilerplate, a rebel telling the woman he loves why he’s rebelling, because he believes the Silo is built on bullshit. 

The other meaning — the more insidious one for said woman, Juliette Nichols — is that she’s not the woman he loves, because he doesn’t really love her at all. At least according to his ex-girlfriend Regina Jackson (Sonita Henry), George is, or was, a serial user of people, women in particular, who could get him closer to the only thing he really does care about: the forbidden history of the Silo and the world that surrounds it. 

Don’t worry, I’m not bragging about sussing out this dual interpretation. The show is not subtle about all this. Nor does it need to be. Silo, as I’ve said before, is a simple show rather than a simplistic one. It has one big central mystery — loosely, “What’s the deal with the Silo?” — as its core support pillar, and wraps everything else around that, from sub-mysteries to world-building to character development — around that pillar like the spiral stairs at the center of the Silo itself. 

I reviewed this past weekend’s episode of Silo for Decider.