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Bored of Marvel’s brashness or Star Wars’ cliches? Apple TV+’s slow-burning series has all the depth (and terror) of Nineteen Eighty-Four
4/5
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Rebecca Ferguson is arguably best known for playing the straight woman to Tom Cruise’s gurning super-spy in the Mission Impossible movies. With her Apple TV+ series Silo she swaps glamorous globe-trotting for dystopian science fiction that harks back to the days sci-fi relied on smart scripts and cerebral storytelling rather than blockbusting special effects.
This atmospheric and tautly-plotted tale of post-apocalyptic survivors entombed in a giant underground complex is a rebuttal to the Marvel concept of bigger always being better. The setting is the eponymous “Silo” where 10,000 inhabitants live in the aftermath of a civilisation-destroying cataclysm from centuries past. It is forbidden to go outside and the rulers of the facility take care to hide from the citizens (and the audience) the truth about the murky nature of their home – and the events that led to its construction.
Ferguson plays Juliette, a former engineer who grew up in the bowels of the Silo and, in season one, discovered the population was secretly controlled by the head of IT (an agreeably villainous Tim Robbins). She also learnt that, despite warnings to the contrary, it was possible to exit through an escape hatch and survive – which she did in a finale that revealed the territory around the underground building strewn with human bodies.
Silo series two takes up the story immediately after that grisly discovery. Trudging through a field of burned-out corpses, she comes to another, second silo and a slow moving and largely dialogue-free opening episode traces her descent into the abandoned depths of the structure. While it isn’t especially pacey viewing, the hollowed-out shell of this new silo is brought hauntingly to the screen, the sense of inhuman scale evoked impressively as Juliette goes deeper and deeper. It’s slow TV for thoughtful sci-fi fans and worth putting your phone away for.
Back at the Silo, the fact that Juliette could go outside and survive has fomented rebellion (the rulers having tampered with the breathing equipment of previous agitators leaving the building). Down in the bowels, the oppressed masses – including Juliette’s friend Shirley (Remmie Milner) – are plotting to rise up. Keeping a close watch on the sedition are horrible head honcho Bernard Holland (Robbins) and security chief Robert Sims (rapper Common, radiating a languid menace).
There’s also a less interesting subplot about the existential woes of Juliette’s estranged father, an obstetrician named Pete who is concerned for his daughter’s safety but powerless to help (a stoic Iain Glen, from Game of Thrones).
The big mystery threaded through season two revolves around a character played by Steve Zahn, whom Juliette discovers in the basement of the new bunker. He peers at the interloper through a door slot and threatens to kill her if she comes closer. As readers of the Hugh Howey books from which the show is adapted will know, there is more to him than meets the eye – and that puzzle is spun out compellingly across the 10 episodes.
There isn’t much to Silo that wouldn’t have fitted into a single instalment of Black Mirror – or even Doctor Who back when it was largely filmed in coal bunkers and quarries. But Ferguson (also a producer) brings all her movie star charisma and the script is careful not to lean too preachily into the Orwellian metaphor of the downtrodden masses controlled by Robbins’s Big Brother character.
Forget social commentary – this is just dark, dystopian fun. In turning a cult novel into an understated sci-fi gem, Ferguson carries off her mission improbable with style.
Silo season two is on Apple TV+ now
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