The aimlessness inside Silo
Graham Hillard
A cardinal rule of television criticism: Don’t read other people’s reviews. Hard to follow that dictum, however, when Apple TV+ puts the consensus right there on the screen, next to the plot summary and cast of characters. Thus did I read without meaning to that Silo, the streaming service’s new chronicle of post-apocalyptic survival and society, is a “sci-fi puzzle box made from other shows’ spare parts.” Is the verdict just? Dammit, yes. So much for making my own way in the world.
Silo opens with a shot of a sheriff’s badge, a quaintly anachronistic emblem given our setting in a cataclysmic future. Donning the insignia is one Holston Becker (Selma’s David Oyelowo), a man whose weary gaze is nonetheless marked by determination. Along with 10,000 other men, women, and children, Holston resides in a massive underground vault, humanity’s final refuge from a toxified outside world. Was the planet bombed? Climate-changed? Struck by an unfriendly meteor? Your guess is as good as mine. “We do not know why we are here,” a somber Holston confesses in voice-over. “We do not know why everything outside the Silo is what it is.” Well then, what do you know? For one thing, the Silo’s 144 levels need law and order. For another, requests to leave the Silo are automatically granted. Complain about the place too loudly, and prepare to take an outdoor stroll.
HBO’S LOVE & DEATH IS NO WHIRLWIND ROMANCE
This policy is put to the test in the pilot episode when Holston’s wife, Allison (Rashida Jones), develops a wild hair about the Silo’s governance. Like all women of childbearing age, Allison is kept on a strict birth-control regimen, lifted only during periods of “reproductive clearance.” When the prospective mother-to-be discovers that her contraception has not actually been removed, despite the opening of her “window,” she begins to question the very nature of the controlling regime. Before long, Allison has convinced herself that the world beyond the Silo is perfectly livable. Is she right? There is evidence to suggest as much. Nevertheless, episode one concludes with the young wife lying face down on a denuded hillside, the latest victim of an unquenchable desire to breathe free air.
Silo’s genre influences are evident from early in its run. Like TNT’s Snowpiercer, the series places a surviving remnant in claustrophobic conditions and then traces the human crises that follow. Like Lost or The X-Files, it expands outward from an enigmatic core, resuscitating its central riddle from time to time but making no hurry to explain it. Other dramatic antecedents, though more obscure, are no less recognizable. Observing the show’s steampunk aesthetic and end-of-the-world mythmaking, the unchoosy cinephile may recall the Peter Jackson-penned flop Mortal Engines (2018), compared to which Kevin Costner’s Waterworld looks positively magisterial. Fans of Agatha Christie adaptations, meanwhile, may think of BBC One’s 2015 And Then There Were None. Silo, too, kills off a character per episode, a nod to the Queen of Mystery that feels, at least through the show’s first four installments, like an intentional homage.
One consequence of this routine destruction is that one is never sure whom Silo is really about. Indeed, the series makes a veritable fetish of upending our expectations in that realm, shifting its narrative perspective constantly until coming to rest, I think, on Rebecca Ferguson. Cast as Juliette Nichols, a mechanical engineer who moves from the Silo’s depths to the sheriff’s office, the Dune and Mission Impossible star is certainly compelling enough to build a show around. The problem, springing inevitably from Silo’s design, is that Juliette’s role as the heroine is not entirely trustable. After all, the show’s murderous writers could off her at any moment. Every time the character left her bedroom, I found myself clenching my teeth.
Yet even if Ferguson’s Juliette were clad in Bubble Wrap, one might still question the series’s unusual structure. By the time the young woman is introduced properly, in Episode 3, the show’s mythology has already been established. Its most important questions lie elsewhere. However sprucely made, episodes concerning a malfunctioning generator or Juliette’s complicated backstory feel like departures from what viewers have been taught to care about. We see much, early on, to indicate that the outside world has healed and that the Silo’s administrators are knaves. What does Juliette’s ability to turn a wrench have to do with any of that?
Other flaws in the show’s construction, though comparatively modest, are nevertheless distracting. A native Stockholmer, Ferguson has not quite mastered her American accent despite numerous professional opportunities. Neither, bizarrely, have Iain Glen or Harriet Walter, two normally superb television actors who play, respectively, Juliette’s father and friend. It is less than clear why Silo’s directors have instructed international actors to chew their words in a vain attempt to sound Peorian. Whatever their reasoning, the result is comically ineffective. Recall Dick Van Dyke’s feigned Cockney in Mary Poppins, then work backward from there.
And what about the series’s political identity, which feels, at times, almost willfully underdeveloped? If, as is probably the case, the Silo is a totalitarian state built on lies, then resistance of some kind would seem appropriate. But few members of the show’s social universe are particularly upset. In a representative early sequence, Holston wonders aloud why the government would keep people in the Silo if the outside world were an option. Clearly, copies of 1984 have failed to survive humanity’s flight underground.
Errors in design, bad accents, and lackluster philosophy. All would appear to be lost. Yet I’ll confess to a certain fondness for Silo’s strange post-apocalyptic world. Without question, the show is a work of visual beauty, with its vast staircases and fantastic machines. And the mystery at the series’s heart is an intriguing one, wide open as it is to any number of solutions. My advice to the show’s creators: Pick one and start working toward it now. The patience of television audiences does not last forever.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Graham Hillard is a Washington Examiner magazine contributing writer and the managing editor of the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal.