Silo - Season Two - Review: The Silo is Safe as Long as Juliette Lives

After a cathartic first season, Silo ends its unstable sophomore run leaving a bittersweet feeling in the air. The first finale ended with a huge cliffhanger: Juliette Nichols (Rebecca Ferguson) was exiled from her Silo and survived, so the residents of Silo 18 started believing it was safe to go outside. After they are told that Juliette is dead and the world is still toxic, a series of increasingly troubled situations dominate Silo 18, dividing the people essentially into two groups: the ones siding with Mayor Bernard (Tim Robbins), who controls the situation through manipulative lies and violence, and the ones siding with the Down Deep characters, who believe there’s more to this story than meets the eye.

Meanwhile, Juliette encounters the abandoned, destroyed Silo 17, where she meets Solo (Steve Zahn), a man who’s been trapped in a vault his entire life and who’s on the brink of insanity. After learning more about how Silo 17 was destroyed, Juliette wants to return to her Silo to prevent her people from having the same fate — and she will have to face a lot to do so.

This presents a challenge: Juliette, who used to be the show’s foundation brought to life by Ferguson’s subtle and powerful acting, is left aside for most of the season. This sophomore run is about the consequences of her departure and her survival, putting multiple (once secondary, now main) characters from Silo 18 front and center. There’s Knox (Shane McRae), Shirley (Remmie Milner), Martha (Harriet Walter) and Carla (Clare Perkins) as the faces of the revolution, representing the main forces against Bernard; there’s Chief Deputy Paul (Chinaza Uche) and Deputy Hank (Billy Postlethwaite) joining forces to investigate suspicious crimes; there’s the Sims couple, Robert (Common) and Camille (Alexandria Riley), each one of them fighting for power in different ways; Dr. Pete Nichols (Iain Glen), who is mourning his daughter’s (Juliette) death/departure; and there’s Bernard, who is at the center interacting with everyone while also dealing with his complicated relationship with Judge Meadows (Tanya Moodie) and a new partnership with Lukas Kyle (Avi Nash).

There’s always a lot happening at Silo 18. Betrayals, uprisings, murders, chase scenes, and conspiracy, all while carefully developing the secondary-turned-main characters. The first half of the season is a good setup of conflicts, and it excels in establishing the slow burn to Juliette’s return. Juliette may not be physically around, but this tension regarding her departure makes you wonder what will happen when she finally returns and how each character will react. The first half is also good at keeping the screen time between the two silos balanced in a way that makes everything seem new, fresh, and exciting.

The latter half is not as fortunate, though. What once seemed exciting and full of potential starts to get tiring. The Silo 18 stories start getting most of the attention — there’s too much happening all the time, but not necessarily things are going forward. Lots of information, lots of new characters, new conflicts, and new questions, but few satisfying resolutions and answers. Juliette appears less and less, and the slow burn to her return to Silo 18 gets cold fast — you know it’s happening only in the last minutes of the finale. Still, the tension and the anticipation are gone once Juliette’s storyline is dragged for so many consecutive episodes filled with tiring narrative choices. The Dive and The Book of Quinn, respectively episodes seven and eight, have some of the most tiresome moments of the season on both silos.

It’s only during The Safeguard, the penultimate episode of the season, that both storylines are made interesting again. New characters come to inject much-needed life into the Juliette/Solo storyline, and even if it’s interesting that it took so long for these characters to be introduced, the episode works and it’s great. A big conflict that manages to involve every main character from Silo 18 also starts taking shape in the ninth episode, so the Into the Fire finale can be this explosive hour of entertainment filled with tension and twists. Some things, however, are too rushed: Juliette getting to communicate with her friends inside the Silo 18, as well as her return to the Silo and her confrontation against Bernard, all of that happens too fast… For the sake of ending the season with another cliffhanger. So these moments that should be the most powerful and outstanding of the season, are hurried, anticlimactic, almost protocolar.

It doesn’t help that after (apparently) setting two of the show’s most important characters on fire, the final five minutes of the finale are dedicated to introducing what seems to be new main characters for the next season, in a scene set years in the past: Daniel (Ashley Zukerman) and Helen (Jessica Henwick) on what seems to be a date, until it’s revealed there’s something more to their meeting, as they are somehow involved in the creation of the Silos. Will the third season be set entirely in the past (like the second book apparently is)? Or will the next season take place in multiple timelines? We’ll have to wait a while to discover, but the slight possibility of having to wait for the fourth season to continue watching the story of Silo 18 is frustrating.

This is not a bad season, though — Silo continues to be a great dystopian sci-fi that brings to the screen interesting questions about human nature, society, and the price of survival, all wrapped in captivating worldbuilding with substantial production value and special performances.

Let’s take a look at some of the characters who uplifted this season: Bernard, this highly competent politician, is despicable. He is also the best character of the season as this person who is complex in fascinating ways; he knows so much, and he is right about (almost) everything, and yet he gets to make so many bad decisions that inevitably will lead his Silo to damnation. Even with all this knowledge, he still hasn’t figured out that being truthful to others and creating an environment for collaboration is more effective than secrets and lies. Juliette only gets to survive many hurdles on Silo 17 because of this: she finds the truth and uses it to make people cooperate until everyone’s needs are met. Bernard does the opposite, and when he meets Juliette at the end of the season, it’s clear that Silo is at its best when these two share the scene, either antagonizing each other or working together — losing any of them would be a massive risk for the show.

Also, Bernard’s relationship with Judge Meadows is one of the finer aspects of the season. Meadows, by the way, receives an even more complex treatment, becoming a nuanced, sympathetic character that leaves the season too soon — Tanya Moodie does wonders here, being responsible along with Tim Robbins for some of the best scenes of the season. Alexandria Riley’s Camille is also another character who becomes full of complexity and compelling developments, ending the season with the promise to become an even greater force in later installments. Finally, Avi Nash’s Lukas goes from a scared, powerless prisoner to someone so full of life and attitude — his endless curiosity, his eagerness to learn, but most importantly his kindness makes Nash’s Lukas a highlight.

The second season of Silo is not as perfect as the first. It has an uneven pace, and it misses the mark in several moments while trying to make the many different storylines work out. But even if it’s weaker than the first one, this season is still pretty good, with some powerful episodes such as Order, Solo, The Harmonium, and The Safeguard, and great ones like Into the Fire. This tale of survival is at its best when it gives the complex characters that inhabit this world a chance to move forward and face changes; whenever they are not running in circles, Silo is one of the most compelling sci-fi shows airing nowadays. And as long as Juliette (and Bernard, to some extent) lives, this will continue to be a remarkable ride.

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