(courtesy IMP Awards)
Humanity has always been defined by an exuberant need to LIVE.
Not just get by nor survive but to LIVE, to revel in possibility and promise and to explore all the amazing ways we can express our innate curiosity, passion and vivacious fascination with life.
But what happens when that’s stymied? When all there is left to do is stay within very set lanes and live a small “l” life as best you can?
Silo is what happens, and this post-apocalyptic tale, like The Walking Dead franchise and a host of other end days stories like them, impactfully displays what happens when the pressure valves of unquenchably exuberant humanity burst and people rush to be who they have evolved to be.
In its somewhat repetitious though still compellingly viewable second season, Silo powerfully demonstrates what it is to find yourself suddenly awake after years and decades of existential sleepwalking and how that need to live life to its fullest and most satisfying potential often runs headlong into an almost as-powerful – though, and this is critical here, not quite – desire by some to defend and preserve the status quo at all costs.
It’s an all but inevitable conclusion that does not end well for anyone really, though you could well argue that those in power in the Silo, who occupy an authoritarian power structure where any sort of deviation from the norm is met with draconian punishments, get off the worst as they try, and fail, to stop unstoppable human nature doing its thing.
After 140 years of relative peace – we find out the ———- SPOILER ALERT !!!!! ———- silo is but one of many, part of a chain of 51 such places sunk into place some four centuries earlier during a fraught time in international relations which ended with a mutually annihilistic destruction of the world.
Outside our once verdant green world, at least the American part of it, is a orange-sanded nuclear wasteland though the powers that be in the Silo go out of their way to keep that truth from the 10,000 beleaguered souls in Silo 18 (they don’t know they are one of 51 by the way; only a small scion of leadership does) who don’t know how good life once was.
But after the woman at the centre of Silo‘s gripping story, Juliette Nichols (Rebecca Ferguson), is sent out to “clean” – this refers to being banished, the ultimate punishment, in a suit that survives the harsh outside elements just long enough for the condemned person to clean the giant screen in the communal eating area – and doesn’t die but disappears over the hill, a movement full of hope grows that declares “Juliette Lives” (or “JL” for short).
Juliette becomes a beacon of hope and possibility for people caught in assigned, heavily circumscribed roles that allow no room for adventure or differentiation and who long to see what else life might have to offer.
The key thing here is while they may not know about Earth as it was, or really, as it is now – yes, it’s as dead as the window shows but no one knows humanity persists in silos dotted across a scorched landscape – an innate part of them knows there must be something more than the very small, dusty, industrial and authoritarian world in which they live.
What season two focuses on heavily is what happens when those down below in Mechanical, who keeps the power on, and others allied to them, finally decide to question authority and challenge people like the cruelly dictatorial Mayor, Bernard Holland (Tim Robbins), the cold bloodedly utilitarian head of security Robert Sims (Common) and the Judicial area in ways that threaten the very existence of the silo itself.
The Mayor and others think its enough that people are told to stay in their lane and adhere to the rigid tenets of a rulebook (and near-religion) known as The Pact, but eventually that’s not enough and the great failing of those in power is that they don’t see that dogmatically enforced enforced consensus isn’t enough to defeat the ceaseless ever-growing need to LIVE and not just put one foot in front of the other over and over … and over again.
Their miscalculation unleashes a violent struggle, one that Juliette, who lives long enough to make it to the next, very empty silo – well, not entirely empty to be fair – desperately wants to head off.
Having found Silo 17, and discovered what happens when a silo is deemed to have failed – it’s not good and involves ———- SPOILER ALERT !!!!! ———- poison, AI and humanity meeting and being defeated by cold, algorithmic rules – she spends much of season two trying to go back and save the people she loves who largely now venerate her as an impossible hero.
Her journey is a long one, despite being only hundreds of metres from home, because her suit is trashed and she needs the help of the emotionally damaged, agoraphobic Solo (Steve Zahn) who lives alone in the Vault – OMG the Vault is incredible and you must watch Silo just to see how incredible it is – to fashion another one which is no easy tasks when the defunct silo you’re in is flooded and ruined.
While Juliette takes a long while to get anywhere, her interactions with Solo, who’s a man child whose emotional growth was stymied and corrupted by being left alone far younger than anyone ever should be – are a beautiful exploration of why we need connection and people to belong to, and why it’s not enough to have just that without a prevailing and expansive life to go with it.
Many of the scenes between Juliette and Solo aren’t easy to watch, and will alarm and break your heart in equal measure, but they do point to the central theme of this season which is how powerful humanity can be and how its imprisonment in a number of different ways can be worse than death.
The second season of Silo is darkly intense but also meditatively thoughtful too, and while it ends on a cliffhanger that takes us right back to what is referred to as the “Before Time”, a lighter and brighter season three is coming which will show what humanity lost and maybe what it can regain, at least in part in its current blighted future.
Silo streams on AppleTV+
Behind the scenes …