‘Silo’ Episode 1 Recap: Notes from Underground

The end of the world is just the beginning…of a lot of science fiction, actually. You don’t have to look any further than this year’s big smash hit The Last of Us for an example — though I would encourage you to do so, as much better work, like HBO’s own Station Eleven, await you if you do. (Sorry, fungus fans, but TLoU just never, ahem, grew on me.)

Silo, Apple TV+’s latest glossy science fiction effort, is also the newest entrant into this crowded sci-fi subgenre. Based in an artificial underground environment that, to the credit of the designers and filmmakers, feels simultaneously dizzyingly expansive and oppressively claustrophobic, it’s the story of a society largely content to coast on bullshit, a handful of people willing to declare that the emperor has no clothes, and the cost paid by both groups for their beliefs.

David Oyelowo (Selma’s Martin Luther King Jr.) stars as Holston Becker, the sheriff of a post-apocalyptic structure called the Silo. An enormous vertical concrete stack of level upon level of dwellings, marketplaces, livestock pens, indoor agriculture, you name it, it was built god knows when by god knows who to protect everyone inside it from god knows what is going on up on the apparently barren and toxic surface of the planet. 

The reason the whole situation is so shrouded in mystery, at least according to the official version of events, is that a rebellion dedicated to opening the door to the outside world completely destroyed all written and digital records of the past on its way to being crushed some 140 years ago. Every year the defeat of the rebels is commemorated on a Fourth of July–type holiday called Freedom Day. As we ourselves have learned here in the real world, naming stuff “Freedom This” and “Freedom That” is not a sign of a healthy society.

But the people seem mostly content — almost incongruously so, since with a few sci-fi trappings aside, society seems basically stuck in a suburb circa 2004. Sheriff Becker and his sidekick Deputy Marnes (Will Patton) are real small-town sorts, genial and friends with everyone, rather than Imperial stormtroopers or Thought Police. (That task seems to be reserved for a branch of government called Judicial, of which we don’t see much but which is reluctantly tolerated and regarded with paranoia by the people, the way a lot of us look at cops today.)

The sheriff’s wife Allison (Rashida Jones), meanwhile, is a perky employee of the Silo’s IT department, dedicated to keeping its various old-fashioned hard drives and desktops running. It’s under these auspices that she meets George Wilkins (Ferdinand Kingsley), a computer repairman several levels below who, knowing her reputation as something of a free-thinker, calls her in for help in cracking a very old-looking drive that may or may not be a forbidden “relic,” i.e. an item from “the Before Times.” (I couldn’t tell if that was a joke on Allison’s part, or if that’s what people actually call the pre-rebellion days, like with a straight face.) What they discover on that drive will change everything.

In the meantime, Holston and Allison spend a full year enthusiastically trying and failing to conceive a child. (I’m not kidding about “enthusiastically”: There’s a very funny and sexy scene in which the sheriff’s whole department holds back laughter while hearing their boss fuck his wife behind his closed office door.) Childbirth is heavily regulated, you see, and they only have one year to get pregnant before Allison will be forced to have her birth control device reimplanted in her body. 

It’s under these auspices that she starts talking to Gloria (Sophie Thompson), a holistic fertility specialist who in actuality is interested in Allison because of her aforementioned free-thinking reputation. The idea she puts in Allison’s head — that a sinister “they” will never allow her to have children, because of, you guessed it, her free-thinking nature — will also change everything.

As the months pass and Allison remains un–knocked up, the doubts planted by Gloria and the intrigue behind George’s verboten device finally get the better of her. She and George go through all the files and discover a recording of the outside world revealing it to be green and full of birds, a type of creature Allison poignantly can only refer to as “things flying in the air.” The next thing Holston knows, Allison has carved into her own torso with a knife to pull out the real birth control device, which her ob/gyn covered up by removing a ringer instead. It’s lies all the way down, in other words.

While Holston races to find medical help, Alison wanders into the communal cafeteria, haggard and bloody, yelling like a crazy person about how we’re all being lied to, it’s perfectly safe outside, et cetera. Then she shouts the words no one in the Silo can ever say: “I wanna go out.” 

This is a violation of their cardinal law and a one-way, unrefusable ticket to, well, going out, and never coming back again. According to the cameras that record the world outside, no one has ever made it more than a few yards from the door without collapsing and dying.

So Allison is sentenced to expulsion, but not before telling Holston that if she’s right and everything’s fine out there, she’ll send him a signal by dutifully cleaning the camera lens before walking away. Sure enough, she does so — but then drops dead anyway. 

But the seeds of doubt have been planted in Holston now, too, though it takes two years for them to blossom. Eventually he locks himself in his own holding cell and proclaims his desire to go out…in hopes, he confides to Marnes, of finding his wife, whom he believes is still alive despite the dead body in a spacesuit that everyone can see on the monitor screens. He’s an optimist — my guess would have been that the suits are rigged to kill anyone who wears them, not that she was somehow digitally swapped out for the dead body and is still roaming around out there somewhere — but even in the Silo, hope springs eternal. 

The pivotal road-to-Damascus event that led Holston from doubting his own wife to risking his life to find her? Meeting a woman named Juliette Nichols (Rebecca Ferguson), the blue-collar engineer who keeps the silo’s generator running. We don’t know what her deal is, or what her relationship with Holston becomes — hell, we don’t even hear her say so much as a single word, we only know she reported that George’s apparent suicide was actually murder — but Holston credits her with his conversion. Ferguson is an executive producer on the project, so I expect her role will be pretty major.

I’ll say this right up front: Silo will not wow you. This is not a big, bold, bizarre, frightening science-fiction vision in the vein of Netflix’s marvelous Dark or HBO Max’s late, lamented Raised by Wolves. It’s more in the vein of Apple+’s own Foundation: adapted from a series of novels, given a decent budget and a solid cast, and aimed right down the middle at the kinds of folks who like to open up streaming apps and watch science fiction shows. There are a lot of people like that, and so there have been a lot of shows like that too. Which is fine.

So is Silo. I do have some problems with the worldbuilding, admittedly: Why does Silo society so closely resemble that of early 21st-century America given its bizarre background and circumstances? If the rebels are bad for wiping out history, why is it now illegal to possess anything created prior to the rebellion? That kind of stuff will either knock you out of the story or not, and I’d understand either way.

For me, though, Silo is a pleasant ride so far. Jones and Oyelowo make for an engaging couple of main characters; they’ve got a kind of Bert-and-Ernie vibe that works, and Jones has a face that’s hard not to watch. Atli Övarsson’s hyperactive score is always at the ready to guide you from one prescribed emotion or tone to the next; normally this is an irritating tactic, but in the hustle and bustle of all those people crammed into this one multi-level space, the omnipresent music somehow fits.

I’m a sucker for colossal architecture and the capsule societies that grow within them, too, so even little details like the spiral staircase that connects all the levels (no elevators), the amount of time it takes to travel from one level to another one far away, and the porters who lug stuff up and down the stairs using massive metal-framed backpacks, are compelling to me. In fact, they might be the most compelling thing about the show. Hey, don’t knock it! Lots of sci-fi shows try and fail to do much of anything distinctive. A big brutalist flight of concrete steps goes a long way.

One more thing: Since we’re watching a show about a society where so much writing was purged, it’s worth noting that without the script by series creator Graham Yost, adapted from the book series by Hugh Howey, we wouldn’t even be here talking right now. As the WGA is fighting every day to prove, writers deserve a fair shake, in our time or any other.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.