For its first two seasons, Apple TV’s Silo built its mystery around a dangerous surplus of “why?”. Why can nobody leave? Why must curiosity be punished? Why does an institution supposedly built to preserve humanity possess the means to exterminate it? In Hugh Howey’s Wool, published in 2011 and followed by Shift and Dust, those questions furnish the architecture of the dystopia. Ten thousand people live underground, sealed inside a colossal Silo and taught that the world outside is toxic. The rules governing their lives have survived for generations, while the history that produced them has been methodically effaced. Inside the Silo, mum’s the word and the wrong question can get you killed.
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Juliette Nichols (Rebecca Ferguson), an engineer whose instinct is to repair whatever is broken, keeps tugging at those loose threads until they lead beyond the machinery of her own Silo. Season 3 finally reveals how the Silos were conceived and how memory became an instrument of control. The 10-episode season divides its attention between Juliette’s return to Silo 18 and the “Before Times,” where journalist Helen Drew (Jessica Henwick) and Congressman Daniel Keene (Ashley Zukerman) become entangled in the conspiracy that will eventually produce the Silos. It is also the show’s most overtly political season, with its explosive final episodes detonating a succession of revelations that have sent fans back through its mythology and towards the question of what any of it portends for the final season.
For showrunner Graham Yost, these political dimensions lead back to the questions that have animated Silo from the beginning. In an interview with The Hindu, he unpacks the season’s political undercurrents, Rebecca Ferguson’s role in shaping Juliette, and the trajectory that awaits her in the final season.
“It’s interesting how this show can feel like it’s reflecting the times we’re living through,” Yost says. “I think that was part of the magic of Hugh’s books, because he wrote them nearly two decades ago, and they were reflective then too.”
A still from ‘Silo’ Season 3
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Apple TV
The anxiety Yost describes is the suspicion that history has been tampered with somewhere beyond reach. “The desire for truth, the feeling that you’re not getting all of the truth, the feeling that there’s something else going on; I think for both left, right, the middle, and across the political spectrum, that’s always a concern,” he says.
By the end of Season 3, Juliette has accumulated enough of the truth to understand that the questions haunting her were never confined to Silo 18. The mystery has acquired political consequences, and the series is now poised for an open contest over who controls the fate of the Silos. “Are the good guys going to win or are the bad guys going to win? Is Juliet going to live or is Juliet going to die?” he asks. “And that’s what Season 4 is about. Season 4 is about who’s going to win.”
That evolution is bound up with Ferguson’s particular reading of Juliette. Yost says the actor’s own temperament gave the character an instinctive impatience with evasiveness. “Rebecca is partly British, but mostly Swedish. And there is a certain, ‘let’s just cut to it’, ‘Let’s just get to the truth’ to her that very much fits into the kind of engineer that Juliette is, which is essentially, something either works or it doesn’t. You either fix it or you don’t.”
A still from ‘Silo’ Season 3
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Apple TV
That blunt practicality becomes increasingly consequential as Juliette’s remit expands. She begins the series with no appetite for public life, then finds herself acquiring authority because every attempt to solve one problem exposes a larger one. By the finale, after helping prevent Safeguard from being activated in Silo 18, her attention has now shifted towards the machinery that governs the Silos themselves. Yost says that reluctant transformation was embedded in the character from the beginning.
“We all loved right from the beginning that the hero of our story is someone who has no interest in being a hero. No interest in leading people. No interest in any of that. And yet, that’s what she becomes.”
He reaches for former First Lady of the United States Eleanor Roosevelt to explain how that kind of political figure can emerge. Roosevelt began her public life through social work and gradually became one of the most consequential American advocates for civil and human rights. Her political identity was shaped by circumstances that expanded the responsibilities she was willing to assume.
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“There have been people in human rights campaigns over the years who never started out knowing that’s what they were going to be,” Yost says. “Eleanor Roosevelt, who was FDR’s wife, worked at settlement houses in New York when she was young and helped people, but she never imagined that she was going to be one of the co-authors of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of the United Nations.”
He sees the same accretion of responsibility in Juliette. “That was never going to be on her plan. But that’s what she ended up doing,” he says of Roosevelt. “And she ended up being such an ally and a force for civil and human rights, and never let her husband forget that stuff.”
But he is quick to acknowledge that Juliette’s version of public service involves considerably more running, fighting and general peril. “I think that Juliet’s a little more action hero than Eleanor was” he chuckles. But Eleanor was a remarkable woman; very smart, and apparently really rather funny like Rebecca is.”
A still from ‘Silo’ Season 3
| Photo Credit:
Apple TV
It also puts Juliette in a long science-fiction lineage in which invented worlds become elaborate disguises for very real political anxieties. From Star Wars, Dune, Battlestar Galactica, The Three Body Problem and more, the genre has remained stubbornly porous to the politics of its moment, absorbing the fears, fault lines and ideological preoccupations of the world that produces it. When asked why the genre keeps circling back to the base human desire for liberation, Yost says, “It’s because there is simply just a call to that. I think we all want to unite. We just want to be free. And we just want the truth.”
Yost sees the same instinct at work in Tony Gilroy’s seminal Star Wars spin-off Andor, which he connects to the resistance movements of the Second World War. “Andor is very, very much like the resistance to the Nazis in World War II. There’s stuff that happened in Norway that you see a lot of in the first season.”
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For Yost, the crucial question is what happens when circumstances steadily erode an ordinary person’s capacity to remain a bystander. “Juliette, like a lot of those people in that extreme time, didn’t set out to be a hero,” he says. He invokes a formulation from the Second World War: “You had three choices — either you hid or you ran away or you fought. I think that those choices are unfortunately perennial in our world. Juliette had no interest in being a fighter, and yet she’s going to end up saving what’s left of the world.”
Season 4 will have to reckon with what that reluctant decision costs her and the rest of the Silo. Apple has confirmed the fourth season as the final chapter of the series.
Silo is currently streaming on Apple TV
Source: TH – Entertainment
