Apple TV+’s “Silo” season 2 finale, “Into the Fire,” aired this past Friday night and we’re still catching our collective breaths and ruminating over all these resolutions and the implications this means for the upcoming season 3.
Warning: Spoilers For “Silo” Season 2 Finale Ahead!
It’s a lot to process, with Mechanical detonating a bomb trapping raiders in the Down Deep, Lukas telling Bernard the ugly truth about The Algorithm, Juliette confronting an armed, shellshocked Bernard back at the Silo 18 airlock only to be trapped in a fiery decontamination chamber, and ending in a jarring time-cut three centuries earlier to a rainy Washington D.C. where we first meet one of the architects of the entire silo project, a junior congressman from Georgia, and his future wife.
Adapted from author Hugh Howey’s best-selling trilogy of post-apocalyptic books by veteran Hollywood writer/producer Graham Yost (“The Pacific,” “Justified,” “Band of Brothers”), “Silo” is an absorbing sci-fi descent into the subterranean lives of what might be the final assembly of humanity hunkered down in a grim 144-level bunker sheltered from a barren Earth that’s apparently been reduced to a wasteland.
We connected with Yost on the eve of “Silo’s” satisfying season 2 conclusion to break down “Into the Fire’s” elements and get hints on where it’s headed in season 3 to focus on when, how, and why the network of underground shelters got constructed.
Space.com: Can you take us through the evolution of Juliette (Rebecca Ferguson) and Solo (Steve Zahn) and what made that pairing so emotionally potent as it came to a heartfelt end when she exited Silo 17 to stop the rebellion back home?
Graham Yost: Well, they understood each other. Rebecca and I did a Zoom with Steve when we were coming after him to play the part. Turns out that Steve is a dear friend of Rick Gomez [Patrick Kennedy] and Rick and Rebecca completely hit it off in season 1. Getting the recommendation from Rick that Steve would fit into this “Silo” family was a big part of us knowing this would be good. What I was unprepared for is what Steve came up with for Solo. We find out in episode 9 that he was 12 years old when he was stuck in that vault. So he’s a kid, but he’s 50 years old. What does that do to someone and how is he able to even tie his shoes? Oh, he’s a character and he figured out a way but that makes him an odd duck.
Juliette is an engineer and she’s annoyed by this guy, but there’s something about him that hooks her. When she finds out his truth, it’s like, “Oh my God, that explains everything.” Rebecca and Steve are two people who love to have a good time as actors together, as well as human beings sitting in their chairs.
Space.com: Can you discuss “Silo’s” vision-related themes as to how things are perceived through observation, whether it’s Bernard’s wall of monitors, Solo’s vault portal, images of a decimated Earth in the cafeteria’s view screen, or helmet visors depicting a false green Earth?
Graham Yost: It wasn’t something that was at the forefront of our minds, but it was something Hugh built into the books. It’s that sense of Bentham and the Panopticon, the ultimate prison thing. What is real and what is the lie? The Sheriff’s wife, Allison, was right, the display is a lie. She just had the wrong display. It goes back to why Hugh wrote the books. He’s an avid sailor and he sailed into Havana harbor back when you could do that, but you’re not supposed to. He said he’d only seen this through American TV screens and it’s a very different reality here. Good, bad, worse, better, it’s just different. And I think that was one of the themes of the whole show. When you see the reality it’s different from what you’ve seen on the screen.
Space.com: Bernard wandering around the silo dumbfounded after Lukas tells him the truth about The Safeguard is an unsettling image. How did those revelations impact the character?
Graham Yost: Lukas tells him that he’s been head of IT for 25 years and has always been afraid that if he didn’t do what that voice in the wall told him to do, that people would come up, they’d storm the airlock, and they’d let in the poison and it would be self-inflicted for the silo. That’s a lie. Sure, that could happen, but really the threat is that they can just kill a whole silo at any time. So that is an absolute paradigm shift for Bernard. “What have I done this for?”
Mary Meadows said to him, “Don’t look into this.” She wishes she’d never found out. If you can’t do anything about it, what’s the point in knowing they can kill you at any moment. All it’s going to do is haunt you and in her case she made the decision she’d drink herself to death. It just didn’t work out that way. For Bernard, it’s “Mary wanted to go outside and have one moment free outside. I’ll do the same thing.” Then Juliette says, “wait, there might be something we can do.”
Space.com: Just when you think the finale episode is over, we make a jarring leap back centuries to Washington D.C. of present-day and are introduced to two characters that will have a tremendous impact on the series as readers of the books will already know. How did you modulate and measure what information was teased that detours into a different narrative?
Graham Yost: We ended season 1 with Juliette walking out and seeing there are more silos. She doesn’t know how she’s going to survive and we find out in season 2 how she did survive. Season 3 we wanted that kind of leaning forward turn at the end. This story basically started in our time and the promise I hope from that scene is that we’ll find out what that means. I thought it was fun to go from the sound of flames to the sound of rain and have the audience go, “What the hell!” We haven’t been outside, except for Juliette walking between silos, for two seasons and we certainly haven’t seen cars and rain and the Capitol building.
Space.com: What can fans anticipate pressing forward with “Silo” season 3 and will it be centered in the past or in the dystopian future?
Graham Yost: It’s about a third of the season of what we call the “Daniel and Helen” story and following them. The rest of it is that Juliette has come back with this big information about maybe there’s a way to stop them from being able to kill us. But we make following up on that incredibly difficult, because the bad guys are smart, is all I’ll say. Apple has been so incredibly supportive. It’s not a cheap or simple show to do. We’ve got the best cast and the best crew and the best writers and the best directors. To work with these people is just an absolute joy.
All episodes of “Silo” Season 2 are available exclusively on Apple TV+.