Scaling "Silo"

The great thing about "Silo" is that it's a post-apocalyptic science-fiction puzzle box story with excellent worldbuilding.  You learn about the massive Silo, housing thousands of people underground, how their society functions, how they lost their history in some past power struggle, and how they believe that it's not safe to go outside.  Just enough information is trickled to the audience, little by little, to keep the mystery compelling.  The trouble with "Silo" is that it starts out very strong with two episodes starring Rashida Jones and David Oyelowo trying to resolve their existential questions about the Silo, but the following eight episodes are about an entirely different character, played by Rebecca Ferguson, trying to solve a murder mystery.  We eventually do get to the big picture questions, but it takes an awfully long time to loop back. 

The story is kicked off with a hard drive, a forbidden "relic" that is discovered by a tinkerer named George (Ferdinand Kingsley), who recruits an IT worker, Allison (Jones) to help him access it.  This leads to several deaths. Mayor Jahns (Geraldine James) decides to appoint a new sheriff - not Paul Billings (Chinaza Uche), the candidate being pushed by the Silo's enforcement organization, Judicial, but a generator engineer named Juliette Nichols (Ferguson), who is the choice of the previous sheriff, Holston (Oyelowo).  Juliette is George's ex, and convinced that he was murdered rather than dead by suicide.  She decides to investigate, despite the concerns of Paul, now her new deputy, and opposition by the Silo's glowering head of security, Robert Sims (Common), who may actually be running everything in the Silo.  Other characters include Juliette's fellow engineer Martha (Harriet Walker), the head of IT, Bernard (Tim Robbins), a stargazer named Lukas (Avi Nash), Juliette's father (Iain Glen), and another deputy, Marnes (Will Patton).  

I've never read the "Silo" books or stories, but I am familiar with the franchise's history.  It was originally expanded from a group of short stories into a full novel, and from there into a series.  This accounts for some of the wild POV switches in the first part of the show.  I like that we get to explore the Silo from different POVs, and see everyone's different ways of coping with living in such an oppressive world.  The show's sci-fi concepts will be very familiar to anyone who has read or watched any dystopian media, but the familiar murder mystery framing goes a long way in helping "Silo" to feel  more grounded in reality than similar stories like "Snowpiercer."  The characters are stronger than what you usually get in puzzle box media, their stories are more relatable, and this is the first show I've seen in a while where it feels like anyone is truly expendable.  This is absolutely necessary, because the pace of the series is fairly slow, and we're not going to be getting answers to the big questions for a while.

The production quality, however, is very high, and the talent involved is excellent.  Created by "Justified" showrunner Graham Yost, with a ton of high profile actors and directors, this was clearly meant to be a prestige project from the outset.  "Silo" often involves environments like the generator, cafeteria, and stairwells that are massive - and from what I can tell they were often practical sets.  It feels very much like an Apple TV+ series in the same vein as "Foundation" and "Extrapolation," willing to be a little more ambitious and trust the audience to keep up.  The ideas here are very compelling, and the performances are strong, but I do think that the show should have cut an episode or two for pacing.  Alternately, it could have committed to the anthology structure and actually let each episode be told from a different character's POV - there are certainly enough strong talents in the ensemble that this could have been feasible.     

In any case, it's nice to have one of these dystopian series that is so thoroughly committed to its premise.  I like that it's very straightforward, with very little by way of twists and turns, and plays fair when it comes to the mystery.   It barely even seems interested in much social allegory at this point, though that may change.  No, we don't get very many answers, but the ones that we do get are satisfying and well considered.  I look forward to seeing more.      

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