For those who remember (how could you forget?!) the shocking finale of Silo Season One, the good news is you won’t have to wait too long to find out what happens as Season Two will continue straight from the moment Juliette (Rebecca Ferguson) walks over the hill.
In fact, the first five minutes of the new season will have no dialogue and will see our favorurite engineer find a whole new – and creepily empty – identical silo to the one she has just left.
“Our goal with the first episode was to just show Juliet by herself and set up that world and her story for the season,” says the show’s creator Graham Yost. “We knew that we had to start over to a degree by showing Juliet in this abandoned, dead silo, and then we came up with the idea of going back in time and seeing what happened to that silo, while at the same time raising some mysteries.
“With season one ending with Juliet going over the hill and the reveal of the other silos, we felt that that’s where we had to start. We didn’t want to play with ‘Is she alive? Is she dead?’ – Rebecca Ferguson is on the poster! We know that she’s alive! On the second episode, we’re in Silo 18, and we have Bernard and Knox and Shirley and Walker and Sims and that whole story.”
Indeed, the second series of the show will jump from Juliette’s story in the dead silo (Silo 17) and the ramifications of her actions in her home silo, Silo 18.
“For season two, our big thing was we’ve got two stories,” Yost continues. “We’ve got Rebecca playing Juliet trying to survive in this dead silo, and then we knew we had to get to rebellion in Silo 18. There are certain things in each storyline that reflect on the other storyline, and yet they have no contact between them. We thought that was a fun challenge.”
The brewing rebellion is a direct result of the residents of Silo 18 seeing Juliette surviving outside the silo. That leaves the officials in Silo 18 with a problem: how to calm things down? That will be down to the silo’s self-appointed mayor, Barnard (played by Tim Robbins) and the silo’s head of judicial security Robert Sims (played by Common).
“If [Juliette] is living then that can create a complete revolution in the silo. That’s a catastrophe! We don’t want that,” says Robbins.
“Seeing her go over the hill, and the way people can potentially react to that is making us get in emergency mode in many ways. How can we get people to refocus?” adds Common.”Governments do that when there are a lot of things going on and they want you to shift your attention to something. They have a plan. They have a way to do it, and I think what we end up doing for the silo, is just trying to get people back in order and not have them erupt over her going over the hill.”
“The thing is, what appears at first in season two to be the truth, perhaps might not be the truth, and so, in fact, what we might be doing is actually trying to save the silo,” Robbins continues. “What I love about the show is that the truth and how we perceive it evolves as the season progresses. So don’t go thinking we’re the bad guys!”
Ah yes, the bad guys. Season One saw Barnard and Sims manipulate Juliette into going outside after they find out she’s been snooping into the secrets of the silo. Something the pair are desperately trying to protect. However, the pair of actors playing them believe the duo have good intentions deep down.
“I really believe that Sims is a good person,” says Common. “I believe he cares a lot about his family, the people of the silo. But I also believe that he will make choices that are not good for other people. People will look at me like, this dude is the bad guy. But I never thought of Sims as the bad guy because I know what his intentions are.”
“I think they both have a responsibility to the silo that forces them to make decisions that, on the surface, could be considered not good, but it’s kind of the reason I wanted to play the part,” adds Robbins. “I’m always fascinated by people in power that make these practical decisions on people’s lives, and whatever justification for the greater good, that the idea that we have to do this in order for the silo to survive. That, unfortunately, is becoming more and more the way that things are governed. The smart people tell us we have to do things that might not be good for us…”
Over in the other silo, Juliette is shocked to discover a pile of bodies at the entrance of the new, mysterious silo and when she enters, she starts to discover the silo’s shocking past which eerily reflects the course of action her own silo is going through.
The second season also introduces a new character to the Silo universe with Solo (played by Steve Zahn) a man who has been marooned and alone for many years before Juliette discovers him.
“He has the exterior of a rugged manly man, and yet his mind and his heart are that of a child because of very unique circumstances, which you find out pretty quick in the show,” Zahn reveals. “It’s a heavy story and a pretty complex character. He’s solo, he’s by himself and his reality is vastly different from somebody who has others to bounce things off of. His world is books, his world is references to pictures that he doesn’t understand. His reality is he doesn’t know what things are real and what things aren’t.
“It’s pretty complex and I think his youthfulness keeps him alive. Because he’s curious, and the curiosity keeps his heart going. The child in this guy was really fun to play with. That’s where the danger comes from, this child, but also the humor. We did a lot of talking on how this very unique human being is going to fit into this crazy world.”
Speaking of that world, Zahn was a fan of the first season of the show and was delighted to come on board and act alongside Rebecce Ferguson (who also serves as the show’s executive producer).
“It was really fun to come into a world that was already established. I really liked season one and so I was excited to come into this world, especially as Solo. It’s a fascinating show and on set, Rebecca and I were out of control. We had so much fun. She’s an absolute delight to work with. She’s smart, she’s overly prepared, she has an opinion, and she’s funny and playful and ridiculous.
“It’s one of the best times I’ve had on set. You go do a job, you’re not guaranteed to like the other person, but it’s such a joy when they become a friend, and she’s a good friend of mine now. It was really fun, believe it or not. It’s a dark show, but we had so much fun!”
Another big fan of Ferguson’s is creator Graham Yost, who also references her sense of humour and hard-working nature: “Working with Rebecca has been one of the greatest gifts of my fairly long career,” he enthuses. ”She is an incredible partner, and she makes me laugh. We both see this show the same way. She has really good notes and is very generous in her praise. She will get on a FaceTime with me, and just talk about the scripts.
“She does that magic trick where she just pulls you in. I mean, we’re all just making stuff up. We’re creating this, we’re doing a TV show, and we’re trying to pull people in and make it feel as real as possible. And she’s critical to that. She feels like a very grounded character. She loves the fact that Juliet has no interest in being a hero in the first season, she’s just trying to solve the mystery of her boyfriend, George, and what happened to him. In season two, her mystery becomes this weird guy in this vault and there’s something about his story that just doesn’t add up, and that becomes her drive later on in the season.”
For those who don’t know, Silo is based on a series of books by Hugh Howey (starting with the short story Wool). So if you’re interested in keeping the mystery alive of what will happen to Juliette and the people of Silo 18, maybe don’t read the books. Just yet…
“My joke with Hugh Howie is always that everyone should buy the books, but don’t read them until the series is over, so that we get to be the ones who answer the questions and solve the mysteries,” laughs Yost. “A lot of the big moves are things that happen in the book [but] with Bernard and Sims, we went quite differently because our characters had developed in a way and we knew where we wanted to go. We’d done a gender flip in the first season, where Walker was a man in the book and became a woman in our show, and Sims didn’t have a wife or a kid in the books, and that became an important thing for us. Then the fate of Bernard is different. I will say that if you watch Season Two, part of that is because when you get Tim Robbins, you want to use him as much as you can.
“So there are those divergences. But I feel that the basic thing of the second half of the first book is the rebellion in Silo 18 and Juliet surviving in Silo 17 and we more or less end roughly in the same place [as the books]. I will say this: Hugh loves the second season. He would just text me and just say ‘yeah, we’re watching it again’. That’s the best thing you can hear from the guy who wrote the books.”
With the books already being written, it’s fair to say that Yost has a pretty solid plan for the way the series will go. Indeed, Ferguson has already said that the show will end with Season Four. But that doesn’t mean that everything is set in stone. Apart from the show’s divergences from the books, Yost reveals that he wouldn’t rule out a prequel series or an off-shoot show.
“If the show is doing well for Apple TV plus, I’m sure they’d say ‘hey, could we do one set in another silo?’ I haven’t been approached about that but I will say this, we do have a plan. Roughly, these first two seasons are that first book, so there’s much more material to do.
“Now, if you read the books, you can see that there are things that we might not want to do because it doesn’t have enough Juliet in them. And when you have Rebecca Ferguson playing this character, that’s what you want to make sure the show is primarily about. It’s her story. What I love about her is she does heroic things, but she has no interest in being a hero. She’s just an engineer, just trying to solve problems and do the next right thing. So we do have a plan and we just hope we get to do it.
“We felt proud of the ending of season one, but that’s what Hugh wrote. She goes out to clean, and then she goes over the hill and she sees there’s more silos. So we wanted to find something at the end of season two that also launches into another part of the story, another part of solving the mystery, the whole mystery of the show, which is, why are they living in silos?When will it be safe to go outside? So that’s where we will head if we get the shot…”
Silo Season Two is out now on Apple TV+. Watch a recap of Season One here.
