Review of Silo – a well-crafted sci-fi drama grappling with big questions | Television

BBeing trapped forever in a basement, after the apocalypse, can have many problems, but one of the worst can be miserable boredom. How can you fill the day, the next day and the next, without strife and darkness? It’s a problem that Silo, a rich but inevitable drama in its place, wears like a rusty chain.

A few hundred years ago, the survivors of the disaster were placed in an iron vault – a huge iron cylinder with hundreds of floors, with the upper floor and everything else underground. Ten thousand of them live there now, the records of how and why all began long ago to mysteriously disappear. Citizens follow the rules where there is no law beyond the established tradition and the terrible fear of the alternative: under what looks like a town square there is a big screen with a live video of the destroyed world, without water outside. Jobs are provided by departments with job titles like Mining and Mechanical, which suggests that the database is a retro contraption that can fail at any time.

You could say that this series had a steampunk vibe, but steam and punk show a terrible energy and Silo is scary and heavy, so it doesn’t fit. Condensation people? mildew eh? However, the people of the underground find it difficult to find the light side of living under the artificial light and, when the green-gray phase comes to the next one, the Silo’s regular plan involves the working people, who live under the big underground tube – especially the lower groups – starting a rebellion thinking that the authorities are deceiving them. Any attempt to change things involves trying to climb one more spiral step than the law allows.

The first season: a desperate, desperate engineer Juliette (Rebecca Ferguson) to test the silo’s belief that the place above ground is an unsurvivable wasteland, only to find that it’s a desert but not unsurvivable. The silo bosses ensured that the quitters died by giving them cheap weapons, perhaps to prevent them from saying that not all of them were humane: there were many other silos not far away. Season 2: more unsettling, where Juliette visits a mass murder facility. He discovers that there are protocols in place that allow for mass killings from afar if he gets too upset. Also: the original silo has some sort of AI oracle hidden underneath that seems to be in charge.

After surviving the second season in which she was trapped in a fire-filled space by the difficult but brutal silo commander Bernard (Tim Robbins) – a masterfully drawn portrait of a tyrant whose morals are the biggest problem that did not stop him from hitting the ground – Juliette is back to what we know now, next to her show. An excuse to do one of the most boring things in excess of tools: a person who has amnesia and cannot remember a major event, but then begins to remember small things in a flashback, and we just have to wait for the brain to continue with it.

As Juliette navigates the chaos, we look forward to another year of well-crafted drama that may not be entertaining but has a political sensibility that makes the effort worthwhile. How do you coordinate a group of commanders, staff and soldiers when what you are defending is false? How do you control people if you have left them helpless? What is society, what is humanity, if not its shared history, which can be created and changed by those in power?

It’s big, cleverly driven questions and a show that’s science fiction with gravitas. And maybe Silo knows it needs to lighten up, which is why the third season introduces a new timeline, several centuries ago in Before Times that seems to be the beginning to the middle of the 21st century. Iran has dropped a dirty bomb on the US, and when the space recovery mission goes awry, Congressman Daniel Keene (Ashley Zukerman) – a powerful, future version of the Democratic Party – and journalist Helen Drew (Jessica Henwick) investigate.

Obviously their work will one day affect the establishment of a silo life, but in the short term they provide the relief of a familiar world. They drive cars! They visit parks and restaurants! They walk in offices with windows! Escape gives Silo what he always needs: fresh air to fill his lungs.