Silo season two is off to a slow but steady start

Anyone hoping for kick-ass action in Silo’s returning hour is bound to be a little disappointed. The season-two premiere is less about Juliette Nichols facing new threats after venturing into the world and more about her realizing just how literally toxic and lonely it is out there. And yet, she carries on. Rebecca Ferguson single-handedly crushes it here, occupying most of the episode’s screen time solo. That alone makes “The Engineer” worth watching, even if Silo season two is off to a slow start. But it’s necessary to spend time with Juliette grasping the truth. And what is the truth? Let’s revisit season one before we fully unpack it. 

Here’s your extremely brief refresher because the Apple TV+ drama aired more than a year ago: Juliette, a genius mechanical engineer, has spent her whole life in an underground silo. The bunker has 140 floors and a population of more than 10,000 people, but no one can leave because the land outside has been uninhabitable for more than a century. In season one, Juliette eventually becomes the sheriff and secretly investigates her boyfriend’s mysterious death, discovering that the IT department is the true wicked mastermind that wants to control everyone. To stop her from revealing this information, she’s banished from the silo. Miraculously, she survives on the outside and finds out what the hell is actually going on. 

Juliette lives on because the suit she’s wearing is taped with high-quality material, unlike others who went outside in the past and dropped dead within minutes, including Sheriff Holston (David Oyelowo) and his wife, Alison (Rashida Jones). Now free to roam around, she spots a skyline silhouette far, far away. She treks her way through the vast, sunny land to discover the existence of several other underground bunkers nearby. They’re not alone! We still don’t know how many other siloes are actively populated and what they’re going through. 

What we do know—thanks to this new season’s cold open—is that decades ago at least one community near Juliette’s silo orchestrated a revolution and stormed out—only to quickly discover that the world was not fit for survival, dying within minutes. Now, years later, Juliette has come across their remains, stomping over them to get to the entrance of their silo. The wide shot of just how many skeletons there are is extremely jarring. It reinforces to us and Juliette that, despite a wicked agenda, people like IT head Bernard Holland (Tim Robbins) are keeping everyone safe. His methods are unhinged and wrong, but at least now she can see the truth with her own eyes. But will she be able to communicate it to any of her friends, like Lukas (Avi Nash), Shirley (Remmie Milner), or Martha (Harriet Walter)? 

There’s a small chance it might happen because Juliette does get inside the other silo. Once in, she sees that it’s constructed similarly, with the same winding stairways that connect all the floors. But unlike her bustling home base, this silo is deserted, dilapidated, dark, and extremely quiet. So off she goes, exploring it floor by floor. If she’s spooked, she doesn’t show it. Her first order of business is to find a change of clothes after she was forced to tear off the suffocating shield she was wearing. This means that her only form of survival on the ground is now in tatters. Then again, no one is more resourceful than her. 

The pace of this episode reminds us that there’s a reason Juliette is the chosen one. Determined to find the truth and equipped with good morals, she’s intelligent and also physically strong. She does a lot of transporting of unwieldy equipment here, including putting all her muscle into turning a heavy object into a bridge. She’s essentially fixing a small corner of this silo, with a lot of grunting and pushing involved. If only they’d light this adventure of hers properly. I get that this silo doesn’t have functioning electricity, but the darkness makes it annoying to watch unfold. 

Thankfully, by the end, Juliette realizes that she isn’t as alone as she thought. She hears notes of Henry Mancini’s “Moon River” playing and stealthily makes her way towards the music. She finally comes to a stop at a huge round door. What greets her from behind is a scary-looking pair of eyes. The man tells her to never, ever try to open the door or he’ll have to kill her. And just like that, welcome to Silo, Steve Zahn. No spoilers for anyone who hasn’t read the book, but he plays an important role with a fascinating backstory that I’m sure the series will leisurely unspool. Let’s see how Zahn fares opposite Ferguson. And let’s also see if next week’s second outing picks up the pace a bit. 

Stray observations 

• • While Juliette is exploring this new silo, the show infrequently flashes back to her adolescence—specifically, to the time she moved down to the mechanical floor as a teen and proved to everyone, including Martha, that she’s a gifted engineer. We get it; she’s a prodigy! 
• • Kudos to the sound designer because the crunching of Juliette stepping on skeletons was like nails on a chalkboard. That is, it was effectively creepy. 
• • Amelie Villiers is a capable actor but I simply don’t buy her as a younger version of Rebecca Ferguson. 
• • How soon will we meet people living in one of the other bunkers (if we meet them at all)? 
• • Juliette also walks past the big digital screen in this silo that shows the outside world to the residents. It has the word LIES written in big, bold letters. 
• • I can’t wait to catch up with Juliette’s silo to see how everyone is faring after her departure and what, ahem, lies have been told about where she disappeared to.