Being trapped indefinitely in an underground bunker, post-apocalypse, would have many drawbacks, but one of the worst would be miserable boredom. How would you fill the day, and the next and the next, apart from with squabbles and gloom? It’s a problem that Silo, a plush but inevitably rather dank sci-fi drama, wears like a rusty shackle.
Hundreds of years ago, the survivors of a cataclysm were ushered into the titular silo – a dizzyingly enormous metal cylinder hundreds of storeys deep, with the top floor at ground level and everything else subterranean. Ten thousand of them live there now, the records of how and why it all started having long since mysteriously vanished. Citizens abide by rules for which there is no mandate beyond solemn tradition and a paralysing fear of the alternative: on the floor that serves as a town square there is a giant screen with a live video feed of the devastated, irradiated world outside. Employment is provided by departments with functional names such as Mining and Mechanical, giving the impression that the silo is a clanking retro contraption that could fail at any moment.
You’d say the series had a steampunk vibe, but both steam and punk suggest ferocious energy and Silo is murky and suffocating, so it doesn’t sit right. Condensation folk? Mildew emo? Anyway, the bunker people struggle to find the lighter side of living under artificial light and, as one greeny-grey episode grinds into the next, the standard Silo plotline involves the proletariat, who are confined to the bottom levels of the big underground tube – literally the lower classes – staging a rebellion having suspected that the upper echelons are deceiving them. Each attempt at revolution involves trying to climb one more flight of spiral stairs than the law allows.
Season one: much disgruntlement, building up to inquisitive engineer Juliette (Rebecca Ferguson) testing the silo’s belief that the land above ground is an unsurvivable wasteland by stepping outside, to find that it is a wasteland but isn’t unsurvivable. The silo bosses had made sure leavers died by issuing them with substandard equipment, perhaps to stop them reporting that they are not all that remains of humankind: there are loads of other silos not far away. Season two: ongoing malaise, while Juliette visits a silo where a mass escape plot led to the death of almost every inhabitant. She discovers that protocols exist allowing for the remotely activated mass murder of everyone in a silo if they get too uppity. Also: the original silo has some kind of AI oracle hidden in the basement that seems to be in charge.
Having survived the season two cliffhanger where she was stuck in an airlock full of fire with complex but nefarious silo governor Bernard (Tim Robbins) – a skilfully drawn portrait of an authoritarian whose moral qualms are a buzzing nuisance that never quite stop him punching down – Juliette is back in what we now know as Silo 18. Dispiritingly, the show uses her near fatal trauma as an excuse to dole out one of the most tedious of all overused dramatic devices: the main character who has amnesia and can’t recall a key event, but then they start remembering bits in flashback, and we just have to sit and wait for their brain to get on with it.
As Juliette shuffles around in a fug of confusion, we gird ourselves for another year of handsomely produced drama that might not be all that entertaining but has a thoughtful political acuity that makes the effort worthwhile. How do you hold together a coalition of rulers, staff and soldiers when the cause you’re defending is very possibly bogus? How do you control a population if you’ve left them with nothing to lose? What is a society, what is humanity, if not its shared history, which can be shaped and edited by those in power?
They’re big questions, handled intelligently by a show that is science fiction with gravity. And yet maybe Silo knows it needs to lighten up, so season three introduces a new timeline, centuries ago in Before Times that look a lot like the early-to-mid 21st century. Iran has set off a dirty bomb in the US, and when an aerial revenge mission goes wrong in a very freaky way, Congressman Daniel Keene (Ashley Zukerman) – a vigorous, future-of-the-Democratic-party type – and journalist Helen Drew (Jessica Henwick) investigate.
Clearly their work will one day influence the inauguration of silo life, but in the short term they offer the relief of a familiar world. They drive cars! They visit parks and cafes! They walk around in offices with windows! Escaping gives Silo what it’s always needed: a lungful of fresh air.
• Silo is on Apple TV now.
