The return of Silo for its sophomore season on Apple TV doesn’t feel as much of a continuation as it does a freshly minted manifesto for its style of storytelling. Grim, gripping, and uncomfortably prophetic; where the first season teased at the edges of its dystopia, this second outing opens by taking a sledgehammer to the walls — both literal and narrative — to unveil further layers of despair and intrigue. With its premiere episode, dubbed “The Engineer,” Apple TV has gambled on a slow-burning, near-silent return to its tightly coiled exploration of what remains of humanity when all else is stripped away.
We begin not with Rebecca Ferguson’s exiled heroine Juliette Nichols, but with a child sprinting through the darkened corridors of a neighbouring subterranean tomb with its own story to tell. Torchlight dances across walls defaced with screams of defiance scrawled over propaganda posters, in this prelude to an uprising. It is rebellion in its final moments, desperate and doomed as the people of Silo 17 storm the gates of their captors, only to escape into an unrelenting toxic deathscape — green flags of triumph in hand, their freedom fleeting and fatal.
As demonstrated in its pilot season, freedom from the Silo, much like truth, often leads to ruin. Flashing forward to the present, we find Juliette navigating her death by exile. She’s alive — a distinction her predecessors never managed to achieve after venturing outside — thanks to some handy duct tap.