This interview contains spoilers for the first season of ‘Silo’.
In the cliffhanger season finale of the dystopian saga “Silo,” streaming on Apple TV+, Bernard (Tim Robbins), the true power of the closed Silo community, gives the condemned protagonist, Juliette (Rebecca Ferguson), a secret glimpse into some hidden truths.
First, he reveals the surveillance machines used to monitor a humble population. Then, sitting in her cell, before being banished to the mysterious outside world – a supposed death sentence – Bernard tries to convince Juliette (and himself) that his authoritarian actions were for the good of all.
“For me, that was a really important scene,” said series creator and showrunner Graham Yost (“Justified”). ‘It’s not easy being Bernard. You get the sense that this man who we’ve come to believe is maddened is someone who has a burden of his own. You realize he has the worst job in the silo.
That word “silo” refers both to the vast underground city that houses 10,000 people and to the practice of information silos: filtering data through narrow, manipulative networks. Those who live in the Silo – this one at least – believe they are the last humans on Earth, convinced that living in the wasteland beyond is impossible.
The echo chamber is closely monitored by Bernard’s IT team, who themselves are unaware of the magnitude of the lies being told on the screens in the Silo. While the image everyone sees is a gray and poisonous world inhospitable to life, a contraband version shows blue skies and green trees – supposedly evidence of the Silo leadership’s manipulation. What is the true representation of the world?
When Juliette is disowned by Bernard in the finale, she sees the ugly truth: the outside is in fact abandoned and poisonous. She also discovers that there are many more silos than her own. But unlike her doomed predecessors – Sheriff Holston Becker (David Oyelowo) and his wife, Allison (Rashida Jones) – Juliette survives thanks to the spacesuit-sealing power of the superior heat tape provided by her friends in the lower reaches of the Silo, the subject of an ongoing subplot.
“Essentially, this is a mystery show,” Yost said. “You’re trying to figure out what the hell happened to force people to live underground, when it’s safe to go out, what’s going on and why.”
In an interview last month, Yost took care not to spoil the many mysteries, though curious viewers can find answers in the Hugh Howey novels that form the basis of the series. (Howey himself makes a short crowd scene cameo in the final.)
As for what the future holds for “Silo,” Yost said he has a four-season plan to cover the three books in the series so far: “Wool,” “Shift,” and “Dust.” (Howey has said he’s writing more “Silo” novels.) The second season is currently in production in England, but Apple TV+ has yet to announce further seasons.
Yost spoke by phone while vacationing in Newfoundland, discussing his “Silo” game plan, a helpful message from Apple, and the Writers Guild of America’s ongoing strike. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.
Many television writers are not talking about their series at the moment, why are you doing that? And how will the strike affect your plans for season 2?
I’m on strike. But I did this interview at the WGA, and I think it’s okay. We’ll see if I get yelled at. It’s a weird time. I have ceased all production activities at the request of the Guild, and I have refused promotional material leading up to the show’s launch. Now it is a month and a half later and if I get the chance to talk about the strike, I am happy to do so.
The reality is that we had a long way to go on Season 2 before announcing it. I imagine if the show had done horribly, they might have pulled the plug. But right now scenes are being shot in England because all the scripts for season 2 were written a long time ago and we did a frenzied run before the strike to make sure we answered the actors’ and directors’ notes as best we could .
In Howey’s first book, we learn early on that the green screen is a virtual reality simulation, but we don’t find that out until the show’s finale.
At the end of the written story, as Holston takes off his helmet, he sees that the world is dead and the representation in the helmet is a lie, while the on-screen representation in the Silo actually tells the truth. That’s a really nice flip; that’s one of the things that got me hooked on this. But we decided to wait.
Why?
Frankly, that was a note from Apple. They said, “What if we don’t find out until the end of the season? Let’s see how that feels.” The great thing is that when you write the scripts, you can read them all and say, “Yeah. Let’s stop talking about that.” We could have reached the finale and said, “No, let’s not reveal it this season.” But we wanted to.
Even before we got the writers’ room together, we knew that going out with Juliette was a great way to end the season. Then we went back and forth on how much to reveal. Are we going to reveal the other Silo berms or are we waiting? In this case, we wanted to reveal that the world is really dead there. The stuff Holston saw, the stuff Juliette sees – it’s not true. It’s an augmented reality.
We also wanted to add another big question with the extra silos, kind of like the hatch in “Lost”: what does all this mean? That feels like a great thing to start a new season with.
Now that you’ve laid out the world of the show, is there more room for the story to breathe in Season 2? Maybe more flashbacks, like in the second book?
When I pitched Season 2, we thought we were going to tell more of the deep backstory than we’re actually going to. It seems so, but I don’t want to say more about it. You have to hit the brakes and go, no, the audience is not going to enjoy that. They want to be able to focus on solving one big piece of mystery at a time.
The show has been loosely stalled for four seasons. I suppose there’s a world where we go into the fourth season and say, “Man, we need two more seasons,” but I honestly don’t see that happening right now. We’re so far into it. We looked for things in the books like, “Wow, this would be a great season 2 ending”; “This would be a great season 3 ending”; “This is how the series should end”; and then worked back.
The story seems to be nervous about technology in general: IT is used for surveillance and manipulation, and even some ‘relics’, which at first seem like important clues, eventually turn out to be misleading.
In the end, be very afraid of technology. This is a cautionary tale: what happened to the world? Was it nuclear? Was it a disease? Was it AI?
And that brings us back to the writers’ strike. AI wasn’t a high priority on our agenda last year, but then ChatGPT came out and it was like, oh my lord. It’s not great, but it can learn. We need to figure this out because AI is not the demon. It’s how you use it.
If a studio or network wants to have AI write scripts and then just have one writer clean them up, I don’t think that would be good. And it’s not just because we’re afraid of being out of work: it’s also because we love the medium we work in. We want it to remain vital, humane, smart and groundbreaking. It would be a terrible shame if things just came out, because AI is a cheaper way to do it: “We don’t need the writers. We don’t need the directors. And we can also use digital models of the actors.” That might cost $1.98, but what would it do for the human mind?
