SILO
GOING SOLO
APPLE’S ACCLAIMED SCI-FI RETURNS AFTER ITS SHOCKING, TWISTY FINALE. SHOWRUNNER GRAHAM YOST BREAKS DOWN WHAT’S NEXT
WORDS: JACK SHEPHERD
WHEN JUSTIFIED’S Graham Yost started adapting the first instalment in Hugh Howey’s Silo trilogy, Wool, for television, something quickly became clear: the debut season would end at the book’s midpoint. “We just knew that Juliette going over the hill and seeing 50 other silos was a great way to end a season,” he tells SFX. “Then, in the writers’ room, we had to ask: ‘How do we start season two?’”
So how do you restart a show that has – spoilers – killed off so many of its most important characters? Silo’s pilot introduced the Beckers, played by Rashida Jones and David Oyelowo, a happy couple told by their overlords that they can have a baby. You see, the Beckers live in an underground silo where the inhabitants know nothing of the outside world except the air is polluted and everyone who surfaces dies within seconds.
Yet despite this knowledge, Allison Becker is convinced the silo’s leaders are hiding something and she volunteers to go outside and “clean” – in other words, wipe the lens of a camera allowing the silo-dwellers to see what’s above them. Upon leaving the silo, she sees a wonderful, fertile world and signals as much to her husband… and then she dies for reasons unknown.
The following season of television – well-reviewed by critics and fans of the books alike – is ripe with conspiracy as Oyelowo’s Holston Becker, the silo’s sheriff, seeks the truth about what happened to his wife. He soon meets the engineer Juliette Nichols, played by Rebecca Ferguson, who quickly becomes the series’ protagonist after Holston also goes outside… and dies.