Silo is intricate enough to trip up even the person running it. As production continued on the Apple TV sci-fi thriller’s final seasons, showrunner Graham Yost recalled at least two moments when details slipped through the cracks. In one case, an actor noticed that a conversation scheduled to be filmed should have already happened in the story. In another, the Japanese localization team flagged a subtitle that did not line up with the action on screen. Both issues were ultimately corrected, but Yost said his response was the same each time: “Oh shit, you’re right.”
For a series with so many moving parts, keeping the mythology, timelines and character arcs aligned is a constant challenge. That task has only become more demanding as Silo moves into its final two seasons. Fortunately for Yost, he is not doing it alone. “It’s a lot to keep track of, but everyone is pitching in,” he says, “and I love this sense of collaboration.”
Season 3 of Silo premieres July 3 and significantly broadens the show’s world. Set hundreds of years in the future, the drama centers on the residents of an enormous underground bunker that functions like a vertical city. Roughly 10,000 people live inside, separated by levels with distinct roles and cultures, from the mines deep below to the seat of government at the top. Movement through the silo depends on a vast spiral staircase running through the entire structure, turning social hierarchy into something residents must physically climb.
At first, the people inside appeared to be the last survivors of a ruined, postapocalyptic Earth. But the first two seasons gradually revealed that their home is only one of many silos, each containing its own isolated society. Season 3 introduces another major layer to the mystery by exploring how that future came to exist, beginning in a world that looks far closer to the present day.
The Season 3 premiere moves repeatedly between the grim future audiences have come to know and the contemporary era in which choices were made that eventually forced humanity underground. The show is already picking up from a complicated point: Juliette (Rebecca Ferguson), the engineer turned mayor and reluctant revolutionary, has become the first known person to travel between silos and is now dealing with memory loss. The added timelines make the puzzle even more complex.
“It’s a lot of pieces you’re trying to put together.”
The cast has developed different ways to stay oriented, especially because scenes are rarely filmed in sequence. For some performers, daily briefings with directors became essential. “A lot of days, we’d start the day with story time, and the director would go through where we’re at, where we just came from, what happens next,” says Alexandria Riley, who plays Camille Sims, a newly elevated figure of authority. “It’s already a complicated story anyway, but then when shooting out of order, you do get a bit foggy.” Ferguson says the hair and makeup department also plays a crucial role, tracking details such as scars and burns to preserve continuity. In a show this precise, small choices can carry major consequences. “The little changes that you do have enormous ripple effects going forward,” she says.
“It’s a lot of pieces you’re trying to put together,” says Common, who plays Robert Sims, Camille’s husband. “It is our job to know where we are, but thank god we had support, too. There are times when I’d have to talk to Alex about something just to be reminded.” He and Riley even held separate rehearsals together to make sure they were clear on the details of their shared storyline.
Others took a different approach. Jessica Henwick, for instance, joined the main cast as the present-day investigative reporter Helen in season 3, and says that “I didn’t read any scenes except my own. Because I’m a fan of the show, I wanted to preserve that experience. I will watch season 3 as a fan and see what happens. I don’t know what happens except in our storyline.” (Henwick is such a fan that, soon after she was cast, she had a single goal in mind: “I went to the set and explored the stairs.”)
Image: Apple
One thing that doesn’t help much, however, is delving into the source material. Silo is based on a trilogy of books by author Hugh Howey; the first two seasons explored the first book, while the final two will wrap up the rest of the story. But much has changed in the adaptation as the TV show attempts to both make Juliette a more visible figure in the central part of the story and update some of the plotlines to reflect present day concerns like AI.
“I started reading the books and realized very quickly that that wasn’t going to help, because the books are so different,” explains Ashley Zukerman, who plays a congressman in the present day storyline. He says that keeping both the novels and the TV show in his mind at the same time wouldn’t be helpful and instead found “that reading the whole scripts and then finding a way to forget [what his character wouldn’t know] was useful.”
With two seasons to go, Silo is racing toward a conclusion as it attempts to wrap everything up. Yost says that four seasons was always the plan, so the process has been figuring out how to fit everything into a set number of episodes. But since the final two seasons were filmed back to back, it also means that the Silo team are done having to worry about keeping all of those complicated plotlines straight. And as much as she says she’ll miss the experience of working on the show, there is one thing Ferguson is excited to be done with beyond memorizing storylines.
“I fucking hated running up and down those stairs,” she says.
