Silo Season 2 premiere evaluate: Rebecca Ferguson’s returns digs deeper into Apple TV’s gripping dystopia

Rebecca Ferguson in a nonetheless from ‘Silo’ Season 2
| Photograph Credit score: Apple TV

The return of Silo for its sophomore season on Apple TV doesn’t really feel as a lot of a continuation because it does a freshly minted manifesto for its fashion of storytelling. Grim, gripping, and uncomfortably prophetic; the place the primary season teased on the edges of its dystopia, this second outing opens by taking a sledgehammer to the partitions — each literal and narrative — to unveil additional 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 stays of humanity when all else is stripped away.

We start not with Rebecca Ferguson’s exiled heroine Juliette Nichols, however with a baby sprinting by way of the darkened corridors of a neighbouring subterranean tomb with its personal story to inform. Torchlight dances throughout partitions defaced with screams of defiance scrawled over propaganda posters, on this prelude to an rebellion. It’s riot in its remaining moments, determined and doomed because the folks of Silo 17 storm the gates of their captors, solely to flee into an unrelenting poisonous deathscape — inexperienced flags of triumph in hand, their freedom fleeting and deadly. As demonstrated in its pilot season, freedom from the Silo, very similar to reality, usually results in destroy.

Flashing ahead to the current, we discover Juliette navigating her loss of life by exile. She’s alive — a distinction her predecessors by no means managed to realize after venturing exterior — because of some useful duct tape. As she wades into the skeletal stays of the beforehand emancipated Silo 17, Juliette’s journey turns into a near-wordless new journey of frustration and tenacity.

Her journey from right here on out is a bodily and psychological crucible, punctuated by moments of peril. Ferguson is a marvel right here, conveying volumes with little greater than a clenched jaw and a scream that reverberates by way of the decayed structure. In one of many episode’s standout sequences, she makes an attempt to cross a damaged walkway, armed with nothing however her years of expertise as a Silo engineer.

Rebecca Ferguson in a nonetheless from ‘Silo’ Season 2
| Photograph Credit score:
Apple TV

Flashbacks interwoven all through the episode give us glimpses of Juliette’s early life. We see a youthful Juliette studying the cruel arithmetic of survival from Martha Walker, who delivers knowledge within the gruff, maternal method solely Harriet Walter can.

The episode doubles down on the present’s visible storytelling. The Silo itself stays a marvel of manufacturing design — a brutalist relic in decay. Director Morten Tyldum transforms the acquainted concrete spirals into one thing nearly mythic — huge and foreboding, a cathedral to humanity’s hubris of kinds. That is Silo at its finest: the best mix of bodily stakes and existential dread.

The sound design, too, deserves credit score, with its orchestration of business groans, water drips, a mysterious clinking sound and the climactic strains of Audrey Hepburn’s “Moon River.”

However what makes Silo so charming isn’t simply its plotting or dystopian sheen — it’s the way wherein it refuses to handhold. The sequence trusts its viewers to piece collectively its puzzles, even because it raises additional questions. What number of silos exist? Who controls the puppet strings from above? And why, for all their omnipotence, do they appear so afraid? These mysteries loom bigger than ever as its second season begins, however they’re anchored by the deeply human story of Juliette’s defiance.

New episodes of ‘Silo’ Season 2 stream each Friday on Apple TV