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We watched Silo (AppleTV) seasons 1-2 over the past week or so. General reactions:
Feel free to ask me questions in the comments. I have not read the books it's based on, though I get the impression the show follows the book trajectory pretty closely.
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- Currently have a placeholder signup in for![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
festivids. I need to finish my signup (closes on Oct. 3).
- Almost certainly signing up for![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
amperslashexchange, currently in nominations.
- I haven't signed up, but extremely tempted by Back from the Dead Flash Exchange, currently in nominations/signups (til Oct 3).
- Biggles holiday exchange is definitely running again! Planning post and polls here at the comm.
I don't have plans to do Yuletide this year, unless the FOMO gets to me too much.
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Draggy and depressing first season, really fun and engaging second season with an infuriating letdown of a season ending. (Even sudden surprise Jessica Henwick could not salvage that hot mess. Which apparently is the books' fault, but still.) I enjoyed most of the season two character arcs enough that I'm pretty happy to consider it a satisfying 2-season show. Maybe I'll write up more details later?Feel free to ask me questions in the comments. I have not read the books it's based on, though I get the impression the show follows the book trajectory pretty closely.
Exchanges:
- Currently have a placeholder signup in for
festivids. I need to finish my signup (closes on Oct. 3).- Almost certainly signing up for
amperslashexchange, currently in nominations.- I haven't signed up, but extremely tempted by Back from the Dead Flash Exchange, currently in nominations/signups (til Oct 3).
- Biggles holiday exchange is definitely running again! Planning post and polls here at the comm.
I don't have plans to do Yuletide this year, unless the FOMO gets to me too much.
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I have heard functionally nothing about this show! What's cool about the second season and then what does it blow about the ending?
Silo spoilers follow
Right! Incoming rambling!
Silo is a post-apocalyptic show based on a dystopian book series, in which all of humanity (as far as we know) lives in a concrete bunker underground, run by a shadowy conspiracy that constantly monitors everyone in the bunker. All they know about their history is that 140 years ago, there was a rebellion that almost killed everyone, and all of their history before that was destroyed for their protection, including books and artifacts. They don't know why they are here, who built the silo, or when or if they can leave. Simply possessing a book showing the before times (like pictures of trees, that sort of thing) is a capital offense.
The first season is slow-paced, has a lot of flashbacks, kills a main character almost every episode (the murder rate in this silo is through the roof), and generally spends a lot of time on trapped characters gradually, one might say glacially, uncovering details of the conspiracy running their world. It takes the entire season for the main character, Juliette, to finally leave the bunker, a supposed death sentence, and find out what's outside, a reveal teased at the start of the first episode.
MASSIVE SEASON ONE ENDER SPOILERS FOR SILO
The characters can see the outside world on screens placed throughout the silo, a poisonous gray wasteland. However, anyone who actually manages to go outside sees a beautiful green world ... and then falls over dead. After a full season of the characters discovering and then slowly attempting to copy and spread a bootleg recording of the beautiful green world, our protagonist Juliette actually does make it outside and finds out that the beautiful green world ... is a fake recording projected on the helmets of people who go outside so they die happy as the toxins of the outside world kill them through their suits, which are intentionally sabotaged by the shadowy conspiracy. (Juliette survives because her friends in the engineering department figured out that the suits were sabotaged and fixed hers; she gets to find out what no one else lived long enough to discover, that there are other silos all around their own.) So basically, the world they see on the screens is the real world, but the shadowy conspiracy running the silo is simultaneously suppressing all books or images of the former, green world .... while projecting images of it into the helmets of anyone who goes outside so they die content and doing exactly what they ought to be doing, which is keeling over dead without fighting it.
I'm just saying, I WONDER HOW THIS PLAN COULD POSSIBLY GO BADLY.
So I went into the second season fully prepared to give it one episode and let it live or die based on that. And the first episode was really good! And then the second was too! The second season is mostly about Juliette exploring a different silo after she's cast out of the first one, meeting survivors there, and going through 20 different kinds of hell trying to get back to her home silo, where (she has realized) her own failure to die immediately is probably causing everyone back home to think the world outside is green and safe, and concoct an escape plan. (She's right about this.) I especially loved Juliette's slowly developing, very affecting enemies-to-friends arc with the first person she meets in the silo she has found her way into, where most people died in a previous rebellion, the damaged silo is slowly filling up with water, and everyone left behind is fucked up beyond belief. It's a great race-against-time plot as she tries to get back to her silo and also help the people she's with. Lots of great improvised-technology scenes as Juliette invents diving gear from first principles, discovers the bends, and refuses to give up! She's great!
Meanwhile we have a group of unlikely heroes fighting against the Man back home, in which we (and only we) know that they're wrong, and working off bad information - they're not wrong that they are being manipulated, but if they actually get what they want (a successful rebellion and escape) everyone's going to die.
Throughout all of this, the actual silo setup is so nonsensical and weird that we speculated on some kind of twist about what's actually going on. They're in a simulation, on an alien planet, it's just one part of the planet under a dome a la that one Twilight Zone episode, etc.
Eventually, through some really lovely sacrifices and heroism from Juliette and other people, she gets back to her home silo ...
.... Then, out of nowhere, the last episode time-whiplashes 300 years back to our modern world and the world's dumbest and most banal scene of two hot young spies conspiring in a bar about a top secret Army Corps of Engineers project they're working on, and talking about Iran bombing D.C. So yes, it is our world, we're on the verge of nuclear armageddon, I guess Iran started it, and we're going to be spending the as-yet-unaired third season with the hot dumbasses (I looked up spoilers) watching the silos be built. I DON'T CARE!!!!
In one of the early season one episodes, Juliette is given a pre-collapse artifact she doesn't understand (obviously a duck-shaped Pez dispenser to modern eyes) and in the final scene, there's a lingering, dramatic shot of Hot Spy Guy giving Hot Spy Girl (Jessica Henwick) a Pez dispenser. It's the same one! We've unlocked the origin of the Pez dispenser! WE TRULY DO NOT CARE. (I think part of what made this so absolutely fucking irritating is that the silos are mostly shot gritty and dim, with middle-aged or older, unconventionally attractive characters, and then we cut to EVERY FUCKING SPY SHOW EVER with these two and their uninteresting attempt at banter. I'm so sorry, Jessica Henwick, I wish you were in a better show, or at least a better scene.)
Re: Silo spoilers follow
And that's just left as a cliffhanger while we rewind to our near future for the third season?!
Re: Silo spoilers follow
And then we cut to the early to mid 2000s!
Edit: Juliette held up a sign to the sensors a minute or two ago telling them not to go outside, so maybe that dimmed their revolutionary fervor for the moment? We just don't know!
Re: Silo spoilers follow
(a) I like Tim Robbins and I am glad he's employed.
(b) Abandoning all the ensemble tension and heroic engineering that you describe in the second season for a season-long flashback seems completely nonsensical! The season-long flashback in and of itself would have to be one of those slow-burn twists that change everything the viewer knows about the nature of the future world in order to justify itself and from your summary of the first season, without even seeing this show I worry it would just be some kind of explanatory slog.
(c) I really do appreciate you writing out all of this detail so that I can be secondhand annoyed. I would just re-read Mordecai Roshwald's Level 7 (1959) or something.
Re: Silo spoilers follow
https://www.tumblr.com/kakinou/772302209786527744/i-dont-understand-that-if-you-found-a-suit-why
Re: Silo spoilers follow
That is really beautiful. Argh.
(Steve Zahn! There are some terrific actors in this thing.)
Re: Silo spoilers follow
Yes! It's definitely one of those "oh, it's THAT ACTOR" sort of shows.
(Also, I was out watching the aurora just now and thinking about how, no matter how badly you'd managed to fuck up the earth, it would really take a lot more effort than nuking it to get rid of the aurora. Or weather. Or snow. Or lightning storms, or tornadoes. The idea of this being Mars, or a previously unknown alien simulation or one of various other theories we were tossing around before the finale makes more sense than humanity having managed to create a planet on which weather doesn't work anymore.)
Re: Silo spoilers follow
You didn't mention the weather doesn't work! Seriously. Like, even a radioactive wasteland should have dust storms or something.
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(She's great, I loved her, but the on-again, off-again American accent was really something. I don't even tend to notice this in general - I have enjoyed plenty of actors doing fake American accents! - but the way she loses the accent in really dramatic scenes was a hell of a thing.)
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(I've heard that kind of slippage before and it always really interests me! Regret that her character had to yell so much, though, as far as maintaining the illusion of Americanness was concerned.)
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I'm not even sure I'll stay signed up for
Yuletide - ditto, for sheer scale of participation when it comes to tiny fandoms
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