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This interview includes 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 peek at some hidden truths.
First he reveals the surveillance machinery used to keep tabs on an unassuming populace. Then, sitting in her cell, before her banishment into 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.
“To me, that was a really important scene,” said the series creator and showrunner, Graham Yost (“Justified”). “It’s not easy being Bernard. You get the sense that this guy who we’ve come to believe is stone evil is someone who has his own burden. You realize he has the worst job in the Silo.”
That word, “Silo,” refers both to the enormous subterranean city that shelters 10,000 people and to the practice of information siloing: filtering data through narrow, manipulative networks. Those living in the Silo — this one, at least — believe themselves to be the last people on Earth, having been convinced that life is impossible in the wasteland outside.
The echo chamber is carefully monitored by Bernard’s I.T. team, themselves unaware of the extent of the lies told on the screens inside the Silo. While the image everyone sees is of a gray and toxic world inhospitable to life, a contraband version shows blue skies and green trees — supposedly evidence of the Silo leadership’s manipulation. Which is the true depiction of the world?
When Juliette is cast out by Bernard in the finale, she sees the ugly truth: The outside is, in fact, desolate and poisonous. She also discovers that there are many more Silos beyond her own. But unlike her doomed predecessors — Sheriff Holston Becker (David Oyelowo) and his wife, Allison (Rashida Jones) — Juliette survives because of the spacesuit-sealing power of the superior heat tape supplied by her pals in the lower reaches of the Silo, the subject of a running subplot.
“At its heart, this is a mystery show,” Yost said. “You’re trying to find out what the hell happened to force people to live underground, when it will be safe to go out, what’s going on and why.”
In an interview last month, Yost was careful 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 brief crowd-scene cameo in the finale.)
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 is writing more “Silo” novels.) The second season is currently in production in England, but Apple TV+ has yet to announce further seasons.
Speaking by phone while on vacation in Newfoundland, Yost discussed his “Silo” game plan, a useful note from Apple and the continuing Writers Guild of America strike. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.
Many television writers aren’t talking about their series right now, why are you doing so? And how does the strike affect your plans for Season 2?
I’m on strike. But I ran this interview by the W.G.A., and I think it’s OK. We’ll see if I get yelled at. It’s a weird time. I did stop all producing activities as requested by the Guild, and I declined promotional stuff leading up to the launch of the show. Now it’s a month-and-a-half later, and if I get a chance to talk about the strike, I’m happy to do it.
The reality is, we had to get started on Season 2 a long time before we would announce it. I imagine that if the show had done terribly, they might have pulled the plug. But scenes are being filmed in England as we speak because all the scripts were written for Season 2 long ago, and we did a mad dash before the strike to make sure we’d answered the actors’ and directors’ notes as best we could.
In Howey’s first book, we learn early on that the greenery screen is a virtual reality simulation, but we don’t find that out in the show until the finale.
At the end of the written story, when Holston takes off his helmet, he sees that the world is dead and that the display in the helmet is a lie, while the display on the screen in the Silo is actually telling the truth. That’s a really nice flip; that’s one of the things that hooked me on this. But we decided let’s hold off.
Why?
Frankly, that was a note from Apple. They said: “What if we don’t find that out until the end of the season? Let’s see how that feels.” The great thing is, when you write the scripts, you can read them all and go: “Yeah. Let’s hold off on that.” We could have gotten to the finale and said, “No, let’s not reveal it this season.” But we wanted to.
Even before we brought the writers’ room together, we knew that Juliette going outside was a great end of the season. Then we went back and forth on how much to reveal. Do we reveal the other Silo berms, or do we hold off? In this instance, we wanted to reveal that the world really is dead out there. The stuff that Holston saw, the stuff that Juliette sees — it’s not true. It’s an augmented reality.
We also wanted to add another big question with the additional Silos, which was something like the hatch in “Lost”: What does all this mean? That feels like a great thing to kick off another season.
Now that you’ve established the world of the show, will there be more room for the story to breathe in Season 2? Perhaps more flashbacks, as in the second book?
When I pitched Season 2, we thought we were going to be telling more of the deep back story than we are actually going to. It does appear, but I don’t want to say anything more about it. You have to put on the brakes and go, No, the audience isn’t going to enjoy that. They want to be able to focus on solving one big chunk of mystery at a time.
The show is loosely blocked out for four seasons. I suppose there’s a world where we get into the fourth season and go, “Man, we’re going to need two more seasons,” but I honestly can’t see that happening now. We’re so far into it. We looked for things in the books like, “Wow, this would be a great end of Season 2”; “This would be a great end of Season 3”; “This is how the series should end”; and then worked backward from that.
The story seems to be nervous about technology in general: I.T. is used for surveillance and manipulation, and even some of the “relics,” which seem initially like important clues, end up being misleading.
Ultimately, be very afraid of technology. This is a cautionary tale: What happened to the world? Was it nuclear? Was it a disease? Was it A.I.?
And that brings us back to the writers’ strike. A.I. was not 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’ve got to figure this out, because A.I. is not the demon. It’s how you use it.
If a studio or network wants to have A.I. 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 that we love the medium we work in. We want it to stay vital, humane, human, clever and groundbreaking. It would be a terrible shame if stuff was just churned out because A.I. is a cheaper way to do it: “We don’t need the writers. We don’t need the directors. And we can use digi-models of the actors, too.” That might cost $1.98, but what would it do for the human spirit?
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