Silo (Apple TV+)

Silo is the ultimate bottle episode, except it’s the whole season. The setup, not a spoiler it’s pretty clear from the trailer, involves a community (it’s about 10,000 people so small by some standards but huge in these circumstances) living in the titular silo and struggling to survive in a toxic external environment. There is a satisfying web of stories going on in this series. We have a police force and a secret police. If you’re American seeing the police in brown uniforms under the sheriff might not ring any alarms, but when the police are in brown shirts and the secret police in black shirts klaxons should start to sound. There’s a romance which is about as much about linking to a million other plots as anything romantic but still has a few good twists and turns in the romance trope area too. It’s a mark of the attention they give to all the little bits that the things you expect aren’t quite what they seem. It’s a theme that resonates throughout the whole series. There are political intrigues galore, which is not always my thing, but because they’re not playing with real world situations I don’t mind it. They’re part of the story and add to the layers of the world they’re building. (There was a really popular thriller on Netflix that I couldn’t watch that tried to do something similar but in the real world and the real world politics just annoyed me too much.) There are several big juicy questions that float around through the season. Some drift in and out of focus a bit depending on the particular episode. Others are smacked, subtly or not, in your face and establish season long, potentially multi-season, arcs that everything else hangs off rather elegantly. Because of the way I watched this, I always remembered them but I think if you binge it you can easily lose track of them. A friend of mine that I’ve talked about the series with did this, and found she had problems retaining the plot elements. Perhaps because of that, perhaps because they’re heavily signalled or perhaps because I’ve just read enough similar stories, the big, shocking reveal in the final episode was obvious to me from episode one, from almost the first scene. Even with that, I watched happily because of all the small intricacies and to see exactly how they got there. This is a story where the journey is as joyful as the destination. Too many shows don’t have that, one or the other is the point, but this balances them beautifully. Someone took, in my opinion, a risk on Rebecca Ferguson being able to carry a show. I’ve always liked what I’ve seen of her but it’s always been supporting roles, even when they’re chunky ones like Lady Jessica in Dune. But she picks this up and carries it confidently and brilliantly. There’s an early episode that is basically “let’s do some welding” and although I have no interest in welding, she carried that through. There are other people around her, certainly, but she runs through the show and carries it all. If you enjoy post-apocalyptic sci-fi thrillers, this could be right up your street. Season two has been confirmed. This story is based on a series of books and novellas, which I don’t really know much about, but perhaps that’s why there’s a deeper story than you see in a lot of TV shows? Bechdel Test: Pass. Juliette as the central character always gives you one named female doing a lot of the talking, although not so much in the first episode, where it’s a different female character. She always has at least one conversation with another named female character that passes, although some are marginal or only parts of a larger conversation. Ko Test: Pass. Again this is sometimes marginal and exactly who passes varies but pass it does. In some ways that could be regarded as a strength - there are multiple WOC with chunky speaking parts, although sometimes we have a lot Juliette talking to men, so it’s really marginal in a couple of episodes. Russo Test: Pass. This is blink and you’ll miss it, but a major character talks about being a coward and retreating into her shell. Then she wistfully looks at a picture of a younger version of herself and her lady love. She’s present in enough episodes that she constitutes a pass. Barely.