Gettin' My Eps In: Silo S2E1
A new season kicks things off quietly, making me wonder when something is going to happen.
Silo
Season 2, Episode 1: “The Engineer”
Written by Graham Yost
Directed by Michael Dinner
Streaming on Apple TV+
The streaming era has definitely changed how TV shows are paced. 20 years ago or so, a season premiere would have been treated as an opportunity to have at least one big event happen, getting viewers excited about developments in the ongoing plot and reminding them about the reasons they’re interested in what happens to the characters. Of course, TV used to be much more episodic, with each installment standing on its own (with exceptions made for the occasional two-parter). Nowadays, shows are created with binge-watching in mind, stretching stories out over entire seasons. Neither approach is necessarily preferable, but it’s at least notable that the structure and pacing of modern shows would never have worked in years past.
Silo is no stranger to non-traditional pacing. The first season opened with a couple episodes focusing on characters who were almost immediately eliminated before the show shifted to follow other people, and it also took its time introducing major players who would play key roles in the ongoing plot. So it’s not especially surprising that it would start its second season somewhat slowly and focus on one aspect of the plot rather than providing an overview of everything that is happening. Still, it does seem a bit odd to focus entirely on one character, almost completely ignoring anything else that is going on.
The finale of the first season ended with the main character, Juliette (Rebecca Ferguson) being forced to leave the eponymous silo and learning that the suspicions she had had about the outside world being lush and green were actually a lie, with the landscape being just as devastated and poisonous as it was reputed to be. But unlike everybody else who has left the silo, she was able to use some special tape that provided a good seal for her spacesuit, so she managed to survive. As she wanders the wasteland, she comes across another silo that is surrounded by the bodies of the people who tried to leave it, and she manages to force her way inside and explore the abandoned facilities.
And, well, that’s pretty much the whole episode. We get a brief intro in which we see the revolt that happened in this silo before everyone headed outside and promptly died, and there are a few flashbacks to Juliette’s childhood as she developed her engineering and problem-solving skills while working in Maintenance. But for the majority of the time, we see her explore this silo and try to find out if there may be any survivors. We get to see a lot of detail about how she uses her technical skills to make her way through the facilities, including building a makeshift bridge to reach an inaccessible area. All of that is fairly interesting, but when it becomes clear that nothing else is going to happen this episode, one starts to wonder when the actual plot of the series is going to advance.
The thing is, while Juliette is the main character of the series, the plot is about more than just her. Yes, she has been separated from the only home she has ever known, and by limiting the episode entirely to her, we get to experience her isolation. But the show isn’t going to suddenly become about Juliette’s survival skills; there’s a lot more going on, and purposefully making viewers wait to find out about the rest of the plot seems counterintuitive.
The other issue with this episode is that it’s so dimly lit that it’s hard to see what’s going on. That makes sense, since Juliette is exploring a dark, abandoned area, but when the episode focuses on the details of what she is doing, but then makes those details hard to see, the whole thing becomes less compelling. There are a few nice images, including the massive pile of bodies Juliette discovers outside of the abandoned silo, but too much of the episode involves straining to make out details.
With such a slow start to the season, it’s hard to tell what to expect in future episodes. I’m sure we’ll get back to the original silo soon enough, but whether episodes will alternate between the two plot threads or whether the different threads will eventually merge is unclear. It will take at least one more episode to get an idea of how things may shape up, but I’m hoping for a bit more incident as the season progresses.