While SILO S1 was a slow but satisfying burn, S2 has gone full throttle with the suspense and excitement. When the season started with Juliette (Rebecca Ferguson) discovering some huge secrets, I worried the story would suffer from fracturing into too many directions. So far, SILO has been able to balance the main two concurrent plots with success. THE HARMONIUM pushes these threads to the edge but expertly brings it all together by the end with shocking results.
SILO S2 has added some great new characters, but none bigger than Solo, played to perfection by Steve Zahn. I haven’t read the books by Graham Yost, upon which the series is based, but my research shows me that Solo is a character directly from the pages. Solo isn’t a huge focus during this episode, but every time he’s on screen, it’s this perfect combination of anxiety, distrust, hope, panic, and desperation. Zahn exudes this in every word and movement as if this character was written exactly for him and only him.
One of the biggest strengths of SILO is its ability to shift away from the main storyline with Juliette and deliver a heart-pounding, incredible, and absolutely heart-wrenching episode around the supporting cast. Tim Robbins is on TV! Yes, I know he’s done a couple of other series, but this is by far his best TV role. As Bernard, the mayor/head of IT, he exudes all the right characteristics of a complex villain, to the point where I wonder from week to week whether he is the bad guy or not. He’ll piss you off, and then he’ll do something that makes sense in the realm of this terrible world these people live in. There’s so much we, the audience (who haven’t read the novels), don’t know about the silo, the outside world, and the big “WHY” of it all. For every awful thing we see Bernard do, maybe he’s just trying to save thousands of lives.
SILO streams every Friday on Apple TV+.
