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Here’s my thoughts on Silo in a single sentence; I will not be back for season two.

I will go into more detailed thoughts about this series, but it will be spoiler filled, so if all you want to know is if I liked or not, I direct you back to the opening sentence.

Silo is centered on Jules Nichols (Rebecca Fergusson) as she uncovers a vast and hidden conspiracy within the close-ecology world of ‘the silo’ where some 10,000 people live hundreds of years following a global undefined ecological catastrophe. The outside world, viewed only through wall sized screen is devoid of life. Individuals exiled from the silo, though given precious resources in the form of a sealed contamination suit, die within a few dozen meters. Investigating the murder of her lover Jules discovers hints and elements of the secret powers that controls and monitors every aspect of the Silo’s life and in the end is exiled. But because her friends make sure she has working sealant tape on her contamination suit she doesn’t die and discovers amid the devastated world dozens of ‘silos’ dotting the landscape.

Stories and settings like Silo require a solid foundation of world building so everything that follows is credible. Once the world building cracks the suspension of disbelief is shattered and everything else unravels. Illogical element after illogical element are compounded throughout the season that reveal shoddy and ill-thought-out world building. The Silo has only one generator to power the vast structure and it is never taken offline for maintenance. Imagine starting your car and running it for years, decades, only added gasoline as needed. It won’t work, that can’t happen. People eat bacon and eggs in a setting where the only rational choice is vegetarianism. With such tight, limited space and resources, it makes no sense and would not be sustainable to grow calories to feed to animals so you can get fewer calories. For a place that has been utterly isolated and with such shoddy recycling as what is shown the silo is amazingly well stocked with new, clean, and pristine plastics. Nothing about how this environment is set up actually works if you give it a moment’s thought.

Even if you wave away all the illogical and irrational world building, Silo is still in my tastes fatally flawed within its own rule set.

At one point late in the season Jules is escaping the dreaded ‘judicial’, the people behind the conspiracy, and is forced to climb between levels in a garbage chute. It is stated in the dialog that she disappeared on ‘level 20’ and she and her compatriots emerge on ‘level 122’. One hundred levels climbing a vertical ladder. If a level is just 8 feet, and they look much taller than that in the sets, they just climbed 800 feet! Yet they emerge not exhausted, tired, cramped, or even sweaty. The writers simply are not thinking at all about what they have just put onto the page.

As part of the conspiracy, we seen the surveillance room where a staff of seven or eight watch many monitors visually scanning the entire silo. Let’s say its seven people, three eight-hour shifts, that 21 people. Add in another shift so you can rotate days off and we have 28 people. However, you need people who aren’t watching to maintain the equipment, so let’s say they brings you up to 35 or 40 people. But you need still more people in this conspiracy. All that equipment draws power from the electric grid, and someone would notice that the ‘janitor’s closet’ is using kilowatts upon kilowatts of juice. So, you have to have people in engineering who are covering up all that missing electricity. A conspiracy so vast simply cannot go on unknown. People talk, it’s a fact of human existence.

Silo excepts too much to be simply waved away for what at its heart is not that compelling of a story nor that interesting collection of characters.

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Bernard Quatermass the brilliant rocket scientist of Nigel Kneale’s writing embarked on numerous adventures, starting with 1953 The Quatermass Experiment a television serial adapted later into a film The Quatermass Xperiment, through my favorite version Quatermass and the Pit (Released in the USA as 5 Million Years to Earth) and then finally concluding in 1979 with another television series Quatermass also known as Quatermass the Conclusion.

Aired in 1979 Quatermass sees the famed scientist aged, and distraught as he searches for his lost granddaughter, a young woman seemingly taken by the same madness infecting the young adults of the world, as society on both sides of the Iron Curtain crumbles. Set in the waning years of the 20th century, the world of Quatermass is a world of decay, societal, governmental, and institutional. Gang battle in the streets of London without police intervention, mass executions are held in sports stadiums, and the cult like ‘Planet People’ disillusioned youth around the world await the aliens that will take them to another world of peace and love.

When a crowd of ‘Planet People’ are vaporized by an unknown energy from space it is clear that some ancient alien force is at work, an alien force that may have visited the Earth some 5000 years earlier. Working with a radio astronomer and a collection of aged scientists, who by their advanced years are immune to the alien’s call, Quatermass feverishly attempts to discover the truth of the attacks, devise a counter, and find his missing granddaughter.

Quatermass is a dark dystopic tale of a world that has quite possibly crumbled beyond restoration. Where the earlier stories had elements of darkness and ancient powers none presented the nature of humanity, even with Martian heritage, a cynical as this limited series. While Kneale was merely 57 when the series aired it has the feeling of an old man grumbling about the disrespectful youth and that the world he had known has fallen into decadence and filth. No one in this series is protected by ‘plot armor’ and Kneale deals death as indiscriminately as reality sadness does. It is surprising that in a post Star Wars environment the BBC produced something are dire and doom filled as this program. Quatermass might very well be the final gasp of the cynical seventies before the coming of the endless mindless adventure stories of the 80s.

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While the series continues to give us good actors, kudos to Rebecca Ferguson for her non-glamorous appearance not something all model quality actors are willing to do, and decent production the continuing failures of world building are making it hard for me to suspend my disbelief in the fictional setting.

This week we learn that things that can’t be recycled or repaired are sent to the incinerators. Really? You have a close ecology, effectively a generation spaceship and you are throwing material over the side? Material that can never ever be replaced.

And where is all this plastic coming from? We see constant used of plastics, and we know it’s been more than 140 years because that was when the ‘rebellion’ occurred. I want to see the plastic oxygen mask that remained clear, perfect, and usable for 140 years.

Eggs? Really, eggs? I am not a vegan or a vegetarian, but I do know that consuming animal products is less efficient that eating the vegetable material directly. In a close ecology with very limited space, it makes no sense whatsoever to spend energy, lights, water pump, cultivation, to grow calories that you then feed to something else and consume the reduced calories from the animal. In the Silo everyone would be vegan or vegetarian.

We also had a reference to ‘burial’ in this episode. Just as with anything else the elements in human bodies are elements you can’t get back if you throw them away. In the Silo everything you eat and breathe would have been at one time a person. You can’t escape the fact that in a closed ecology everything gets recycled or the ecology collapses.

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Premiering on May 5th, 2023, Silo is a limited series adapted from novels by Hugh Howey
concerning a community of 10,000 people surviving a devastated ecology by living underground in a massive silo.

Rebecca Ferguson plays Juliette an engineer from the structures lower levels suddenly pulled into a conspiracy that entangles the silo’s highest citizens, the sheriff, the mayor, and the judge.

Only three episodes have streamed, and it would be unfair and unjust to judge the series’ quality without having seen the final turns and revelations, but I do have a few thoughts.

First off, the production values are first rate. The environment and the setting feel real. There is a palatable sense that this place, with its undetermined age, has seen countless generations of survivors.

Second, the cast is fantastic. Led by Ferguson, who is also a producer for the show, everyone is real and complicated. The actors and their characters are engaging enough to endear attachment from the viewer helping to audience to flow past some of the less that ideal world building.

The less-than-ideal world building comes down to a few key issues.

For dramatic reasons in the 3rd episode Machines Juliette leads a dangerous but unavoidable repair procedure to correct the colony’s single massive generator before it fails and dooms everyone. The idea that the colony was constructed with a single generator, upon which everyone’s survival depended, without even the ability to shut it down for regular maintenance is absurd and a sin against rational engineering. (Not to mention the lack of a relief valve for the geothermal steam that powers the generator.)

Much is made of the vast distance from the top of the silo to its lowest inhabited level with such trips effectively taking an entire day even for the silo’s political leadership. Apparently, the structure has no elevators, which again is absurd considering the large amount of material that would be required to move between levels to sustain a large population.

A close ecology system such as the silo where no new material comes in from the outside would be very fixated on recycling and not wasting a single gram of material. Yet, the colony maintains a tradition that anyone who proclaims that they ‘want to go out,’ is allowed to go outside of the silo to their certain death taking with them kilos of fabric, plastic, and irreplaceable mass. Madness.

All that said I am still intrigues by the series and have some hope it might stick the landing. With conspiracy stories the revelation of the conspiracy is a major element that either contributes to success of failure and only when we reach that final turn can a valid judgement be rendered.

Silo streams on Apple TV+.