Apple will open the vault this weekend. You can watch anything in their prestige television library free of charge for 48 hours.

Spend some of that time with Silo. You’re not going to regret it.

What Silo is trying to do

Speculative fiction is an exercise in truth telling. Strip away what is familiar, discard your biases, and see our human systems with fresh eyes.

As part of this process, speculative fiction can simplify what is otherwise vast and complex, making systems small enough to fit into the cracks of our imaginations.

Silo embarks on both processes with gusto. It wants to talk about social systems, and it wants to talk about power.

To do this, the show portrays an underground society of 10,000 people, arranged into a 144 story cylinder. They face a bleak reality: to leave their silo is to die on the surface of a poisoned, ruined Earth.

What emerges from this arrangement is class stratification. The Silo is broken into three broad neighborhoods, stacked upon each other:

The Up-Top, which houses the branches of government and civic leadership. The sheriff’s headquarters, the silo’s judiciary, the mayor, and IT are all here.

The Mids, where people live and grow food.

The Down-Deep, where core infrastructure, manufacturing and supply management all reside.

The Silo has access to many technological conveniences, but it doesn’t do elevators. The only way to traverse its many levels is to walk the stairs. This is obviously time consuming, and also exhausting.

As a result, most Silo residents stay close to home. This creates identities and outgroups, with all the attendant distrust this implies.

It also means that communication between regions of the Silo can be limited, further amplifying that distrust.

A word about power

Without saying too much to spoil the show, Silo has a certain distrust for the technocrat.

Silo argues that the danger of seeing the world through analytics and spreadsheets is that you reduce humanity to numbers and pieces on a board. You become a manipulator instead of a partner to your fellow humans.

To maintain social order, the Silo’s governance demands a certain level of general ignorance. To know too much about the past or present is to become ungovernable, and the stakes of survival are just too high to risk a population that works that way.

The power of the technocrat has a foil in this show, in the power of the worker, represented by the engineers and mechanics who operate the infrastructure of the Silo, and thus keep everyone alive. The Up-Top and the Down-Deep are frequently at odds, if only because they communicate so poorly.

It’s not just their physical distance, they just have such different worldviews. Rather than a punitive approach that takes a free hand in controlling the fates of others, the folks of the Down-Deep see each other as a sort of extended family. Even in matters of justice.

The conflict portrayed is… timely.

The craft of Silo

I love the narrative of Silo, but I have to take a moment to celebrate its other craft.

The production design of this show might be the most deliberate and sumptuous I’ve ever seen anywhere. Every detail of architecture, props, and costuming has received painstaking attention.

Where something comes from in Silo matters. Was it made in the Silo, or was it inherited from the broken world that was? The story can sometimes turn on these answers, so the details of objects in the show’s world must reflect this accurately.

Atli Örvarsson’s haunting, memorable score for Silo takes all these details and seals them in a soundscape that completely sells the premise. Thanks to this music, you can feel the setting, what it’s like to live these lives, down deep in your bones.

Upon this meticulous stage, the production’s players stride out with relentless verve and panache.

I mean it: this whole cast is fucking amazing. Yes, Rebecca Ferguson is an action hero for the ages as an engineer and hands-on mechanic who holds the Silo’s power systems in her palm. She’s funny, she’s sweet, she’s sharp-edged, and it all works.

But everyone’s incredible. Tim Robbins plays a prickly and enigmatic chief of IT. Tanya Moodie, as head of Judicial, offers him a formidable opposition as an obvious intellectual equal. Their jousting steals every episode we get with them.

Chinaza Uche was a real sleeper for me. He starts as a functionary in Judicial, and just gets hotter from there. I had no idea just how much I would grow to like him as Paul Billings.

I could do two thousand words just on this cast. No one’s a dud. From the leads to the bit players, they’ve found some absolutely electric talent. Everyone is fluidly locked into their roles like the gearing of a fine watch.

That’s all I’m going to say

The show works because it’s a story, in the end, about love. Everyone in this desperately bleak setting loves someone. This creates meaningful stakes, but more than that, it makes the story relevant for every one of us.

That’s the pitch. I don’t want to say much more. You deserve to go in and have a blast, draw your own conclusions, do your own speculation.

Apple has confirmed two more seasons are locked in, so this story is going to get its full expression.

You will not waste your time.

Go.