Silo
Streaming services…generally do not love science-fiction. The genre has fallen out of favor outside of Disney making endless Star Wars series, as great shows have been cancelled, either coming to a natural end or being killed in their prime. They’re usually extremely high cost, associated with the visual effects or elaborate sets necessary to bring them to life, make them tough to stomach for streamers unless they overperform. And often, they don’t.
Enter Silo, the Apple TV+ series that just had its season finale, which I would say cements it as the singular best science-fiction show on TV right now, even with the limited pool.
Silo is based on the Wool series by Hugh Howey, and the show stars Mission Impossible’s Rebecca Ferguson as a new sheriff attempting to find the truth about 10,000 humans trapped underground in a long, vertical Silo will no clue how they got there and why exactly the outdoors is toxic enough to kill you in 30 seconds.
Despite no spaceships, it’s excellent sci-fi, and should remind the gaming viewers out there of Fallout’s numerous Vaults, albeit without the oddball humor from that series (and an actual Fallout series is coming).
Silo
The finale of Silo (spoilers follow) was rather mindblowing, as Ferguson’s Juliette Nichols has found a way to survive in the outdoors, not sabotaged by the mayor of the Silo like so many others. The final shot is a wide pan, revealing countless other Silo exits all around her in a desolated, seemingly nuclear-destroyed wasteland, raising a huge number of questions about what comes next.
It’s Apple that has the largest number of quality sci-fi shows on TV these days. Besides Silo there’s For All Mankind and Foundation, and I suppose Severance, if you can count that as some level of sci-fi. Amazon, Netflix and HBO have all killed off many great sci-fi series, The Expanse, Altered Carbon and Raised by Wolves come to mind. Netflix does have Stranger Things, the highest profile sci-fi show on TV, but for my money, season one of Silo tops most seasons of Stranger Things, even if it’s a bit apples and oranges. As for Disney, the only real competitor of the Star Wars cluster is probably Andor.
For whatever reason, Apple seems to understand how to cultivate high quality sci-fi projects in a way its rivals don’t, as they continue to abandon them en masse for the most part. Silo is the best example of this, and a worthwhile watch for everyone.
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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.
