Review | Silo, Apple TV+ post-apocalyptic sci-fi drama starring Rebecca Ferguson and Tim Robbins, puts Earth’s survivors in a hole in the ground
- Rebecca Ferguson stars as the sheriff of the 10,000 surviving humans on Earth, who all live underground, in Apple TV+’s tense lo-tech sci-fi series Silo
- Meanwhile, in K-drama series Race on Disney+, Lee Yeon-hee plays PR consultant Park Yoon-jo, who encounters hostility when she takes a new job
As governments everywhere shamelessly try to make global eco-catastrophe the new normal, Apple TV+ delivers a tense, lo-tech sci-fi drama that puts the future “us” in a deep, dark, depressing hole.
Silo stars Rebecca Ferguson as Juliette Nichols, sheriff of the 10,000-plus remaining humans on Earth – or inside it, anyway – a reluctant badge wearer chosen by departed lawman Holston Becker (David Oyelowo).
He can now be seen dead, with his wife, through the one window the silo’s inhabitants are allowed onto the world, their bodies a prostrate warning to anyone else wanting to “go outside” into the apparently poisonous atmosphere.
Naturally, all is illusion. Who is making the rules? Why, really, is the planet’s surface out of bounds? Who built the silo and put these people underground, where humans have been for 140 years?
Nichols is likely to nix this mass imprisonment, but with little help from slippery mayor Bernard Holland (Tim Robbins), who is keen on the status quo and keener to enforce the law on relics – artefacts such as clunky hard drives, video cameras and even a baffling Pez sweet dispenser with deep symbolic significance.
The silo’s collective memory has been purged of such illegal fripperies (and the echoes here of Cultural Revolution mania are startling).
Reproduction requires official sanction; the irony of calling a public holiday Freedom Day evades most; a rigid class system separates the “up-toppers” from the “bottom-siders” (there’s a “mid-levels”, no less, between summit and basement); and the judicial section is the ultimate arbiter of what passes for justice.
Its black-jacketed enforcers, led by C (the rapper Common), are society’s homeland security thugs.
Based on Hugh Howey’s Silo novels, the series presents an underground lockdown world that’s defiantly proletarian in the grubby, oily, lower reaches, and one whose technology and interiors look bang up to date for 1950.
It’s a visually convincing setting for a species going backwards and whose cave-dweller ignorance is summed up by its puzzlement at the nature of those innumerable lights in the night sky.
The silo permits a precarious existence only. And as one sheriff’s deputy declares: “We’ve always been one catastrophic failure away from the end of it all.”
Sound familiar?
Living dead
Identifying the race in Race (Disney+) isn’t easy.
Is it a race to the bottom of the pile in Seoul’s overheated public relations industry? A competition to find the most humiliated office worker of the week?
The 12-part first series, now complete, stars Lee Yeon-hee as “digital PR” consultant Park Yoon-jo. Ambitious but directionless, she needs all her innate cheerfulness to combat the festering resentment encountered as she moves from a small agency to the PR department of cosmetics conglomerate Seyong.
She has a friend (and potential squeeze) in Ryu Jae-min (Hong Jong-hyun) – but he’s also the inadvertent cause of the flak fired at Yoon-jo, particularly by foul-tempered superior Ji Eun-jeong (Kim Jung).
The circumstances of Yoon-jo’s appointment are cloudy, deepening the hostility of her new colleagues.
Office power struggles also crystallise around the dynamic between fabled PR guru Goo Yi-jung (Moon So-ri) and anointed Seyong heiress Lim Ji-hyeon (Kim Hye-hwa).
Neither trusts the other, but both inspire trepidation in the feeble, tradition-bound male executives who scuttle around them like drones.
A joyless industry existence is partly alleviated for Yoon-jo at a seriously underpopulated bar conveniently run by another friend, Heo Eun (Kim Ye-eun), where plain speaking is encouraged.
Meanwhile, the one reliable comic counterpoint to all the gloomy action is Yoon-jo’s mother, Hwa-ja (Oh Min-ae), rediscovering her youth through drinking and dancing.
Perhaps that’s what it takes to be a Seoul survivor.
