Silo Season 2 premiere review: Rebecca Ferguson’s returns digs deeper into Apple TV’s gripping dystopia

Rebecca Ferguson in a still from ‘Silo’ Season 2
| Photo Credit: Apple TV

The return of Silo for its sophomore season on Apple TV doesn’t feel as much of a continuation as it does a freshly minted manifesto for its style of storytelling. Grim, gripping, and uncomfortably prophetic; where the first season teased at the edges of its dystopia, this second outing opens by taking a sledgehammer to the walls — both literal and narrative — to unveil further layers of despair and intrigue. With its premiere episode, dubbed “The Engineer,” Apple TV has gambled on a slow-burning, near-silent return to its tightly coiled exploration of what remains of humanity when all else is stripped away.

We begin not with Rebecca Ferguson’s exiled heroine Juliette Nichols, but with a child sprinting through the darkened corridors of a neighbouring subterranean tomb with its own story to tell. Torchlight dances across walls defaced with screams of defiance scrawled over propaganda posters, in this prelude to an uprising. It is rebellion in its final moments, desperate and doomed as the people of Silo 17 storm the gates of their captors, only to escape into an unrelenting toxic deathscape — green flags of triumph in hand, their freedom fleeting and fatal. As demonstrated in its pilot season, freedom from the Silo, much like truth, often leads to ruin.

Flashing forward to the present, we find Juliette navigating her death by exile. She’s alive — a distinction her predecessors never managed to achieve after venturing outside — thanks to some handy duct tape. As she wades into the skeletal remains of the previously emancipated Silo 17, Juliette’s journey becomes a near-wordless new adventure of frustration and tenacity.

Her journey from here on out is a physical and psychological crucible, punctuated by moments of peril. Ferguson is a marvel here, conveying volumes with little more than a clenched jaw and a scream that reverberates through the decayed architecture. In one of the episode’s standout sequences, she attempts to cross a broken walkway, armed with nothing but her years of experience as a Silo engineer.

Rebecca Ferguson in a still from ‘Silo’ Season 2
| Photo Credit:
Apple TV

Flashbacks interwoven throughout the episode give us glimpses of Juliette’s formative years. We see a younger Juliette learning the harsh arithmetic of survival from Martha Walker, who delivers wisdom in the gruff, maternal way only Harriet Walter can.

The episode doubles down on the show’s visual storytelling. The Silo itself remains a marvel of production design — a brutalist relic in decay. Director Morten Tyldum transforms the familiar concrete spirals into something almost mythic — vast and foreboding, a cathedral to humanity’s hubris of sorts. This is Silo at its best: the finest blend of physical stakes and existential dread.

The sound design, too, deserves credit, with its orchestration of industrial groans, water drips, a mysterious clinking sound and the climactic strains of Audrey Hepburn’s “Moon River.”

But what makes Silo so captivating isn’t just its plotting or dystopian sheen — it’s the manner in which it refuses to handhold. The series trusts its audience to piece together its puzzles, even as it raises further questions. How many silos exist? Who controls the puppet strings from above? And why, for all their omnipotence, do they seem so afraid? These mysteries loom larger than ever as its second season begins, but they are anchored by the deeply human story of Juliette’s defiance.

New episodes of ‘Silo’ Season 2 stream every Friday on Apple TV