This is a weekly examination of each new “Silo” episode. It contains spoilers, so if you haven’t watched, come back when you have.
As I took my brisk little jaunt from Silo 17 back to Silo 18, just in the nick of time, it occurred to me that…oh, wait, wrong person.
I think what I’ve learned from doing the “Silo” Box Set is the series is divisive, but for most of the people who have some nagging issues, they really like it at its core. I consider myself in that group and truly enjoyed the season finale, which answered plenty of questions while raising, at minimum, double that amount of new ones.
That’s fine. There are two seasons left. Nothing egregious has happened within the wheels of motion.
Just like last week’s episode, I feel compelled, however, to start from the end of the episode and work backward. That’s because even though we all knew a cliffhanger was imminent, this one has some pretty serious time constraint issues that will need to be addressed in the first episode of the third season.
So, let me slap a sticky note to the top here proclaiming that not only did I quite enjoy the season finale, I also found S2 to be its own success and there was nothing so annoying as to move me off the show, even if I might like the pace to follow the last few episodes rather than the chunk in the middle.
And now, here’s a very important disclaimer:
I absolutely loathe the practice of having series creators, writers, show runners etc. talk about each episode after they air, whether in a podcast or a video interview from whatever platform the series appears — because that allows them, all too frequently, to explain/spin their intentions for the episode when, as viewers, we didn’t really see much (or any!) of that in the episode. For a critic, that is absolutely maddening. It’s verbally rewriting what often wasn’t seen. It allows said creators/writers/show runners to manipulate what viewers saw; it’s a New World version of fix-it-in-post.
And it’s too ever-present.
That said, I do believe that post-season finale interviews with the creatives, which have been a regular staple for maybe a decade now, are legitimate ways for them to frame what we saw in the season and what’s coming up next. In many situations, they still remain vague, but in others they are transparent and direct, which many readers will see (and probably should). The presence of season-finale interviews makes something I’m doing here — deconstructing each episode, noting up front that I haven’t read the books, etc., a little more difficult because I could guess at something but if the creatives have already said publicly “yes I’m confirming this thing happened and also next year we’re doing to do X,” then it’s kind of pointless to stay willfully in the dark.
I will point you to, then, and reference in the following parts of the deconstruction, what series creator Graham Yost shared with The Wrap, much of which is important to know.
Now, onward we go:
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