The “Silo” Season 2 finale ended with another jaw-dropping twist, as the Apple TV+ sci-fi mystery series went backward in time 140 years to show viewers the world before the silos.
To answer your most pressing questions: Yes, Ashley Zuckerman and Jessica Henwick are joining the cast of “Silo” for Season 3, and yes, there will be much more of the “Silo” origin story explored going forward.
How was the show so well-prepared to set up Season 3 in that Season 2 finale? As “Silo” showrunner Graham Yost revealed to TheWrap during an interview tied to the finale, he’s actually had the go-ahead to complete the adaptation of Hugh Howey’s books since 2023.
“OK so now the cat’s out of the bag, we can talk about it. I would say five weeks into Season 1, we knew we were going to do the whole thing,” he said of completing the adaptation. While the show was publicly greenlit for an additional two seasons last fall, Yost revealed Apple agreed to complete the series back when Season 1 was airing due to the strong response from fans.
Not only that but Season 3 is already months into filming and Season 4 has been completely written. Seasons 3 and 4 will be shot back-to-back throughout 2025 with only a short break to complete pre-production on the final season.
Talk about planning ahead.
But what about that big confrontation with Juliette (Rebecca Ferguson) and Bernard (Tim Robbins)? What, exactly, did Lucas find out that freaked him out so much? And are more big deaths on the way? All that and more revealed in TheWrap’s Season 2 finale post-mortem interview with Yost below.
When did you know you were going to end this season with a big flashback that would reveal what was going on before the silos?
A lot of it is just instinctual and also just trial and error. Breaking Season 2 was difficult. We didn’t know how far Season 2 was going to go. We thought maybe we would have Juliette over in Silo 17 for two seasons, and then we said, “No, we can’t sustain that. We don’t need to sustain that. Let’s move it along.” Then it was sort of like, then what’s Season 3 and what’s Season 4? I won’t get into all of that, but we are going to get into some origin story stuff in Season 3, you’ve now met Daniel and Helen, played by Ashley Zuckerman and Jessica Henwick.
There was talk with Apple, initially there were some who thought maybe we just end with Juliette on fire in the in the air lock. And we said, “No, this not a show that ends with just a cliffhanger. It needs to be something is answered and something is raised.” At the end of Season 1, when she walks over the hill and out of sight, we could have ended with that. But no, we want her to be seeing that there are 50 other silos. So now we’ve answered some things, and now we’re asking new questions.
With this one, it was a different kind of thing. We knew people are going to go, “Oh s–t, that’s where the Pez came from. What does that mean?” That then propels us forward and that’s kind of the way this show works best because it’s a mystery show.
So tell me about the plan to wrap the series up in the next two seasons. Will they closely follow Hugh Howey’s books?
In Hugh’s books, the second book, Juliette only appears on the last page. Originally, Jamie Erlicht and I thought the series would run five years, and that Book 1 would be two seasons, Book 2 would be one season, and Book 3 would be two seasons. And I called him and I said, “We’ve got Rebecca Ferguson, we can’t do a season of television when she’s [only] in the last scene. We’ve got to come up with something different.” That’s when we decided on four seasons. And that was our plan really from the beginning.
So we knew that in the book, there’s a lot of stuff about what happened 140 years ago and then there’s the origin story. We’ve monkeyed with the origin story dramatically, renaming him from Donald to Daniel. Whichever way you are in the political spectrum, we just didn’t want anyone named Donald in that role. It’s just too confusing for people and are we making a point? Are we not making a point? We’re just not going to address the point. And we wanted to make more out of their relationship than was really in the book, so we’ve also gender-swapped Thurman. So there’s that, but then we came up with a different story for Juliette for that period that we’ll get into when Season 3 comes out. But I would just say a lot of Season 3 is about memory.
But we felt with Season 2, just these two stories going in Silo 18 and Silo 17, that was fun. We rolled the dice and went for that opening two episodes where one’s about Juliette and one’s without Juliette, and it just felt right. People have asked, how do we know when to cut back and forth? We just tried it. And sometimes in the edit we go, “Oh no, let’s move this, let’s make the jump at this point.”
How early did you know you were getting a two-season renewal to wrap the whole series up?
OK so now the cat’s out of the bag, we can talk about it. I would say five weeks into Season 1, we knew we were going to do the whole thing. In terms of being released, it was like, “Oh, it’s connecting with people. People are talking about it.”
It’s an incredibly complicated show to produce. There’s only so much stage space, so sets have to be built, shot in, taken down, something else built in that place. And then, “Oh, you want to do that IT bullpen again? We have to rebuild that.” And that takes three weeks. When we’re doing 10 episodes, we are filming all 10 episodes at some point every week, and so that means all the directors have to be there the whole time, a lot of the cast, and then it’s cast availability. It’s Grammys week so Common can’t be there. Rebecca is doing a movie. Rebecca is doing promotion for ‘Dune 2.’
All of this is weighed in, so we had to write all the scripts early. All of Season 2 was written before we had finished filming Season 1. We had finished writing Season 3 pretty much before the strike was called, and that’s while we were filming Season 2. And we’ve written all of Season 4. So, because we have to plan, there’s no hiatus. We’re shutting down for three months of pre-production for Season 4 and then we’re going to roll right in.
Apple hasn’t seen every script for Season 4. They’ve seen up through Episode 9, they just haven’t seen the finale. So the great thing about doing that all together is like, “Oh, that thing is Season 3. We can pay that off in Season 4” or “This thing is in Season 4, we need to set that up in Season 3. So it’s an incredible luxury.
So when do you start shooting Season 3?
We’re already filming.
Wow.
I know, I know. We’ve all had to play cute. We trust in Apple, and they have their way of doing things, and I understand that.
Constructing the Season 2 finale and the scene with Juliette and Bernard in the airlock, there are a lot of things you could reveal in that scene. How do you thread the needle of what to reveal and what to hold back?
It’s guesswork. We feel like the world that Hugh created, and our approach to it — and his support has been amazing — but we feel like there’s meat and we can set stuff up and we can try this and try that, but that doesn’t mean that we don’t try it 10 different ways. We talked about that conversation so much. What are they going to say? How much do we need? How much can we reduce it? How much are we leaning into something? How much are we just setting things up?
I will say that in that final confrontation between them, every word is important. There are certain key words that you’ll see come back big in Season 3. I will also say to those who have read the books, Bernard dies at the end of the book, he’s gone. So I would just say that. No one is safe in this show, as we showed in Season 1.
So just to clarify, Judge Meadows quit because she found out there was a tunnel with poison gas that could be leaked into the silo, and that’s what Lucas is telling Bernard?
Right, because what the voice says is if you tell anyone about this, we will enact this safeguard. “Do you know what the safeguard is? Yes, I do.” And that’s what Juliette figures out with with Jimmy/Solo is there’s something coming in. They could do this thing and my parents were trying to stop this, and that’s what they were working on, and that was the whole thing. Because there are a lot of mysteries about Silo 17. The chief one being that all those people went outside, they had an hour to get outside. They didn’t all die in three minutes. What the f–k happened out there? That’s gonna be part of Season 3. You’ll get the answers to all of that. And then there are other things you don’t find out until Season 4.
But yes, that’s the knowledge that Juliette brings back. Bernard says, “They can kill us at any time” and she says, “Maybe not,” and that’s the crux of the whole thing, is the “Maybe not. Now what?” That’s what she’s bringing back to Silo 18. She didn’t know that that’s what she had to do. She thought she was just going to go and hold up a sign saying, Don’t come outside. It’s not safe,” right? But she ends up having big knowledge. And then the little preview of Season 3 is all of that just gets totally ripped away from her ability early, right from the jump.
The ending of the entire series. Is it different or similar to the ending of the books?
You’re going to have to pay to find out.
Listen you tell me you’ve written the series finale, I have to ask.
I know. Yeah it was a lot of tears in the writers room. It’s been a weird, wonderful experience. The whole writer’s room has been on Zoom for the whole series. We got very much into each other’s lives in a different way than you do in person. In person, you have lunch together and you talk to each other in the hallway. But on the Zoom, you see the kid coming in to give his dad a hug. You see the baby that was born three weeks ago being introduced to the room. It’s been an amazing bunch of years.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
“Silo” is streaming on Apple TV+.
