Silo’s season 2 finale was excellent, but the show is running out of time

The second season of Silo — a postapocalyptic thriller on Apple TV Plus — has wrapped up, and the finale was the show at its very best. It was full of dramatic twists, painful sacrifices, brutal fights, beautiful shots of a decayed future, and in its final moments, a tease that shows how much larger and more expansive the story actually is. It left me excited about what’s coming next — but also wary that the show is running out of time to tell the full story.

This article contains spoilers for the first two seasons of Silo.

Silo takes place far in the future, when the outside world is seemingly uninhabitable and what remains of humanity lives in vast, tightly controlled silos deep underground. The first season followed Juliette (Rebecca Ferguson) as she was able to uncover (some of) the truth about the reality of the world and her home’s place within it. It ended with a great cliffhanger as she stepped outside and discovered that her silo, which she believed to be the only remaining place full of human life, was just one of many.

Season 2 picked up right after that and explored two concurrent threads. On one side, there was Juliette, whose trek outside uncovered a silo filled with dead bodies. With the help of the long-isolated Solo (Steve Zahn), the apparent sole survivor of a devastating rebellion in Silo 17, she spends almost the entire season attempting to repair a suit so that she can return to her home (Silo 18) and prevent it from facing a similar fate. Meanwhile, tensions are rising in 18, as the rebellion from the lower levels really starts to heat up, throwing everything in disarray. Imagine a civil war contained in a subterranean concrete structure with 144 levels, 10,000 inhabitants, and a series of very specific rules intended to keep everyone alive, and you have an idea of how dire things get.

The season 2 finale saw those two threads finally connect in thrilling fashion and then ended with an even greater tease: a look at the world before the silos existed. Which is to say, the present day. Just like the ending of season 1, it showed there is so much more to the story than was first let on. So far, the show has done a great job of managing that balance between questions and answers, keeping me curious about what’s next while still doling out important revelations.

Silo is based on a trilogy of books by Hugh Howey, and the first two seasons cover book one, known as Wool. While it’s mostly been a solid adaptation, midway through season 2, there were moments that felt like the show was stretching things out a little longer than they needed to be. The pacing faltered under an unnecessary amount of detail, particularly when it came to Juliette engineering all kinds of solutions to her problem of traveling between silos.

What makes that concerning is that Silo only has so much time. Apple has renewed the show for two more seasons, after which it will conclude, meaning that the two remaining seasons need to cover the entirety of the two final novels, Shift and Dust. That won’t be easy. Without spoiling much, I’ll just say that things get much more complex in the later books. There are still the silos we know about and Juliette’s quest to free their inhabitants, plus important details about silos we haven’t seen yet, along with the exceedingly convoluted story of how the world came to be the way it is. These books span not only multiple locations but also multiple time periods.

Since Silo spent so much time dithering on book one (which, to be fair, is the most cinematic of the bunch, making it likely the most exciting to adapt), it now has its work cut out for it to squeeze the rest of the postapocalyptic epic into two seasons of television. At its current pacing, I have no idea how the show’s creators are going to make it work in a satisfying way.

Then again, this pressure might be a good thing. Maybe with that hard deadline in place, the storytelling will become more efficient and faster-paced, cutting out the fluff to focus on the bigger picture. The show is at its best when it’s racing toward a conclusion, rather than spending a lot of time lingering on the logistics of heat-resistant tape or air pumps. With the end now in sight, the race is on.