Note: This story contains spoilers from “Silo” Season 3, Episode 10.
With its Season 3 finale, “Silo” has officially entered its endgame.
The Apple TV sci-fi series based on Hugh Howey’s books has been charting the journey of Rebecca Ferguson’s Juliette Nichols as she asks big questions and, ultimately, takes massive risks to uncover the secrets of her silo in the dystopian future.
But Season 3 finally offered context to the “who” and “why” behind the construction of the silos in the first place with a past-set storyline involving U.S. congressman Daniel Keene (Ashley Zuckerman) and journalist Helen Drew (Jessica Henwick). And at the end of Season 3, those two timelines converged as we witnessed Helen tricked into entering Silo 18 and Daniel whisked away to Silo 1 amidst a nuclear explosion upon the unveiling of the silo project deep in the past.
In the “Silo” Season 3 finale, we saw Daniel wake up not as Daniel but as “Troy,” an analytical killing machine who appears to be awoken from a cryosleep whenever there’s a crisis that needs fixing with one of the silos. With Victor (Matt Craven) as his handler, we see Troy handle the breakout of Silo 17 with ease, mowing down hordes of people — including children — without an empathetic bone in his body. This is not the Daniel we know.
But we also see that each time Daniel wakes up, he has flashes of Helen and starts asking Victor questions about his past. It’s then that Victor puts him back to sleep. Except, at the end of the finale, we see Victor has been the voice guiding Camille to quell the uprising in Silo 18, and we watch his face as he learns he’s been tricked by Camille and Juliette who are now working together against Silo 1.
Victor decides to record a video for Troy leaving a clue about his past — he tells him the name of the woman he keeps seeing in visions is Helen — and then committing suicide. This sets up a final confrontation between Troy, who is now running the operation in Silo 1, and Juliette and her Silo 18 cohort.
Series showrunner Graham Yost said the team felt emboldened by the tease at the end of Season 2, which set up the dual timelines seen in Season 3, to offer fans a preview of the fourth and final season at the end of Season 3.
“What that did was it gave us a sense of leaning forward into the next season, so we felt like, “What if the final episode of this season is really leaning forward into next season?” We felt that by bringing them together on the timeline at the end of Season 3, then the audience knows this is where we’re going. It’s this person versus this person. It’s just fun to do s–t like that,” he told TheWrap.
Read on as Yost breaks down the finale, the big “Troy” reveal and teases what’s next in Season 4.
TheWrap: I wanted to talk about creating the arc of the season, because it’s a tricky needle to thread. You’re teasing out plot points at the beginning that don’t pay off until the end. I’m sure you saw some online chatter about the memory stuff…
Yost: I don’t read it because of the old line: “10 good reviews don’t make up for one bad one.” And if you believe the good stuff, you got to believe the bad stuff. So I just don’t read any of it. And we finished the whole series four months ago, there’s nothing more we can do. But listen, we were concerned about the memory thing. We were concerned about Juliette not really being Juliette for a few episodes. But our feeling was get through the first episode and a half, and once she starts to really get on a path, once she finds out that she’s been drugged, once she’s sort of rebelling against Camille, it’s like OK, now Juliet is becoming Juliet again. We’re back on.
We felt that the origin story would satisfy people because Ash Zuckerman and Jess Henwick are amazing and fun, and then the whole team is so good. So many of them are old friends, by the way.
So how did you break the finale? You have all this buildup and this shocking cliffhanger in Episode 9, but Episode 10 doesn’t really answer any of that. You smash into the recent history of Silo 1 and introduce Troy.
It’s the writers’ room, and I can’t remember who said what when. I know that I had an interest in wanting to see what happened to Silo 17. We’ve seen all the bodies. We saw Ross going out there in Season 2 at the very beginning. So I was interested in that, and it’s also in the books. He goes into this thing as he’s Donald. We made him Daniel, but we kept him as Troy waking up, and so we knew that that was critical. We thought, should we do that? Should that be the opening of Season 4, or should we do this big switch-up?
We did this thing at the end of Season 2, which we hoped would work, which is Juliette and Bernard are on fire in the airlock, and then we go to black, and the fire turns into the sound of rain and now we’re in Washington D.C. and it’s present day, but it’s weird. What that did was it gave us a sense of leaning forward into the next season, so we felt like, “What if the final episode of this season is really leaning forward into next season?” We felt that by bringing them together on the timeline at the end of of Season 3, then the audience knows this is where we’re going. It’s this person versus this person. It’s just fun to do s–t like that.
I love a big swing. I love a big changeup.
We liked it in the writers’ room, and then Apple read it and they liked it, and then the directors and the cast loved it. So it’s like, OK, I think this works. And then we saw it cut together and, for us inside the tent at least, it’s like, this is one of the best things we’ve ever done. We’re very proud of it.
Tell me about the Troy of it all. Is that in the books?
Yes that’s in the books, Daniel is called Donald in the books and he does wake up in the second book and he’s Troy, and that was our anchor. It’s like OK, so if they’re not only wiping an entire memory of an entire silo, as we find out in the first season that’s what happened in Silo 18 140 years ago. If they’re doing this individually, and this is part of the Silo 1 thing, that led us back to the only way Juliette could stay alive is if her memory was wiped. So let’s do that, and then figure out how that happened. And that led us to the whole story of wait a second, what if Bernard’s alive? And that was a huge moment. So all this stuff sort of followed on, but then the idea to do a big switch up at the end just materialized.
The indication I get is that Troy can’t be awake for too long, or otherwise he starts remembering Helen and having issues. Is that the correct takeaway?
You know what? It’ll do for now. You’ll find out more in Season 4. It’s 35 years between shifts. There’s X number of people in Silo 1, and they’re always rotating through. There’s like always 100 people on shift, and I mean that’s all from the book. So that was the basic architecture of it. What we anchored our thing on was that they give people new identities, but their skill sets carry through, and I bring up one of Oliver Sacks books. There’s a guy with very bad short-term memory loss. He would introduce himself every 1520 seconds to people. But if he sat at the piano, he could play an entire concerto by memory. So there was something of his skill set, of his passion, lasted through, and for us, we thought, what if Daniel, even though he’s Troy, has flashes of memory of love, and that becomes basically the key to the whole thing, is that persistence of memory.
They refer to Victor as “the founder.” Is the main founder of the silos?
He is a founder. There are many.
And Peter Gabriel is like the top founder.
(Laughs) He was just a hoot. We met early on through the show when I wanted him to do something on the show, and it just didn’t work out. And then we connected on other things, and I had to tell him. I said, “Look, I’ve been a fan for a long time.” And he was just very sweet about it. He came out with his son, who’s on the side of the stage, and that’s his son’s girlfriend, and they got to play in the show.
Victor’s story I found super emotional and compelling in this finale, and he admits he was relieved when Juliette wins, and then he kind of tragically commits suicide. Can you talk a bit about Victor’s journey? What do you want like viewers to take away in this final episode, and do we get more of Victor in Season 4?
I will say this: you’ll pay to find that out. But one of the big things in Season 4 is you will find out what happened to Helen. Victor’s thing, we kept on talking about well, why did he kill himself? And we finally landed on: If you’ve ever known anyone who’s taken their life, there’s never really one answer. There’s often a lot of answers. The constellation. For Victor, when he says he was relieved, I think that’s key. But Matt Craven, just watching him look at Daniel/Troy as he’s killing Silo 17, and just the look on his face, seeing this guy that he always liked do this thing, I think half of his life was gone with that. And then Juliette comes along, and Camille and all of that.
I’m curious about the conversations with Ashley about Daniel/Troy. His performance in the finale is so good and so different. Daniel is such a morally good guy, and then Troy is just a machine. Tell me about those conversations with Ashley about that performance there.
You know, that was basically it. Because he’s Ash, and he’s so freaking good at his job, there can be just this tiny little twinkle in his eye. The key was Fred Golan’s idea. Fred wrote the episode, and Fred, our deal has been since “Justified” that he would write the finale of every season. It was his notion of Troy waking up and having flashes of Helen, and I was unsure of it. He was absolutely right. That’s the story, and persistence of memory. So there is something nagging at Troy, and he can’t let it go. And we find out that he’s asked this question every time he’s woken up, because he’s had these flashes, and Victor has never given him an answer until he does at the end of the season. But that’s the little thing. That’s the little mote in his eye, as it were, that drives something in Troy to find out what the hell is going on. And Ash just found it.
I also love the way the season ends. Juliette and the Silo are now unified. You are very much setting up this final battle into the final season, and after three seasons of Juliette battling everyone inside her silo, they’re now together. Tell me about getting to that endpoint and what you want viewers to be feeling as they’re heading into Season 4.
Well, it is going to be war. Juliette was not Juliette at the beginning of Season 3, and she had to find herself in Season 4. Juliette from the first frame to the end is is our Juliette, but she goes through s–t. Season 4 is not easy, and while the silo is united, that doesn’t mean it can’t fracture. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t personal costs. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t things that have to be addressed.
And because we’re doing this crazy freaking show about people who live underground in the future, it’s like OK, let’s try to make it as real as possible and make these people as engaging as possible. But it’s something we used to say in “Justified”: when someone fires a bullet in the air, it goes somewhere. Where does it go? Let’s follow it. So we take that into this. Shelly Birse, who’s a big part of the writing, one of the things about her writing is everyone has their reasons, and you have to honor them as human beings that they’ve got their reasons. Even the assholes, they’ve got their reasons.
Something you told me last time we spoke, which I thought was really fascinating, was that during Season 1, Apple came to you and said, “You can finish the books. You’re good to go. However many seasons you need, let us know.” Tell me what that afforded you as a storyteller as you finish up this story.
Well, there’s a really big “we.” First of all, there’s the writers’ room, and there was a fair amount of continuity from beginning to end. We’re all doing this together, and then there’s the cast, and when we really settled on our directors in Season 2, this is the group that’s doing it, and then our producers and our production designer. We could plan ahead.
We knew that we were going to be doing a Silo 1. Well, man, we’re going to do a lot of work in Silo 1 in Season 4, but we’ve got to start it in Season 3. So how much do we build? There’s all those decisions.
But story-wise, honestly, Jamie Erlicht and I discussed it before we even started, which was initially Jamie and I talked about five seasons: two for book one, one for book two, two for book three, and I said, “Jamie, we can’t do it the way Hugh wrote the second book. We can’t just have Juliette appear at the end of the season.” This was when we had landed Rebecca Ferguson, and it’s like we can’t do a season without Rebecca. She’s on the poster, and she’s Rebecca freaking Ferguson. She’s so good. So that changed things. I said, “What about four seasons?”
It’s a different math now than having six seasons of something, but really they get most of the juice out of the lemon in the first three or four years, anyways. So Apple was OK with it, and when we knew that, then we started planning how does Season 2 end, how does Season 3 end, and then we would work backwards.
It’s incredible freedom, and it also helps you sort of figure out the story. I won’t lie; the first draft of Episode 9 of the season was very long, and I loved it so much. I said, “Why don’t we end the season with that? Divide into two episodes.” And there was rebellion in the writers’ room. There was Katie DiSavino going, “No, we can’t.” And Fred didn’t want to do that because he was going to write the finale, and we finally figured out how to bring nine down into a reasonable size. Thank God we did it that way.
You said Season 4 is done?
Done.
Any chance that could come out sooner than a year from now, or still on a yearly release cadence?
No, it’s all just the visual effects. As one of our producers said, “At a certain point, more money doesn’t make it go faster.” We’ve got so many vendors, so many people, and stuff is coming in. We do calls every week or so and see what’s coming in and adjust this, adjust that. But it’s as fast as we can go. But also a year is good. In our modern thing, if you’re going a year and a half or two years, that’s problematic. I think a year is OK, and it’ll come around soon enough. I’m a Buffalo Bills fan. I’ve got to go from the end of January until September without them. I think people can make it.
“Silo” Seasons 1-3 are now streaming on Apple TV.
