‘Silo’ Works Best When Rebecca Ferguson Goes Hard

Season two threw Juliette Nichols a curveball that proved Rebecca Ferguson can project a ferocious energy even when she’s not climbing and falling and grunting.
Photo: Rekha Garton/Apple TV+

Silo is perfectly okay B-grade science-fiction grub, though it has the distinction of being strangely bloodless, literally and metaphorically. Sure, it can be violent, and people die, but there’s a robotic sheen to the Apple TV+ series, which adapts Hugh Howey’s postapocalyptic novels set in a world where humanity is thought to be whittled down to just tens of thousands of people living in massive underground silos. Even when characters curse —and they do like to say “fuck” a lot! — the utterance feels superfluous, like they’re saying it because that’s what people are supposed to shout when they’re pissed.

Not so with Rebecca Ferguson, who stars and serves as executive producer on Silo. As Juliette Nichols, a mechanical whiz turned sheriff who quickly discovers that nothing is as it seems, she injects so much electricity into the air that she could light up a small town. The second-season finale has a moment when she yells, “Be angry at the motherfuckers who built this place and put us in it!!,” and she goes so hard you can feel the walls vibrate. Ferguson is an absolute beast, and the way she commits to Nichols results in fleeting moments where Silo suddenly becomes kind of great.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen Ferguson give a performance that’s anything short of hilariously intense. This is no complaint. In the Mission: Impossible franchise, she plays Ilsa Faust, an impossibly cool femme fatale who stares holes into walls and whose grand introduction involves steadying a sniper rifle with one of her very long legs. Dune: Part Two finds Ferguson’s Lady Jessica skulking around caves as she mutters about the glorious future to her unborn fetus, freaking out the people around her. One of her best characters is Rose the Hat, the leader of a psychic-vampire cult in Mike Flanagan’s Doctor Sleep, in which she wears a top hat and utters her signature phrase — “Hi there” — with tectonic severity. Ferguson even brings intensity to the late-night circuit: Here she is walking onto Fallon carrying a Dyson vacuum like a Swedish Terminator; here she is on Colbert and Meyers, giving genial dominatrix as she constantly breaks the flow of conversation to establish control.

So it is with Silo, which channels Ferguson’s inimitable ferocity to its own benefit, and ours. It helps that the show gives her plenty of physical work to do. The first season made her spelunk in the silo’s depths as she looked for answers. She climbs pipes, shimmies up ropes, falls from tall places, and all the while, Ferguson augments these sequences with a cacophony of grunts and guttural screams that locks you into the reality of the universe. She gets even more physical labor to do in Silo’s second season, with Nichols navigating a seemingly abandoned neighboring silo for material to help her return home: more pipes, more ropes, more falls, more grunts, more yells. At some point, you might start to wonder this: Why doesn’t anybody else in the cast have to do such grueling tasks? Nichols is almost always alone when facing these physical challenges, but it never gets old because Ferguson sells the difficulty of these tasks so well. Watch her eyes study the world around her; that conscious sense of looking gives a tangible quality to the surrounding set.

Season two also threw her character a curveball that proved Ferguson can project a ferocious energy even when she’s not climbing and falling and grunting. With Nichols sequestered from the rest of the established cast, Silo locks Ferguson into a nearly season-long two-hander with Steve Zahn, who plays Solo, a man she discovers in the new vault who she later learns has been alone since he was a child. This makes Solo an interesting foil for Nichols, a whimpering man-child to her hypercompetent and quiet loner. As you would expect from Zahn, he’s great at drawing sympathy from a character that initially tracks as pathetic, but you do still want to slap him in the face. So does Nichols, and the dynamic that emerges between the two is pretty compelling to watch. Nichols, an alpha who understands she can’t just bulldoze Solo into giving her what she needs, shifts between trying to connect and reason with him as she grows increasingly desperate. Again, there’s a striking physicality to how Ferguson holds her body in contrast to Zahn’s Solo: She’s so tightly wound while he’s loosey-goosey, having spent most of his life behind a locked door not having to worry much about what’s happening outside. It’s a fun give-and-take that adds a real spark to an otherwise stolid show.

Not that Silo is bad, necessarily. The show has a few quirks that generally add to its watchability. Tim Robbins, Oscar winner, plays the head of the silo’s IT department who by the end of the first season becomes mayor, turns out to be the secret baddie, and ends the second season in near madness after discovering that he never had any control over his fate in the vault. Harriet Walter, whom you might remember as the very British mother to the three main Roy children in Succession, plays her character with a very American twang. Common is also on the show, hard at work pulling off the one lone facial expression he seems to know how to do as Sims, the heavy in charge of maintaining order in the underground society. Many of the younger actors are good-looking in a generic sort of way. It’s just unfortunate that so much of the rest of the show feels like a SyFy series given an Apple TV+ glow-up. There’s lot of rich ideas baked into its premise of a society built on literal class strata segmented according to work functions, with bits in there about the nature of societal control, fascism, and the spark of rebellion, but it generally doesn’t explore its moral and philosophical questions in ways that are thorny or difficult. For a show set in a dangerous world, the whole thing feels suspiciously chill. Except, of course, for Ferguson, whose core gift is being devoid of any chill, and we’re all the better for it.