Apple TVThere’s one big question that haunts every post-apocalyptic story: the apocalypse itself. Maybe you start with the apocalypse unfolding in the first episode before leaping to the future, like The Last of Us or Fallout, maybe you keep the true nature of the apocalypse secret until a key moment, like in Paradise, or maybe you don’t acknowledge what happened at all, like in Twisted Metal. But Apple TV’s post-apocalyptic sci-fi series Silo is trying a new tack entirely.
Season 3, premiering in July, splits the story between the post-apocalyptic present, where Juliette (Rebecca Ferguson) returns to her home silo after being exiled for a “cleaning,” and the pre-apocalyptic past, where politicians do what they can to prepare for the worst. Check out the first teaser for the series below: These extended flashbacks aren’t coming out of nowhere. The final moments of Season 2 flashed back to Washington, D.C., in the near future, where a congressman met with a journalist to discuss the tragic events that had happened recently.
He gives her a gift — a duck Pez dispenser. He explains it away as something he panic-bought in a corner store, but for Silo fans, this seemingly meaningless prop is a huge tie to the show’s main storyline. Centuries in the future, it’s this Pez dispenser that persists as an artifact from “The Before Times.” Incorporating the origin story is a tactic pulled straight from the books.
Hugh Howey’s second book in the Silo trilogy, Shift, doesn’t actually include Juliette until the very end, instead focusing on events without her, intercut with flashbacks. But when you have Rebecca Ferguson on your show, you use her, so much of Season 2 was spent following her in a neighboring silo. It looks like Season 3 will now go back and cover those flashbacks from Shift while keeping Juliette’s story moving.As teased in the Season 2 finale, Season 3 of Silo will be split between the present and the “Before Times.” | Apple TVThese flashbacks are uniquely interesting for Silo.
We’ve heard discussions of the Before Times before, but nobody in the silo actually remembers what happened to force the population underground in the first place. So this isn’t an issue of the characters knowing something the audience doesn’t — instead, we’ll have the dramatic irony of knowing just what went down. Hopefully, we can watch Juliette and the rest of the silo dwellers figure it out for themselves, too.
Silo has a firm game plan in mind, as it’s already renewed for a fourth and final season. That means that everything we see in Season 3, even the prequel storyline, is the beginning of the end. Silo has always delivered some epic finales, and with this much runway and an even bigger scope than before, it’s likely everything is building to a series finale for the history books. Silo Season 3 premieres July 3 on Apple TV.