Dystopian sci-fi doesn’t have to mean relentlessly bleak and cynical.
In Apple TV’s Silo – based on the Wool novel series by Hugh Howey – there’s a lot wrong in the lives of the 10,000 people confined to subterranean Silo 18. However, surprisingly, discriminatory attitudes to race, gender and sexual orientation aren’t among them. It’s an interesting approach in a series that already has a nuanced handling of “villainy,” and intricately thought-out world building couched in practicality and logic.
We got to probe this specific creative choice, more apparent on the screen than the page, in an exclusive interview segment with Silo showrunner Graham Yost and series star Rebecca Ferguson (both executive producers on the series). Watch and/or read below.
Having launched on 3 July, Silo Season 3 is streaming now on Apple TV, with new episodes every Friday. You can read our spoiler-free S3 review here.
Noelle Adams (Pfangirl.com): I’ve always appreciated, and been interested in how sexual orientation, along with gender and ethnicity, is such a non-issue within the silo, and its social structure – which is so much unlike our own. Could you elaborate on that creative choice?
Graham Yost: Yes, we can and we will.
Rebecca Ferguson: So I hadn’t even questioned it.
Graham Yost: I think one of the things we hit upon is, OK, there’s something very wrong in what we find out eventually about Silo 18; but also right from the beginning with the sheriff, and his wife. There’s something wrong with how everything is structured. They don’t know when the silo was built, or why, and when it’ll be safe to go outside and all of that. So, we know there’s something wrong.
And yet what we loved about the fact that they’ve had their memories erased, and they don’t know where they come from, is that in a way, as human beings, they forgot to be racist, they forgot to be sexist, they forgot to be gender normative, they forgot to be homophobic. People just live their lives. It doesn’t really matter who you love or what you think, what you look like, what colour your skin is, or any of that – they wouldn’t even understand it.
And yet there’s so much they don’t know, like Juliet is afraid of water in the first season because she’s never seen water deeper than a bathtub. There’s so much that that these silo people are ignorant of, but what they’re not ignorant of is just being human beings and trying to get along.
Rebecca Ferguson: That’s a good answer. And I agree. It’s such a good question. I think we have hierarchy; that’s what we have. The focus is order, structure, don’t question certain things, and stick to your level. I guess that’s the only sort of parameter of any form of “ism.”
Graham Yost: Yeah, there’s not really a caste, but it’s sort of a class system to a degree. But even that, ultimately, there’s a sense in the silo that they carry of “We’re all in this together,” but they also know that there’s something kind of wrong. But the good thing is they just get to be.
So that was a real conscious choice by Hugh (Howey) and in the writers’ room. There have been certain relationships, and it was like, “Well, we want these two to be together,” and it doesn’t matter what their gender is. We just do that. They’re just living their lives.
