Silo (Apple+)

0:01 Voyage. Welcome to watch this tonight. I'm your host, Dan Bettimore. I'm a producer, writer of film and television and now a podcast producer. And despite having every streaming service, I never know what to watch. So anytime I watch something good, I talk about it on the show. This way, you'll never have the same problem I do. I watch this tonight, there's always something good to watch. Let's get started. We don't know who built the silo. We don't know why we're here. We don't know why things are and the way they are outside. We don't know when it will be safe to go outside. This is the religious motto of the silo.

0:52 This is a new show on Apple Plus. I'm going to give you just the basic premise and then we're gonna talk about why the execution of this show is proof that chat GPT is never going to be able to write television. So there's all these people underground. They're in a silo. The silo is at least one hundred and twenty floors, it could be even more. I'm going to really avoid spoilers here because I really want you to watch this and I want you to be able to listen to this episode without it being spoiled for you. The essential idea of dystopian, you know, all these people in a silo underground. If you just start from that, typically what you're gonna have is something where you know, there was like ecological disaster, humans were driven underground, and it's a known thing. Everybody knows what happened, why they're there, their history. Instead a really clever subversion of that, they don't know, they don't know like how long really have we been here? Why did this start? Who built this thing? Like what are we doing here? So that was a really clever subversion of probably like the typical way you would write this. We meet David Oyolowo and Rashida Jones and there are a couple and they've they've been given reproductive clearance, so they're going to try to have a baby, and everyone in the silo knows immediately.

2:13 It's like the next day, like they're walking to breakfast and it was like hey, sweet good luck, good luck bro. And clearly Rashida Jones doesn't like that everybody knows, which means that it's not something that they like shared on like the silo Facebook page, like they clearly it's like this is just a thing that is known in the community for some reason. But like why, you know, if anything you would expect the opposite, wouldn't it be kind of like a secret, And it's a privilege that they're getting, and so that's sort of interesting. And then the doctor removes Rashida Jones birth control capsule. They do like an extreme close up of this terrifying looking device, and I'm watching it, going, there's no fucking way, there's no way that's just for birth control. So at each step in the pilot you can sense that something is wrong, but it's not exactly the way that you would expect given the premise. In other words, it's really well written in a nuanced way. That's why I'm saying chat GPT would never be able to do this. The nuance of it, the cleverness of it, the way that it kind of subtly subverts a lot of what you would expect given the premise.

3:20 That's special. That's what makes it good. Also great to see Tim Robbins coming out of the Witness Protection Program. Tim Robbins has just been very unlucky in picking TV projects since twenty fifteen. His TV credits are The Brink which is a show that I don't think very many people watched. Here and Now again a show I don't think many people watched, and Castle Rock, which I think more people watched, but again still wasn't like a big hit, wasn't part of the zeitgeist, that kind of thing. He shows up for one scene and then he goes back into witness protection everybody to see if we get I hope to see a lot more of Tim Robbins and the rest of the show. So the reason that they don't know their own history is they say, we blame the rebels for racing our history. One criticism of the show is they refer to their history before what they know of as the before Times, which I'm pretty sure they did that on Solar opposites. Like that's the one thing that's like a little bit of a sci fi trope, just the language there. But it is really interesting. Their history only goes back one hundred and forty years. They have no idea what happened prior to that. All they know is that they've been told their whole lives. If anyone opens the door to the outside world, we're all going to die.

4:30 A computer repair guy finds one hundred and forty year old hard drive and it gets through. Shea Jones curious about what's inside of it, and they find some video in there that they watch and we just see it reflected in her glasses. Whatever she sees in there totally blows her mind. And what's so exciting in that moment and that moment as you're watching the show, you're like, this could be anything. It could be like giant bird creatures, like what is on this video? What I also love about it is that Silo really moves like the pilot moves. We are getting through plot here. I think the bad version of this, the stuff that happens in the pilot, would be like six episodes and it just is burning through plot and you're thinking, man, like, where are we going here? How are they gonna, you know, have enough road left to go that they can do a TV series. About halfway through the pilot, there's definitive proof that the system is a lie, which like obviously you know that going in right, that's not really a spoiler. Like you know, if you've ever watched television, if you've ever read sci fi, like you know that that something's run in Denmark. Here we also know because they do a teaser device to tease it in the opening that Rashida Jones is going to go out of the silo.

5:35 We see her in the teaser with an astronaut kind of helmet, and we also know that Oyoloo will want to go outside eventually too, So we know all those things very early in the show. The spoiler, which I'm not going to spoil here is why why does she want to go outside? And I want to just again compliment the quality of the writing, so you know, I think typically with this sort of premise, it would be a bit convoluted to keep the people in the silo, right, it would be just like, oh, we just just don't go like, but the way they've designed this world, they've made it so it's credible, Like if you were living in the silo, you'd probably be like, all right, like says to me, If you want to leave, all you have to do is say I want to leave, and any request to leave the silo is granted, so you're not trapped there. They have a giant viewscreen in their like cafeteria that shows the outside world and shows the bodies of people who have previously left the silo. So again it's it's really well thought out, Like you could totally understand if you are a resident in the silo that you would stay there. It wouldn't be it wouldn't be an unreasonable thing to think that you would see there. So it takes this standard sci fi premise, this kind of you know, it's high concept, but it's familiar, and they execute it really well every step of the way. And then at the end of the pilot and this is not again I'm not explaining anything. Rebecca Ferguson, who's on the cover on all the art. You're sort of watching the pilot like where is she? She shows up at the end, and she's just immediately a star. She kind of has always been like that, you know,

7:08 since she showed up in Mission a Possible Rogue Nation. She owns the screen. She just has a quality and she would have been a star in any era of Hollywood. Like there's a version of where Rebecca Ferguson is born, you know, however, many years earlier and is in Casablanca, right, Like she is just a classic star. And there's a way that she's introduced, the visual of which how she's introduced really reminded me of Ripley and Aliens. She's just you know, she has a magnetism to her that she's such an asset to anything she's in and I'm really excited to see where the story is going to go with her with Tim Robbins. Just you know, a lot of good actors in this show and a very aggressive plot. And this continues in episode two by the way, Like I'm again not spoiling it, but I started watching eppisode two and they're just give and ship away.

8:00 You're like, WHOA. So that's exciting when you're watching a show and you're like they're not stalling for time, like they're not trying to fill an episode count here, they are moving. So yeah, Silo, you know, another good Apple Plus show. It's almost to the point where I got to start reviewing the Apple Plus shows that aren't that good, just so it doesn't feel like I'm like a homer for Apple Plus. But really Silo is very impressed with So if you like sci fi, totally encourage you to check out Silo. Definitely worth your time. That is the show for today. If you notice the show sounding a little different today, it's because I had to record it on my iPhone. Yeah, spoiler, This is all recorded on my iPhone in the sound booth of my car because my Friday was a disaster and I did not have time to record on Friday, so I had to sneak in a weekend recording away from my children. That's what I do for you, dear listener. Anyway, let me know what you think of Silo if you check it out. And that is the show for the day till next time. M h m hm m m m m m m m