Silo Midseason Report (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 watched this tonight. There's always something good to watch. Let's get started today on the show. As I previously recorded an episode about Silo on my iPhone, I thought I would keep the tradition going in the spirit of Silo, I'm I'm using a relic to record this episode. I just watched episode seven, The Flamekeepers.

0:58 Silos an interesting show, you know. I think it's very much a prototypical streaming show for better and for worse. So for better in the sense that it has an incredible cast, it has a clearly very large budget. It feels like it has all this sort of prestige of a high end streaming show. Graham Yost obviously like big name creator and all that. Based on popular series of novels, so it has all those elements, and it had a great first couple of episodes, and then it kind of slowed down, and I remember when they did the first couple of episodes, I think I said something to the effect of, wow, they're really moving it, doesn't It feels like they're like expending a lot of story material in these first couple episodes, and I wondered how they were going to kind of keep that going.

1:52 And the way they kept it going was they slowed way down and we got some kind of shoe leather in between episodes, and honestly, it got so enough that I almost stopped watching it. And the way they kind of kept me in was they have really good end of episode outs where the mystery, you know, continues kind of unfurling, and then just within I would say this episode of the one before it, it really kind of picked back up again and now I'm super excited to get to the end of the series. So it felt like in a way like and Or, you know, and Or had this issue as well, where first, I think the first couple episodes were really strong, and then there was a couple of middle episodes that were a little bit slower, and then it just kind of picked back up and was awesome all the way to the end. I don't think this is as good as and Or. I think that there is some kind of clunky stuff in some of the writing, and that's part of what I want to talk about. So we um episode seven. This is sort of my mid season check in on or or on side. So if you're not caught up on Silo with the most recent episode, you should probably not listen to this. But if you are caught up, or if you have given up and you're just not gonna watch the rest of the show and you want to know what happens, then keep listening. So they've established my guy, Ian Glenn as Rebecca Ferguson's dad, who is this doctor that she's estranged from?

3:22 And Ian, you know, it's so interesting he in this Endgame of Thrones, he plays a character who has a relationship with a woman whom he clearly loves but has betrayed in some way and now is sort of this like long suffering, you know, relationship with that person where you're just like, man, can we get Ian Glenn a hug? Can someone can she just give him a moment of grace? And it was interesting to be that it's that commonality between the roles. I don't know if I mentioned this before. But I'll just quickly give you thirty seconds of my personal experience with Ian Glenn. Ian is in an episode of Voyage Media's series Fever Dreams of Pulp Collection.

4:02 He's actually in the first episode called Down in the Double's Hole. And when we cast him, typically what we do is we record and the actors record themselves and then I direct them over zoom and so that's what we wanted to do, and they said, no, he's going to record it by himself and he'll send it to you. And but he just wants to talk to you for half an hour. So I talked to him zoom. We talked through the role and the character and all that, and he basically was like, listen, I'm going to do it one time. You're gonna get it. It's gonna be pretty pretty much. He's such a gentleman, he's such a classy guy. He's just really like the coolest guy. But pretty much what he said was, you know, I'm going to do it once.

4:42 I'm going to do it well, and if you have any issues with it, you know, let me know and I can make adjustments. But that's how I'm going to do it. And I'm gonna just send it to you and that'll be it. And we were a little nervous because that, you know, you have to put a lot of trust in the actor, obviously when we know he's an incredible actor, but we were just worried, like what if something was missing or you know, like an oversighter. It was perfect, perfect, He did it perfectly. So you know, he's someone who I have a tremendous amount of perspect for as an actor, and I was really excited to see him in this show. And it's cool to see they've given him a pretty juicy role. You know, as this episode goes along, you learn that he's complicit in the conspiracy of the Silo in a major way. But part of what happens in this episode, and that's why I say it's not quite as strong as like and or. So there's this lady who was a fertility specialist and she's been drugged and they have to take her to an area, sneak her out of the medical facility where the drugs will wear off and she can tell them what she knows about the conspiracy.

5:46 So they sneak her into the nursery and they have this whole conversation, she has a seizure a lot, it's just them in this room. They're like the cameras don't work in here for some reason. And then like ten minutes in this scene, essentially because this lady was never able to have children and wanted children, it's an emotional moment when a baby cries in the nursery and then she picks up the baby, So emotionally makes sense, right, But on a like logical are they just leaving these babies alone overnight? They established that the nursery is empty. The least lady there's like I'm leaving for the night, So they're just leaving these babies completely alone overnight. And also this baby does not wake up when these people are having like an impassioned conversation right next to it. Just that whole it really, I don't think it made any sense, you know. I mean, I would happily be proven wrong, but I just didn't see how they made any sense. So that kind of felt a little bit rushed to me. And that's where I say that, you know, you compare it to something like and or that moment when Andy Circus says I can't swim, so heartbreaking you know, they really earned that moment, and I feel like some of the emotional beats in Silo are not pulled off quite as strongly. But I still really like the show, and I think that they did do something actually in this episode that they did pull off and it was very satisfying. So I want to compliment the show

7:17 for that. In the previous episode I leave it was episode six, we established that there's people watching everybody. There's a room where they're just watching everybody, and if you turn on the captions, it refers to the guys in there as watchers like watch her one watch or two watch or three. And over the course of the show, Rebecca Ferguson has been learning all these little clues and stuff, and they've dropped all these breadcrumbs. And in this episode, Rebecca Ferguson is in the Fertility Ladies room and she puts it all together and she realizes that there's cameras in the mirrors, and then she takes a blanket and covers the mirror, and all the people that are in the surveillance room they're like, oh shit, Like you see the other people in the back who were working on other stuff kind of like stand up and walk over like it's a seismic change in the silo. So that was really satisfying.

8:11 That's I think why the show works. It's a pretty rare situation where the central mystery of what is going on here is so good that as long as they could keep coming up with these kind of like act outs or episode outs that advanced the mystery considerably, it's just hard to stop watching it. And such good actors, I mean, Rebecca Ferguson, Ian Glenn, you know, they had Will Patton was there for a while and they killed him off, David Oyiloo, Rashida Jones, Tim Robbins, which, by the way, Tim Robbins, it feels like there's still some cards left to play.

8:52 I think him and Common, who plays kind of the antagonist. It feels like they have like they need their moment, right, they need their moment like Andy Serkis had an and or. That really deepens those characters, and I hope it's coming, like I want to believe the show has that up as sleeve. It's an interesting thing, and that's why I say it's it's kind of like a prototypical streaming show. It's just good enough that You're like, this feels really good, like I'm gonna keep watching it. I think it's very well made, but at the same time, it also feels like it a little bit undercooked in some hard to define way. It's almost like if they had I don't know, I'm not sure. I mean, there's there's a lot of talk within the writer's guild, obviously because the strike and everything about many rooms and not enough writers on staff and not enough time to make these shows and things of that nature. And I do wonder about that, you know, I do almost feel like I can sense that, And I could be wrong. It could be that they had plenty of time all that kind of stuff, but I almost feel like they need like twenty one percent time in the oven. It just feels slightly undercooked, but at the same time, it is really good, Like I'm really excited to finish it out, and I think it is one of the better streaming shows that's on TV right now. So that's where I say it's it's kind of prototypical of our time, you know. You think about and or Tony Gilroy has reached a point in his career where I think he has such juice that he can really throw his weight around. And obviously and Or because the Star Wars property,

10:24 I'm sure his budget was like insane and like a limited essentially, So yeah, I just I do wonder about that. One of the things I'm actually kind of worried about for the next season of Andor is My understanding is Tony is not I don't think he's working on it like day to day because of the writer strike, so he might not be able to make the adjustments you know that he would otherwise be able to make in production and post production. So I'm a little concerned about that. But yeah, Silo, you know, it's sort of it got me in really good in the beginning, almost lost me in the middle, and now it pretty much fully has me back, and so I'm very excited to see where they go with the last couple episodes. I would love to know what you all think about Silo.

11:09 You can almost reach me at dan ad Voyagemedia dot com. Watch This Tonight on Instagram, Watch This Night podcast on TikTok. You can join our Facebook group. Are you still in on Silo? Did you have that same kind of middle period where you almost left like me? I know, my guy brother of Doom and I have been messaging about it, and you know, he sort of had a similar feeling, and you know, I think we both felt that it's sort of got its mojo back. So yeah, it'll be interesting to see if it finishes out the season at a real high point. It feels like the potential for that is there, So yeah, excited to see what happens next on Silo. That is the show for today. As always, thank you so much for listening. I'm still on the hunt for the next great like Sunday night thing to watch from HBO. Maybe there isn't one, but if you have one, reach out Until next time, m h look, look, look