‘Silo’ Is More Than a Dystopia. It’s a Theology of the Human Spirit
Editor’s note: This piece contains spoilers.
(REVIEW) I never realized the TV series “Silo” was so deep.
Discard your Midwestern notions of grain silos standing in fields. I’m talking about holes in the ground with people living inside for centuries after an unnamed apocalypse.
This subterranean world is the sci-fi creation of author Hugh Howey in his trilogy starting with “Wool” and popularized in the Apple TV show. The show just wrapped up a groundbreaking third season and is digging its way to next summer’s finale.
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The world Howey built and TV creator Graham Yost (“Justified” and “The Americans”) crafted with his writers was perfect for the slow-going, weekly streaming schedule of setups and payoffs. It’s also why it took me a while to see the deep theology showing up.
The show’s citizens live in 144 floors of civilization and social class. Mechanics and miners keep the generators going down deep; elites administrate from up top. The mushy mids grow food, treat the sick and teach the children — those allowed by population control.
The system’s design speaks to a designer — known as the Founders — who saved the people from the outside world and continue to save them from a toxic environment they can only see on a giant viewscreen or hear about in their sacred text, “The Pact”:
“We do not know why everything outside the silo is as it is. We do not know... when it will be safe to go outside. We only know that day is not this day.”
The survivors have their scripture and their story, so they must also have their system to show rules have consequences. Anyone asking to go outside is sent to clean – a public ritual all citizens watch as the offender exits, glimpses an illusion of beauty, then wipes off the camera lens just in time for everyone to see them die.
But free will is hard to bury.
Juliette Nichols is the cleaner who lived, a determined mechanic named the new sheriff in town because she dares to investigate everything. Her probing inevitably leads to cleaning, and she becomes the hero because she tops the hill and keeps walking, returning weeks later with a new story to tell.
Or she would, if she could just remember it.
The last pillar of this society’s shaky social structure is memory. To maintain order, someone or something wipes away Juliette’s identity. Forgetting is its foundation. The Founders chose a clean slate for everyone, because when they remember, they rebel.
I soon realized I wasn’t watching Orwell’s “1984” or Huxley’s “Brave New World.” “Silo” skillfully weaves all of these dystopian tropes into the background of something quite new. The hints were there in the opening titles we streamers learn to skip. The closing shot is an animation of the show’s citizens going up and down and up and down the endless steps.
Silo is not a city — it’s an ant farm. Season 3 showed me the ants were scurrying in Eden.
The most recent chapters introduced us to the founder of founders – an untouchable tech billionaire who paid for it all to save some lives. We’re also told the silos were humanity’s last chance — a reset of society and innocence with a god-like AI actively enforcing the boundaries. This entity later turns out to be an ordinary human wizard hiding behind a screen, yet demanding you pay attention because he commands weapons of destruction.
Here we must part from our Eden metaphor. The god(s) of “Silo” are not only ordinary but corrupted by their delusions that the human spirit can be caged for the greater good. This world is no utopia or the never-fallen planet Malacandra of C.S. Lewis’s space trilogy; it’s an ant colony experiment that must be managed 24/7 by an army of surveillance and suppression.
Silo’s god is not the God and I don’t believe its creators are challenging true myth. In probing eternal issues of free will vs. determinism, the series asks all of us to question our social compacts, moral codes and reasons for living.
As a Christian, I’m inspired by the series’ story because I look to my own faith with questions and actual answers. My God reveals and does not hide. My God disciplines yet also redeems. My God entered into our dark down-deep and saved us by becoming one of us. And my fellow citizens are not ants but image-bearers of the one God, free to choose His way up and out of the hole.
Like Silo’s offenders, believers have caught a vision of something so beautiful we want to wipe off the muck of this world so others can see. Our Eden is not a cage, but a horizon we will reach when we choose the right door and let God clean.
Dr. Randall E. King is a professor of communication at North Greenville University in South Carolina and a former television reporter and news producer. He writes about media issues on his Substack, TURN IT OFF: Media Literacy for Followers.