5/5 - Hugh Howey's SF Silo Series to be series on Apple TV

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81

So we just finished watching this last night. Skimmed through the thread above but may have missed some details …

We thought the heat tape thing was fine; Walk knew there was a reason it had been badly made, and connected the dots though to the loss of the clean-o-nauts, which we are sure is due to the ‘gas’ they get sprayed with just before exit (did they ever explain what that was said to achieve?) seeping into their suits. But! Someone must be maintaining that spray system, and refilling it with poison every now and then. Judicial? Really?

And yes, the VR green terrain that only the clean-o-nauts saw. What was the point? Why was there a video of that greenery inside the Silo at all, why have the suits record the VR and send it back in? I understand the story point - the V of birds flying over is exactly what Juliette sees when she goes out, so she knows it is fake.

And the brief flash of green terrain they see when the systems are shutting down a few shows earlier - why would that be?

And why have the security monitors hide their eyes when it comes on their screens, what does that achieve?

82

Re: “gas being sprayed”

It is not gas being sprayed on the person going outside. It’s an airlock. Under no circumstances can air from the outside be allowed inside the silo. What is killing people is outside the silo and as others have noted what’s outside gets inside the suit via weakness of the low quality heat tape. That’s all I’ll say about that. Read the 2nd book if you want to learn more.

As for the question of why do they clean? My perspective may be a bit different but as noted there is a cultural reverence when someone goes out clean. The silo creed mentions that they do not know when it will be safe to go outside but they know it is not today. Everyone on the levels with an outside view screen comes together to watch. People make long treks upward to level to watch. To gather. To commune. To hope that this time, this person does not die like people in the past. The victim going outside knows the only way anyone inside will know if tomorrow or the day after is the day when it will be safe is if the sensor is kept clean. Now, throw in all the psychological chaos that must be going on with facing death, seeing possible salvation and feeling like you’ve been given a lifeline and it’ll be okay, and I can easily see why they’d go clean. Maybe it won’t change what those inside see for now but without the cleaning they’ll quickly never see anything outside again. They’ll never know if tomorrow is the day. It is imperative that the sensor is cleaned.

83

Then why do they always claim that they aren’t going to do it? If that was true, they’d say “of course I am going to clean. It’s my last act for the community”.

84

I think it goes back to the psychological side of what you THINK you’re going to do before you go out vs. what you actually end up doing when faced with death and then a sudden unexpected reprieve. Are the people in shock and simply act as conditioned by their cultural expectations built up over a lifetime? It seems plausible to me.

But to be honest, I don’t really care. It’s a minor issue to me, not something that has to be explained… If they had said “most” clean instead of “all clean” may it wouldn’t be an issue to some. It wouldn’t really matter to me. I imagine for a living inhabitant someone saying historically “all clean” may be accepted as truth but it can’t be proven beyond what has been witnessed in that lifetime. There are no records we know of that the public has access to. There certainly are no publicly available videos. :smiley: If in a lifetime you maybe have one or two cleanings total, who is to argue “they all do it” isn’t true or that it is a lie?

85

I’m not going to spoiler anything, but I have read the books and after the first one I had the exact same questions and reservations you and others have expressed.

Later on in the books there are explanations given. I won’t say I was 100% satisfied with all of them, but there are reasons behind all this. I can’t say how closely this series will follow the books but I expect you’ll get some answers later on, assuming the series isn’t cancelled before that happens.

86

But they don’t know that the others also saw a green world. What I didn’t understand was why they had Mayor Jahns and Marnes killed. It doesn’t seem to help any of their goals at all. Both were just ready to retire and live out their lives, neither had any clue at all about what was going on.

87

The wife of the original sheriff knew because she saw the cleaning tape of the other person on the hard drive. The original sheriff knew because his wife told him and he even said that she was right as his last words.

88

I think killing the mayor was a mistake… they were trying to kill Marnes, and the water bottle swapping screwed that up. And the stated motive for killing Marnes, as I recall, was to kill him before he could name Juliette as Sherriff… due to some combination of her being a generally dangerous and independent-minded person, and her having an incentive to investigate George’s death, and her also already having f***ed with their heat tape.

89

So it’s like a self-contained dystopian world? Parts of the trailer reminded me of the choo- choo that couldn’t stop. Man, how big is that silo supposed to be?

90

It’s about 200 levels and about 10,000 people live there.

91

And the diameter of it’s footprint is not unimaginably large. It is nicely shown to human scale at the end of Season One.

92

So when the power was shut off why did the screen look green for a second?

93

It was a boot up glitch.

94

No one has suggested a non-fanwanky suggestion that really makes sense in-universe, sadly.

95

Just finished the season — I only stumbled across it a couple of weeks ago — and I have a thought or two.

Regarding @Nars_Glinley’s post (I’m not going to quote it because doing so tends to reveal spoilers): given Bernard’s comment that if Juliette had succeeded it would have killed everyone in the Silo, and his reaction when he realized she’d pierced the illusion (then failed to die on schedule), I have to wonder if the powers-that-be in Silo 1 have a tendency to take … extreme measures … against a Silo which shows signs of going “off the reservation.” Which doesn’t make a lot of sense since there doesn’t appear to be any way for a “rebellion” in one Silo to infect another (unless that’s the “door” George was referring to), but being “in control” sometimes operates under its own rules.

Also, I wonder if Juliette is going to try to enter another Silo? Doesn’t seem to be any obvious way to do so — I doubt the airlock has a doorbell — but taking her arc to this point (showing that the surface is uninhabitable and there are other Silos) only to have her die seems kind of pointless. Whatever she does, she’d better do it quickly since I don’t imagine she has much of an air supply.

Anyway, notwithstanding the shortcomings mentioned above, I find myself looking forward to Series Two. Even if it’s a prequel that doesn’t advance what we’ve seen so far, there are some interesting questions to be answered.

96

Spoilered because it’s major book spoilers, and who knows how closely the TV show will follow those:

Summary

Silo 1 does, very much, have a way to take extreme and permanent measures against a Silo that isn’t “behaving” the way they’d like.

In the book, some Silos had undergone disasters that killed (nearly) everyone inside without the intervention of Silo 1

Juliette does, in fact, make it to another Silo

There is a way for one Silo to make it to another, and in the book series that does happen with the result that Silo 1 takes extreme measures.

97

I finally found a way to watch this, so here’s a “4 months later” bump.

I’m glad this show got made, and I’m willing to forgive a lot if it means networks are still willing to take risks on stuff like this. I’ve enjoyed the discussion here about the justification for the “green world” deception – I don’t think any of the possible in-universe explanations make a lot of sense, and I agree that the author’s own justification as provided upthread is a bit weak as well. But it’s an interesting visual, adds some fun mystery, and oddly it doesn’t bother me a whole lot.

A few things that do bother me (show spoilers):

The show isn’t entirely consistent on the nature of resource scarcity. Paper seems like it would be in short supply, even though it can be almost infinitely recycled, and yet police reports are on physical paper, messages are passed around on paper, and drawing and doodling on paper isn’t frowned upon.

At one point the doctor uses a ruse of “I just need to grab some aspirin for my headache.”
Aspirin would either be reserved for only the most dire emergencies, or it would have run out long ago.
Unless it’s easier to synthesize from basic crops than I realize.

At one point they mention coffee. Maybe in-universe it’s some other roasted malty beverage that has adopted the name “coffee,” but I can’t stretch disbelief enough to think that they’re farming coffee in their limited space.

The entire turbine scene. Oh my god, I cannot agree enough with the above criticisms.
There’s no bypass vent? Oh but there is, because you can just take the sides of the turbine off which would allow all of the steam to bypass the blades. Except when they took the sides off, it didn’t seem to affect the turbine’s operation. And the valve getting red hot, and the entire steam pipe able to be cooled via the surface area on the valve itself, and somehow that stops the pressure from building up.
And yes, the fact that the turbine has been dragging some ridiculously damaged blades for an extended period of time, without anyone really being that concerned. I just… I couldn’t handle this episode. High tension nonsense.

All that said, my real issue with this show was laid out by Ann Perkins in the first ten minutes – if the rebels destroyed any information from prior to 140 years ago, why is it forbidden to try to recover that knowledge? Why are so few of the characters evidently concerned about this?

Well… people here who have read the books have suggested that there is an explanation given, and I was so annoyed at this basic “plot hole” permeating the first season that I wasn’t going to commit to watching any more seasons without knowing. So I spoiled the whole series for myself. For those who are interested but don’t want to be bothered to go read the wiki plot summary, here are book spoilers:

The world was destroyed by nanobots gone haywire. The creators of the silo wanted to restart human civilization with a genetically selected population that lacks a certain scientific curiosity, so that humanity wouldn’t repeat its mistakes. Atlanta was intentionally nuked in order to force the initial Silo participants underground. Magnification is forbidden because nanobots are bad and nobody can learn about them. The eugenics shown in the first season is the real star of the experiment, and dissidents are allowed to leave (to die) because it’s an easy way of getting rid of their bloodlines.

The plot gets a bit more involved, but that’s the basics of why things seem “off” to us viewers.

Now, my thoughts…

It’s a bold idea, but a pretty bad way to write a book series. The characters must act irrationally, because they’ve been bred to do so. But writing it as a mystery for the viewer means that in order to learn the truth about why the characters are seeming to act irrationally, we have to endure a whole lot of characters acting irrationally. Which is frustrating.

98

I just finished the series, too, because I wanted to reread the books before watching it (I read them when they first came out).

I think most of the criticisms and praise in this thread are valid. Some of the criticisms are just because the true explanation is unknown. The books do reveal the reasons, even if some readers/viewers might find the explanation unsatisfying. Mostly you have to accept the Founders as engaging in Asimov style psychohistory to control future people.

My biggest complaint about the show, which I didn’t see mentioned, was the insertion of Judicial. In the book IT was the heavy, and pretty much everything Judicial does in the show was done by IT and IT security. Or did I somehow completely miss that in the books?

Another big change from the books, which I think plays directly into the criticisms of the green world VR setup and always cleaning is what was on the hard drive. In the book, the first sheriff’s wife found the software that allowed manipulation of the camera feed and the creation of the VR world. She (and the readers) are led to believe it was being used to change what was shown on the screen in the cafeteria.

So anybody going out to clean would have no concept of the ability to do image manipulation or video overlays, so couldn’t even imagine what they were seeing was fake. In the books this adds suspense, because it takes Juliette a while to figure it out as even the Supply tape starts to fail. She is convinced by noticing the bodies had been replaced by rocks, which anyone else who went to clean might also notice, but again, they also would have no concept of not believing what they see.

Finally, one major theme in the book, that is kept in the show, is that none of the departments like or trust the others. Each thinks they are the most important, and don’t think the others matter. Nobody would have air or power without mechanical, therefore we are the most important. Nobody has new or repaired equipment without Supply, so how will you fix your machines without us, therefore we are most important. Nobody can eat without the farms, etc. This is deliberate, but also explains why things like fixing the generator are done quickly and byh trading favors with the mayor, rather than the way any functional organization would handle a major disruption.

99

Just finished the first season, and I have to admit that by the end I was watching at 1.2x speed with one finger on the ffwd button.

I’m completely baffled by the decision-making on this show.

Why did they try to stretch maaaybe four episodes of TV into ten? Are they worried about running out of plot? This season covered half of book one. They couldn’t commit to the full book? I vaguely remember it, and there’s nothing horrifically expensively groundbreaking about the second half of the first book - it’s pretty much more of the same, location-wise, sorta. They would’n’t’ve even had to expand the cast very much.

And, for a series rife with potentially interesting subplots - hell, just rife with opportunities to show how everyday life in the silo is conducted to an eagerly interested audience - why did they focus the show on the most insipid family drama / vague detective story of the most mid character ever? They killed off the most interesting characters right off the bat, and to me never quite found their footing afterwards - none of the remaining characters are likeable or relatable enough to root for, nor interesting enough to invest your attention in otherwise.

(And special mention to Common, who I guess is some sort of celebrity rapper or something, I don’t care enough to look it up. But one thing I do know, and it’s that he is not an actor. The impression I got whenever he came onscreen was, “Oh, there’s that guy that’s been hanging out with the actors.” If we could somehow harness the cringe that I felt whenever he tried to deliver lines requiring human emotion, our energy troubles would be over.)

Anyway, I won’t even get into nitpicking the actual plot of the show, but I will say that the author doesn’t seem to have much experience with much of anything - not technology, not logistics, not humanity, not even with the walking of stairs.

…

Hmn, I didn’t mean to come off so negative. The set design certainly had a lot of potential!

100

In their own silos, eh?