Toxic earth revealed in AppleTV+ final Silo trailer

Silo, the new prestige series starring an ensemble cast led by Rebecca Ferguson, will be streaming on AppleTV+ on May 5. The final series trailer has dropped, revealing the landscape outside the bunkers as a blasted, toxic earth.

The trailer opens with Sheriff Holston (David Oyelowo) marching through the moody underground corridors with a grim expression. As the enforcer of the rules, Holston holds one of the prime, literal, and figurative, upper-level jobs in the silo.

With a voiceover from Bernard (Tim Robbins), the preacher figure in the community, we see that the lives of the underground dwellers have been reduced to a litany of easy to remember maxims for both safety and social control. One of them is the oft-repeated, “We do not know when it will be safe to go outside. We only know that today is not that day.”

What is the Silo series all about?

Based on Hugh Howey’s Silo series of novels, the 10 episodes tackle how, to avoid an unknown apocalypse from generations past, the last 10,000 people on earth have been sheltered in a vast and sprawling underground complex of silos that dig so deep it houses 140 floors. Generations have since grown and died without setting foot on the earth above.

Society has become self-sufficient yet strictly hierarchical. Helmed by executive producer and star Rebecca Ferguson, who plays the engineer Juliette Nichols, teasers of the series have intrigued sci-fi fans with the premise of a blasted earth and how an underground society needed to organize so that survivors could make it to the light at the end of the post-apocalypse.

“The show at its core is a mystery,” declares director Morten Tyldum in the trailer. Indeed, since the residents have been conditioned to believe that the world above is highly dangerous, there have also been doubters as to why any form of discussion about it is strictly banned.

Why is voicing one’s opinion about the world beyond the silos a criminal offense? Why are skeptics forced to go outside as punishment to suffer the toxic environment that we see in the trailer pervaded by a greyish atmosphere and full of twisted, lifeless trees?

Seeking answers to these questions and the murder of a loved one, Juliette starts to investigate minor clues. She begins pulling on threads, starting from her literally lowly station, way below the caste-like culture, in what’s known as The Deep Down.

Strange clues lead her to even greater mysteries that point to a cover-up about the past and about what really lies outside their underground walls. “[Juliette] wants to know, what is being kept from us?” adds executive producer Graham Yost.

The trailer ends with a person inside a suit, something dressed in a cross between a hazmat suit and an astronaut’s outfit. In an exciting cliffhanger, the huge doors of the silo open and the light of the sky shines down.

Is it Juliette stepping outside? We’ll know soon enough!

Silo’s first two episodes will be available to stream on AppleTV+ on May 5.