What’s next in season 3?

The “Silo” The Season 2 finale ended with another astonishing twist as the Apple TV+ sci-fi mystery series went back in time 140 years to show viewers the world before the silos.

To answer your most pressing questions: Yes, Ashley Zuckerman and Jessica Henwick are joining the cast of “Silo” for Season 3, and yes, there will be a lot more exploration of the “Silo” origin story going forward.

How was the show so well prepared to set up Season 3 in that Season 2 finale? As “Silo” showrunner Graham Yost revealed to TheWrap during an interview in connection with the finale, he has actually had the green light to complete the adaptation of Hugh Howey’s books since 2023.

“Ok so now the cat’s out of the bag we can talk about it. I’d say five weeks into Season 1 we knew we were going to do the whole thing,” he said of completing the adaptation. While the show was publicly greenlit for two more seasons last fallYost revealed that Apple agreed to end the series when Season 1 aired due to the strong response from fans.

Not only that, but Season 3 is already months into filming, and Season 4 has been completely written. Seasons 3 and 4 will be shot back-to-back throughout 2025 with only a short break to complete pre-production on the final season.

Talk about planning ahead.

But what about the big confrontation with Juliette (Rebecca Ferguson) and Bernard (Tim Robbins)? What exactly did Lucas find out that scared him so much? And are there more major deaths to come? All that and more revealed in TheWrap’s season 2 finale post-mortem interview with Yost below.

When did you know you were going to end this season with a big flashback that would reveal what was going on before the silos?

A lot of it is just instinctive and also just trial and error. Breaking season 2 was hard. We didn’t know how far season 2 would go. We thought that maybe we would have Juliette over in Silo 17 for two seasons, and then we said: “No, we can’t stand that. We don’t need to maintain that. Let’s move it on.” Then it was like, what’s season 3 and what’s season 4? I don’t want to get into all that, but we’ll get into some origin story in season 3, you’ve now met Daniel and Helen , played by Ashley Zuckerman and Jessica Henwick.

There was talk with Apple, at first there were some who thought that we might just end up with Juliette on fire in the airlock. And we said, “No, this is not a show that ends on just a cliffhanger. It has to be something that gets answered and something gets raised.” At the end of season 1, when she walks over the hill and out of sight, we could have ended it. But no, we want her to see that there are 50 other silos. So now we have answered some things and now we are asking new questions.

With this one, it was a different kind of thing. We knew people would go, “Oh s–t, that’s where the Pez came from. What does that mean?” It drives us so forward, and that’s kind of the way this show works best because it’s a mystery show.

So tell me about the plan to finish the series for the next two seasons. Will they closely follow Hugh Howey’s books?

In Hugh’s books, the second book, Juliette only appears on the last page. Originally, Jamie Erlicht and I thought the series would run for five years, and that Book 1 would be two seasons, Book 2 would be one season, and Book 3 would be two seasons. And I called him and I said, “We’ve got Rebecca Ferguson, we can’t do a season of TV with her (only) in the last scene. We’ve got to come up with something else.” That’s when we decided on four seasons, and that was really our plan from the beginning.

So we knew that in the book there’s a lot of stuff about what happened 140 years ago, and then there’s the origin story. We have monkey with the origin story dramatically and renamed him from Donald to Daniel. No matter where you are on the political spectrum, we just didn’t want someone named Donald in that role. It’s just too confusing for people and are we making a point? Aren’t we making a point? We just don’t want to address the matter. And we wanted to make more out of their relationship than was actually in the book, so we also changed Thurman. So there’s that, but then we came up with a different story for Juliette for the period that we’ll get into when season 3 comes out. But I will just say that a lot of season 3 is about memory.

But we felt with Season 2, just these two stories in Silo 18 and Silo 17, it was fun. We rolled the dice and went for the two opening episodes, one with Juliette and one without Juliette, and it just felt right. People have asked how do we know when to cut back and forth? We just tried it. And sometimes in editing we say, “Oh no, let’s move this, let’s skip at this point.”

How early did you know you were getting a two-season renewal to finish the entire series?

OK, so now that the cat is out of the bag, we can talk about it. I would say five weeks into season 1 we knew we were going to do it all. In terms of being released, it was like, “Oh, it’s connecting with people. People are talking about it.”

It’s an incredibly complicated show to produce. There is only so much stage space, so sets have to be built, shot in, taken down, something else built in that place. And then: “Oh, you want to do that IT bull again? We have to rebuild that.” And it takes three weeks. When we’re doing 10 episodes, we shoot all 10 episodes at one point every week, and that means all the directors have to be there all the time, a lot of the cast, and then it’s the availability of the cast It’s Grammy week so Common can’t be there Rebecca is doing a movie promotion for ‘Dune 2’.

All of this is weighed in, so we had to write all the scripts early on. All of season 2 was written before we finished shooting season 1. We finished writing season 3 pretty much before the strike was called, and that was while we were filming season 2. And we’ve written all of season 4. So, because we have to plan, there is no break. We’re shutting down three months of pre-production for Season 4, and then we’re rolling right in.

Apple hasn’t seen all the scripts for season 4. They’ve seen up through episode 9, they just haven’t seen the finale. So the great thing about doing it is everybody’s like, “Oh, that thing is Season 3. We can pay it off in Season 4,” or “This thing is in Season 4, we’re going to set it up in Season 3. So it’s an incredible luxury.

So when do you start shooting season 3?

We are already filming.

Wow.

I know, I know. We’ve all had to play cute. We trust Apple and they have their way of doing things and I understand that.

When you construct the Season 2 finale and the scene with Juliette and Bernard in the airlock, there are many things you can reveal in that scene. How do you thread the needle on what to reveal and what to withhold?

It’s guesswork. We feel like the world that Hugh created and our approach to it – and his support has been great – but we feel like there’s flesh and we can set things up and we can try this and try that, but that doesn’t mean we don’t try it 10 different ways. We talked so much about that conversation. What will they say? How much do we need? How much can we reduce it? How much do we lean towards something? Just how much do we have to step things up?

I would say that in the final confrontation between them, every word counts. There are certain key words that you will see come back in a big way in season 3. I will also say to those who have read the books, Bernard dies at the end of the book, he is gone. So I’ll just say that. No one is safe on this show, as we showed in Season 1.

So just to clarify, Judge Meadows quit because she found out there was a tunnel of poison gas that could leak into the silo and that’s what Lucas tells Bernard?

Okay, because what the voice is saying is, if you tell anybody about this, we’re going to put this protection in place. “Do you know what protection is? Yes, I do.” And that’s what Juliette finds out with Jimmy/Solo that something is coming. They could do this and my parents tried to stop this and that’s what they worked on and that was it. Because there are many mysteries about Silo 17. The most important thing is that all the people went outside, they had an hour to get outside. They didn’t all die in three minutes. What the hell happened out there? It will be part of season 3. You will get the answers to all that. And then there are other things you won’t find out until season 4.

But yes, that is the knowledge that Juliette brings back. Bernard says, “They can kill us at any time,” and she says, “Maybe not,” and that’s the bottom line, is “Maybe not. Now what?” That’s what she brings back to Silo 18. She didn’t know that’s what she was supposed to do. She thought she was just going to go and hold up a sign that said: Don’t come outside. It’s not safe,” is it? But she ends up having great knowledge. And then the little preview for Season 3 is all that is just completely ripped away from her abilities early on, right from the jump.

The end of the whole series. Is it different or similar to the end of the books?

You have to pay to find out.

Hear you tell me you wrote the series finale, I have to ask.

I know that. Yes, there were many tears in the writers’ room. It has been a strange, wonderful experience. The entire writers’ room has been on Zoom for the entire series. We came into each other’s lives in a different way than you do in person. In person, you eat lunch together and you talk to each other in the hallway. But on Zoom, you see the child come in to give his father a hug. You see the baby who was born three weeks ago being introduced to the room. It’s been an amazing bunch of years.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

“Silo” is streaming on Apple TV+.

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