‘Silo’ Exits Its Titular Location, as Season 3 Turns Into a Riveting Political Thriller with a Brand New Timeline

It’s rare to see a TV show completely reinvent itself, but that’s exactly what Apple TV’s post-apocalyptic sci-fi epic “Silo,” based on the books by Hugh Howey, has done with its upcoming third season. Thanks to a last-minute surprise scene in the Season 2 finale, approximately half of the running time (roughly) of Season 3 turns what was a mystery box show about what happens after the end of the world into a taut political thriller that is part Tom Clancy, part Robert Heinlein, and set in — if not the present — the very near, very potential future.

Season 2 left heroic engineer Juliette (Rebecca Ferguson) and her antagonist Bernard (Tim Robbins) in dire circumstances, possibly getting flash-fried while the titular Silo — an underground bunker 300 or so years in the future, populated by 10,000 people who have never seen the outside world — was erupting in rebellion.

But the bigger surprise is what happened next, as we flashed back to a pre-apocalypse Washington D.C., where young congressman Daniel (Ashley Zukerman) went on what he thought was a date with journalist Helen (Jessica Henwick). Instead, she plugged him for information on a dirty bomb placed by Iran in the nation’s capital, alongside other intriguing teases that tied into the future of the show without making any explicit connections.

“We put that scene at the end of Season 2, knowing that we wanted to set up Season 3, and we also thought it would just be a fun switcheroo,” showrunner Graham Yost told IndieWire “We didn’t realize that so many people were going to think, ‘Wow, Apple just switched shows on me without me asking. I don’t know what this is.’”

Thankfully, an eye-popping Pez dispenser gifted from Daniel to Helen quickly settled any debates about whether Apple TV tech was on the fritz, as centuries later, that seemingly innocuous “relic” has been passed around to various characters throughout the two preceding seasons.

Despite having a fair idea of what the plot could — and should — be for Season 3, as well as the already-filmed final fourth season of the series, the key factor here was getting Daniel and Helen cast right, as they would be anchoring a good chunk of Season 3 (and perhaps beyond).

Yost had previously worked with Zukerman on HBO’s “The Pacific” when “he was just this young punk kid.” More recently, Zukerman starred in “The Code,” an Australian political thriller created by Shelley Birse, who joined the “Silo” writing staff for Season 3.

As for Henwick, Yost recalled, “She reached out to her agent and said, ‘Tell the people in “Silo,” I’d like to work on that,’ and we’re like, ‘Huh, OK, oh yeah.’ She had that small, but great part in ‘Glass Onion.’ She was really funny, and she gives me crap for that. ‘Oh, you just hired me because I’m funny.’”

Yost understands that “Silo” is “not a funny show,” despite the inclusion of an as-usual off-the-wall Steve Zahn in the second season of the series. But when it came to the “near future” set political thriller of Season 3, they needed “that storyline to create a romance, and that’s kind of what my love language is. If you talk to my wife, we just give each other shit all the time. … Rebecca [Ferguson, who is also an EP on the series] and I, too, we got onto that right from the beginning. So I knew that I wanted that in their relationship.”

And you get that sense in real life, talking to Zukerman and Henwick, who go back and forth poking each other with jokes when you speak with them — Zukerman stating the facts, while Henwick tries to push him off the rails.

“We were very aware when we were both pitched the show, we knew the entire story,” Zukerman said. “We read scenes from Season 3 before we did that Episode 2 scene. We knew where this was going. We didn’t know exactly how it would unfold.”

Added Henwick, drily, “I knew everything.”

More seriously, Zukerman noted that they knew that “the stakes were quite high” and it was “the beginning of a really big story,” but that ultimately it was “a real pleasure that we had such a great time doing it, and we share the same taste, and we [have] the same work ethic, and we just work in very similar ways.” That extended to the rest of the cast of the past sequences, which includes “Downton Abbey” star Jessica Brown Findlay and others.

‘Silo’Apple TV

“That very first day we met up for rehearsal, it was just so clear that it was all going to be fine,” Henwick said, “and it’s such a relief, because almost every scene is together, and if we didn’t get along, that would have been a really shit two years.”

Comparing the political plot to classic thrillers like “Three Days of the Condor” or “The Parallax View,” Yost also emphasized that the Daniel and Helen romance isn’t a way to get info about the “before times” to viewers. If anything, it’s the other way around. “The love story between Daniel and Helen is a foundational thing for the whole rest of the series. It takes some horrible turns, and that was part of our job, too,” Yost said.

“We wanted to be very conscious that these people don’t know they’re in a political thriller, they don’t know they’re part of a larger sci-fi story, and to just try to be as true to the idea that two people who really only know each other for a matter of, like, three days over the course of Season 3, that was our guiding light,” Zukerman said. “Let’s make sure that at every step this is as honest and real as possible, these are just people that cannot fathom that what they’re about to find out is going to be as strange as what it ends up being.”

By the time Yost and staff got to that scene in the Season 2 finale, they “left enough open so that we could do what we needed to do without being totally locked in, but we also did enough in Season 2 so that we had a way to go into Season 3.”

Slightly complicating matters was the SAG-AFTRA strike. And, yes, if you’re thinking “wait, that happened back in 2023,” indeed, Season 2 filmed in 2023, with a break for the strike, then wrapped up in 2024, with Season 3 filming late 2024 through mid-2025. So things have been in the works on this for a while.

The writing was the easy part. “Silo” films out of Hoddesdon Studios in the UK, and given nearly everything takes place in the same underground bunker the team has gotten used to shooting in, flipping to producing a political thriller that — get this — is shot mostly outside is difficult enough. But to up the difficulty level immensely, they shot both halves at the same time, basically producing two distinct TV shows that somehow had to seamlessly blend into one whole.

“We had the Silo unit, which was on our stages, that was mostly all the Juliette story and Camille [Alexandria Riley’s character], and all of that, and then we had this ‘Dust’ unit, which was the before time story,” Yost explained. “There is stage work at the end of the season, in the final episode, but there’s a lot of exterior stuff.”

So how does one keep two shows running simultaneously? Magnanimously, Yost gave all credit to EPs Nina Jack and Joanna Thapa, who “oversaw everything, and they said to me at the end, ‘Graham, never do this again.’”

Alongside Producer Jon Midlane, who “had to do all of scheduling, and it was bonkers,” the show would often have the four directors of the season “going back and forth between the units. … It’s not as though a couple directors did just the ‘Dust’ stuff. No, they were jumping around all over the place, and so that was madness.”

Luckily, the cast was very much like the Silo-dwellers in this situation, aka blissfully unaware that the producers were slowly losing their minds. “The cast was sequestered,” Yost said. “The ‘Dust’ unit cast really didn’t mix much with the ‘Silo’ unit cast. We had a couple of things, we all get together, and they’re kind of like, ‘Oh, hi, nice to meet you, Rebecca. You know, I’m in this show called “Silo.”‘”

‘Silo’Apple TV

Added Zukerman, “Logistics were such that it honestly felt like we needed to, by definition, forget that we were part of a larger show, and we were starting a whole new show. This was a new universe. We knew that the story would do so much of the work of echoing what had come before that, but we needed to try to make it as honest as possible.”

In fact, the press tour for Season 3, which happened in June of 2026 (and which these very quotes in this very article come from) is the first time the two casts have really interacted. Henwick and Zukerman recalled a kickoff party, as well as a drinks session halfway through that Zukerman called “sort of odd,” as well as “trickling spotty meetings crossing each other in makeup or in costume fittings.” But neither Henwick nor Zukerman made it over to the regular poker games the silo-dwellers had throughout the filming — though it seems like the invitation was open.

“Yeah, the two groups were quite siloed — sorry — but probably for the better,” Zukerman said. “The two universes did feel very different.”

While the team did film only a few days in Washington, Michael Dinner — who tackles directing the first three episodes of the season — got scenes at multiple D.C. based locations, including the Metro and even at the reflecting pool (prior to its current algae infestation). “Two days, three days of just bang, bang, bang, just flying around,” Yost continued. “But the rest of the exteriors were all in England. … People would find architecture that you could kind of believe is the Pentagon courtyard.”

There are plenty of interiors, of course, ranging from Helen’s ex-boyfriend’s apartment to a dilapidated hacker’s den. Funnily enough, Yost was pushing for even more interiors, from a hotel and department store to a bowling alley (they couldn’t find any bowling alley in England that looked remotely American), until writer Fred Golan pointed out something vitally important.

Said Yost, recalling what Golan suggested, “Let’s get as much green and as much blue sky as we can, because we want to give the audience some relief from having been inside for two seasons.”

One place Zukerman and Henwick didn’t get to film on? The future-set Silo sets. “At first I was like, ‘Oh, I want to wear overalls, and I want to run up and down the stairwell,’” Henwick recalled. “I visited the set on my very first day when I was in for my fitting, and so I did run up and down the stairs, and I’m very glad that we didn’t have to do a whole season of that.”

And one more interior location that pops up this season viewers might want to keep an eye on: the clickbait farm Helen works at, which is called Zoz. When asked about whether this was a tribute to actress Caitlin Zoz, who plays the character Kathleen Billings on the series, Yost seemed delighted at picking up on that.

“Yes!” Yost said. “I forget who came up with it. First of all, it cleared. There is no clickbait website that we could find named Zoz, and it was just a little treat for her, because we love her, and we could give her all the Gak that was created for it, because there were little letterheads and little signs and stuff like that.”

So that’s writing and production What about actually somehow getting a modern political thriller romance and a post-apocalyptic action show to work together and feel (somehow) like a cohesive season of television? We certainly don’t want viewers to feel like Apple TV was accidentally flipping between two shows again.

“I would love to say this was all calculated and we knew exactly what we were going to get,” Yost said. “Some of it was just a best guess, some of it was just a feeling in that there was a convergence of the story, or a parallel, or a reflecting in the storyline.”

An important side-bar here: Howey’s trilogy of novels, “Wool,” “Shift,” and “Dust” don’t include Ferguson’s Juliette in the second book, which Season 3 partially adapts. Though that novel does deal with the “before times,” aka pre-apocalypse, “I said, ‘Hugh, we can’t do that. We’re doing a TV show. We’ve got Rebecca Ferguson, her face is on the poster. We’ve got to come up with a story for Juliette.’ We came up with this thing when we realized that the control of memory is a big part of his world that he created, and it’s a big part of this Silo 18 story.”

Knowing where they needed the story to end up in the finale of Season 3 — no spoilers here — Yost and company worked backwards, figuring out a parallel storylines for Juliette with what they were laying in for the pre-apocalypse part of the series. That blew out into other characters like Camille, who found new plotlines, thanks to the focus on memories lost and gained.

“Working all of that out was an incredible puzzle, not as much of a puzzle as John Midlane had to do, scheduling two entire series … running at the same time, but it was a challenge, and it was fun,” Yost said. Helping matters there were two writers — Aric Avelino (who also directs three episodes this season) and Birse — that were tasked with tracking characters’ memories. With drugs that make people forget a big thrust of both plots this season, knowing what a character remembers and when was important for the actors to know, as well as for informing what the characters can say in the script.

Also helping things cohere is the argument that Helen and Daniel are almost like two halves of Juliette’s character. While Henwick didn’t look specifically to Ferguson’s performance to craft her own, “As a fan of the show, she carries it on her shoulders. Every time she’s on screen, I find her so magnetic. … But no, I know that is a fan theory out there, and I never really honed in, and went, ‘Let me take little mannerisms,’”

“Yeah, some epigenetic mannerisms that I’ll seed in, to make sense of questions later,” joked Zukerman. “No, so much of it was in the writing, but you are picking up on something that’s very true, that although our storyline is the origin story of the Silos, by definition, it actually is the story of rebellion in the Silos. … Our connection, our drive, our search, that is the spark and the seed.”

‘Silo’

Even with all this time and intricate planning, curious coincidences can still arise, like how Season 3 (which again, was filmed in 2024 and 2025 and written well before that) begins with a U.S. attack on Iran and spirals out from there.

“The original title for the mission was ‘Righteous Hammer,’” Yost said of the American mission to Iran in the show. “In June of last year, when there was the bombing strike, it was called ‘Midnight Hammer.’ It’s like, well, we’ve got to rename our missions. … All that was, was changing the crawls on the bottom of the TV screens that you see in the senator’s office. … Didn’t really matter, you could barely see it, but that was about it.”

Ultimately, while these past sections of Silo comprise a taut political thriller with overt sci-fi elements, like Yost and the cast emphasized over and over, it’s the human element that matters.

“I found it to be quite a life-changing experience, honestly,” Henwick said on wrapping the series, which finished filming in March. “Working on the show, I loved it. It was very hard at times, but I felt very affected by the storyline and by Helen herself and the journey that she goes on. It’s actually quite rare to feel changed by a character, and I do feel like Helen changed me.”

Added Zukerman, “There’s something about … the material feeling very personal. This show meditates on the same things that I think about every day, and in these times that feel very dark, to be able to go to work and think about those things and try to wrestle with those things at work … I find that was a really meaningful experience. Getting to do it with an incredible group of people, it was a very special two years.”

Season 3 of “Silo” will premiere on Apple TV with the first episode on Friday, July 3, followed by one new episode every Friday through September 4.