‘Silo’ showrunner Graham Yost breaks down the Season 3 finale’s massive Silo 1 reveal

After three seasons of mystery, Silo has finally unveiled what’s inside Silo 1: most of the characters from its past timeline. Also, elevators!

The Season 3 finale reveals that Daniel (Ashley Zukerman) survived episode 9’s devastating nuclear blast. So did his sister Charlotte (Jessica Brown Findlay). However, they aren’t the same people they once were. Their memories have been erased, and they now go by Troy and Susan. Even worse, they’re cryogenically frozen for long periods of time, waking up every few years to carry out a shift in the silo.

The first shift we see Troy/Daniel carry out is horrifying. Overseen by Dr. Victor (Matt Craven), he clinically orders the mass poisoning of the Silo 17 rebellion, both answering the question of what wiped out the silo and raising more questions about Silo 1’s insistence that the silos do not interact with one another. In an interview with Mashable, showrunner Graham Yost broke down the long-awaited introduction of Silo 1, from its aesthetic to the dehumanization of its inhabitants.

We finally get to see Silo 1 this episode, and it’s visually so different from all the other silos. How did you and your team shape the look for Silo 1?

Graham Yost: I’d originally thought one thing, and then quickly realized no, we’ve got to go cool. We’ve got go, “What’s the most fun, interesting, weird [idea] that still fits in the Silo world? What’s a silo that doesn’t look like the other silos, but still is a silo?”

What [production designer] Nicole Northridge came up with was that everything’s curved, and it’s all very well maintained. In the other silos you’re seeing cracks in the walls and destruction and overgrowing. There’s no plants. There is this weird tree in another set that you’ll see in the next season, but it’s a fake.

The other silos were designed to be lived in for 500 years with succeeding people. Silo 1 is the same people, so they need a sense of continuity. It needs to be the same shift by shift so that they can do their jobs, and it needs to be well maintained, so they’re not spiraling into depression. Then we talked about the big screen. The big screen in the other silos shows the outside world, and it’s dead and horrible. And for Silo 1, we thought, “What if it’s just pictures of Earth?” My thing was there should be no or very little human stuff in it. It should be more just nature.

I was so intrigued by that whole setup, like those big futuristic mouse pads for the controls.

There were so many discussions about that! And there’s stuff that we used in the finale episode of Season 3 that you won’t see again in Season 4 because we decided enough time has passed that they’ve figured out a better design.

Sticking with that control room, we get to see the murder of the citizens of Silo 17 through Troy/Daniel’s eyes. Tell me about showing this brutal moment through his eyes.

We wanted to show the dehumanization that’s happened in this silo, and how he’s no longer Daniel.

We knew it would be really interesting to see what happened to Silo 17 because we’ve seen all the bodies as Juliette walked through. We saw this hand holding this flagpole and this tattered flag, and we know that that was the sheriff, but how did it get there? So there was this sort of retconning that Amber [Templemore], the director, had to do to get Ross [McCall] to land in such a way that his hand would be on the flag, so it would make sense from the beginning of Season 2. Seeing him, seeing his face, seeing his wife’s face, seeing their their son, it really humanized them as this horrible shit’s about to happen. All of that was in service to see Daniel — now Troy — doing it without apparently having the least qualm. That’s his job and that’s what he does. Charlotte — now Susan — has a different reaction, and that was important to us.

I am so fascinated by that. I’m also fascinated by Victor monitoring them and checking to see how much they remember of each other.

It was fun to create this character that we look at as being sort of a secondary character in the first part of the season, who then steps up. There’s a reason that I got Matt Craven to play him.

But in his reaction [to the Daniel and Charlotte scene], he’s not only clocking them; he’s just watching Daniel/Tory do this horrific thing, and there’s a part of him that’s dying. When he leaves that message to Daniel saying, “When they capped the safeguard in Silo 18, there was part of me that was relieved,” it’s clear he doesn’t want to be a part of this anymore. His life has run its course. There’s no point.

We thought it would be interesting and hopefully emotional to see a character that we learn to love over the course of the season, Daniel, become this absolute amoral, completely untethered [person], just doing his job and killing people. There’s a line that [finale writer] Fred [Golan] wrote where he says, “Let’s get those numbers down, people.” The numbers are people. It’s just like, “Let’s make more dead bodies.” That’s a big setup for Season 4 as well, just understanding the level of the lethality of this project.

The interview above was edited for length and clarity.

Silo Season 3 is now streaming on Apple TV.

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