Silo starts with a disappointing season 2 premiere

While the Silo season one finale sets the stage for a potentially explosive second season, the season two premiere drones slowly on at best without a strong sense of stakes or emotional investment in the events it wants to present.

Beginning a season on an isolated character is a risky decision, and Silo does not pull off its Juliette-centric season premiere that chooses to ignore the significance of every other character she left behind.

There is not enough action, reveals, or storytelling occurring as Juliette quickly makes her way into a second bunker that had been emptied an undetermined amount of time ago by a group who were desperate to get outside, only to die immediately.

Juliette's journey is frustratingly dull, offering almost nothing exciting or emotionally driven to hang on to, and is overlapped by a series of flashbacks to Juliette's childhood that can only be justified if they mean something by the end of the season.

The big cliffhanger at the episode's conclusion is an important one, but also one that should have occurred earlier in the episode so that it felt like the season premiere was actually going somewhere. Instead, without allowing Juliette to actually find something of importance in the Silo before the final minutes, it is just a waste of a premiere that had the opportunity to develop true world-building or go into the aftermath of Juliette leaving the Silo and seeing how the other residents reacted after she walked away.

Silo makes the mistake of not actively verbalizing Juliette's reasoning for walking directly into another bunker following her release. There could be plenty of reasons, from Juliette's interest in finding food or water supplies to a guaranteed shelter from the uncertainty of whether the outside is truly survivable at this point or not. Still, the outside, while riddled with bunkers, also gives a glimpse of a city in the distance. The decision to avoid exploring the outside world further strips the audience of a sense of satisfaction of experiencing a potential new world and new government groups and systems, replacing it with a sense of more of the same.

Given the amount of questions surrounding whether the outside world is habitable, it does make sense that Juliette would strive for the safety of familiarity. However, the refusal to begin developing the world outside of the Silo that Juliette had spent her entire life growing up in does not spark hope in the season premiere, nor does it suggest to the audience that there is a lot to look forward to, even if it is still too early in the season to know exactly what the overall season plan is.