Silo, season 1

Sheriff Holston Becker locks himself in his own cell and tells Deputy Sam Marnes he wants to go out. Then the pilot goes back three years. Holston and his wife Allison, who works in IT, are granted a year to conceive, her implant out for 365 days, and a fertility counselor, Gloria Hildebrandt, plants doubts. On Freedom Day, the silo’s festival for a rebellion put down some 140 years before, Allison helps George Wilkins, a computer man in the Mids, open a forbidden hard drive. When the year runs out she shows Holston the implant the doctor only pretended to remove, cut out of her own body. In the cafeteria she tells the silo the screen is a lie and she wants to go out. She cleans, smiling, and dies on the hill. Two years later George is found dead at level 120, and Holston walks down to the generator to meet an engineer who calls it murder: Juliette Nichols.

From Wool: Part 1, Holston: the cell, the year’s chance with the implant out, Allison’s digging in deleted files, her public “I want to go out” (at the airlock, in the book). Her promise in the book is bigger:

“If that hill is there and it’s green, we’ll go over it together.”

The festival, Gloria, the faked removal and the drive are the series’. So is George alive: in Wool he is a mechanic Juliette loved, dead before the story starts.

Holston goes out. Through his visor the hills are green under a sky full of birds; he cleans the lens, walks toward Allison, takes off his helmet and dies beside her. In flashback Juliette, George’s secret lover, leads Holston down a hidden tunnel to George’s camp beneath the silo, where they find the drive and notes in Allison’s hand. He promises her a signal when he finds something; she hears nothing more, but he leaves a written nomination: Juliette as his successor. Mayor Ruth Jahns decides to walk down all 144 levels to meet her. Juliette ropes down into the flooded dig below the camp, hunting a door George saw on old plans.

From Wool: the end of Holston, except that the book shows what Holston sees with the helmet off: a dead brown hill, and a “boulder” that is his wife. The series saves that for the finale, on a suggestion Yost credits to Apple’s Max Aronson: “Hey, what if we didn’t reveal that until the end, so that’s a mystery, too?” In Wool it is Marnes who picks Juliette, and she and Holston had crossed paths only over George’s death. Yost: “that was one line in the book, and we made a season out of it.”

Jahns and Marnes start down. Bernard Holland of IT brands Juliette a thief of his heat tape; Robert Sims of Judicial pushes Judge Meadows’s man, Paul Billings; in the Mids Jahns meets Juliette’s estranged father, Dr. Pete Nichols. Jahns consults her old friend Martha Walker and offers Juliette the job. Juliette refuses until Holston’s badge reaches her with TRUTH scratched on its back; her price is the first shutdown of the main generator, which Mechanical restarts after she nearly drowns in its pressure chamber. In the dark, Jahns and Marnes confess their love; back up top, Jahns signs Juliette’s appointment and collapses, blood in her mouth.

From Wool: Proper Gauge, nearly beat for beat: the descent, the doctor, the “power holiday”, the old friends’ love, the poison. The book’s Billings is a Judicial clerk put forward by Bernard, and its Jahns dies at Dr. Nichols’s ward, understanding too late that she drank from Marnes’s canteen. The badge’s word is the series’, and so is Walker as a woman: “I wanted Juliette to have a mother figure,” Yost has said.

Jahns is dead of rat poison, and Marnes believes it was meant for him: they had swapped flasks. Bernard, now mayor pro tem, swears Juliette in over a copy of the Pact. Flashbacks show her at thirteen, after the deaths of her mother Hanna and brother Jacob, talking her way into Mechanical. A file Holston left for his successor holds his note: double the flowers in front of the mirror. Late one night in the cafeteria she meets Lukas Kyle of IT. Then Marnes is attacked in his apartment, while Juliette finds Holston’s hidden file on George.

From Wool: the opening of Casting Off: Bernard as acting mayor, the canteen, Lukas in the dark cafeteria. The book’s Juliette also lost a baby brother, Nicholas, when she was thirteen, and her mother a week later; the series renames him Jacob, names her mother Hanna, and plays it out. The clerk Sandy, the flower note and the widower Patrick Kennedy are the series’.

Marnes is found dead, beaten with his own shotgun, and Sims installs Billings as Juliette’s chief deputy. Evidence against Kennedy turns out to be planted; Juliette chases the planter, Judicial’s Doug Trumbull, who shoves her over a rail, where she hangs on. Then, outside a door marked JANITORIAL, Sims tells Trumbull of his own father, a janitor with a secret job, tests his would-be shadow’s loyalty and pushes him over the railing. Trumbull is blamed for both murders. Lukas shows Juliette the lights he charts on the night screen: stars, though no one in the silo knows it. Martha judges George’s camcorder beyond anything the Pact allows.

From Wool: Casting Off. The book’s Marnes is found hanged, his death left looking like suicide, and Bernard, not Sims, installs Billings. Wool’s Sims is IT’s head of security, a large man Bernard throws out later; the series moves him to Judicial and gives him the killing and the room behind the janitor’s door.

Juliette plants a relic in Trumbull’s flat so it can be “found”, and uses it to reach a supposed relic dealer, Regina Jackson, George’s former lover. Bernard closes the case. Billings, made complicit, is furious, but Juliette knows he hides the Syndrome, a tremor that should bar him from office. Regina admits she gave up the drive’s secret under threat, and hands Juliette what George traded her: a children’s travel book about Georgia. Juliette reads it at home while a surveillance team watches her on sharp, modern screens.

From Wool: almost nothing; the book’s sheriff follows Holston’s computer trail through IT instead. Relics as contraband, Regina, the Syndrome, the travel book and the watchers are the series’.

A name in the travel book leads Juliette to Gloria, kept sedated in long-term care on Judge Meadows’s order. Lukas tries to kiss Juliette; she turns him away. Her estranged father brings Gloria out of the sedative, and Gloria tells of the Flamekeepers, a secret society keeping the past alive, its members dying one by one; Juliette’s mother was close to them. Gloria remembers Holston setting flowers before her mirror and fussing with her vent: the cameras, Juliette realizes, are behind the mirrors. She covers Gloria’s, opens the vent, and is gone with George’s drive before Sims’s raiders arrive.

From Wool: nothing directly; the society, Gloria, Meadows and the mirror cameras are the series’. In the book Juliette and Lukas fall for each other fast; Yost held Lukas back while George filled the frame.

In flashback, Juliette’s mother Hanna builds a forbidden magnifier to find a hole in a sick rabbit’s heart, like the one that killed Jacob. In the present Juliette arrests Sims for an illegal search and reads his files: Judicial’s cameras, not her father, betrayed Hanna’s magnifier. Juliette and Pete make peace; Hanna’s defiance and her suicide followed Jacob’s death. Then Bernard lets slip that he knows about the drive: he runs the silo, and Jahns and Marnes died on his account. He and Sims arrest her and announce that she has asked to go out. As Billings, shaking, leads her up the stair, she goes over the rail.

From Wool: the turn of Casting Off, Juliette arrested and sent to clean. The book’s reader has suspected Bernard since the canteens were filled at IT; the series kept him a mild mentor until now. The book’s mother, too, killed herself after the baby died; the magnifier, the rabbit and the leap are the series’.

Juliette lands hard on a bridge below and gets away. She hides in Sims’s own apartment, cuffs his wife Camille to a kitchen pipe and opens the drive: a file is waiting, and George’s face fills the screen. Camille frees herself and lets her go. Billings finds the travel book, keeps one page and burns the rest; Bernard arrests Lukas. At Patrick Kennedy’s, with Danny, an IT man who can disguise where the drive is, Juliette hears all of George’s message: he found a door in the flooded cavern, about fifteen feet high, and could not open it. Watch “Jane Carmody Cleaning”, he tells her. It shows green land, and birds.

From Wool: none of it; Wool’s condemned sheriff never runs.

From the silo-high trash chute, Juliette gets the green footage onto the silo’s screens; Bernard blacks them out. Cornered in the Down Deep, Juliette takes his deal: she goes out with no hearing, Mechanical is spared, and he shows her what became of George, footage of him under arrest choosing to drop from the stair rail rather than be questioned. Lukas is sentenced to the mines. Martha, who has not left her workshop in more than twenty years, goes to Supply about heat tape. Outside, the visor shows Carmody’s green; Juliette holds the wool to the camera and lets it fall. Where the display shows a rock, her hand finds Holston, and she leaves him his badge. The tape holds, the display dies, and she climbs out of the crater into a grey ruin dotted with dozens of craters like her own.

From Wool: the end of Casting Off and the start of The Unraveling. Kept: Walker’s quiet favor with Supply and a note that ends “they’re good in Supply”; the lie in the visor and the bodies it disguises as rocks; the refusal to clean; the walk out of sight. Martha’s note says “The truth is I love you” where Walker’s said “The truth is a joke.” Changed: the book’s Bernard later admits George was murdered and makes Lukas his shadow, and the book’s Juliette finds one dead neighbor over the hill, learning only later how many silos there are.