This article contains spoilers for the Apple TV + Silo series.
One of the things you can guarantee after any conclusion to a movie or season of a TV show is that social media users will very quickly start picking holes in the plot. This was true of the Apple TV + series silo, which came to a dramatic conclusion over the weekend with a twist that many weren’t expecting. However, while responding to a question about the end of the show on Reddit Ask Me Anything, the show’s executive producer and creator siloNovels Hugh Howie Take a shot at those viewers who spend way too much time looking for and pointing out plot holes instead of trying to explain them themselves.
During the session, it was noted that one of the questions many people asked focused on the final moments of the season, when it was revealed that the toxic wasteland he saw from inside the silo was very much the real world, while the Cleaners were shown a more attractive world of through the helmets they wear. The question was, “Did the writers have an in-universe technical reason for why the cleaning video would appear on the wall screen during the blackout? Or was it just intended as something fun for viewers to speculate about?”
It’s probably the last of the two, Howey told him, showing how differently everything was laid out than the way he would have played it, but he went on to show how easy it is to explain a real reason for a scene playing the way it was…if you’re willing to take a moment to think in the matter. He said:
“When it was shown to me, what I imagined was that the screen would flash green in a sort of phosphorescent way, a way the screen could change colors if you pressed it too hard, or there was a power surge. Not that they would show Carmody cleaning shots. 3 frames, rather than this long.
Having said that, if you want to come up with a creative reason, it’s not hard. An ex-IT hacker sent in to clean up (probably Carmody herself) tried really hard to put that footage on the big screen years ago (similar to what Jules did in Episode 10). It didn’t work, but the video was still loading. When the power picked up, her old hack passed momentarily but then the power went out. A dying gasp of a long dead cleaner who wanted people to see the truth.
(This is an example of how easy it is to explain plot holes, which any viewer can do, but people seem to enjoy getting angry more than they like using their imagination. I’m not sure why that is.)
Over the past few decades, the amount of complaints about plot holes, meaningless endings, and small mistakes in filming or editing has become a subgenre of YouTube and TikTok videos. When viewers are eager to spend ten minutes talking and stressing a small gap in the plot, it’s not surprising that Howey feels the way he approaches the topic.
when dealing with programs such as silowhich has an element of mystery about it and doesn’t always seek to answer every question they ask, sifting through every little detail and blowing it up on the internet doesn’t necessarily help when it comes to presenting a story that is ultimately fictional and therefore open to certain amounts of interpretation and some small gaps in reasoning from time to time.
