The first time viewers see the duck Pez dispenser in Apple TV’s “Silo,” it’s presented as an inconsequential keepsake — a gift from George (Ferdinand Kingsley) to Juliette (Rebecca Ferguson). But the battered (and cute!) trinket gradually becomes a key narrative plant, a symbol of suppressed memories and a reflection of one of the show’s central themes: that even the smallest relic can reshape an entire society. The end of Season 2 gave us our biggest glimpse into its deeper significance.
Created by Graham Yost and adapted from Hugh Howey’s trilogy of novels, the series chronicles humanity’s last remaining survivors who are confined to a massive underground city. In the closing moments of Season 2, however, we jump back to a time before the apocalypse in Washington D.C., where Congressman Daniel Keene (Ashley Zukerman) and journalist Helen Drew (Jessica Henwick) share a “date,” discussing past accolades, politics, and dirty bombs, before Keene leaves her with an unexpected gift: an unopened duck Pez.
The scene set them up for Season 3 (and Season 4), where Daniel and Helen’s adventures in more contemporary times offer clues to the Silo’s existence. “I wish I could say we planned it all from the beginning,” Yost told IndieWire of the Pez dispenser’s importance. “But there have been so many developments in the writing of the show, you’ve got to sort of moderate or modulate your Pez usage, or it’s going to be too much.”
What has been moderating the early events of Season 3 is Juliette’s memory loss, thanks to Camille Sims (Alexandria Riley) giving her “medication” designed to make people forget — aka the forgetting pills. But in the third season’s fifth episode, “Memory,” writer Katherine DiSavino and director Aric Avelino weave between past and present, revealing how Juliette’s rescue changed the Silo while she (and everyone not named Camille) races to recover the memories to prevent a catastrophic threat of poison that could kill everyone inside.
Below, star Rebecca Ferguson, showrunner Graham Yost, and ep director Aric Avelino unpack the emotional decisions behind Juliette’s transformation and how the Pez dispenser grew into “Silo’s” biggest narrative revelation.
The Performance
For Ferguson, who is also an executive producer, she had to conceal two seasons of carefully laid character development and plot points to pull off the performance of a Juliette who’s lost her hold on herself. But it was also a bit of a gift to play a familiar character through a new lens.
“What’s interesting is, you can wipe memory, but there is something embodied. It’s like people who have been in a car accident and their body will have a memory of the crash. It’s the same with Juliette. You can start wiping her memory, but there’s a DNA in her that will conquer. That is her constant curiosity. It doesn’t matter how much you reverse and take away from the before time with her; she will still question why something’s off, even in the new,” Ferguson told IndieWire.
However, translating those ideas into performance demanded a more grounding connection to the character. “One of the first days we were filming was me as the Mayor, and I was in my dress, and they put heels on me. I started walking in the outfit, and I had to cut myself. I was like, cut, cut, cut. This is not right. I wouldn’t do this. I asked if [the camera] could see my feet? They were like, ‘No.’ I was like, ‘Great. Can you get my boots? I need my boots because my boots would kick me into character,’” Ferguson said.
The boots — bigger and heavier than heels — helped Ferguson walk a certain way, which helped her wordlessly maintain something of the core of who Juliette is, even when she can no longer consciously access that same sense of self. “That was one thing I really had to focus on a lot was to stay true to who she was,” Ferguson said.
Those hints are important, because Avelino told IndieWire that a lot else has been stripped away from the Silo’s greatest engineer. “Juliette is missing the empathy that she has for these other people, but the other people have it for her. It puts her in a fish tank, and the places where she would normally stride in no longer feel familiar,” Avelino said. “But then what helps the audience is, you have everybody else looking at Juliette like she’s an alien, but it’s like, ‘No, this is your place. You love this place.’”
The Setup
As Episode 5 alternates between Juliette’s rescue from death in the past and security chief Robert Sims’ (Common) discovery of the fact that Camille’s placed Juliette on memory-suppressing drugs to better control the Silo. This puts the series’ resident heel in a bind. Sims, his family (especially his son), and the show’s best leather jacket he wears could stay in control, or triggering Juliette’s suppressed memories could save the Silo.
Yost mentioned Sims’ arc as a father was baked into the story from the start. “We landed pretty early that what unites Camille and Robert is their love for their son, in this hope for a dream that he could live outside someday,” Yost said. “The big turn in Season was motivated by a sense that they are no longer operating on limited information.”
Some of that newfound information arrives when it’s revealed that former mayor Bernard Holland (Tim Robbins) is still alive; don’t ask — and has been in hiding thanks to Sims. In a defining scene, Bernard tells Sims and Martha (Harriet Walter), Juliette’s mechanical wiz mentor, that relics might unlock Juliette’s forgotten memories. The camera intercuts between the characters, lingering on Sims as he realizes Bernard has been keeping secrets about the Silo.
“What’s happening in that moment between Bernard and Sims is you have these two guys who have worked with each other for years, and one of them has been devoted to the other. But Robert is finding out that there’s so much more that was not told to him by the person he’s been in service of, which is a bit of a painful reveal,” said Avelino. “So if you look at the eye lines while Bernard is telling the story, it starts with Martha, then goes to Sims because it’s kind of a confession saying, ‘Yeah, I knew a whole lot more than what I had been sharing with you.’ And so that moment hangs in there, in part, because there’s this almost like an apology from Bernard to Sims.”
The reveal found its rhythm on the cutting room floor. “It is important that we are able to sit in these moments with the characters and our editor Jamie Alain has wonderful instincts,” Avelino said. “One of the things that we talk about in the edit is the idea of withholding, which is when you’re editing back and forth on dialogue and you’re giving the audience exactly what they want when they want it. So the idea is to hold a little bit on one person because you’re waiting desperately to see the reaction of the person on the other side.”
The Bait and Switch
By the high point of the episode, the reaction that the residents of the Silo are desperately waiting to see is Juliette’s. Brought down to mechanical, with all her trusted friends present, she’s placed in front of a small box full of relics that might help trigger her memories. She pulls out a wind-up toy, a small stuffed animal, pictures, and brochures, each triggering her past… but not, alas, her memory. It’s a very tricky scene both for the people present in that room and the baffled woman who’s unable to give them what they want.
Ferguson pulls us into the moment with a look of apprehension. “When it comes to her blankness, I think if you just take away any idea of recognition, you are blank. And if you constantly have a feeling of, ‘I’m not comfortable. Why am I not comfortable? What are these scars? Do I like the person in front of me…’ Even the smallest of characters would mean something for her or not. She would keep searching the person, and it would become, ‘I don’t know but I trust you,’” she said of developing her performance across the five episodes.
But the key moment of the sequence is the reaction Ferguson has to a watch, also a gift from George, that she’d thought to be lost, finally returned to her with some affirming words from Officer Hank (Billy Postlethwaite). “What’s so special about the moment is where she turns her head away. She couldn’t stay looking at him because it was too much,” said Avelino. “It happens as a result of two people trusting each other and Rebecca allowing herself to be vulnerable enough in that moment. She’s this character who’s so fragile that she can’t hold eye contact.”
Despite the emotional impact of the sequence, the watch doesn’t prove to be the correct memory trigger, either. This is classic storytelling misdirection, though, as even in the writers’ room, Yost knew it would be way more fun (and/or torture to the audience) for the answer to come from a less expected source.
“A friend of mine had this line working in half-hour that you’re always looking for the treacle-cutter [the term to describe when a joke immediately follows a serious moment],” Yost said. “There’s so much emphasis on the watch in the first two seasons; we knew the watch would be important. But boy, wouldn’t it be great if that’s not the key?”
The Key
When it seems all hope is lost, Sims and Juliette are walking the stairs to Camille. Sims stops; first apologizing, then telling Juliette he’s been hiding something. “The more Bernard talked about artifacts being able to trigger someone’s memory, the more I convinced myself that this thing would help my son remember me if Camille released the Vitamin D. Like it was going to perform some kind of magic or something. But it wasn’t mine to keep. It was yours,” Robert said to Juliette.
There’s plenty of beauty in the performances between the lines, and in finding them, Ferguson said they laid out the emotional groundwork. “We always have conversations so that everyone in the room feels like they’re on board with the DNA of the scene and then we can go wherever we want to from that,” she explained. “We [Common] work so well together. We also talk about scenes on days we’re not shooting the scene. We were constantly living in the world and how can we make the little small shifts interesting.”
When Sims hands Juliette the duck Pez dispenser — “Was it important?” — it flashes through her memories: the first time George gives her the relic, the forbidden hard drive, the outside, her escape to Silo 17… Avelino leaned on his editor again to find the beats. “I give Jamie all credit. That’s something he cut together early because it’s the one thing I couldn’t envision because it felt too big. We have to catch the audience and Juliette up on all the things that happened. And what he assembled in his very first edit is almost identical to what’s in the final cut,” Avelino said.
Coming out of the flashback, Juliette and Sims are looking directly at each other, breaking the fourth wall; the camera playing their perspective. “There’s something about getting eye contact from someone you love watching and them peering into your soul. And so being on their eye line, I think really allowed us to share that moment,” noted Avelino, who slowed down the intercutting shots for extra punch. “How do you show Juliette getting her memory back in that moment of realization? I didn’t want to miss that, and that idea ended up being a very special and powerful thing.”
Season 3 of “Silo” is airing weekly on Apple TV.