‘Silo’ Boss Graham Yost Breaks Down Season 3 Finale; Teases “War” Of Season 4 With Key Players “More United Than They’ve Ever Been”

SPOILER ALERT: This post contains spoilers for the Silo Season 3 finale, Episode 10, titled “Troy.”

Graham Yost’s suggestion of plitting up one big script into Episodes 9 and 10 of Silo Season 3 caused a rebellion of its own in the writers room for the Apple TV science fiction series adaptation, based on the books by Hugh Howey.

With the goal of uniting the two separate timelines that interweave throughout Season 3 — that of Juliette Nichols’ (Rebecca Ferguson) perspective in Silo 17 and the neighboring 18 plus the ‘Before Times’ thread of journalist Helen Drew (Jessica Henwick) and engineer-turned politician Daniel Keene (Ashley Zuckerman), writer Jeffrey Wang turned in a “ridiculously long” draft for the penultimate episode, in which a new controversy is introduced when a nuclear bomb detonates near the freshly constructed Silos in Atlanta, Georgia, conveniently on the day that the time capsule structures were unveiled to a select sample of the public.

“There was a point where I said, ‘We could divide this in two, and this could be nine and 10,’ and the writers’ room revolted. They were throwing stuff at the screen because we had come up with this idea: ‘What if we did bring the timelines together? What if we saw that Daniel had become this guy Troy? What if we see the cost of this project, and get a sense of what it’s like in Silo 1?’” the showrunner told Deadline the week of the penultimate episode’s release. “There were production problems with that because that meant that we had to do a certain amount of work to build Silo 1, even while we’re doing Season 3, knowing that Silo 1 was going to be huge in Season 4. But we had Nicole Northridge and her incredible team doing production design.”

The Season 3 finale jumps right into Daniel waking up a whole new person in Silo 1, summoned to quell the rebellion quickly going out of control in Silo 17 — Jimmy’s (Steve Zahn) home. Daniel now responds to the name Troy in this futuristic bunker, where he and others like Senator Thurman (Laura Innes) are cryogenically preserved in quicksilvery liquid past the devastation of the nuclear bomb to continue to oversee the dystopian project funded by trillionaire Per Stensen (Colin Hanks).

“There’s something that [author] Hugh [Howey] said to us right from the beginning when we had this mini room back in early 2020, which is the ‘The people in Silo 1, the founders, the whole architects of this thing, they’re not perfect. Things don’t work perfectly, but they do have this plan,’” Yost said. “And that’s what our story is: is finding out what the plan is and how it’s been acted out. So, they wanted to wipe people’s memory, and then give them a new name, but they also wanted to keep their skill set.”

In the below interview, Yost breaks down elements of Season 3’s ending including Peter Gabriel’s cameo appearance in Episode 9 and the ‘tentative, uneasy” alliance between Juliette, Camille Sims (Alexandria Riley), Robert Sims (Common), Knox (Shane McRae), Shirley (Remmie Milner) Sheriff Billings (Chinaza Uche) and more. Teasing the fourth and final season, he sums it up with “Season 4 is war,” and he hints at the further unfurling of the mystery at the heart of the series and how questions will be answered.

DEADLINE: Did you always envision the two timelines that you’ve introduced with Juliette and then Helen & Daniel meeting this way in the season three finale?

GRAHAM YOST: That was our plan, but then Jeff Wang, who wrote 309, the penultimate episode, turned in a draft that was ridiculously long for television, but it was great. After the rebellion in in the writers’ room, I came back online and we just managed to cull Jeff’s script down to fighting weight. It felt like, if we hadn’t done that, if we’d ended the season with a nuclear bomb going off, then then we are a cliffhanger show.

That’s not what we did in Season 1. It’s not what we did in Season 2. Season 1, you could say, ‘Okay, is Juliette gonna live or die?’ ‘Well, it’s Rebecca Ferguson, so she’s probably gonna live.’ Her face is on the poster.

Then in Season 2, we got Juliette and Bernard (Tim Robbins) burning up in the airlock, then we’ve got this final scene where we meet two people we’ve never seen before. But when we see the Pez, we know ‘Oh okay, so this is origin story.’ So that’s leaning forward, and I think that really became our thing. There’s the element of cliffhanger, but really it’s more leaning forward, and so we felt in both stories — Daniel slash Troy’s story with him finally getting a name to this face he’s been seeing when he wakes up every shift — that’s one thing, and then Juliette saying we have to take down Silo 1. That’s Fred Golan, and he wrote the finale.

DEADLINE: Going off of the Pez dispenser, I’m so fascinated by this concept of, not to call it removing memories, but maybe it is removing memories?

YOST: Well, it is. It is removing, and the introducing a new thing. ‘Oh no, your name is Troy.’ We find out more about the mechanism of that in Season 4, but we know that it has happened. And when he sees his sister [Charlotte] (Jessica Brown Findlay)and doesn’t know who the hell she is, she’s just drone pilot Susan, and to him, to her, he’s just specialist Troy. Yeah, that’s fun.

DEADLINE: And viewers saw them both take on different personalities than what they had in the past. For her, I noticed when she refused to carry out the order because “There are women and children.” I was like, “Oh, is that her military background coming through as Charlotte?” How did you want to navigate all of that?

YOST: So Daniel is an engineer. He figures how to do shit. So he’s posed with a problem. It’s a simple problem. All these people are coming out of the silo. “Well, we kill them, and without any emotion, that’s what we do. We just kill them all because that’s our job. But here’s how we’ll do it.”

For Charlotte, part of her persistence is military — ‘You don’t kill civilians,’ but it’s also something at her core, and that becomes an important thing going forward. That’s all I can tease on that, but we modeled a little bit — there’s an Oliver Sacks book where there’s a guy with very bad short-term memory loss, and he would introduce himself to people every 15-30 seconds, but he could sit down at a piano and play an entire concerto from memory, right? So skill can carry through, and in the case of Daniel slash Troy, the persistence of memory is love. It’s Helen. It’s the love of his life. It’s the most important thing in his life, and so that bleeds through.

DEADLINE: I’m assuming, there are a lot of things you’ll answer in Season 4 about the plan and the nuclear bomb, and I don’t think that was part of the plan, but then they had to adjust? Can you say? Do you answer that in 4?

YOST: [Gets up really close to the Zoom computer screen.] That’s an interesting theory, Dessi. You’ll pay to find out the truth.

We’ve done these things sitting with Rebecca on press day, where we’re answering questions to people [saying] “we think it’s this, and it’s on Mars.” And sometimes we say, “It’s not on Mars.” We just say “No, no, you’re wrong.” But there have been some over the years where it’s like, “That’s interesting.” And sometimes there’s bullshitting. It’s not interesting because it’s not true, but there have been a few where it’s like, “Oh yeah, you guessed the whole thing.”

DEADLINE: I also wanted to ask about the vault and the voice in the vault that comes from Silo 1. I had subtitles on the whole time watching, so I saw that it was called The Algorithm, and I know there’s the idea that it could be AI, but how did you want to play with balancing that in a time where people are looking to AI to make all these decisions and having it end up be like, “No, it’s a person” or a version of a person?

YOST: A version of a person, yeah. It’s ultimately whoever’s talking, but it’s filtered in through this AI construct, so they would always sound the same to whoever was in whatever contact room of whatever Silo had contact with Silo 1. It would always be that voice. That was a process. That was an evolution.

My first idea was crazy. I wanted to get the rights to use Douglas Rain’s voice (the voice of Hal in 2001: A Space Odyssey) and it was just going to be so complex and so hard, and his estate and all of this stuff. And then I realized, you know, it’d be too cute. People would say, “Oh, it’s Hal!” And the idea was that, for the founders, it was kind of a joke, but it would be distracting. And then we thought that we would use Colin Hanks’ voice because he’s playing Per Stenson. And then we thought, no, if people hear that voice, they’re gonna know. So let’s make it an AI construct, but let’s have it be the words spoken by whoever’s, in the operations room in Silo 1.

DEADLINE: Speaking of Colin Hanks’ character, is he in the books? Were you modeling him off of any specific billionaires? I saw parallels between Elon Musk, but I thought it was interesting with most billionaires wanting to go to space vs. dig deep into the ground to make a bunker.

YOST: There is no Per Stenson in the books. There are billionaires who want to go to space, but there is something where Laura Innes’s character [Senator] Thurman says when they’re going through the tech check on the speech and everything about “Now you want to go to space, you want to go to the stars? Will you have any money left?” A little joke. That’s an important part of who he is. He is one of those, if not trans-humanists, he is someone who does believe in, “Our destiny lies in the stars,” and he would love to have spent his trillions of dollars on that.” In our writers’ room, we did think of Peter Thiel, Zuckerberg, and Musk as these incredibly wealthy people. Not so much Bezos, even though he has the space thing, there was a little bit of that.

It’s so funny when you get Colin Hanks to play him, and he’s an old friend of the family because we worked together on Band of Brothers, and there was something where our version is really not the things we fear about these billionaires, now trillionaires of it’s all so weird. We wanted to make him less weird, and you’ll see how that plays out in Season 4.

DEADLINE: When he’s sparring with Helen, I sense there’s some good behind there, but I can’t tell what’s going on.

YOST: There’s a writer on the show, Shelley Birse, Australian. A bunch of us have worked with her for a long time, and Fred Golan, who wrote the finale, said about Shelley’s writing, “Everyone’s got their reasons,” and that always becomes our guiding light. Even a trillionaire has his reasons. He’s not Musk. He’s a different person.

DEADLINE: How’d you get Peter Gabriel in Season 3?

YOST: I had this idea in Season 1 that I wanted the Freedom Day song to be “Solsbury Hill” by Peter Gabriel with different lyrics.

There’s this thing, which is true, that the Star-Spangled Banner was a British drinking club song with new lyrics, and if you look it up on YouTube, it was called “To Anacreon in Heaven,” and it’s just a booze song, and it became “The Star Spangled Banner.” I thought, what if it was “Solsbury Hill”? So we reached out to him, and he was interested, and we zoomed, and we talked, and there was a version he did of ‘Sols’ as he calls it. That’s what they call it. “Yeah, we’re gonna play ‘Sols’ tonight” with ‘Ode to Joy’, and he said maybe we could do that. And then it all fell apart because Morten Tyldum, who was the director, and I didn’t really see eye to eye on this.

So we just got a different song composed for it, which ended up being great, and it’s so important in Season 3 when you see Juliette and Bernard standing, and there’s a young girl singing the song, and “Oh, it’s so cool.” But Peter, I got to know him, and so I had this idea, what if he was performing, and it was “Hey, it’ll just be a sound check, so we don’t have to fill an audience.” We don’t have to do this big thing. It’s just a sound check. And then he said, “Can I bring my son and his girlfriend?” We said, “Sure.” So they’re in the show. That’s his actual son and his girlfriend. And he’s just a hoot. He’s just a very funny guy. And it turns out, because we’d connected before Season 1, he started watching the show, and he and his family are big fans of the show.

DEADLINE: And it’s meta because in the show, they want to see a silo. That’s cool. Solsbury Hill’s a great song.

YOST: It’s an amazing song. I love it. And “Here Comes the Flood” was on that album, and it’s funny because Reed Birney, who [plays Henry], was on the set that day and said, “It’s a little on the nose.” I said “I know Reed, but that I’m willing to play.” It’s like “Here comes the flood. We’ll say goodbye to flesh and blood,” and it’s like “Okay, we we we promised it, and here it is.”

DEADLINE: I was at Comic Con when you guys did the panel for Hall H, and I remember you saying — Bernard does have his end in Episode 9 — but I know you said he does die in the books. How did you want to work him back in and then have him be that distraction and savior to help everybody?

YOST: It was so much fun to take this character who we feared and hated in Season 1, and then got to know a little bit more in Season 2. It’s Shelley Birse and Fred and the room, which is everyone’s got their reasons, and Bernard just thought that he was doing what he had to do. That’s in the season, right? He explains what he thought, and then to find out things are different. Juliette says, “Well, what happened?” He says, “Well, you happened, Juliette. You showed up.”

There’s one of the cheesiest lines in the whole show, and I wrote it, and I forced Jenny to put it in. But it’s when Juliette says, “I hate this,” and he says, “Hate what?” “I hate not hating you.” To me that was a fun bit. It’s cheese, but it’s fun. It’s good fun cheese. I don’t know when we figured that he would be instrumental in the success of the operation, but we liked the idea that he was willing to give his life for this. But the other thing he says is, “You’ve got to trust your people, you’ve got to trust your friends” because it’s an interesting season. Juliette starts without any memory or knowledge of herself, slowly recovers that, and at the end, she is powerless to do anything. The most she can do is say to Camille, “Why? Bernard had one question for me: “Why?” and that does help with Camille making her decision to fake out Silo 1 and let the capping of the Safeguard go forward. It was a fun thing to land on in the room.

DEADLINE: Solo, or Jimmy, comes back, he’s shaved, which is great, he looks totally different —you have now Camille, Robert, everyone’s down in the chamber wanting to go through that door. There’s always these leadership shifts, and they’re always questioning. Can you tease how that leaves off to step into Season 4. Are they finally all united? How would you summarize the status at the end of 3?

YOST: I would say that there’s a tentative, maybe uneasy, [alliance] and not everything is perfect. There’s stuff that needs to be sorted out, but basically they’re more united than they’ve ever been.

Thanks to Bernard, thanks to Juliette. Thanks to Camille, but I mean, the other thing is that Juliette says “We have to take out Silo 1.” It’s war. Season 4 is war. This is it. A lot of the questions have been answered. Not all. There’s some that don’t get answered until the last 10 minutes of the series, but a lot of it is just “How does this play out?” And it’s not easy. There are fractures. There are big problems. There are emotional issues. People you love will not see the end. I will say that.

DEADLINE: At Comic Con, you said next year this time is the goal that Season 4 will be out?

YOST: We’ll hit it. Unless Apple decides, “Oh, let’s let it slide to September because we’ve got other shows coming out in July. That’s their business. But I think we’ll be ready. The visual effects are coming along. I heard the music for the last scene of the entire series today, and I was just like, “Oh Jesus, Atli [Örvarsson], so good.”