Rebecca Ferguson on ‘Silo’ Season 3 Memory Loss & What’s Next for Juliette

Juliette Nichols has spent two seasons of Silo being the immovable object in a world built on lies. Rebecca Ferguson‘s engineer-turned-sheriff clawed her way from the down deep to the surface and became the first person in generations to walk between silos. By the end of Season 2, she had returned home with proof that everything her people believed about the outside world was a managed fiction. Which is why Season 3 opens with such a disorienting choice.

The woman who fought hardest to remember the truth no longer remembers much of anything. It’s kind of a bold swing for a show entering its penultimate season, and in theory, it sounds like a genre cliché (amnesia storylines have a long, mostly embarrassing television history). So when MovieWeb sat down with Ferguson and showrunner Graham Yost, we wanted to know how they approached a character carrying all that grief and determination just beneath a blissful surface.

For Ferguson, the appeal was getting to dismantle her own creation.

“Ah, it’s great. It’s fun. I said, we talked about the fact that Graham would always pitch the next season to me whilst we were filming the previous season. So even before I got the episodes, I knew where we were heading, which I was very excited about. But it’s a good setup. It’s a really exciting beginning to start with a character who we know is so capable and so forceful in her way of getting around things, and then putting a memory loss on it. It’s a fun thing to play with. Very simple. And then gradually you see her kind of come through when she has her dreams and her feelings and her thoughts that don’t align with the powerful few who are trying to control her.”

Yost, for his part, was quick to draw a line between what Silo is doing and the lazy version of the trope, though he couldn’t resist a joke about it.

“Yeah, and for us, on our side of it, it wasn’t gratuitous memory loss. We were not doing a soap opera where someone just got hit on the head, so they could forget who they were, which actually would have been great. No, but it was, you find out, ‘Oh, there’s a reason for this.’ And they’re trying to control her because she is potentially so powerful in this silo, and they’ve got to tamp that down. And so it gave us a place to go story-wise.”

Yost’s comment about Juliette being “potentially so powerful” also speaks to where Silo appears to be heading. Season 3 is testing whether the people running the silo can still contain what she represents. Apple has already renewed Silo through Season 4, with the fourth season set to conclude the adaptation of Hugh Howey’s trilogy. If the show is going to land cleanly, Juliette’s memory loss cannot just be a temporary complication.