Warning: This article contains spoilers for Apple TV+'s Silo.
Silo is an exciting slow-burn drama that borrows The Matrix's best storytelling trick and reimagines it in more intriguing ways than one. Set in a post-apocalyptic world, Apple TV+'s Silo unfolds in an underground 144-story structure that protects a small population of surviving humans from the uninhabitable surface of the planet. With each episode, the series gradually removes the tapestry around the rules governing the central Silo's human society and the motives of the characters who set out to defy them.
While Silo's character beats are fairly unique, its setting seems to have a lot in common with that of The Wachowskis' magnum opus, The Matrix. For instance, like The Matrix's Zion, the show's Silo serves as an underground bunker for the remnants of the human population following an apocalyptic event. Similar to Zion, the Silo's history, too, seems shrouded in mystery, and only little seems clear about its true origins. Even beyond these surface-level similarities, Silo reconceives the very philosophy that drives The Matrix's storyline.
Like The Matrix, Silo Reimagines Plato's Allegory
Plato's allegory of "The Cave" questions the nature of perception and reality by citing a hypothetical example of a group that is chained inside a cave and forced to face a wall. Instead of seeing the world for what it truly is, the chained prisoners only observe the shadows projected on the wall from the cave's opening. Adopting this philosophy, The Matrix highlights how the ones living in the simulation are unaware of the true nature of reality and only see the shadows of deception cast by the machines. Silo, too, reimagines the same by showing how the citizens of its central underground civilization blindly conform to the illusion that the outside world is unsafe.
Like a freed prisoner from Plato's allegory struggles to adapt to the brightness outside the cave, The Matrix's Neo and Silo's defiant characters initially feel dazzled by the reality of their respective worlds. However, the more they understand the true nature of their previously skewed perception of the world, the more they open up to the idea of adapting to their new reality. Meanwhile, similar to the prisoners who remain in the cave, people accustomed to the comfort of the Matrix and the Silo choose to accept the false reality of their delusory world instead of facing the discomfort of questioning it and seeking the truth.
How Plato's Allegory References Make Silo Better
Silo stretches the suspension of disbelief by portraying how an entire human civilization sustains itself in an underground city. However, its Plato's allegory references and The Matrix similarities allow it to connect its abstract ideas to a tangible and relatively more realistic philosophical fable. Its parallels with Plato's allegory also add more heft to the motives and actions of its characters as they establish how, regardless of the setting, humans have an innate desire to seek free will. This, in turn, improves Silo since its forces audiences to step inside its characters' boots and engage with it on a deeper intellectual level instead of treating it as a mere source of entertainment.
New episodes of Silo release Fridays on Apple TV+.