This article appears in the new issue of DEN OF GEEK magazine. You can read all of our magazine stories here.

Dystopias continue to be a popular sci-fi subgenre, despite how much the real world itself feels more and more like it’s pulled from the page or screen of one of these stories. Maybe it’s because we see ourselves in these characters more than we used to, or relate to their struggles more deeply. Or maybe it’s because, despite often insurmountable odds, they find a way to hold on to hope.

Based on the book Wool and its sequels by Hugh Howey, the Apple TV+ series Silo follows the last surviving vestiges of humanity, relegated to living in massive underground silos because the outside world has become too toxic. Asking to go outside, or, really, asking anything about the world before, is forbidden. Anyone who does is given their request and sent out to clean the sensors that show the rest of the silo the desolate wasteland that surrounds them. For everyone who has ventured out to clean thus far, it has been a death sentence.

Season 2 begins right where we left off, with Juliette (Rebecca Ferguson) having been sent out to clean by her silo’s leader, Bernard (Tim Robbins), making it further into the outside world than anyone before her ever has and stumbling upon a silo that appears to have been long abandoned. But what she doesn’t realize is that in doing so, she becomes a symbol of hope to the people she’s left behind, inspiring them to ask questions about their existence and the lies that have been told to them.