During a press day for season 2, Den of Geek asked Silo showrunner Graham Yost whether or not this was an intentional homage to the books, or just a happy accident that came along as they were developing the story this season. “It was a happy accident in that we decided to start the season that way,” Yost says. “We do get into things toward the end and you’ll eventually see the final episode where we are going, ‘bang, bang, bang.’ But the big thing was, we quickly decided in the writers room that we wanted to start with Juliette.” 

According to Yost, the writers had a “crazy idea” about following the structure of the book and alternating episodes for “four or five episodes,” but ultimately realized that it could ”become annoying” to have a television show formatted that way. But even if they couldn’t do it for all of the episodes, they could do it for the first two, and then “settle into just a regular story where we’re going back and forth between these two [silos].”

It’s often challenging to adapt formatting elements across mediums, like gameplay from video games, or in this case the chapter structure from a book, without it feeling odd or out of place in the new medium. By using the first two episodes as chapters, however, Yost and the season 2 writers came up with a fun and unexpected way to pay homage to the books without making it feel forced or unnatural to watch as a TV show.

Yost says that author Hugh Howey and his wife Shea love the season, and that’s “the best review we can get.” Just because a story might change slightly as it’s adapted, doesn’t mean that the heart of the original isn’t still there, and this nod to Wool in Silo is further proof of that.