Your Early 2025 Sci-Fi Roundup

Thoughts on Silo, Skeleton Crew, and Section 31

Photo by Rod Long on Unsplash

[WARNING: LOTS OF SPOILERS AHEAD.]

The hard-working staff here at Spoiler Alerts is wary of working too hard in chronicling the Trump administration’s acts of destructive entrepreneurship. It is gonna be a long, painful four years, and as I noted a few months ago, occasionally it is worth diving into the science fiction genre as a means of coping with the real world. So let’s go there this weekend rather than Trump’s ongoing deconstruction of the administrative state.

[Cue the shameless plug!!-ed.] First, might I kindly suggest that readers looking for more sci-fi content consider becoming patrons of Space the Nation, a podcast I host with Ana Marie Cox?! We are currently in the process of wrapping up FISHMAS— our celebration of everything Laurence Fishburne brings to the sci-fi table. What Ana and I discovered along the way is that Fishburne f**king rules. Sure, he’s fantastic in the great sci-fi classics he has appeared in like The Matrix or Contagion. He rises above the material in more mixed productions like Event Horizon or Predators. What is amazing, however, is that even in total schlock like The Colony, Fishburne refuses to mail it in. Our conclusion from Fishmas is that Laurence Fishburne is a great actor who deserves all the good scripts and Oscar nominations.

Beyond Fishmas, however, three sci-fi properties have recently been released and prompt further discussion:

1. Season 2 of Silo (on Apple+)

2. Season 1 of Star Wars: Skeleton Crew (on Disney+)

3. The Star Trek: Section 31 film (on Paramount+)

Let’s start with Silo, simultaneously the most promising and most frustrating of this lot. The premise is intriguing: our protagonists live in an underground silo of 10,000 people with 144 floors and no elevator. There is no memory of any history prior to the silo and only a few relics suggesting that humans used to live outside on Earth. They live underground because the outside is toxic; one form of punishment is to be sent outside to “clean” the external video camera; most folks die after one minute of exposure, even with a hazmat suit. As the show unfolds, questions emerge: Who is actually running the Silo? Why are they in the Silo? Is the outside really toxic? What happened in the before times? Our protagonist, Juliette Nichols (played by Rebecca Ferguson), asks a lot of questions and at the end of season one was sent outside to clean for her troubles by Bernard (played by Tim Robbins), the acting mayor and head of IT.¹ Complications ensue.

Silo is great at world-building, which is a necessary condition for a puzzlebox of a show. The set design of the silo is fantastic; the class structure created in the silo is well handled and relatively subtle as these things go.

Season two expanded the world even further, as Juliet learns that there are lots of silos. She spends all of season two trying to find a way to return to her own silo to warn them not to go outside. Meanwhile, Bernard is trying to keep order in his silo as its denizens are roiled by Juliet’s departure and possible survival. Robbins’ performance as Bernard is worth the watch. He imbues a character that ordinarily no one would like — the martinet who thinks he is smarter than everyone else but is actually over his head — with just enough humanity to care about him.

There is so much that is frustrating with this show, however. It has suffered from a saggy middle in both seasons, with plots being stretched out to fill the episode count. Juliette’s arc this season was pretty meh despite Ferguson and Steve Zahn playing pivotal roles. It was a structural problem, as both characters are sufficiently anti-social to make their pairing a bit odd. It did not help that almost all of their sequences were poorly lit.

And yet…. boy does this show knows how to craft a season finale. The last episode of season two matched the plot developments and cliffhangers of season one, including a shocking flashback to the present day in which we get hints of why the silos needed to be created in the first place.

So will I watch the next two seasons? Yes, I will — because watching a population rebel against a smug-but-incompetent leadership seems like a rather trenchant theme nowadays.

Skeleton Crew is pretty much the opposite of Silo, in that it’s less somber, less ambitious but also less saggy. While set during the Mandoverse, the show is otherwise disconnected from other recent Star Wars properties in both plot and tone. The series follows four kids from the isolated, suburban planet of At Attin as they stumble into an off-planet adventure in a galaxy with a lot of pirates interested in the Old Republic credits that the kids use as lunch money.

The Ringer’s Ben Lindbergh was correct to note that Skeleton Crew feels like a cross-pollination of Steven Spielberg’s Amblin and Lucasfilm. The scenes on the planet At Attin are homages to E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial; everything else is an homage to The Goonies. The combination kinda sorta works? I confess I found the kid protagonists super-annoying at the start, but to their credit the child actors are good and showruners Jon Watts and Christopher Ford give each of them a deepening narrative arc. Jude Law is good enough to make the viewer feel some sympathy for Jod Na Nawood, someone who is, in the end, a very unsympathetic character.

The adult plot reveal — that At Attin was purposefully hidden because it was one of the Old Republic’s mints — was legitimately intriguing. But I wish they had gone further! They should have revealed that At Attin was the truly independent central bank of the galaxy far, far away, run by an AI and managing to produce a stable currency even during the Galactic Civil War and its aftermath.² That’s what Star Wars needed: an entire season dedicated to the proposition that independent central banking is good!

I don’t understand why Hollywood doesn’t listen to more political economy scholars to provide them with MacGuffins is what I’m saying here.

Finally, there is Section 31….