Apple TV’s ‘The Bunker’ Returns for Season 2 ‘Brave’ | Uncategorized

Apple TV likes to spend a ton of money on prestige sci-fi projects like “Dark Matter” And “Foundation“but their best in this subgenre is, by some stretch of the imagination, Graham Yost’s riveting work.”Silage.” The first season of this adaptation of Hugh Howey’s books was a timely riff on philosophical sci-fi noirs like Blade Runner, stories that use big ideas to say something new about relatable themes. expressing his willingness to take risks right at the premiere when he sent high-profile actors David Oyelowo And Rashida Jones show that the real star of this show will be the phenomenal Rebecca Fergusonplaying an engineer who discovers that everything she knows is a lie.

If you haven’t seen the first season, go back and watch that first because we need spoilers (and this is one best shows of 2023). At the end of the first season, Juliet Nichols (Ferguson) was effectively pushed out of her bunker by the deeply corrupt Bernard Holland (Tim Robbins) and the shallowly corrupt Robert Sims (General). After seeing footage of Allison leaving the bunker, Juliet was convinced that the powers that be had lied and that leaving was not as dangerous as the residents had been led to believe. When she actually walked up the hill to the exit, she discovered that there was a lie embedded in it. The videotape was a fake vision given to Allison before the faulty thermal suit she was wearing led to her death. The world has virtually become a desert hell, but Martha Walker (Harriet Walter) prepared Juliet’s costume enough so that she could still walk over the gray horizon.

What now? How do you keep getting Juliet out of the bunker? The Bunker’s second season wisely doesn’t just send Juliet back to the Bunker to fight Bernard and Sims again, which might have been tempting from a storytelling perspective but would have diminished the impact of the first year. Juliet doesn’t just return to the bunker. Without spoiling too much, Juliet is soon driven into another hideout, where she finds the only survivor, played beautifully by the great Steve Zahn. He tells her about how all the other residents were inspired by someone who left their bunker to try to do the same, which resulted in piles of skeletal remains outside the door. Juliet realizes that this may be the fate of her bunker and her role in it, as false hope could lead to massacre. She vows to return to stop the destruction of people, trading one lie for a deadlier truth.

As the two-handed weapon unfolds across the landscape, season two also focuses on the growing resistance in the Bunker as people become increasingly convinced that Juliet is alive and that her exile was not fair. Much of the plot there centers on Knox (Shane McRae) and Shirley (Remmie Milner), the new leaders of a movement that Bernard knows he needs to destroy.

This is the season of storytelling and who drives it. It is also about how rebellion grows from a seed of truth. In last season’s finale, Holland told his lackeys, “What you just saw, you won’t see.” Of course, he learns that this is impossible, but the text is even richer than that as it delves into the idea that even the things we see that lead us to what we think we know may not be right. It’s not so much about what is true and what is false, but how these beliefs can be used to control people and shape society. This is an incredibly rich and smart show.

However, it lacks the momentum of the first season, as the script often revolves around these ideas without the same driving plot to propel them forward. Luckily, whenever it seems like it’s starting to get repetitive, one of the performers finds a character rhythm that grounds the philosophical meandering. Robbins and the rest of the crew in the bunker are solid, but the season belongs to Ferguson and Zahn, who find the perfect balance of the excitement of seeing another real person and the paranoia and fear that has worked its way into every fiber of his soul. existence. Isolation makes you lonely, but it also destroys your communication skills and trust in humanity. Zahn and the writers understand this.

Apple TV has become one of those services that is now so crowded that even the best shows can have a hard time cutting through the noise. Whenever people tell me they’re considering a free trial (and I think everyone should, given the company’s overall GPA), I always encourage them to prioritize “silo.” This isn’t a show that can be easily cut into viral videos, and it’s not as flashy as some of their more high-profile offerings. However, people always tell me that they miss what they missed during Prestige TV’s heyday: character-driven writing that didn’t treat its audience like idiots.

If the first season seemed like an allegory for how we all wanted to escape the nightmare of a pandemic, the second asks an even scarier question that we’ll all have to answer with even greater urgency in the coming months: what now?

Six episodes are shown for review. Premieres November 15^th.