I’ll be the first to admit that I was a bit skeptical about the first couple of episodes Silosa new Apple TV Plus series about 10,000 people living in an underground bunker with no idea who built it or why the world outside seems to be poisoned.

Yes, it’s all very much a Fallout Vault side mission, but as of this week I’m completely sold, as Silo delivered an intensely engrossing episode as good as any sci-fi series currently on TV. And Lord knows I’ve been looking for one since The Expanse was killed off too soon, even if we’re underground instead of flying through space.

The world of Silos looks rich and detailed, like a $200 million budget show that Amazon might favor, except it costs far less and is actually good. It’s based on Hugh Howey’s Wool-Shift-Dust series, so there’s a lot of source material to pull from, rather than just making things up as it goes along. It was supposed to be a movie a decade ago, but through a series of rights transfers and contract failures, it ended up as an Apple TV Plus series, and I’m very glad it did.

While the show starts out obviously with David Oyelowo and Rashida Jones in the lead roles, it quickly transfers the bulk of the heavy lifting to Rebecca Ferguson as Juliette, an engineer thrust into the prominent role of Sheriff Silos.

You know Ferguson from… many things, two Mission Impossible films, Doctor Sleep and most recently, Dinah. It speaks to Apple TV’s ability to land powerful actors for their original series, and Ferguson absolutely destroys Episode 3 with his intensity, as the story focuses on an intensely time-limited repair of the generator that powers the entire facility, where failure means certain death instead for everything. It’s as exciting as anything on TV right now, and I’m absolutely ready for the long haul after this week, even if the first two didn’t quite hook me. I loved Oyelowo and Jones’ story, and I expect their characters to return as time goes on, but Ferguson is great here, and the show feels like it’s going to be worth checking out for her performance.

Sci-fi isn’t exactly in the best place on TV right now. I guess there’s The Last of Us, which is more of a zombie series. From is horror. The expansion ended early. The Orville is on an indefinite hiatus. Raised by Wolves was dropped by HBO. Picard ends. So that’s really Silo and then I guess For All Mankind and Foundation, both also on Apple TV Plus. Apple seems to be the last streamer to invest seriously in sci-fi right now, and I’m thankful for that. Go watch Silo.

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Take my sci-fi novels Herokiller series and Earthborn Trilogy.