Silo Season 3 Episode 7 References An Important Book Character
by Jeremy Mathai · /FilmWarning: This article contains spoilers for "Silo" Season 3, Episode 7, "Radio."
There's no denying it: Silo" has had to make some serious deviations from the original books, but there's a pretty good reason for that. The Apple TV show owes its entire existence to author Hugh Howey and his dystopian vision of Earth, centuries after some cataclysmic event rendered the outside world unlivable. Still, series creator Graham Yost has done as able a job as anyone could've expected in terms of adapting such an intimidating collection of stories. Given some of the more complicated aspects of the source material, like the fact that a strict retelling would've meant sidelining literally all of our characters in the Silo in favor of following Ashley Zukerman's Congressman Daniel Keene (changed from Donald in the books) and Helen Drew (Jessica Henwick) in Season 3, it's safe to say that "Silo" knows exactly when to stay faithful and when to change things up.
Season 3, Episode 7 ("Radio"), however, swings the balance back towards the books. The overall storyline this week revolves around one central aspect: Mayor Juliette Nichols (Rebecca Ferguson) sending out two trusted allies to travel to the closest Silo, save the kids from Season 2, and find a way to stop the poison gas from killing everyone inside. But when that plan fails spectacularly, and it seems as if both Lukas Kyle (Avi Nash) and Patrick Kennedy (Rick Gomez) are dead, it's left to Juliette to make an impossible call and potentially sacrifice hundreds of citizens in a desperate bid to save thousands more.
The kicker comes in the form of a mysterious diary that Tim Robbins' Bernard Holland tracks down for Juliette — a reference alluding to Mission, one of the most important and notable characters from the books.
Silo Season 3's Mission diary reveal and how it explains Camille's memory-drug plot
It's always helpful to know exactly what you're up against. It'd be one thing if "Silo" simply pitted Juliette and her friends against a single antagonist, like the role Bernard played after his big reveal as the villainous Head of IT in Season 1. It's quite another to know the face and name of your enemy's replacement, Camille Sims (Alexandria Riley), but remain powerless against the Algorithm entity who appears to be calling all the shots. That involves pressuring Camille to dump the Vitamin D+ drugs into the water supply, which she did at the end of last week's episode — something that threatens to render everything our protagonists are fighting for meaningless.
Enter Bernard and the ace up his sleeve. With Lukas Kyle and Patrick Kennedy out of the picture (albeit temporarily, as a last-minute reveal indicates), Plan B involves packing the Judicial level with explosives and using brute force to stop the Algorithm from enacting its Safeguard protocol. Juliette is understandably loath to risk something that could unleash the poison on innocents nearby, but her unlikely ally takes the opportunity to force Juliette to reckon with history.
When Bernard produces the Mission diary, readers everywhere likely perked up in unison. "Shift," the second entry in Hugh Howey's books, devotes a portion of the story to Mission — a revolutionary over 100 years in the past whose arc ends in quiet tragedy. Here, we're given greater insight into exactly how his own fight against his Head of IT led to a familiar outcome. As laid out previously by Bernard, his predecessor Salvador Quinn never hesitated to introduce the memory drugs to the water supply and doom the Silo to a slow, painful, traumatizing fate.
Silo Episode 7 shows the true costs of failure, should Juliette do nothing
More than a simple book reference, however, the Mission diary plays a huge role in motivating Juliette and showing her the true costs of failure — or, rather, inaction. There's something undeniably noble about her refusal to allow collateral damage in her war against Camille and everything the Silo stands for. But, in a perfect distillation of how necessary it is to learn from history, Bernard picks this moment to offer up a warning to Juliette.
The Mission diary sequence is quite chilling to watch unfold, as the long-missing fertility counselor Gloria Hildebrandt (Sophie Thompson) finally reappears. Our first introduction to her came way back in the Season 1 premiere and again when she later crossed paths with Juliette, though Bernard and Robert Sims (Common) had since dosed her with Vitamin D+ to make her forget who she is, her underground resistance group known as the Flamekeepers, and everything she saw go down with Sheriff Holston (David Oyelowo) and his wife Allison (Rashida Jones). Now restored to her former self, Gloria reads from the Mission diary relic and reveals the haunting testimony of the porter who lived 140 years ago — his inability to remember core facets of himself, his terrifying observations of the Silo's residents opting for starvation and suicide, and his feeling that something was wrong that he couldn't fix.
It's an unsettling glimpse into the reality that the Silo now once again faces and the push Juliette needs to step up and make the tough choice. Thankfully, this measure of last resort proves unnecessary when we find out that Patrick seems to be alive and well in Silo 17 after being presumed dead. But with one clever book reference, "Silo" raises the stakes even higher.