Silo Season-Premiere Recap: The Hole Truth

Silo
Who Are You?
Season 3 Episode 1
Editor’s Rating ★★★★
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We’ve reached the second half of Silo now — two seasons down, two to go. So let’s take a moment here to sum up what we know, as we begin season three of this strange and twisty science-fiction mystery.

Last season, our hero Juliette Nichols (Rebecca Ferguson) learned that the enormous cylindrical underground bunker where she was born and raised is actually Silo 18 in a complex of 50. These silos have been around for hundreds of years, and across those centuries the people in charge have passed down laws and codes, some of which are public — under the name “the Pact” — and some of which are known only to a select few. The true powers-that-be intentionally suppress most historical record-keeping to keep the citizenry in the dark and under control. From time to time, some frustrated lower-class residents in various silos have mounted rebellions, but these quickly get squashed by some master-control unit, either by mass-executing the entire population or by flooding the facilities with memory-wiping drugs. 

In season two, Juliette explored Silo 17, where one of those genocides occurred, leaving only a handful of survivors. At the same time, Silo 18’s big boss, Bernard (Tim Robbins), tried to put down a revolution without everyone getting killed. In the season two finale, Juliette returned to Silo 18, where she faced off against Bernard at the silo’s airlock entrance. The room was set ablaze, with both of them still inside. Juliette survived the fire, and as season three begins, she has become Silo 18’s mayor and a hero to the people. But — and here’s the important part —  Juliette is also suffering from memory loss, due to drugs administered to her secretly by Camille Sims (Alexandria Riley), under orders from some mysterious voice, whom Camille consults in one of the silo’s hidden chambers. 

There has been more going on in Silo than just this, of course. But these two main ideas — that Juliette was close to finding out the truth about the silos, and that someone somewhere wants to keep her from sharing what she knows — drive season three’s story. The memory loss serves a necessary narrative function. If Juliette had returned home and spilled every secret… Well, that wouldn’t really be in the Silo spirit, would it? Like Lost, this is a show where every step forward tends to be arduous, and where every new piece of information is hard-won.

Plus, now we have some fresh intrigue at the start of a new season. For one thing: How long can Camille keep Juliette in a fog? At the end of this episode, Juliette receives a hidden message in her food, telling her to turn her soup bowl upside down if she wants to know what’s going on. This could’ve come from a couple of missing rebels, Kennedy and Lukas. Or it could’ve come from the masked marauders dubbed “the Outsiders,” who have been seen on the silo’s surveillance cameras stealing critical supplies? 

We’re told that Juliette’s return effectively ended the nascent revolution in Silo 18, and that with minimal bloodshed she has — intentionally or not — ushered in a new era of cooperation between the silo’s scattered departments. But apparently some people out there still want more radical change. And they expect Juliette, their hero, to lead the charge. 

Juliette’s memory loss also adds a note of poignancy to this episode. It makes Silo 18’s purported savior look lost and vulnerable. The first time we see her, she’s being prompted to dress up and go out to meet her public — which she hates, because she can’t remember who any of them are. Her closest allies, Knox (Shane McRae) and Shirley (Remmie Milner), are shocked by how zoned-out Juliette is. She’s wearing a dress, for goodness sake! She seems completely unmoved when she visits the spot on the central staircase where her father sacrificed his life. She doesn’t even react when Knox mentions all the heroic work she did in Mechanical before her rise to power. Juliette’s triumphs last season suddenly seem hollow. 

It doesn’t help that she has Camille and her husband, Robert, constantly whispering in her ear, trying to replace her actual memories with what they want her to believe. Every time Juliette comes close to piecing something together in her mind about where she was before she returned to Silo 18, or why she came back, the Simses feed her a fake story. Camille shows her doctored POV footage from her helmet-cam, showing her leaving Silo 18 in one safety suit, spending a few days hunkered down in a “refuge hut,” donning a different safety suit, then coming back. The Silo 17 part of her adventures has been omitted entirely.

Outwardly, Mr. and Mrs. Sims are playing along with the post-Bernard order in Silo 18. The formerly fearsome Robert insists to the public that he only acted against the Pact in the past under Bernard’s orders, and that he assumed that some of his extra-legal duties were just following “tradition.” He says he’s excited to share that only the essential surveillance devices remain in the silo (or so he claims) and that he’s happy to be part of a new multi-level, multi-department council, making more democratic decisions (or so they think). He’s also proud to announce that the kind and diligent lawman Paul Billings (Chinaza Uche) is busy making modifications to the Pact, to help usher in a new era of equality and reasonableness… maybe. 

Another smart storytelling choice by the showrunner Graham Yost and his writers this season is how they’ve chosen to follow up on last year’s other cliffhanger, in which we got a brief glimpse of a freshman Georgia congressman named Daniel Keene (Ashley Zukerman) in the pre-silo times, talking with a reporter about the threat of a nuclear strike on Iran. In Hugh Howey’s book series, after Juliette returns to Silo 18, she disappears from the story for a while, replaced by the story of Daniel and some of the ancient history of the whole silo program. Here, rather than sidelining the show’s primary protagonist, Yost and company cut back and forth between Daniel’s era and Juliette’s. In the premiere at least, this works well.

At this point in Daniel’s story, we’re still pretty far away from any silos being built. We mainly learn in this episode that he was a brilliant Army engineer before becoming a politician, and that he was involved with the design of a bunker in New Orleans that saved a bunch of people from an Iranian dirty bomb. We also learn that his sister Charlotte (Jessica Brown Findlay) is a top naval pilot slated to take part in the mission to retaliate for that attack. During that flight, Charlotte’s plane is hit by a viscous metallic goop. When next we see her, Daniel is at her bedside at a billionaire’s private high-tech hospital in Fairfax. And her memory is gone. 

See the theme here? In Silo, the powerful try to maintain their position by controlling the flow of information, even going so far as to tinker with people’s minds and memories. Knowledge isn’t just power; it’s a precious resource. And it looks like season three is going to be about a fight over sharing that wealth.

The Down Deep

• Is Bernard actually dead? Robert tells Juliette that he died from the poisoned air in the airlock when his suit burned up, and that his body was then incinerated. But in an alternate flashback, we see that Bernard actually survived the airlock before being smothered by Robert. Is it possible that Robert didn’t smother him to death? (Note: Tim Robbins’s name is still in the opening credits.) 

• Camille has been getting cocky with her Juliette gaslighting, going so far as to serve her mushroom soup… even though the pre-amnesia Juliette hated mushrooms. 

• As much as Camille and Robert want to pretend that the rebellion’s over because the people now have a voice, some of the questions raised during the uprising — including whether the outside world as seen on the big cafeteria display screen is really all that dangerous — persist. Until Juliette regains her memories and can answer some questions, the malcontents will keep causing problems. 

• Juliette is such an icon now that we see people in the cafeteria trading her personal artifacts — including her old sheriff’s badge! — as though they were collectors’ items. 

• We meet a few new characters in this premiere and are introduced to some fresh internal silo conflicts, but I’m going to hold off on talking about the newcomers and their problems until future weeks, when they become more relevant to the main story. One thing to keep an eye on though: The mining department complains that the Pact prevents them from tunneling too far beyond the silo, which means that after centuries of tunneling near the complex, the threat of collapse has been elevated. We may see a huge disaster soon. Or… Maybe Billings’s revised Pact will allow miners to tunnel far enough to reach other silos. Hmmm….