Silo S1E7: The Flamekeepers
Silo has thrown us plenty of mysteries, and we open with another one: an elderly woman, Gloria, is remembering a day at the beach with her husband and child. She can’t be a silo resident — no one’s been outside in centuries, and no one living is old enough to remember the outside. She’s snapped out of her reverie by a nurse, who sedates her and handwaves the memories away, saying, “You missed a dose.”
Juliette is looking at a drawing of what seems to be the same beach, in a children’s guide to visiting Georgia — an extremely forbidden relic of the Before Times. It was passed down in secret through generations, and three names are written on the inside cover. The last is George, her murdered lover who started her down this rabbit hole of questions. The first name is Gloria.
But if Gloria is recent enough to have an until-recently-living adult grandchild, how is she old enough to have been an adult in a time before the Silo? To the show’s credit, it lets the audience silently ponder these questions as Juliette does the same without spelling anything out.
We at least get one answer: to what was behind the secret door Sims talked about in “The Janitor’s Boy” — a bank of monitors where people watch Juliette’s every move (and likely those of everyone in the silo) under Sims’ direction. They know she has the Georgia book, and are ready to apprehend her for possessing it — a crime that surely carries the death penalty, given what we’ve seen so far. But Sims insists on handling things himself.
Juliette discovers that Gloria is still alive and visits her on a nursing home level of the silo. The nurse says Gloria’s suffering hallucinations as the result of vascular dementia. But what sounds like incoherent ramblings to the nurse — about “the water they don’t want us to know about” — only pique Juliette’s interest. She offers to take the patient for a walk, and learns that Judge Meadows has personally ordered that Gloria not leave the facility.
Meanwhile, somebody brings an emergency to Deputy Billings, but Juliette ignores the call. She storms into the judge’s office, despite her assistant insisting she’s out sick. But the emergency is real, as Billings sprints to the mid levels, and he and his officers try to break up a riot. Tensions are high in the aftermath of the murders, and a bar fight tips over into a level-wide brawl.
Juliette only returns in time for the aftermath, which involves Billings dressing her down for abandoning her duties to pursue her own mysterious agenda. He demands answers, and for once, she gives them. She comes clean about only wanting the job to solve George’s murder, and that it’s connected to the murders of the former mayor, the former deputy, and even Sheriff Holston’s decision to walk out of the silo even if it meant his death.
Billings is a stickler for the rules, which is why the people who make the rules saddled Juliette with him in the first place. But he’s also sympathetic enough that he points out that the rules allow for George’s murder investigation to be reopened, given they’re also investigating the forbidden relic that was found in his apartment.
Before she can keep going with the investigation, Juliette shares a quiet moment with Lukas, her new friend who watches the window on the top level. They talk about the stars, and the mystery of what’s outside, before he leans in and tries to kiss her. She shies away, and then quickly leaves. But not to get away from her would-be paramour; she rushes home to consult the forbidden book. It has charts of the constellations and a star-filled sky on a page about one of Georgia’s science museums.
In the morning, she’s summoned to meet Acting Mayor Holland. He confides to Juliette that after he took her side over Sims’ last week, Sims threatened him on behalf of Judge Meadows. The Judge would use some legal loophole to remove Holland from office — not just that of mayor, but as I.T. director. Holland has spent years staying out of the Judge’s way because, in his estimation, the servers that manage every detail of life in the silo are every bit as essential to life there as the generator Juliette devoted her life to maintaining. If the wrong person got control of either, they could do untold damage. Holland isn’t sure if the judge wants to take over I.T. or what she would do if she did, but he isn’t going to wait around to find out. Juliette stops short of telling Holland what she’s investigating, but he reminds her that Billings was chosen to be her replacement, and it’s only a matter of time before the judge replaces her too.
So with that hanging over her head, Juliette goes to visit Judge Meadows. She barges in as usual, bringing the judge breakfast in lieu of the silo’s DoorDash equivalent. Juliette pulls no punches, accusing the judge of drugging citizens (i.e. Gloria) and holding them against their will. The judge relents and lets her in. The first thing she sees is a glass case holding an ancient Etch-a-Sketch. Meadows makes no pretense about being beholden to the laws that she upholds.
And that’s when we’re reminded who Gloria is. She was the fertility counselor in episode one, who told Allison she “wasn’t the kind of person they want having children.” Her words sent Allison down the path towards leaving the silo. Which started her husband, the previous sheriff, down that path, which set the whole plot in motion. Juliette tells the judge point blank that if she lifts the order for Gloria to be drugged so Juliette can question her, she’ll turn in her badge, go back down to the lower levels, and never trouble the judge again.
Meadows simply replies, “I can’t.” And there’s fear in her voice when she says it. “They’ll never let you.” The judge isn’t the mastermind of events we’ve been led to think she is. She’s as much under the thumb of “they” as Holland and Billings and everyone else we’ve been led to suspect is the real threat. Which just leaves Sims. He’s watching Juliette talk to Meadows on a screen — which Meadows obscured with a potted plant for the occasion. She knows full well she’s being watched.
Everyone in a position of ostensible power in the silo seems to know how powerless they truly are. And that includes Juliette’s father. She visits him, for the first time in who knows how long, and asks him to help get Gloria off of her medication long enough to answer some questions. He tells her she shouldn’t say such things out loud. But one pang of parental guilt later, he’s sneaking into the medical clinic to swipe a drug and take Gloria for a walk.
He wheels her into the nursery. “I don’t know why, but they don’t listen in here.” (Turns out, they don’t listen because while Sims’ people have eyes everywhere, they don’t have eyes everywhere — they’ve been taking cameras out of medical to replace broken ones around the silo, so Juliette’s in a convenient blind spot, much to Sims’ frustration.)
Gloria wakes up, but she’s too distraught to answer Juliette’s questions. She recognizes her father. “It was you. You work for them. You stopped me from having a baby.” She doesn’t trust Juliette either until she shows her the Georgia book, which was hers, before she passed it down to George’s mother.
His mother was “one of us.” The Flamekeepers — a group who tried to preserve the past despite the rules. She says the Silo put something in the water to erase people’s memories. They tried to wipe out the past and anyone who remembered it. Gloria thinks the powers that be identified the Flamekeepers and kept them sterile so the families preserving the past would die out. George’s mother died not long after Gloria passed the book on to her. And now George — the last of the Flamekeepers — is dead.
She reveals that George’s mother knew Juliette’s. She wasn’t a Flamekeeper per se, but she had “the same curiosity.” The two women were working on a magnifying device — something we know from past episodes was also forbidden. As long as that curiosity survives, says Gloria, the past has a chance to survive.
But Gloria’s memory of the past — of the ocean — was just a fantasy inspired by the book. She’ll never know what the ocean sounded like or how it smelled. She’s spent her whole life trapped — not just in a silo whose residents can never leave without facing certain death, but under a boot of a conspiracy she could only see the vaguest edges of. Every bit of resistance, every memory of a way of life other than the one carefully maintained from the shadows, has been snuffed out. And Juliette is now the last keeper of the flame.
Stray thoughts:
• Sorry we got a week behind on these; your humble TV critic is keeping up on Bupkis, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, Secret Invasion, and I’m a Virgo, and life occasionally gets in the way.
