Silo S2E3: Solo
After spending a Juliette-free episode back in the original silo, we pick up episode 3 with episode 1’s cliffhanger. Juliette, having explored the abandoned second silo, finds a man in a locked room (beloved character actor Steve Zahn), who threatens to kill her if she tries to open the door.
But, threat having been issued, he now wants to talk. He isn’t surprised that she came from another silo, or that another silo exists. There are 50 of them. (He and Juliette are in #17.) He gives Juliette (and us) what can only be described as an info dump, but it works because the information is deeply unsettling. His name is Solo — a name he gave himself after being stuck there alone — and he was the head of I.T.’s shadow. He was instructed to stay in the vault while the rest of the population revolved, went outside, and died. And the thing that inspired that revolt? Someone who went outside and walked out of sight without dying. Just like Juliette just did.
Which means the exact scenario Bernard Holland, our silo’s head of I.T., is trying to avoid in the original silo is not only plausible, it’s already happened. And having just escaped the original Silo, Juliette’s now desperate to get back, before her entire community suffers the same fate as Silo 17.
Right on cue, we cut back to a revolt fomenting in our silo. And Holland goes into his own vault, with his new/old shadow Judge Meadows in tow. Last week she agreed to help him in the hopes that she could escape the hell he presides over. And she is genuinely helpful, counseling Holland not to crack down too harshly on Juliette’s friends in mechanical, as that will only push the silo closer to revolt. She tells him to think beyond The Order — the book that tells Holland how to handle a crisis. After all, it didn’t do whoever was running 17 any good.
The Judge might be helping Holland, but she’s also smart enough not to trust him. She suspects he’s lying when he tells her Juliette volunteered to go outside and wasn’t forced, strongly enough to send Sheriff Billings investigating.
Then we get the biggest revelation of them all — both Holland and Meadows already know about Silo 17 and what happened there. Which suggests that, far from being the hermetically sealed world we’ve seen so far, they’ve been in contact with the other 49 silos all along. The mystery of who put 10,000 people into a silo in the first place has just expanded exponentially. There might be half a million other people living underground. Or maybe 17 isn’t the only silo to face catastrophe.
As always, the show does a good job of floating those larger mysteries, while still staying grounded in the immediate. Juliette needs to get back to her own silo, and her only ally is a crazed hermit who refuses to leave the vault because continuing to do what he sees as his job is the only thing holding his fragile psyche together.
That being said, he is genuinely helpful at times — he knows everything about the silo and is happy to share, when it comes to helping Juliette find materials to repair her suit well enough to go back outside. But with a revolt brewing and Holland desperate to keep order at all costs, the original silo might not be any safer for her than the dead one.
Stray thoughts:
• Even the “Juliette Lives” graffiti is echoed in Silo 17. There it’s “Ron Tucker LIves.”
• Juliette rigs up a power source and some lights in 17, but with no generator running, it’s not clear where either she or Solo are getting power. One of those things we can safely chalk up to “it’s just a TV show.”
• Juliette’s friend Shirl is at the center of the tension in the silo, and Remmie Milner does a fantastic job of balancing her heightened rage, grief, and fear at what comes next.
• One of Meadows’ forbidden relics is a projector that plays some long-forgotten family’s home movies. A parent and child at the beach. A little girl on a horse. A birthday party. The show intercuts the rising tensions in the silo with Meadows weeping over the lost world, and it’s devastatingly effective.
• Virtually every scene includes a few seconds of an air-is-wavy-because-of-a-gas-leak effect and it’s not clear why.
