Silo S2E68: The Book of Quinn

We complained last week that the Juliette-Solo storyline in Silo 17 dragged a bit, compared to all the machinations going on in the original silo. But that was before the episode’s cliffhanger. Juliette’s successful in her effort to dive deeper into the flooded silo and get the water pumps working again. But when she signals to Solo to pull her back up, there’s no response. She swims to the surface to find a hatchet on the empty platform, and blood on the ground. And this episode’s previouslies remind us that, when she first met Solo, there were two dead bodies outside his vault, who had died more recently than the rest of the silo’s population. Which is to say, Solo isn’t alone after all.

Juliette picks up the hatchet and heads up the stairs to investigate, but she doesn’t make it very far — she also has the bends. Solo warned her last week about not surfacing too quickly, but without him pumping air to her, she didn’t have much of a choice. Besides, “the bends” surely just sounded like another crazy thing Solo would come up with. So last week’s cliffhanger just leads to this week’s cliffhanger, as we leave Juliette for a long stretch of the episode, doubled over in pain, and not sure who else is out there. 

Back in the original silo, Shirl and Sheriff Billings have a philosophical dispute. They both know Mayor Holland is corrupt, but Shirl insists everything they’ve ever been told about the silo is a lie, and Billings isn’t quite ready to abandon his faith in institutions and stability. He’s never going to come around to Shirl’s burn-it-all-down attitude, but doubts are starting to creep in.

Lukas Kyle, meanwhile, is starting to learn that institutional support has its privileges. Holland asks him to find something in Judge Meadows’ apartment, which is already being turned over by two of Sims’ men. Avi Nash does a great job of taking Lukas from scared to tentative to confident over the course of maybe twenty seconds, when he realizes that these two heavies from Judicial have to follow his orders and not the other way around. As the episode goes, he vacillates between nerves and confidence, but he slips into the role of authoritarian a little too easily.

He looks through the judge’s collection of forbidden books — which likely represent the majority of books in the silo outside Holland’s secret vault. Assuming it hasn’t been destroyed, one of those books can unlock the coded message Kyle (and Holland) have been trying to decipher for several episodes. But if the book still exists, it isn’t in Meadows’ collection.

So Kyle tracks down Quinn’s descendents, who aren’t eager to help, nor are they proud of their heritage. Quinn almost destroyed the silo, and his name “has only brought shame and dishonor.” We assume this all has to do with the long-ago rebellion that keeps getting mentioned, but we still don’t know what his role was.

Holland has a more favorable opinion. Quinn saved the silo, he tells Kyle, because he, not the rebels, burned most of the silo’s books and erased their history. Before him, there was a rebellion every 20 years, and each one risked mass death like the one Silo 17 experienced. When Quinn destroyed the records, he also drugged the water supply with a chemical that caused memory loss. No one remembered the previous rebellions, and therefore weren’t inclined to emulate them. Since then, there’s been 140 years of peace. The ends, in Holland’s view, more than justify the means.

This gets reinforced, as with each passing episode, Mayor Holland continues his gradual heel turn from someone who’s making hard choices based on what he things is best for the silo, to someone who relishes the power he has over the other 9,999 residents, and has no qualms about doing whatever he has to to get his way. 

As for Juliette, the episode leaves her literally and figuratively treading water for a stretch. But once the action gets going in silo 17, things quickly go from bad to worse, and it finally feels like our B story has caught up to the A story, in terms of urgency. Two episodes left, so we assume Juliette makes it home next week, and deals with the ramifications in the finale, but who knows.

Stray thoughts:
• Mechanical makes another incursion into enemy territory, but leading the raid is a new character we’ve never seen before, and he may as well be wearing a red Star Trek uniform

• It seems like every week someone new gets a chance to do some capital-A acting opposite Tim Robbins. This time it’s Harriet Walter’s turn, as Walker tries to confront Holland in person and immediately regrets it. Holland knows she still cares about her ex-wife, who he has in custody, and he has no compunction about using that against her.

• We also get a short scene of Billings’ wife forcing him to show her the page from a forbidden book he’s been secretly keeping with him — a photo of the Blue Ridge mountains, evidence that there was once a beautiful world outside. The two of them share a moment of wordless grief for a lost world they’ll never get to experience, and the helplessness they feel trapped in a silo that wasn’t exactly a paradise to being with, and is rapidly going from bad to worse.

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