We knew it would be bad. The people in Silo 1 have, it seems, already orchestrated the nuclear annihilation of the surface world, or at least of Atlanta, Georgia. What would slaughtering a few more people, roughly ten thousand at a time, matter to them? For the purposes of Silo’s main narrative, they’ve already done it at least once, to Silo 17. Mass murder is baked right into the concept.
But knowing it is one thing, and seeing it done is something else entirely. This episode’s entire opening sequence is a sickening display of organized sociopathy, in which a handful of self-selected elites and their slavish functionaries exterminate thousands of people in a matter of minutes. This is the end of Silo 17 that we’re witnessing, in fact. Those people did not die from some atmospheric poison, but from a coordinated drone attack, combining lethal gas called “the compound” with bullets to finish off the runners and stragglers. It was butchery, plain and simple.
As this genocide plays out before our eyes and ears, its architects mercifully cut the audio, then switch the cameras to heat vision. We are thus spared the final sights and sounds of over 9,800 executions in less than the time it takes for a prestige TV cold open to unfold.
But this doesn’t make it any easier to watch. In fact, the depersonalization of the murders, the switch from a live audiovisual feed to a silent image of red blobs moving and then suddenly ceasing to move, makes it worse. These are unpersons to their murderers, NPCs, a contagion.
“Let’s get those numbers up,” says the drone pilots’ commander, a specialist brought in for this purpose, who has already relieved one pilot of her post for refusing to kill women and children. Let’s get those numbers up. This gamification of mass death made me shrivel in my seat.
Especially considering who’s commanding it: Victor, the kindly neurologist…and “Troy,” a man who was once the do-gooding Army engineer turned congressman, Daniel Keene.
Over the course of the episode, our glimpse of the luxurious, technologically advanced, elevator-complemented Silo 1 allows us to figure some things out about the way things work and why. There’s an inner circle of Founders who seem to have retained their memories — Victor, Senator Thurman, implicitly her daughter, and their dogsbody Henry — augmented by others hand-selected to be a part of the group. These people, like Daniel and his sister Charlotte, have had their minds completely wiped and been issued mononymic new names. Daniel is “Troy,” Charlotte is “Susan,” and so forth. (Victor’s got a file on everyone as part of his psychiatric duties, it seems.)
All of this is governed by something called the Directive, which supersedes both the Order and the Pact. It appears to have been made to serve the interests of the Director, Senator Thurman. Where Per Stensen fits into all this is unclear at the moment, as he’s nowhere to be found and isn’t mentioned, either. Still, I’m going to assume you don’t cast Colin Hanks without having some future plans for him beyond a couple of episodes.
Things come to a head in Silo 1 when Juliette’s rebels successfully shut down the Safeguard pipe in Silo 18, thus preventing Silo 1 from threatening them (for now). They do this with help from a surprising source: Camille Sims, who pretends to ship poison gas canisters down to the mines to kill the rebels in order to placate the voice in the Vault, which she’s figured out is quite human and not AI at all. But the canisters contain nothing but oxygen, and it was all a plot to buy time for Knox and Shirley to seal the pipe successfully. Actor Alexandria Riley does series-best work in this sequence, and given her performance so far this season, that’s saying something.
Indeed, Camille is more powerful even than the voice, which turns out, in this case, to be Victor. When she asks the big question, Why?, all he can do is offer some platitudes about how mankind was headed for extinction, the Silos are their last best hope, et cetera. He cannot explain why it is the Founders’ prerogative to exterminate ten thousand people at a time whenever they choose if the purpose of “the Project,” as the Silo 1 residents call it, was to save people’s lives.
Faced at last with the absurdity and bloodthirstiness of the rules he has followed, sobbing over childhood photos of the daughter whose loss he tried so hard to forget, Victor pulls out a gun. Next thing we know, he’s dead — but not before requesting that “Troy” be woken up from cryosleep for the first time in 35 years, since the Silo 17 uprising.
Troy immediately goes to work trying to get the Silo 18 situation under control. But when Juliette, Camille, and some of the other rebels approach the forbidden door beneath the Silo, his bluff gets called. There is no longer anything the Voice can do to threaten them. So he proposes a deal: If they agree not to contact any of the other Silos, he won’t even try to kill them anymore. Juliette takes the deal and leads the group away.
It’s obvious bullshit, of course, and Juliette knows it. She also knows that the people in Silo 1 — there’s no question whatsoever that they’re talking to human beings rather than a machine anymore — will know that they know this, and expect Silo 18 to be preparing defenses against invasion. This, Juliette says, gives them an opportunity not to defend, but to attack. Taking the fight directly to Silo 1 is the last thing their self-appointed overlords would expect. If Silo 1 is defeated, tens of thousands of people in any number of Silos are free from fear forever.
So Juliette at last has an endgame in mind. She has a nemesis, for now anyway, in Troy, who stares at her giant beautiful face on his viewscreen like an astronaut regarding the big blue marble we live on. And Troy gets an answer he’s sought every single time he’s been thawed out to deal with a crisis: The woman he sees in visions when he is rapidly unfrozen, according to a secret suicide-note video left behind just for him by Victor, is Helen Drew.
The episode ends with Troy whispering Helen’s name in a voice choked with sobs, tears in his eyes. Does he remember her? Does he remember himself? Is he now, somehow, feeling the full weight of everything he’s done in the Director’s name? We won’t know till next season.
What a note to end on. For one thing, it leans heavily on the ample talents of Ashley Zukerman, who turns his white-meat babyface character into a soulless heel with alarming ease. The performance alone raises the question of whether this monster was inside Daniel all along, or if it was somehow created by Thurman, Victor, and their co-Founders. Seeing him break, at least a little, and possibly revert to his old self is like watching the sun break through the clouds. It’s that viscerally disturbing to see him act the way he has, and that much of a relief that he might stop. (This is a much more effective use of him as an actor than the drawn-out Nancy Drew romance stuff was.)
The fates of the other present-day characters we know are almost as unnerving. Victor, for example, has apparently been in on everything from the start, and until his suicide (a big exception, I’ll grant you) he is nauseatingly comfortable with overseeing the slaughter of innocent people. It’s interesting that the conditioning never took with “Susan,” the pilot who refuses orders and is relieved of command and arrested on Troy’s orders. Neither has any memory of being the other’s sibling, but somehow her moral code remains intact while his has not. The performances here by Matt Craven and Jessica Brown Findlay are cold and creepy, right up until the moment they’re not, when the conditioning breaks and they become human again.
The alarming thing is that in Victor’s case, at least, the conditioning was self-inflicted. He appears to have bought into the plot by Senator Thurman to rule in Hell rather than serve in Heaven, and played a vital role in its execution with his memory-neutralizing drugs. His suicide, ironically, is a very hopeful development. It shows that some of these bastards can still be driven to recognize their sins and, well, do the honorable thing.
On the opposite side of the ledger from Troy is Juliette. The show has smartly selected a storyline for her final act, one that will push her two most compelling characteristics to their limits. By taking on Silo 1, she has gone from criminal to dissident to rebel to revolutionary, the apotheosis of her endearingly defiant spirit. The question of how to pull it off — how to get there undetected, how to take down its defenses, how to take out its leadership caste, how to shut down the Safeguards for good — will meanwhile push her problem-solving skills to their absolute limit. This is exactly what you want from this character.
And this episode, a series high point, is exactly what I wanted from this show. The savagery that starts the episode is hard to watch but absolutely necessary, a reminder that the exciting sci-fi dystopia is built on a mountain of corpses, with a billionaire technocracy allied with a radical and egomaniacal right-wing politician deciding who lives and who dies. This is a very real story playing out across our all too real world at this very moment.
In my head, I have pictures of Juliette and friends smashing the system to pieces as they seek the answer to their big question and fight to liberate the Silos. This just doesn’t seem like a show headed for a down ending — though that wouldn’t necessarily preclude many of our favorites, up to and including the messianic Juliette herself, from making the ultimate sacrifice for other people’s freedom.
This is what Silo 1 is trying to prevent, and they say so in no uncertain terms. Contact between Silos constitutes “contamination” and must be avoided at all costs. They need to keep the people divided to control them. Let’s hope the protest slogan rings true: The people united will never be defeated.
Sean T. Collins (@seantcollins.com on Bluesky and theseantcollins on Patreon) has written about television for The New York Times, Vulture, Rolling Stone, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pain Don’t Hurt: Meditations on Road House. He lives with his family on Long Island.
