Ryan Kirksey
The following recap contains spoilers for Silo S2E2, “Order” (written by Fred Golan and directed by Michael Dinner)
Did you hear the one about the tape? I heard it’s actually pretty tear-able.
Alright, that’s not one of my better puns. And I really thought this second episode of Season 2 of Silo was far from terrible, but it sure was a lot of talk about tape.
“Order,” while at times struggling to align points within the plot, does exactly what we as viewers wanted it to do. What we needed it to do after the solo story of Juliette in episode 1. It tells the story of what happens when 10,000 people see someone blatantly defy authority and what, quite simply, has been the natural order of things for centuries.
To transition from Episode 1, “The Engineer,” this latest episode opens with Bernard (Tim Robbins) seeing what Juliette (Rebecca Ferguson) sees when she finds another silo and discovers thousands upon thousands of bodies littered outside and on the stairs leading into the new silo. As the signal goes out the farther and Juliette makes it down the stairs, we cut to Bernard viewing the feed from her suit.
He then opens a book titled The Order to a passage that clearly looks like it has never been read before: “IN THE EVENT OF A FAILED CLEANING, PREPARE FOR WAR.”
Seems like a bit of overkill—when my kids have a failed cleaning we just make them do it over again—but I guess the stakes in the silo are slightly higher. Bernard mentions later in the episode to Judge Meadows (Tanya Moodie) that he has never thought of what to do if someone doesn’t clean, and that the Founders never imagined someone would go out and not clean.
Clearly, someone planned for this contingency because The Order lays out an “action plan” for Mayoral, Judicial, and the Raiders to comply with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s Silo Emergency Plan. The rest of the passage is intentionally blurred out by the camera, so we don’t get a sense of what that plan entails.
But, there are a few interesting clues we can take from this scene. The first is that the “Action Plan” does not mention how IT needs to comply with it. That lends more validity to the theory that IT is ultimately the group in charge of every silo, and they alone are charged with keeping its secrets and outlining what must be done in all situations, according to The Order.
Bernard, as both head of IT and acting Mayor, now has almost complete authority of not only the information, but also the messaging and the control. It’s an oversized amount of authoritarianism for one person charged with keeping the silo’s secrets.
In our podcast last week covering Episode 1, Caemeron and I speculated that this information must be something like the Targaryen prophecy that is mentioned in the pilot episode of House of the Dragon. That secret is passed down from leader to leader throughout generations, and it appears the secrets and history of the silo follow a similar pattern.
The second interesting thing we see at the end of this scene is when Bernard runs out of the vault that’s labeled “Server Room.” As he leaves, he passes what are clearly state-of-the-art servers as we would recognize them today. Racks and racks of blue-light technology that is unlike any of the retro-futuristic tech we see throughout the show.
This revelation makes me wonder if there is some kind of technologically advanced society that still exists somewhere in the world that is keeping IT running with modern equipment.
Bernard and Robert Sims (Common) then meet to come up with a plan for how to keep the silo under control after just about everyone in the place saw what Juliette did. They are going to round up some Mechanical folks, imprison Juliette’s confidants, and keep an eye on her father in case he tries to do more than reset a baby’s dislocated elbow and walk circles around the nursery.
One person who apparently did not see or hear about Juliette’s act of rebellion was Judge Meadows, who presumably was too drunk and/or passed out to understand what happened. She doesn’t even believe her assistant (Taj Kandula), who promises her that 10,000 people saw Juliette not clean.
Bernard visits her and explains the situation, which causes Medows to sober up in a hurry, even though she wants nothing to do with helping Bernard manage the coming uprising. What she does want, however, is to become like the Wizard at the end of The Wizard of Oz. People eventually knew he was fake, yet he got to leave in a hot air balloon anyway. Meadows wants her own hot air balloon in exchange for standing in solidarity with Bernard. But in the absence of a hot air balloon, some of that good tape will do.
Meadows would rather risk a toxic death than spend one more day in the silo with you, Bernard.
Meanwhile, in the Down Deep, things are getting rowdy. Deputy Hank (Billy Postlethwaite) is trying to keep the peace. Shirley and Knox are at odds about which one of them is actually loyal to Juliette. Walker (Harriet Walter) shows up, gives everyone a proper hosing of water, and tells them to get back to work. Bernard is going to address the silo that night, after all, and there is no use causing trouble before then.
At his all-hands-on-deck address, it’s clear Bernard has taken Crisis Communication 101 as part of his IT and Mayoral training. Get ahead of the crisis so you can control the messaging. Bernard knows no one will believe him if he tries to convince them Juliette didn’t just walk away. He claims it was the hard work of the brilliant “suit technicians” who came up with a stronger tape that can seal the cleaning suits and protect the wearer from the outside elements.
(As a refresher, it was Walker who helped facilitate Juliette getting the impenetrable heat tape at the end of Season 1, which allowed her to walk outside unexposed to the elements.)
Bernard framed it as a dangerous, unproven technique and that Juliette went out to clean as a hero because she was willing to conduct the risky experiment. He says it was the first step toward achieving their goal of eventually leaving the silo together. With that argument, along with some strategically planted hecklers in the crowd, Bernard is able to deliver a speech that he believes should buy them all “a day or two” before the natives get restless again.
But the Mechanical faction in the Down Deep isn’t buying it. Shirley (Remmie Milner) and Knox (Shane McRae) are still at each other’s throats because Shirley thinks Knox sold out Juliette to the Raiders last season. Shirley does not believe one word of what Bernard says because she knows Juliette did not want to leave. She also saw the note Walker snuck to Juliette and has pieced together that Walker got her stronger tape for her cleaning suit.
Shirley and Walker seem to be the early planners of an uprising movement, but someone may have beaten them to the punch. Even on the upper levels, Bernard has seen at least three instances of graffiti that show a “JL” inside a circle. Walker has seen them too. Who is responsible for the graffiti? No one knows at this point.
“Juliette Lives.”
We know that she does. We know she has discovered someone or someone(s) in another silo. Among the many questions that still remain in Season 2 is what impact will Juliette’s decision have on the citizens of the silo? Who will we meet in the new silo Juliette discovered? What type of event or incident will eventually bring these stories back together?
There are plenty more questions than these still to be solved (plus, where is Lukas Kyle?!). Those might be shelved next week in service to more of the story with Juliette, but Silo has now expanded the world, and with it, the mysteries.
We will be back next week to hopefully help uncover some of these answers.
