Ryan Kirksey
The following recap contains spoilers for Silo S2E4, “The Harmonium” (written by Sal Calleros and directed by Aric Avelino)
It’s unlikely that anyone reading this column has ever played a real harmonium. Electric organs and accordions eventually drove these 19th century instruments out of the market and they have been mostly out of use ever since. Once more efficient and faster methods of producing similar sounds of the harmonium were introduced, the hand or foot pump harmonium became mostly irrelevant.
Yeah, I had to Google “What is a harmonium” before watching Episode 4 of this second season of Silo. You know you did too. But the irony of this instrument’s history hit me in the face while watching “The Harmonium” because that’s exactly how I felt watching the two different narratives unfold in this fourth episode. One was slow, cumbersome, and bordering on unnecessary, while the other was smooth, fast, and featured those sleek twists and turns we love in a good science fiction show.
Episode 3 introduced us to the fact that this show is likely to pivot back and forth between Silo 17—with Juliette (Rebecca Ferguson) and Solo (Steve Zahn)—and Silo 18 (the OG silo). I praised that improvement as it was clear the path is to have them converge at some point, but there are compelling things to do at each location first.
In “The Harmonium,” Silo 18 continues that torrid pace as the original silo comes closer and closer to a boiling point of rebellion. In Silo 17, we have another Juliette-needs-to-engineer something “with a box of scraps!” that moves slowly and gets us only a few feet down the path to merging the silos by finding an old firefighter suit.
Let me make one thing clear before the plot breakdown begins. When discussing my unhappiness about the Silo 17 part of this episode, in NO WAY do I mean it to cover Steve Zahn’s manic, frantic performance as Solo in Episode 4. His description of what a circus was, with the same childlike wonder of an actual child seeing the circus for the first time, was magical and one of the best things I’ve seen on television this year.
I guess I just expected Juliette to accomplish more than building a breathing apparatus and procuring a firefighter suit in this episode. In the long arc of the 10 episodes of the season, if we want Juliette to make it back to Silo 18 by episode 10, there are still many steps to take. Did Juliette take one step? Half a step? The process of building the apparatus out of an old harmonium did give us a deeper glimpse into not only the Solo character (“I forgot to lock the vault! I know I did!”), but also how the world of Silo 17 worked (“They let you guys read books in 18?”)
Whether Juliette is building a bridge to Silo 17’s IT department in Episode 1, designing a breathing apparatus, or trying to break free from the rope trapping her underwater, it has just not been compelling to me. The stakes have been contrived. Did we think Juliette was not going to reach IT? Did we think Juliette was going to drown trying to grab a suit? I much rather enjoyed the banter and negotiation between Juliette and Solo in Episode 3 than Juliette constantly telling Solo to shut up so she can check the aperture of her invention.
Their final conversation did gave me hope for Episode 5, however. Juliette describing her fear as she walked out to clean as a way to empathize with Solo and his fear of being outside the vault was brilliant. Getting to hear Solo describe lions to someone who has never seen one before was just the icing on the cake.
Meanwhile, in Silo 18, we have a little bit of everything. Rebellion, backstabbing, missing bodies, poisoned mushrooms, Down-Deeper power plays, and a conversation between Judge Meadows (Tanya Moodie) and Lukas Kyle (welcome back Avi Nash!) that is so interesting it decidedly deserves its own column.
(My one-sentence opinion: What Meadows did to Lukas by planting the seeds of our greater universe in his head and then sending him to the mines for five years is more tortuous than anything that will happen later.)
Knox (Shane McRae) and Shirley (Remmie Milner) are still working out their differences and Knox has a new way to try and do that. He takes Shirley to a wall of names that never made sense to them until now. Knox is beginning to unravel the clues that point to the fact that anytime there is a struggle in the silo, the strategy from Judicial is to try and blame everything on Mechanical.
Where they finally find common ground on how to proceed is to make a pitch to Judge Meadows with their demands. They know they have an ace up their sleeve that they can play at any time where they can shut down the power to the silo. All they are looking for is A) the chance to see the outside and report back, and B) the truth.
They recruit older members of Mechanical in Carla (Clare Perkins) and Walker (Harriet Walter) to make the trek with them and begin the long walk up dozens of levels to get to the Judge’s chambers. But they did not know that they would never get to meet her while she was still alive. As speculated here before, Bernard was never going to grant Meadows’ wish to leave the silo with a suit that would protect her.
After Robert Sims (Common) subversively lays the groundwork for the people of the silo to impeach Judge Meadows in an attempt to unite the people of Silo 18, Bernard says hold my beer. He can do Sims one better. The real way to unite the silo, he believes, is to follow The Order and frame a heinous act on the visitors from Mechanical walking up to meet the Judge. Over dinner, Bernard poisons Meadows (and this is why I don’t eat mushrooms), which kills her mere minutes after Bernard allows her to put on some kind of silo-style Oculus headset so she can see a version of the world (from 2018? That seems important.) before it was lost into a silo-filled dystopia.
“What did they do to lose this world,” she asks. What exactly, indeed? This is the question we will likely ask throughout this series. It is perhaps tied to a letter Meadows tells Bernard about from Juliette’s hard drive just before she dies. A letter she decoded from Salvador Quinn, who was the head of IT during the rebellion 140 years ago. She won’t tell Bernard what is says. It’s a cruel twist of the knife into Bernard for his role in her death.
Bernard calls in his yes-man, I mean Sims, to “do exactly as I instructed” with Meadows’ dead body. It turns out what he instructed was for Sims to move the body into her office and plunge a knife deep into her chest. That way, when Knox and Shirley finally convince Bernard to let them see her, all they find is a dead judge with only Bernard and Sims as “witnesses.”
Bernard doesn’t stop them from leaving, of course. He tells Sims that the “people of the silo have to take care of this themselves.” Mob justice. Sure, it causes a lot of violence, but at least the silo will be united in their violent acts! No more questions about heat tape and Juliette’s freedom walk. All the people want now is blood. And there are only so many levels Knox, Shirley, Walker, and Carla can go down before they run out of real estate.
The residents of the silo are united against Mechanical. Meadows is dead. Sims has been called out for being the lap dog that he is. Bernard’s plan is working. Who will be the one to foil it, or at least try? Juliette? Lukas? The Sheriff? A had-enough Sims? Hank? I can’t wait to find out.
