Ryan Kirksey
The following recap contains spoilers for Silo S2E7, “The Dive” (written by Katherine DiSavino and directed by Michael Dinner)
By now you’ve likely seen the news that Silo has been renewed for two more seasons (Seasons 3 and 4), which will complete the show and allow creator Graham Yost to tell the complete story that he is adapting from Hugh Howey’s novels.
While we will likely never know if the renewal for two more seasons was in doubt, the finality and certainty of this information now allows the show to more closely follow the plot and structure of the books as well as help create a roadmap of exactly what information is revealed when.
One thing Silo has done well is the consistent, but slow, drip, drip, drip of information throughout the course of the almost two seasons now available to us. We learned early in Season 1 that everyone who goes outside dies when they try to clean. Drip. We learn that what the cleaners see is not what the silo residents are seeing on the big screens. Drip.
There might be someone in authority manipulating information about what is really happening outside and what happens to those who clean. Drip. Juliette figures out the pristine version of the outside cleaners see in their visor is a fake. Drip. But she knows what it takes to stay alive outside and can move forward with her own discovery, which shows her dozens of silos exist. Drip, drip.
When Episode 6 of the second season ended, it looked like we were headed for an exposition dump with Bernard (Tim Robbins) swearing in Lukas Kyle (Avi Nash) as his shadow so he could see and learn from The Legacy. I was afraid that drip, drip was going to turn into a full firehose blast and reveal all the silo’s secrets in one conversation.
Smartly, that is not what Yost, writer Katherine DiSavino, and director Michael Dinner decided to do. What they did give us was just enough of a dopamine hit to satisfy our mystery box brains by showing us the inside of the vault, but instead helping Lukas (and by extension, us) learn some answers through essentially Bernard using the Socratic method.
The vault we see in Silo 18 (and presumably there is/was a similar version in Silo 17) has living quarters, food, a copy of The Order, books and relics from human past, and “servers” that can digitally answer any question to which it possesses the knowledge.
Bernard tells Lukas that he has learned through these servers that the silo was built 352 years ago, but information about why and how does not exist. The whole of recorded human history exists on the tablet Bernard gives Lukas, but somehow this artificial intelligence does not know when, why, or how it was created.
That small piece of information gives me a little bit of pause as to whether or not we should trust the information coming from its database. Bernard has not proven trustworthy. Solo in Silo 17 has not proven trustworthy. But we are supposed to completely believe the prescient technology that some head of IT created centuries ago?
After enough of a drip, drip of information to get us to the edge of our seats, Lukas agrees to use the technology to help him figure out a cipher to crack Salvador Quinn’s code. Grrrr, more information about the silo and its history next week, perhaps. Bernard admits he cares much more about what this note says and what secrets it holds than about the rebellion.
That opinion is quickly put to the test by the “Delta Event” happening outside. Shirley (Remmie Milner) and Knox (Shane McRae) procured some gunpowder from Martin and have blasted some kind of whirling dervish of a contraption into the upper levels of the silo, where it opens and lets paper fall all throughout the levels of Silo 18. (Man, imagine what an “Alpha Event” must be like if this was just at the Delta level.)
But this is no ticker tape parade. It’s a campaign to make the entire silo doubt IT and their motivations and stories. Recent history shows us how effective a disinformation campaign can be, so even if the reasons behind Mechanical’s attempts to sow doubt on IT might be short-sighted, it admittedly works to add more chaos to the silo.
Bernard begins to panic. He threatens the imprisoned Carla (Clare Perkins). He tries to get Sims (Common) to sign off on a search warrant for suspects, but when he won’t, he begins positioning Sims’ wife Camille (Alexandria Riley) against him. He keeps all radio communication in the silo shut down. Sheriff Billings (Chinaza Uche) is still canoodling around with Mechanical.
The only thing that can bring Bernard back into his James-Bond-evil-genius level of contemplation is Lukas claiming he has discovered the cipher. He believes it is a number cipher that corresponds to the pages of a certain book that exists in the silo. It would have to be an old book, one that has been around for at least 140 years.
Bernard confesses that the only person who had something like that was Judge Meadows, and Bernard hands over her copy of The Wizard of Oz, which he apparently boosted from her after her death. (Look at the marked-up copy of The Pact from this Apple TV+ fan theory video at the 1:22 mark. Those letters must mean something.)
Lukas will surely make headway with that mystery in next week’s episode now that he has the codebreaker. Drip, drip.
Over in Silo 17, you won’t believe this, but Juliette had a complicated engineering task to complete in this episode which forced her into several harrowing moments, but she somehow survived. When my podcast partner talks about plot armor in this and other shows, this is the type of story he is referencing.
At no point did we believe Juliette (Rebecca Ferguson) would meet her end during her task, but this episode took it even one step further. It took a couple of minutes for Solo (Steve Zahn) to explain to Juliette what “the bends” are and that you can’t come out of deep water too quickly or you could easily die. What ends up happening? Juliette has to come out of the water quickly. Did she die? No. Does she even have any joint pain or side effects? Doesn’t appear so.
True to the name of the episode, “The Dive,” Juliette plunges into the deep, deep water of Silo 17 to fix Solo’s water pump. The two rig up a long air supply system and a rope harness so that Solo can bring her out of the water when the work is done.
The job of fixing the pump seemed easy enough, but as Juliette preps to go back up, her rope and air supply appear to be sabotaged. After the quick (and consequence-free) swim to the surface, Solo is nowhere to be found.
There is an ax that clearly cut the rope. There is a bloody arrow, I believe. Traces of blood are around, but Solo is nowhere to be found. This only leaves two options. One, Solo had some kind of freak accident and ran off injured. I’m not buying that one. Or two, the fear Juliette had about other people being in the silo aligns with Solo’s paranoia of staying near the vault because other people are actually still alive in Silo 17.
This revelation would surely change the course Juliette is on get her suit and make it back to Silo 18. Others that are alive in Silo 17 would represent a major twist in what has been a fairly straightforward two-person play with Juliette and Solo. Did they come from 17 or somewhere else? How have they survived? What do they want with Solo and his vault?
Drip, drip.
