Caemeron Crain
The following recap contains spoilers for Silo S3E4, “Whatever You Do, Don’t Go Home” (written by Jessica Blaire and directed by Aric Avelino)
As last week’s episode of Silo ended, Helen (Jessica Henwick) and Daniel (Ashley Zukerman) had discovered that their contact, Steve (Ed Coleman), had disappeared. His place had been ransacked, and the Iran recording was gone. Their storyline in S3E4 picks up immediately after this, as the pair struggles to figure out what they should do in light of the forces they are apparently up against.
Daniel wants to call the cops—or, at least, call someone—but Helen is more properly paranoid. She smashes Daniel’s phone before giving him an address to meet at later that night. She tells him not to show until 10pm, and I’m frankly not sure if there’s something to question about that or not.
It turns out that the suggested safehouse belongs to her ex, Palmer. She helped him pick out the furniture, and he still has a giant picture of Helen on his wall. Palmer’s not petty, Helen says, and he’s currently on deployment in Sudan.
If this were real life, or a show other than Silo, I probably wouldn’t have any suspicions about Helen’s account, but given that this is Silo, where it can feel like everyone is lying all of the time, I have some questions.
Why did Daniel need to kill some time before going to Palmer’s place? If it was just so Helen could check with Palmer, I’m not sure that would take hours, except I’m also not sure she could even do that, depending on the nature of Palmer’s deployment. So, did she get permission? Does she still have a key? Are they really broken up? Was it just so that Helen would have time to return to the workplace she’s just been fired from to steal a computer (and how did she do that, exactly)? In short, should we trust Helen, or is she lying for some reason?
As always with Silo, I’d be more curious about the reason than anything else.
Regardless, Daniel remembers Steve getting excited when it was his turn in the chess game he had running on his computer during their visit, but was confused when Steve proceeded to make a poor move with his king. From this, Helen (recalling some stuff about World of Warcraft that came out through Edward Snowden that is true in the real world, if you’re curious), infers that Steve was using the game to communicate with someone. She recalls his username, or part of it (BigfootLives), and suggests trying to find out who Steve was playing against.
This leads Daniel to reach out to an old buddy named Sam (Elijah Cook). They used to be in a band called The Lost Boys together, but now Sam works at the Pentagon. Sam insists that he very much will not help Daniel access military secrets, but he seems to have had a change of heart by the end of the episode. He calls Daniel, saying that he couldn’t help but scratch the itch created by Daniel’s query. He went down a rabbit hole and found something Daniel isn’t going to believe.
We’d probably believe it, but don’t get to find out what it is in Silo S3E4. I’m guessing it relates to the grey-haired man (Reed Birney) who has been showing up in the background all season. This week, he approaches Daniel and Helen after their initial conversation with Sam (but before the aforementioned phone call) and tries to encourage them to drop their investigation by offering to buy them off. He says that this is what happened with Steve and Mr. Alameda (whose phone has also stopped working), but he also won’t tell our friends his name, so I’m not sure if they should trust him (per casting information, it’s Henry, apologies if that feels at all like a spoiler).
Henry offers Helen her dream job at the Times, but with Daniel he uses more of a stick than a carrot, threatening the continued funding of the care that Charlotte (Jessica Brown Findlay) is receiving. That’s kind of weird insofar as Charlotte’s treatment includes giving her memory-suppressing drugs, and Henry probably does not want her to remember what she saw in Iran, but probably he’s just confident that his coercion will be effective.
It’s clear that it hasn’t been as we leave the Before Times storyline in this episode. Daniel, having received whatever information from Sam, goes to Helen to loop her in, and they take off together in a minivan Daniel says he rented from some guy advertising on a lamppost. Not sure I buy that, but I suppose it would be under the radar if you could get a vehicle that way.
Whatever You Do, Don’t Go Home
While Silo S3E4 leaves us on the cusp of a big reveal in the Before Times, it ends with a big reveal in Silo 18. Bernard (Tim Robbins) lives! That knowledge should retroactively color our understanding of what comes before it.
As the episode begins, Camille Sims (Alexandria Riley) is trying to steel herself to kill Juliette (Rebecca Ferguson) when her husband, Robert (Common), interrupts her. Camille tells him that the gas in the mines was meant for Lukas Kyle (Avi Nash), who is alive and got away, but Juliette ended up being affected. She wants Robert to initiate the process for installing an interim mayor, and he quickly puts together that the Algorithm thinks it would be good for Juliette to die. He offers to take care of it for Camille, but she insists that she has to do it herself, though she’ll let him tag along for moral support.
Camille radios Emerson (Florian Clare), who tells Nurse Amy (Jacqueline Berces) that Mrs. Sims wants Juliette to be unconscious when she arrives, so Amy prepares a syringe and asks Emerson to hold Juliette down. But Amy doesn’t inject Juliette with whatever anesthetic she’s prepared; rather, she injects Emerson and proceeds to help Juliette escape the room before Camille gets there.
Amy says that she stopped giving Juliette memory suppressors even before Juliette started spitting them out (because someone asked her to), and ends up creating a distraction so that Juliette can evade the raiders who are after her. Amy tells Juliette to go to pump room 76, and when Juliette gets there she encounters… Robert Sims.
Juliette freaks out and is aided by Shirley (Remmie Milner), who has overheard Robert and Camille talking about killing Juliette and has been tracking Sims to help her erstwhile best friend. She gets Jules out of room 76 and traps Sims inside by breaking off the handle. Then, Shirley helps Juliette get to the digger void, which Martha (Harriet Walter) had supposedly sealed off. They find that the wall with a No Access sign is actually a door, and behind that door is Bernard.
It is a general rule of television that, while characters can mislead us in dialogue, what we see is what really happened. There are, of course, some exceptions, such as dream sequences and hallucinations, but these tend to be fairly explicitly marked, even if only retrospectively. In other instances, a TV series (or film) might make it clear that what we are seeing is from a particular character’s perspective, or something along those lines, but we’re clued into the fact that we aren’t seeing objective reality.
Silo isn’t doing any of those things, but rather playing the dangerous game of suggesting that our eyes have lied to us.
In the Season 3 premiere, we saw a body that was purported to be Bernard’s taken to an incinerator and placed inside, and we further saw Robert Sims wrapping Bernard’s head in plastic wrap in a way that clearly seemed to kill him. I suppose Sims could have proceeded to poke a hole in the plastic so that Bernard could breathe, as a part of a plan to sneak him away to safety, and maybe we’ll get confirmation of that down the line, but I can’t help but think of how, back in Season 1 when the power went out, it was visually indicated that it was nice outside (something we know now is not true). That tripped me up so significantly at the time that it did not occur to me that the lush outdoor scene could be projected into the helmets of those sent out to clean, which I now accept to be the case.
So, it could be that what we saw in S3E1 vis-à-vis Bernard was simply not the whole story, or it could be that Silo is violating the norms of televisual reality. Regardless, a show that makes us question everything everyone says is dialing up the degree to which we should be suspicious of what we see as well.
Given the events I recapped above, the only thing that makes sense to me is that Robert told Nurse Amy to stop giving Juliette the drugs, because Bernard told Robert that Juliette knows how to disable the Safeguard. He’s been acting in secret, not so much against his wife (he tells himself) as against the Algorithm (which means he has to deceive his wife).
It’s not that Sims is suddenly a Good Guy, but he loves his family and feels spurned by the powers that be. Maybe Bernard has even told him who is behind the Algorithm (recalling that in S2E10 he told Juliette he knew who, but didn’t know why), and they’ve been working on a plan.
An interesting wrinkle is that Martha seems to be involved in that plan, since the official story is that she sealed access to the digger void where Juliette finds Bernard. We haven’t seen much of Martha this season, and we haven’t seen any of her ex-wife Carla (Clare Perkins), the Head of Supply, though she’s been mentioned frequently.
Carla’s shadow, Orla Kent (Quelin Sepulveda), was discovered dead in the mines in last week’s episode, but Billings (Chinaza Uche) learns this week that she didn’t die there. Someone was trying to hide the body. Was it Mike Davidson (Chris Fulton), who may or may not have been Orla’s boyfriend? Or Glenda Harwood (Gemma Acosta), Mike’s ex-girlfriend who also used to be the shadow for Supply before Orla took her job?
It seems like there is a lot to this whole story we haven’t gotten yet, but for the moment I’m thinking that Orla was killed by whoever has been stealing from Critical Supply, and I have little idea who that might be or why. I refuse to believe it could have been Martha. Am I forgetting another woman from the down deep that Orla could have been referring to before she disappeared episodes ago?
Lukas has found relative safety with Patrick Kennedy (Rick Gomez) and the Outsiders, and, after some bickering about whether or not it’s safe outside, convinces them to join him in seeking out Juliette so they can ask her. Maybe she didn’t remember Kennedy when she saw him, but she remembered Lukas when he saved her from the mines, so they have some evidence that she’s getting her memory back.
The Outsiders have been confused, more than anything. They know that Juliette returned to the silo with a helmet marked 17, even though the ones native to the silo are marked 18, but they haven’t fully made the inference that there are other silos. Lukas could tell them, but they wouldn’t believe him about that any more than Kennedy believes Lukas when he says that the view of the outside from the cafeteria depicts it exactly as it is. They insist on believing their lying eyes (from when they watched the Jane Carmody tape).
That seems set to change, presuming that this group makes it to the digger void to join up with Juliette and Bernard (and Martha and Carla?). The stage is set for everyone who knows things to share the information they know, and from there to hatch a plan to disable the Safeguard before the Algorithm can stop them. I just hope that doesn’t take until the season finale.
I’m still curious what Lukas had been up to for three months in the mines. Was he simply hiding, or was he indeed trying to burrow to another silo? Is there any chance that he succeeded? Will Solo (Steve Zahn) and the lost children reenter the story this season?
Through its first four episodes, Silo Season 3 has done a brilliant job of weaving the story in Silo 18 together with the story in the Before Times, to the point that even the episode titles have had a double valence. “Who Are You?” referred to the memory loss experienced by Juliette and Charlotte. “It’s All Good” struck a consequentialist theme in each timeline with the suggestion that maybe everyone would be happiest if they just focused on the future and forgot about the reality of their trauma. “A Dark Web” referred to “the dark web” in the Before Times, but also plays in both timelines in relation to the tangled web of deception our protagonists were encountering. And, while “Whatever You Do, Don’t Go Home” is literally a line that Helen says to Daniel in S3E4, it could equally apply to Juliette.
It’s a strong season so far, and perhaps the fact that Graham Yost et al. were forced to diverge from the source material in order to keep Rebecca Ferguson on our screens has allowed the series to take flight not just as a great story, but as great television.
See you next week.
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