Caemeron Crain
The following recap contains spoilers for Silo S3E5, “Memory” (written by Katherine DiSavino and directed by Aric Avelino)
Silo S3E5 spends most of its runtime confirming what I’d inferred in light of the end of last week’s episode. We flash back to when Juliette (Rebecca Ferguson) returned to Silo 18 to see how she and Bernard (Tim Robbins) were rescued from the airlock. Camille (Alexandria Riley) tells Robert (Common) that Juliette, Bernard, and Lukas (Avi Nash) represent threats to the silo, and he takes on the task of dealing with the problems.
Before Robert Sims begins to wrap Bernard’s head in plastic, Bernard relays that Juliette knows how to stop the Safeguard, which leads Sims to cut a slit in the plastic so Bernard can breathe. He then visits Martha (Harriet Walter) and Carla (Clare Perkins) to secure their help in faking Bernard’s incineration, and plants the seeds for Juliette’s mayoral campaign to save her life.
In the present, Juliette learns that Sims had planned to put her into radio contact with Bernard, but she disrupted that plan by running away and making it to the digger void. They are now worried that Camille might find Bernard, so Martha loops Shirley (Remmie Milner) and Knox (Shane McRae) in on the truth of things to enlist their help in moving Bernard.
Kennedy (Rick Gomez) and Lukas make their way towards the down deep, as they’d set out to do in the previous episode. They are accosted by Sims, who brings them to where Bernard has been hiding. Juliette still doesn’t remember her past well enough to know what she meant when she indicated to Bernard (in S2E10) that she knew how to disable the Safeguard, so the group tries to jumpstart her memories with relics from her life.
Hank (Billy Postlethwaite) has been holding onto the watch that Juliette’s father gave him during the rebellion, and that seems to help Jules remember George (Ferdinand Kingsley), but it’s not enough. Sims thinks they’ve been gone too long, so he and Juliette head back up the silo, not knowing exactly what they’re going to do when they come to face Camille.
Along the way, however, Robert comes around to the idea of giving Juliette the Pez dispenser, which he’d been selfishly holding onto because of how it has played a role in his relationship with his son, Anthony (Oscar Coleman). This seems to cause Juliette to remember everything, except she doesn’t know where the pipe is that they’ll need to cap in order to disable the Safeguard. She heads back down to the others in the digger void while Robert prepares to face his wife alone.
Elsewhere in the silo, Carla finally returns to Supply, where Sheriff Billings (Chinaza Uche) has been waiting for her. Paul informs Carla that Orla Kent (Quelin Sepulveda) has been murdered, and Carla quickly believes that this was her fault. Someone has been stealing from Critical Supply, and she’d tasked Orla with investigating.
I think we already knew that, but Carla further informs Paul (and us) that the thefts from Critical Supply have put the silo into a precarious position. We’re talking about things that have been there since the beginning of the silo, because they cannot be made within the silo, like lightbulbs. They should have 50 years left, but unless they recover what’s been stolen, they’re down to two years before there are no grow lights for the farms, at which point they’d all starve to death in the dark.
I’ve wondered about the sustainability of the silo, but I was somewhat surprised at this reveal. To start with the smaller scale question, we have to wonder who has been stealing lightbulbs, and to what end. I’d speculated that maybe Sims had killed Orla because she was getting too close to discovering Bernard, but I think we can rule that out now. It feels like there is a direct line between the thefts and her murder, and I’m frankly at a loss to even guess who could be behind it.
The bigger picture question is what the plan was supposed to be when these supplies ran out in 50 years. Is it based on a projection that it would be safe to leave the silos after 400 years, or has the whole idea of people being able to leave at some point been a lie from the beginning? I’m leaning toward the latter, but even then I wonder if the Algorithm knows about the thefts and what its plan would be either way.
Perhaps we get a clue in the brief scene set in the Before Times that serves to close the episode. Daniel (Ashley Zukerman) and Helen (Jessica Henwick) are in the van he rented last week, and he tells her that Per Stensen, the “number one advocate for AI control,” was somehow involved in the Iran mission. Then, the van starts driving itself, which causes Daniel and Helen to freak out as Silo S3E5 ends. (That’s what you get for renting a van from a streetlamp flyer, I guess).
Daniel describes Per Stensen as the number one advocate for AI control, but does that mean controlling AI or being controlled by AI? I’ve long speculated that the purpose of the silos might not be genuine but related to some kind of protracted social experiment. Could it all actually be about training the Algorithm? Perhaps the point is to teach it how to effectively control a population. The inhabitants are test subjects that can be destroyed at any point if something goes wrong, or die after 400 years when the experiment is over. They’re functionally lab rats.
To be honest, the biggest thing that makes me doubt this possibility is the 400-year timespan. It would take a degree of hubris to be confident that people would still be around to reap the benefits of a 400-year study, but, more to the point, it’s hard for me to imagine any AI advocate being that patient.
I’ve thought since Season 1 that maybe the silo was younger than everyone has been led to believe, but Season 3 has given us Harwood (Ned Dennehy) talking about evidence of 350 years of mining, and the Algorithm referencing that amount of time to Camille. It’s easy enough to doubt the latter, but what about the former?
I feel like I am at once close to and far away from the truth of things.
Until Episode 5, the pacing of Silo Season 3 has been far better than in previous seasons, so it’s somewhat disappointing to see “Memory” be devoted almost entirely to spoonfeeding us things we could have figured out on our own with regard to Silo 18, while only moving the plot in the Before Times forward an inch. Here’s hoping that we’ve gotten all of the table setting out of the way now, and that the rest of the season is a feast.
See you next week.
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I like your idea of AI training but why do you assume AI needs a patient advocate or anyone at all when it seems that AI controls people and not the other way around. Maybe it intends to let the people out after all once the AI model training is over and it can use it to control them on the surface.
I also wondered what if mentioned Silo 1 originally was indeed intended for government to control other silos but that control was hijacked by AI, and now all the silos are controlled by AI.
interesting, yeah I guess I was just thinking about the motivation to set the thing up in the first place
Nothing wrong with the pacing of this episode and I wouldn’t have been able to “figure out” what was revealed in the episode. You can’t expect every episode to be tense and hectic and nail-biting at every turn.
Yeah, that’s fair. I inferred that Martha and Carla were helping Robert keep Bernard hidden and alive down there when I was thinking through S3E4, but the show did need to make that explicit and it probably lands different if you hadn’t drawn that conclusion. And maybe it’s not pacing with this one so much as I had been really enjoying the back and forth between timelines in the first four episodes of the season and we didn’t so much get that here. Part of it’s clearly me, too, I’ll acknowledge that not everyone is going to share my (relatively minor) complaints about how slowly the plot sometimes moves in this show. Thanks for reading!