Caemeron Crain
The following recap contains spoilers for Silo S3E7, “Radio” (written by Remi Aubuchon and directed by Aric Avelino)
Silo S3E7 once again provides little forward movement in the Before Times storyline, though what does occur is significant.
After having their van hijacked by its computer and being driven to a hangar where Senator Thurman (Laura Innes) awaited them in last week’s episode, Helen (Jessica Henwick) and Daniel (Ashley Zukerman) are offered access to the biggest secret in the world, if they’re willing to sign a bunch of NDAs. Charlotte (Jessica Brown Findlay) is there, doing much better than last we saw her, and she’s signed because she wants to know what happened to her in Iran. That’s apparently enough for Daniel.
Helen is more reluctant, which makes sense given the fact that she’s a journalist who is going to want to write about what she’s learned, but she agrees to sign as well once she’s assured that she will be able to do so within five years. We’ll see how she feels about that once she learns the (terrible?) truth.
Per Stenson (Colin Hanks) joins the group in the middle of all of this to let them know that he’s behind things (and also threaten to send them to Gitmo if they break the NDA). Daniel briefly mentioned Stenson to Helen in a previous episode, calling him an “advocate for AI control,” which led me to wonder whether that means controlling AI, or being controlled by it. I continue to guess it’s the latter.
Per is also the richest man in the world and has a reputation for being something of a “mad scientist.” Helen asks him about his attempt to create a unicorn, and Per tells her that it was basically successful, but he nixed the project after some billionaire offered him a tidy sum to hunt one for sport. He scoffs at his fellows, and Colin Hanks does a great job of making Per affable, but it’s not enough (yet?) to overcome how predisposed I am to view this man negatively. Thurman may be convinced that the project that will lead to the silos is going to “save the world,” but I can’t imagine any explanation that will bring me around on that.
The connection between Per and the silos is confirmed by the end of “Radio” as the group arrives in Georgia, and Daniel identifies a giant drill from above. Further information will have to wait until next week.
The big question is, of course, why the silos are being created, but I’m also really curious to learn what relates this project to the (diegetic) war in Iran. The charitable reading might be that Iran has developed some kind of weapon that they used on Charlotte’s battalion and might use more broadly, but living in silos underground for hundreds of years is an extreme solution to that kind of problem. Nuclear armageddon and climate catastrophe are the two scenarios that come to mind for me where long-term underground silos might feel appropriate, but I hope that Silo might be doing some third thing I haven’t been able to guess.
Fear Is Your Only God on the Radio
The action in Silo 18 picks up this week more or less where we left it. After Robert Sims (Common) discovers that the vitamin D+ has already been released into the water supply, he relays this information to Juliette (Rebecca Ferguson), and she decides they aren’t waiting for dawn to begin the Silo 17 mission.
Lukas (Avi Nash) and Patrick (Rick Gomez) head out of the silo as soon as they are prepped, in the middle of the night. Things go well enough at first (and Lukas gets a nice moment where he’s literally starstruck), but as they approach the field of corpses Juliette navigated through in Season 2, they begin to hear a buzzing noise. We return to the perspective within the silo, where Martha (Harriet Walter) has been on the radio with Lukas and Kennedy, and hear gunshots before radio contact is lost.
The Algorithm tells Camille (Alexandria Riley) that Lukas and Kennedy have been neutralized, and assures her that the Safeguard is not something that can be escaped. It tasks Camille with determining whether Juliette is trying to disable the Safeguard (because I guess they don’t know that for sure yet, even if we do), so Camille goes to Juliette’s room to inform her that Kennedy and Lukas are dead. Juliette had already inferred that from the gunshots, and she doesn’t believe Camille’s line about their suits malfunctioning for one second. Camille doesn’t believe Juliette either when she insists that she was just trying to save children, so the two remain at a standoff.
Camille had planned to kill Juliette just a couple of episodes ago, but I think the intention was to blame that on Juliette’s accidental exposure to rat poison in the mines. If they simply killed Juliette now, that could cause chaos in the silo, and that would be bad. Much better to let the vitamin D+ take effect.
Of course, this is likely to cause chaos of its own. Bernard (Tim Robbins) brings Gloria (Sophie Thompson), who has long been a member of The Flamekeepers, to Juliette so that she can read from the Mission diary, which was written during the rebellion 140 years ago. In the last entry, Mission mentions mass suicides due to the unexplained memory loss cutting through the silo, and it’s implied that he took the same path shortly after writing the entry.
Juliette is considering a harebrained plan to blow up Judicial, which might kill 1,000 people. Bernard (who is still not a good guy) wants her to know that if she does nothing, the cost might be 2,000 lives (with memory loss for everyone else).
I’m not entirely sure how the plan to blow up Judicial was supposed to work, if I’m honest. Destroying the Safeguard pipe makes some sense, but they don’t really know what would happen if the poison gas was released anyway after that. They are just confident they could seal off the rest of the silo from it, I guess.
It’s even less clear how this plan would help with the vitamin D+ problem, though I did appreciate that Silo S3E7 includes a moment where Sims tells Juliette to drink milk, juice, wine, or whatever hasn’t come out of the tap, making it explicit that there are at least some available hydration options in the silo besides water. Of course, in the long term, I don’t know if the memory drugs will seep into the milk and juice, and I’m really unsure what our friends are going to do about this problem even if they do manage to take care of the Safeguard and neuter the Algorithm.
Camille is in a desperate spot. She’s figured out that her husband is working for the other side, which leads to a confrontation between the Simses towards the end of S3E7. It doesn’t really resolve, but it is clear that Camille and Robert are each doing what they think is best to save their family and the silo at large. They’re just working in opposite directions.
It’s emblematic of an ongoing tension in Silo: go along to survive or rebel even though you might die, if just to be free for one second. We’ve seen Meadows (Tanya Moodie) and Bernard each take both of those paths at points in this story, and it’s exemplified, too, in the aborted plan to bomb Judicial in this episode. Maybe they don’t know what would happen next, but, across a certain threshold, you don’t care. Maybe we’ll figure it out, or maybe we’ll die, but at least we’ll be free.
Patrick Kennedy embodies something of that sentiment, but he’s not dead. Whatever happened to him and Lukas, they manage to re-establish radio contact with Martha just in time for the attempt to blow up Judicial to be called off. Did they make it to Silo 17 and meet Solo (Steve Zahn)? We’ll have to wait until next week to find out.
The bigger question is what exactly happened during the cold open of the episode, when they heard buzzing followed by gunshots. If there had been soldiers or drones waiting for Lukas and Patrick outside of the silo to gun them down, that would have been new and intriguing information, but apparently it’s not that. So, what the heck? I’m honestly at a loss to speculate.
We know that Martha has been messing with different channels on the radio, so I suppose it’s possible that communication dropped at the beginning of the episode because Lukas got outside the range of Silo 18’s frequency and they reconnected on a different channel at the end of the episode. But what about the gunshots? It wouldn’t really make sense for that to be a ploy for the sake of Juliette et al. because it implies that there are people out there. Juliette didn’t trigger any kind of automatic gunfire when she walked to Silo 17. But if it was actual gunfire, how did Lukas and Patrick survive? Was it not intended for them? Did the kids from Silo 17 shoot someone who was coming after them?
I really can’t wait to find out.
Who Killed Orla Kent?
Knox (Shane McRae) is bothered by something in the way Ed Harwood (Ned Dennehy) told him about his father’s death, so Knox goes to see Mark (George Robinson) to ask him about it. It turns out that Knox’s dad isn’t dead. He designed something for Harwood, and the payment was faking his death. I’d guess that what Knox’s dad designed is related to how Glenda (Gemma Acosta) managed to get from the mines to Supply so fast in the CCTV footage Billings (Chinaza Uche) and Hank (Billy Postlethwaite) saw in last week’s episode—some kind of secret tunnel?—but we don’t learn any more at this point.
Ed Harwood is also uncooperative when Billings pays him a visit and is unswayed by threats about investigations launched by Sheriff Holston (David Oyelowo) that never led to charges. All signs point to Harwood being behind Orla Kent’s (Quelin Sepulveda) murder, and I might only doubt it at this point because I’ve seen a lot of TV shows (and this one, in particular, encourages us to doubt everything).
The bigger question is what has happened to what has been stolen from Critical Supply, and whether there is a way for Silo 18 to survive for more than two years given these thefts. I increasingly think that this plot thread is laying the grounds for Silo Season 4 more than I expect it to be resolved in Season 3. Whatever happens, we now know that the silo is on a ticking clock. Even if it were 50 years, that would start to feel pressing.
Perhaps things will come to a head sooner. There are three episodes left in Season 3 of Silo, and we’re on the precipice of a big reveal in the Before Times about what led to the creation of the silos in the first place. The thematic resonances between the timelines have gotten weaker over the past couple of weeks, but the series is now in a position to make the plot connections much stronger. I’m as excited as I’ve ever been.
See you next week.
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