Silo S3E9 Recap: “Farewell” Cruel World — I’m Off To Join the Circus

The following recap contains spoilers for Silo S3E9, “Farewell” (written by Jeffery Wang and directed by Amber Templemore)

---

After last week’s Silo, I feared that the penultimate episode of the season might see the series spinning its wheels in order to hold big narrative moments for the finale. Instead, the action pushes forward meaningfully in the Silo 18 timeline (even if the climax is still to come), while the story in the Before Times left me sick to my stomach and made it hard for me to fall asleep. That’s good TV!

Let’s begin, as S3E9 does, with the story in Silo 18.

Farewell, Bernard

As the episode opens, Juliette (Rebecca Ferguson) is in jail with Robert Sims (Common) after her plan to cap the Safeguard failed in S3E8. The new plan, it appears, is for Bernard (Tim Robbins) to give himself up to Camille (Alexandria Riley), in order to create a distraction for Knox (Shane McRae), Shirley (Remmie Milner), Martha (Harriet Walter), et al.

First, however, he tries to negotiate with the Algorithm. Bernard claims that a fresh rebellion is brewing in Mechanical (which is kind of true), and suggests that Camille blame everything bad that has happened in the silo over the preceding months on him. Of course, that had already been the strategy. What’s fresh is in Bernard’s notion that Camille then “rehabilitate” him and allow him to live.

I don’t know if Bernard ever thought this had a chance of working, but it doesn’t. The Algorithm claims that, after running the numbers, Bernard’s plan would have a negligible effect on the survival of the silo; however, if they publicly pin everything on him before sending him out to clean, that would be better.

Bernard pushes back, and the Algorithm seems to become frustrated with him, ending the conversation. This is arguably the main thing to take away from the exchange, as it leads Bernard to conclude that the Algorithm isn’t actually a super smart computer like he’d thought. He’s now convinced that it’s a person, and a person can be defeated.

Insofar as Silo has taught us to be skeptical of everything, I’m not sure if I fully buy Bernard’s inference. Maybe the Algorithm is a machine, but more like the chatbots we’ve become used to than some kind of semi-omniscient AI. Maybe feigning emotion is a part of its programming, because its primary purpose is manipulation. But, at the same time, I feel like the show is trying to use Bernard to convey information to the audience, so perhaps we should believe him.

Regardless, he’s sent out to clean, without a suit (which apparently isn’t against The Pact), and Juliette is forced to preside over the proceedings as mayor. Sheriff Billings (Chinaza Uche) also plays his part, even as he has been aiding the rebel group by giving them access to the secret elevator he and Hank (Billy Postlethwaite) discovered last week when they solved the murder of Orla Kent (Quelin Sepulveda).

By the time Bernard is sent out to clean, they’ve already failed in their attempt to get to Water Filtration and are engaged in another plan that the episode never fully explains. It would seem to involve setting off explosives in the mines, so my best guess is that they are trying to open a passage to Silo 17. Camille clearly has enough of an idea of what they’re doing to worry that it means the Safeguard will be enacted.

Bernard walks out of the silo and tries to hold his head high. He doesn’t clean, but he hasn’t even been asked to. This is a straightforward execution. He stumbles to the tree outside of the silo—which we’ve seen many times at this point, but which I’ve maybe never thought about quite enough—and sits beneath it, to (apparently) die. In his last moments, he imagines it lush with leaves, and that the sun is shining.

I didn’t notice Holston or Allison’s corpse in this scene, by the way, though I was doing my best to spot them. I wonder if there is some kind of automated corpse removal that everyone in the silo knows about, which has just never been made fully explicit to us. You could potentially tie in the Algorithm’s remark to Camille about Lukas (Avi Nash) and Patrick’s (Rick Gomez) bodies going missing to something along those lines. Or maybe it’s just an oversight.

Farewell, Atlanta

Unlike most of the episodes of Season 3, Silo S3E8 makes a clean cut between the timelines, with the entire first half of the episode devoted to Bernard’s story, and the entire second half devoted to Daniel (Ashley Zukerman) and Helen (Jessica Henwick) in the Before Times.

We begin with an ultrasound, and ultimately learn that it has been three years since that night when Daniel got into a helicopter and told Helen that he wanted to become gray goo with her (they say romance is dead!). Now, Helen is quite pregnant, but not too pregnant to fly to Atlanta for the unveiling of the silos Per Stenson (Colin Hanks) has created.

First, they have dinner with Charlotte (Jessica Brown Findlay) and Anna (Morven Christie), who are also an established couple by this point. We learn that Helen and Daniel have been living in Oregon, and that Anna has recently overcome cancer. Everything seems really pleasant until the Keenes start talking about meeting for breakfast the next morning, and Anna worries that she and Charlotte may need to get to the silo site early.

I’m not sure when exactly the dread set in. Maybe it wasn’t until Helen and Daniel arrived at the silos, and someone said that Helen would be touring Silo 18. I bet she has that Pez dispenser her husband gave her on their first date (that wasn’t a date) in her purse.

The silos are beautiful and everyone is friendly, but the dread pervades everything. Daniel asks Victor (Matt Craven) about The Pact, which Victor and Anna have been writing. Victor says it was mostly written by AI, with them editing, but talks about how his expertise in treating trauma is relevant to thinking about people living in the silos, since if anyone ever does long term, it will be in the wake of great trauma. Victor, with his memory-suppressing drugs. Does he know what’s coming?

Henry (Reed Birney) certainly does, which makes the way he glad-hands Daniel and Helen, talking about music and fireworks, feel pernicious. Maybe he thought everyone would get a Peter Gabriel concert before the event, but I doubt it.

Anna knows, which is why Charlotte is absent. They got there early to make sure that Charlotte was in Silo 1 before anything bad happened. She’s had enough trauma. Maybe they’ll wipe her memory some more.

Per Stenson surely knows, since it’s surely his plan, but if you weren’t sure, you can tell by the way he glibly starts playing “Chopsticks” on the piano while Senator Thurman (Laura Innes) rehearses the speech she’ll never give.

Senator Thurman doesn’t know what’s about to happen. She’s just been a useful idiot in securing whatever Stenson needed from the government. Probably she’ll survive and happily go along with what’s next, though, because she’s a career politician.

Daniel starts to get wind that something is wrong when he can’t reach Charlotte, and then he gets a text message “from her” that fails to live up to their running joke about how, if their parents were alive, they’d be clawing to get out of their coffins.

Helen gets the ick even earlier. In all fairness, it’s hard to separate the general ick from encountering a guy who uses smart glasses to call you by name even when you’ve never met him from the particular ick that would portend danger. It’s enough for her to leave her tour of Silo 18, but it’s too late.

As Daniel and Helen connect on the phone, a nuke goes off on the horizon, and we hear the voice of the Algorithm for the first time in the Before Times, urging everyone to get into the nearest silo as quickly as possible.

It’s all incredibly cruel.

I don’t know if anyone will dispute my interpretation of the events of the latter half of Silo S3E9, but I suppose I should make it explicit. Per Stenson set off that nuclear bomb. His plan was never to create the silos “just in case” a catastrophe occurred; his plan was to populate them with individuals he had selected to attend his unveiling ceremony. I presume that he’ll join them, because I do believe that he believes that global catastrophe is inevitable.

But that doesn’t mean that it’s happened by the end of “Farewell.” There are a number of questions to think through, and I’ll do that presently.

First, however, I want to dwell with the evil of what Stenson has done, and the cruelty of it. The cruelest thing of all might be separating Daniel and Helen—by design, and with malice aforethought—given the love they clearly have for one another and their unborn child. It makes me sick, and it’s unforgivable.

Anna, who clearly knew about the plan, is also unforgivable in my estimation. May she and Per burn forever on a burning pile of garbage. You might be tempted to think about how they were doing what they thought was in the service of humanity in general, and/or those they love in particular, and I wouldn’t necessarily disagree with that. Rather, I’d argue it’s part of what makes them irredeemably evil—thinking they know what’s best… the paternalism of it…

Helen and Daniel decided that they’d rather become gray goo together than live underground, and their autonomy has been stripped from them. It’s an absolute moral wrong.

You’re free to disagree, but if I were Daniel or Charlotte, I would never forgive them, and I expect that this sentiment, coming from those two (and even more strongly from Helen) will play a role in the institution of various policies we’ve become familiar with through the main Silo 18 storyline.

Of course, we don’t know whether it was just that one nuclear bomb in Atlanta, or if Stenson has set off a nuclear war that will make the whole planet uninhabitable. We also don’t know what role nano-weapons might play in our story as it progresses. What I feel like we do know is that the people who entered the silos on this day of their unveiling are never coming out.

Some will go along, out of fear or a compliant disposition. Others will chafe, like Helen. I wouldn’t be surprised if she’s the first person to ever be sent out to clean. Stenson may have selected people based on traits he admired, but it’s easy to see how that will shift into policies intended to weed some of them out of the population. Unless…

Dr. Crnkovich makes a joke to Daniel about Silo 17 being the best silo, but what if he’s not joking? Maybe each silo was designed to be different from the beginning, and the library we’ve seen in Silo 17 is not something Silo 18 ever had. I’ve long played with the idea that the silo is a social experiment, and it’s interesting to think about the possibility that it’s 50 social experiments, each set up differently from the others. Maybe the members of each group of seven are similar, but there are wider divergences between the groups. We should bear in mind that we’ve only seen two silos.

That leads me to wonder if there was a reason to put Helen in Silo 18 that had to do with her personality, but, to be clear, nothing along those lines could excuse the cruelty of separating her from Daniel. Even the apocalypse only takes us so far, as far as excuses go.

About That Tree…

Since the beginning of Silo, we’ve seen the tree outside, whether through the cafeteria window, on the Jane Carmody cleaning tape, or when someone went out to clean. Here in “Farewell,” we see it in the Before Times, and I’m starting to wonder if I’ve thought about that tree enough.

My first thought was that a dead tree would definitely not stand for 350 years, but it turns out that trees can survive a nuclear blast. In Japan, they call them hibakujumoku, and it would seem there are dozens of trees that continue to survive despite the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Now, if the tree outside of the silo survived for some 350 years after the bomb we see go off in the Before Times in S3E9, we might think that it would have grown noticeably larger, but I can’t claim to know enough about trees to assert that definitively, particularly without knowing more about the environmental conditions it has persisted through. Maybe it’s found just enough nutrition to sustain itself for a long time in its current state, but a dead tree isn’t likely to stand for more than a few decades.

Longtime readers will know I’ve wondered for a while if the silos might be younger than we’ve been told, and I’m tempted to spin out a wild theory here, which I do not fully endorse. What if the silos are only about 70 years old, and Bernard is Helen’s son? I kind of hope that’s wrong, to be honest.

To take things in another direction, if we presume that the tree outside of the silo has survived for centuries, I think that would imply something about the world at large—there is at least enough to sustain this tree. Maybe there’s even an explanation here for the moment in Season 1 when the power went out and it appeared to be nice outside through the cafeteria window. Maybe the tree does bloom sometimes and grows leaves, but it’s still not safe outside, so you can’t let people see that.

Juliette, spurred by Bernard, suggests in Silo S3E9 that all of their questions might boil down to just one: Why? And certainly that’s right, if that’s what we want to focus on. We may have gotten something of an answer at this point when it comes to the question of why people are in the silos, but it’s an incomplete one. Why people are sent out to clean (emphasis on clean) is a more specific question I’ve wondered about since the beginning, and why there is a Safeguard is a question that’s felt particularly pressing for some time in the narrative. But it does all boil down to wondering why any of this is happening, where even the idea that it isn’t safe to go outside doesn’t provide a sufficient answer.

I think that the answers we’ll get, though, are more about how this state of affairs came to be than they are about why, and, thankfully, that’s also the kind of answer I want. If we focus on the why, we can tend to presume rationality. The how is probably far messier.

As to the what, I find myself focused on a few things. Was it just one bomb in Georgia, or was it broader than that? Is the world at large OK, or not? If so, does anyone out there even know about the silos? Does the Safeguard (as a plan to kill everyone within a silo) even really exist? Is it deadly outside all of the time, or only when Silo 1 (or whoever) sends dust? Are there 50 silos, or 51 (and what’s up with that extra one, if the latter)? What’s been happening in all of the silos we haven’t seen yet? Who shot at Patrick and Lukas, and what was all that about?

I don’t expect we’ll get answers to all of those questions in the Season 3 finale, but if we get some, they will feed into an answer about the how, which feeds into an answer about the why.

In the meantime, I’m so mad when I think about what they did to Helen.

See you next week.