Silo S3E10 Recap: “Troy” — Who Are We, Freed From the Past?

The following recap contains spoilers for the Season 3 finale of Silo, S3E10, “Troy” (written by Fred Golan and directed by Amber Templemore), but no book spoilers.

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I’ll be honest, after the conclusion of last week’s episode of Silo, what I wanted most from the season finale was a direct continuation of the story with regard to Helen (Jessica Henwick) and Daniel (Ashley Zukerman)—to see what occurred immediately after that bomb went off. This is, of course, precisely what Silo S3E10 withholds, and it will be hard for me to properly assess that creative decision until I’ve seen Season 4. As much as I want answers, I do have to recognize that the fun is in the questions.

Troy without Helen

The episode begins with Daniel waking up from a cryopod (which are a part of this story now) in Silo 1, where he is known as Troy. Victor (Matt Craven) says, with apology, that they had to rapid sequence him, so they have to do a thermal flush, which sounds like it’s an abnormal measure (but I’m not sure it actually is, given that we don’t see a “normal” procedure in S3E10).

There’s an emergency unfolding, and it’s one that we, as viewers of Silo, have already seen from a different perspective. The inhabitants of Silo 17 have disabled their Safeguard and are storming out of their silo. The Directive (which we haven’t heard about before, but which seems roughly equivalent to The Order but for Silo 1) states that contact between the silos must be avoided at all costs, so Daniel Troy orders that everyone be killed with a series of drone strikes (some using “the compound” and some using bullets). He wants the team to wait until almost everyone is out of Silo 17 before they initiate this.

Pushback arrives from Charlotte (Jessica Brown Findlay), who is called Susan now (with Troy having no idea that Susan is his sister). She argues that, if they target the Sheriff of Silo 17, who has led the rebellion, the others will flee back inside. But Troy isn’t having it. When Susan refuses to carry out her orders, Troy has her arrested and leads the operation himself. In what feels almost like slow motion, we see some 9,800 people from Silo 17 slaughtered.

Victor seems a bit horrified, even as he recognizes the apparent necessity of the action given The Directive, but Troy appears to feel nothing. There is almost no indication that this is the same person as the Daniel we’ve come to know over the course of Season 3, except when he asks Victor about the woman he briefly remembered as he woke up.

Victor promises to look into it, but as Troy is sent back to cryo-sleep he files the note—which reads “Who is she?”—in a folder containing many notes that are exactly the same.

In the middle of all of this, Troy is commended by Madam Director Thurman (Laura Innes), who also informs him that Charlotte Susan has been released from custody, and that she won’t be “neutralized” because she will play a critical role at the end of The Project, and she’s important to Thurman’s daughter. Anna (Morven Christie) does not appear in this episode.

It seems like Thurman has aged more than Daniel Troy has. This may simply be because she was already significantly older in the Before Times, but I took the implication that she’s been awake for longer stretches of time than he has, perhaps due to her position.

The whole idea of cryo-sleep is new to the narrative of Silo, and we’re left to piece together how it works from the events of this episode. I gather that people do not age when they are in the pod, and that the inhabitants of Silo 1 work in shifts, though it is not entirely clear how long those shifts are.

When he is first awoken in S3E10, Troy is told that it’s been seven years. The second time, he’ll be told it’s been 35 years. It seems like Troy is only called upon in moments of crisis (leading me to wonder what happened seven years prior to the death of Silo 17), and the same may go for Henry (Reed Birney). Victor seems to be awake more consistently, but maybe that’s just a quirk of the narrative we’re seeing.

“Troy” confirms that it isn’t deadly outside of the silos except insofar as Silo 1 makes it deadly, since the people of Silo 17 were fine until the dust came, but things remain murky when it comes to how long the silos have been operating. Given what we see in S3E10, can we buy that it’s been 350 years? I’m not sure the idea of cryo-sleep is enough to get us quite that period of time.

Regardless, Troy and Susan seem to be the only characters we’ve previously met who don’t remember who they are. At least, they are the only ones going by new names. It’s possible that Senator Thurman’s memory has been messed with, but worth noting that Victor looks at pictures of his daughter, indicating that he remembers his previous life.

It’s also worth noting that, when Troy and Victor talk in the cafeteria of Silo 1, the window shows not desolation but a lush landscape of trees. This could, of course, be a virtual projection, but I’m prone to take it as further evidence that the world outside of the silos is largely fine, at least from an environmental point of view.

As we pick up with the action in Silo 18, Shirley (Remmie Milner) and Knox (Shane McRae) are working in the mines, while Camille (Alexandria Riley) orders Emerson (Florian Clare) to take cannisters down there and make sure the Raiders doing so are seen. Camille is pleading with The Algorithm for more time before the Safeguard is initiated, and, on the other end, it’s Victor, who gives her a few more minutes.

It’s a ruse on Camille’s part, however. The Raiders are taking oxygen to the mines, and she’s decided to do her best to help the rebels try to seal off the Safeguard. They’ve found a spot where they can clench off the pipe down deep, and they manage to do so before the poison pumps in. For the moment, at least, Silo 18 is free.

It’s a credit to the writers of Silo, and to Alexandria Riley, that Camille’s last-second turn plays as well as it does. She’s clearly been conflicted all season, not wanting to kill people or to wipe everyone’s memory, but feeling forced to make decisions for the sake of the silo’s survival. I wouldn’t give Camille a lot of moral credit for her about-face, since she was forced into that as well, but the character beats make sense, as does Juliette’s (Rebecca Ferguson) apparent decision to forgive her.

Juliette can’t get the door that Lukas (Avi Nash) found at the bottom of the silo out of her mind, so she heads there with Camille, Knox, Shirley, and Hank (Billy Postlethwaite) in tow. When they get there, the voice of The Algorithm activates (it’s Troy now) to threaten them, and then offers a compromise when Jules calls the bluff: refrain from trying to contact other silos, and you’ll be safe.

As Hank questions Juliette’s acceptance of this offer, it’s clear that she’s already been thinking about how Silo 1 could kill everyone in any silo they made contact with, and that she’s well aware that Silo 1 is going to keep trying to kill everyone in Silo 18. But they expect Silo 18 to play defense. Juliette suggests they play offense instead. They have to take out Silo 1.

In Silo 1, Troy has been awoken to discover that Victor killed himself. He didn’t leave a note for just anyone to find, but he did leave a private message for Troy, in which he says that he was relieved when the Safeguard for Silo 18 failed, and he tells Troy that the woman he keeps remembering is Helen Drew.

Troy tears up, and the episode ends.

The Season 3 finale leaves us with a lot of questions, even as the information it provides changes the parameters of those questions. I’ve long wondered, for example, whether it was always toxic outside, and while it would seem that we’ve learned here that it isn’t, the broader question about the state of the world remains.

So, too, does the question of how long people have been in the silos. The introduction of cryo-sleep makes it somewhat plausible that the same people have been able to survive in Silo 1 for centuries, but the fact that these same people are still around also puts pressure on the idea that it’s been 350 years.

“Troy” sees Camille pushing Victor as to why Silo 1 would have the power to kill everyone, and he answers another question instead, saying that humanity had been caught in a cycle of self-annihilation. He tells Troy that The Project’s purpose involves freeing us from the past, and so far, so misguided, but even if we buy that, we’re a step short of what would justify the Safeguard.

I believe that S3E9 told us that Per Stenson (Colin Hanks) set off a nuke in Atlanta in order to force his hand-selected silo tourists to live in the silos long term, that he’s evil, and that there is no real justification for what he’s done. But even if we take it from his perspective, I struggle to understand the Safeguard.

Here is the best I’ve got, thinking about things very cynically, and writing the next few sentences from the point of view of the Founders. We believe that humanity needs a reset, so we’re going to store people underground while we destroy civilization, and we have to keep them safe underground until that whole process has played out. Each silo should believe it’s the only silo, and that the survival of the species is at stake. If they contact one another, they might learn that it’s actually safe to go outside and empty out all of the silos, which would be mission failure. So, if any silo starts to do that, we wipe it out, having dozens of others that are still intact.

I continue to wonder if, beyond this, each set of silos might represent a distinct kind of social experiment, and about what the broader world looks like. Is anyone out there who might possibly see all those corpses outside of Silo 17? Is Silo 1 depending on a no-fly zone, or has humanity been generally annihilated? And what’s the endgame here? We learned in Season 3 that Silo 18 only has the resources to survive for another 50 years (at most), but that narrative thread is left dangling over the course of its closing episodes.

I hope that Season 4 picks up Helen’s story, since I think that could be a fruitful entry point into the history of Silo 18 in a way that could provide answers to questions I’ve been pondering since the beginning (like why they need people to clean), and I hope that the series finds a way to explore the four dozen or so silos we haven’t seen at all yet, at least to some degree. I’m starting to worry whether one more season of Silo is going to feel like enough.

See you next year!