Silo Recap: Breakdown, It’s All Right
One of my favorite comic-book supervillain clichés is when everything goes horribly awry for the bad guys for page after page, until at the end of the issue, in a cliffhanger panel, Doctor Doom or Lex Luthor or whoever cackles and says something like, “Everything is going … just the way I planned it!”
Bernard Holland is very much a “just the way I planned it” kind of villain. An adherent to the Pact and the Order and every other how-to manual left by the silos’ masterminds for later generations to follow, Bernard always seems to act strangely calm and confident whenever everything appears to be sliding into chaos. Even in this week’s episode, as two separate militias from Mechanical are making their way toward Judicial’s barricades, undaunted by Bernard’s supply blockade, the mayor seems almost gleeful. It’s “ahead of schedule,” he says. It’s “good news.” It “accelerates our timeline.” He hasn’t just anticipated this rebellion, he’s hoped it would happen just this way.
But do Bernard’s books really tell him all he needs to know? Those ancestors may have understood a thing or two about human nature, but they weren’t the fourth or fifth generation to have lived their whole lives in a silo. Did they really predict, down to the finest detail, how people and culture would evolve?
What “Barricades” presupposes is: Maybe they didn’t?
This entire episode takes place mostly in Silo 18 until a brief (and highly pertinent) check-in with Silo 17 at the end. The choice to stay with Silo 18 makes sense at this point in the season because the story in 18 — finally — has some serious momentum. The real action right now is with the rebellion, which Bernard hopes will sow dissension both within Mechanical and between Mechanical and the rest of the silo.
The internal dissension is a pressing concern for Knox and Shirley, who have safely returned to their home after the previous episode’s rappelling adventure but have brought Judicial’s wrath down on their people. Somebody in the Down Deep has poisoned their food, and with deliveries prohibited by the barricade on Level 130, the citizens surrounding Mechanical have begun wondering why their children should starve to protect a couple of troublemakers. As Bernard notes, smugly, the old wisdom holds that “only nine missed meals separate a functioning society from chaos.” The plans! They keep falling into place!
Bernard even claims he doesn’t mind when Knox, Shirley, and Walker quell the rebellion within the rebellion, both by providing food — dropped down the garbage chutes by some allies on higher levels — and by giving rousing speeches about the Mechanical way of life, where everyone pools resources and makes do together. But a couple of signs that maybe — just maybe — Bernard doesn’t have a road map to where this journey ends come after the rested and fed Mechanical militias acquire weapons and armor from Knox’s foundry friend and begin their dual march to the barricade.
The first surprise? One of the militias has a powerful saw that can cut through concrete, enabling them to sneak behind Judicial’s raiders. The second surprise? Shirley has come up with a plan of her own to get the raiders into a standoff position on Level 120 and then propose a truce involving moving the barricade to that level. When Bernard hears that his head of security, Amundsen, agreed to this deal, his eyes practically roll out of his head. Did Amundsen realize that by giving the Down Deepers access to everything below Level 120, he just gave them a whole frickin’ farm?
I’ll come back to Bernard in a moment because, in addition to losing his strategic food blockade, in this episode he also inevitably loses Sheriff Billings’s trust. The sheriff is still in the Mechanical area, investigating the firebombing (among many other nagging mysteries); he’s now in no hurry to head back upstairs, given that his wife, Kathleen, has joined him down there with their baby. Kathleen came to help with an off-the-books medical emergency — removing a bullet from the firebomber, Patrick — and she brought Dr. Nichols with her since only he has access to the good drugs.
Billings isn’t entirely sure where his loyalty lies, but he knows he doesn’t like being jerked around and lied to by anybody. He gets very annoyed when Patrick — who promised to spill silo secrets so shocking that “it’ll ruin your fuckin’ life” — suddenly clams up after Nichols dopes him up and sews him up. Finally, Billings sends everyone out of the room and takes a threatening posture with Patrick, who reluctantly says what he knows: that before Juliette went out, she briefly switched all the silo’s view screens to show the video of the lush green outside. Not everybody saw it, but Patrick did, and it haunts him because now he knows everything he’s ever been told about the world outside is a lie. (We, of course, know that it was the video that’s the lie. But Patrick’s instincts are still spot-on. He doesn’t have to be such a jerk about it, but he’s not entirely wrong.)
Meanwhile, with the Down Deepers, Billing insists that if they keep hiding Knox and Shirley, he can’t help them with anything — and that includes helping Walker figure out where Judicial has taken her ex-wife, Carla. When he does finally find Knox and Shirley (who are smooching at the time, by the way), he radios Bernard and lets him know that he won’t turn them over to Judicial until there’s an investigation into Judge Meadows’s death. A flustered Bernard shuts down all radio communications, lest people throughout the silo hear the sheriff defying the mayor.
And so we return to Bernard, who is much less confident by the end of this episode than he appeared to be at the start. At one point, during a visitation with Mary Meadows’s corpse, he breaks down crying, confessing that he murdered her due to “the calculations” and that her death ultimately might make no difference. “140 years of stability,” he says, “and it could all end on my watch.”
Speaking of plans … what’s that old saying about the best-laid ones?
The Down Deep
• I don’t want to say that “the Syndrome” is a load of bull crap, but I do find it suspicious that when Sheriff Billings stops taking his special herbs and suffers no apparent physical consequences, his wife suggests it’s because he’s “changed.” I’m not sure “becoming a take-charge kind of guy” has that much effect on non-imaginary afflictions.
• Walker has a nice moment with Dr. Nichols, who pays her a visit while he’s on the Mechanical level. He thanks her for taking care of Juliette for so many years, and Walker replies, “It was her who took care of us.” But then when he asks if she thinks Juliette’s alive, Walker crushes his hopes by saying “no.” She thinks Juliette walked out of view of the camera only so that her loved ones wouldn’t have to watch her die.
• Plot point to keep an eye on: While Bernard is trying to get to the bottom of Camille’s decision to help Knox and Shirley escape the mob’s vigilante justice, he lets her know that it was her husband who planted the agitators in that mob. Clearly, Bernard sees some tactical value in getting the Sims family to question one another’s decisions.
• There are two more crucial plot points introduced toward the end of this episode that will likely get more play next week. In one, Lukas tries to crack the code in Salvador Quinn’s letter and gets so flummoxed that Bernard makes a shocking decision: He swears Lukas in as his new IT shadow, so that under the rules of the Pact he can share pertinent secrets. You know what that means, don’t you, Silo fans? Next episode, we might start getting that thing all “mystery box” shows eventually must deliver. It’s “answers” time!
• Solo is responsible for the other “to be continued” cliffhanger in this episode, as he helps Juliette recover from her infection and then confesses that he will be holding her suit and helmet hostage until she can get the water pump going. Looks like she won’t be leaving Silo 17 and heading home anytime soon.
• I hope you all saw the announcement earlier this week that Silo has been renewed for two more seasons, with the completed four-season series intending to cover the entirety of Hugh Howey’s multi-book saga. This is great news, as this show is really starting to find a groove and it would’ve been a shame if its creator, Graham Yost, didn’t get to tell the whole story.