Silo Recap: Just Keep Swimming

Do you ever think about how much it must’ve cost to build the Silo set? Then do you think about how much it cost this season to build a second set for the crumbling and waterlogged Silo 17?

I thought about it a lot throughout the visually stunning Silo 17 scenes in this week’s episode — titled “The Dive” because Juliette’s plunge deep into the silo’s rising waters is the episode’s centerpiece. For the second time this season, Juliette has a thrilling underwater adventure as she tries to get the silo’s water pump going for Solo, who has hidden the suit and helmet she needs to return to Silo 18. Once again, she has to rely on Solo to help keep her alive during the dive through a silo that has the same basic layout as her own but with unpredictable obstacles due to the post-rebellion flooding and mayhem.

Lately, though, Solo’s been less reliable. He’s no longer the sweet, boyish hermit brimming with curiosity. He’s revealed himself to be petty, quick-tempered, deceptive … and an impostor. The scenes between Rebecca Ferguson and Steve Zahn have their own kind of action and tension, as the suffer-no-fools Juliette tries to push this overgrown kid around, and he responds with stubborn petulance.

The foundation of Solo’s argument is strong. He needs Juliette to reverse the flooding now because once she leaves Silo 17, there’s a strong likelihood she’ll never return. But he comes across as so whiny and pathetic throughout their conversation. When she says he should do the dive, he responds by shouting, “I’m the head of IT,” and she snaps back, “You’re not even Solo!” He’s holding a little bell as he cringes from her comment, and the way it jingles only makes the scene sadder.

Of course, ultimately, Juliette makes the dive, counting on that little bell to alert Solo once the pump is operational and she’s ready to be pulled back up. In classic “let me explain the plan in detail to the audience so they’ll know what’s at stake when it inevitably goes awry” fashion, Solo teaches Juliette a little bit about swimming and warns her about the dangers of surfacing too fast and getting the bends. Sure enough, after Juliette flips all the necessary switches, she finds that the rope attached to the bell has floated away, and that her air supply has been cut off. She has no choice but to ignore Solo’s warning and ascend quickly.

Again, this is all just fantastic action-adventure storytelling filled with strong character moments, eye-catching imagery, and nerve-shredding twists. This part of the episode ends dramatically as well, with Juliette making her way back up and out of the water only to find a trail of blood leading away from where Solo was stationed. Throw in as many exclamation points and question marks as you need there to express the proper amount of surprise.

The action in Silo 18 can’t compare this week, but that’s okay. After last week’s gripping, 18-focused episode, the characters there have earned a little time to regroup and prepare for all the conflict surely still to come.

Much of the drama in 18 involves an internal investigation among the Mechanical separatists, who need to know both who poisoned their food supply in the last episode and who in the Down Deep is one of the duplicitous “listeners” feeding inside intel upstairs to Judicial. Deputy Hank eventually traces the poisoning to the very person who told them about it in the first place: the level’s head cook, who struck a deal to keep her mother’s supply of medicine coming through the blockade. Knox says they forgive her, but he also pledges to give her hell for a little while for betraying Mechanical.

Anyway, Knox and company can’t be too mad right now because they’re on a hot streak in their cold war with the upper levels. They have a fresh food supply now. And using a cache of gunpowder — which they are most definitely not supposed to have — they begin this episode by shooting a rocket up through the middle of the silo that then showers down leaflets, each prodding the upper-level citizens to question why the power stays on in IT whenever Mechanical shuts off the generator.

All of this is very bad news for Bernard. First off, nowhere in The Order did anyone predict that Mechanical would get access to gunpowder. Second off, the questions about IT’s secret power supply can’t just be waved off as some kind of Mechanical trick. When Bernard holds a meeting with the upper-level deputies to try and get them on his side — in part by suggesting that Sheriff Billings is being held hostage by the Down Deepers — all the deputies want to ask about is the leaflets. (“What does this mean? ‘IT lies to us?’”)

Making matters worse, when Bernard decides to officially transfer the control of all rebellion-related matters from the Sheriff’s deputies to Judicial’s raiders, his newly appointed Judge Sims won’t sign off on the order without a meeting. Bernard had hoped that Sims would accept the figurehead position he’d been given and would stay out of his way forever. But for that to happen, Sims first needs to understand why he spent a decade of his life being the silo’s resident boogeyman for Bernard without ever getting the payoff he was expecting: becoming the IT shadow.

Like the tense conversation between Juliette and Solo, the angry standoff between Sims and Bernard is one of this episode’s highlights. It’s a smartly written, directed, and performed scene exploring the shifting balance of power between two longtime colleagues who have never been friends. Bernard thinks he’s putting Sims in his place when he describes the former head of security thusly: “You’re very good at solving problems, but you lack curiosity.” But then Sims counters with a summary of everything going wrong in the silo right now, including the deputy revolt and a new wave of graffiti appearing on the stairs. Sims is plugged in enough to know that Bernard’s losing control.

Bernard knows this too, which is why, despite all the crises mounting in the silo, he spends a lot of this episode in The Vault with Lukas, his new IT shadow. One of the most exciting moments this week comes when Bernard introduces Lukas to “The Legacy” — a library containing important historical artifacts and thousands of books and artworks, as well as a digital tablet containing hundreds of thousands more. Bernard warns Lukas not to waste his time looking up facts about astronomy or about why the silo was built, though. Lukas must quickly learn all he can about code breaking to decipher Salvador Quinn’s letter.

For those of us hoping for more silo-related answers from Lukas’s new job … oh, well, not yet. But it is fun to see Bernard squirm as he pins his hopes on Quinn, having buried a strategic solution to the mounting rebellion that The Pact and The Order haven’t provided. And it’s even more fun to see what happens when Lukas realizes he needs access to a particular old book, not in The Vault, to crack Quinn’s code. Lukas doesn’t know which book, but Bernard’s pretty sure he has the right one. It’s probably Mary’s old copy of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. After all, what could be a better way to learn more about the man behind the curtain?

The Down Deep

• No offense intended to Harriet Walter or Clare Perkins, but the Walker/Carla reconciliation storyline has yet to click on an emotional level for me … perhaps because it’s mainly been limited to a scene or two scattered across multiple episodes this season. That said, Carla’s seclusion in an off-the-books Judicial cell is plot-relevant since it leads Walker — who’s supposed to be lying low, incognito — to reactivate the security cameras she disabled to send a message to the powers that be about Carla. This has the unintended effect of alerting Bernard that Walker may know a few things about the stolen gunpowder.

• Camille Sims continues to lean into her Lady Macbeth era, whispering in her husband’s ear about how to steal power back from Bernard. It’s Camille who tells Sims to force Bernard to come to him, saying, “If you go to him, you’re doing him a kindness.” But Sims also worries that his wife was trying to keep him away from Bernard because she’s been secretly colluding with the rebels. Toil and trouble indeed.

• According to Bernard, the only information available within The Legacy about the history of Silo 18 is that it’s 352 years old … which makes Bernard’s statement last week about “140 years of stability” much more provocative, yes?

• Next week’s episode is called “The Book of Quinn.” Here we go.