Silo Recap: Suffering from the Bends
I blame myself. From the moment I saw there was a Silo episode coming titled “The Book of Quinn” — after so many episodes where the mysterious Salvador Quinn’s name had been dropped with a mix of awe and fear — I began anticipating a flashback episode, taking us back to Silo 18’s distant past and bringing us some long-awaited answers about the silo’s history. And really, wouldn’t this have been a good time for a flashback? With tensions high in both Silo 18 and Silo 17, and with two more episodes to go in the season after this one, wouldn’t a little breather and a little backstory have been nice?
Alas, the Silo writers had other ideas, and I confess that my thwarted expectations may have soured my feelings. Or it may be that the episode is pretty middling on its own merits. Compared with this season’s recent action-packed, plot-forward chapters, “The Book of Quinn” stalls quite a lot, jumping between a half-dozen storylines without moving many of them along in a particularly gripping way.
As it happens, the episode’s title refers to a literal book sought out by Lukas in what turns out to be this week’s richest storyline. While trying to crack Quinn’s complicated code, Lukas embarks on an investigation on multiple silo levels, starting in the late Judge Meadows’ apartment and then in the home of Quinn’s direct descendants. Those descendants eventually tell Lukas that Judge Meadows visited them before she died, trading some printed relics for Quinn’s personal, annotated copy of The Pact — the actual “book of Quinn,” so to speak.
The Lukas scenes aren’t exciting per se, but they are revealing in that Lukas’s attempts to wield his new power as Bernard’s shadow show the limits of that power. Judge Sims and his Judicial goons don’t have a lot of respect for the shadow’s blue badge — especially given that the goons had planned to plunder Meadows’ apartment before Lukas got there —and they let him know that while Bernard may officially be in charge, the people the mayor relies on to do his dirty work are the ones who really decide who gets the favors and who gets the punishment. (To drive the point home, Sims casually notes that he knows where Lukas’s mother lives and works.)
Still, even if we don’t get a full-blown Quinn flashback in this episode, we do learn more about him. Bernard tells Lukas that everything the silo’s residents have been taught about Quinn — that he failed to quell a rebellion, which ended with all the important historical records either burned or erased — is misleading. According to Bernard, Quinn was a genius for letting the lore be destroyed because before then, there were rebellions roughly every 20 years, and since Quinn, there’s been peace for 140.
That sure seems like a plausible explanation. Yet when Lukas uses Quinn’s copy of The Pact to decode his secret message, he reads these words: “If you’ve gotten this far, you already know the game is rigged.” Could Bernard’s secret history of Quinn be another ruse?
One of the more intriguing questions this episode raises is whether the game is worth playing anyway, even if the people running it know it’s rigged. It’s something Sheriff Billings wrestles with this week when Shirley tries to convince him to ignore The Pact, given that it’s highly likely the silo’s Founders were liars. The sheriff’s fiery counter-argument is that the whole social order would collapse without some kind of an organizing principle. They may as well trust the process the Founders established, even if their reasons remain shrouded in mystery.
This debate never gets much of a chance to take root or develop because there are too many other characters involved in too many other plots. Some scenes this week barely last a minute before we’re rushed to another part of the silo for another scene, which barely gets going before we’re yanked away again, and so on. This isn’t like the climactic part of an adventure story, where purposeful cross-cutting between daring deeds builds suspense. This feels more like trying to follow a half-dozen conversations that keep getting interrupted.
Two of these storylines — the ones with actual action — suffer from the diffusion. First, down in Mechanical, Knox plans to rob Supply because raiders are blocking the stairs, and their Supply ally Carla is still incarcerated, so the Down Deep is running low on essentials. Walker objects, arguing that they should be more focused on getting Carla back. When Bernard calls Walker to a secret meeting, he offers a deal: He’ll let her check to see that her ex-wife is okay in exchange for information about what the Mechanical rebels are planning.
The end result of all this backroom scheming is that the rebels’ robbery turns into an ambush, as they barge right into a room full of raiders. The whole caper sequence should be more exciting, but because we’ve already seen Walker’s betrayal, one of this episode’s only action sequences flattens out into “here is something else that happened.”
That leveling effect is even more bothersome when it comes to what’s going on in Silo 17. We left Juliette last week at a dramatic moment after she rapidly ascended through the silo’s flooded levels, only to discover a trail of blood and a missing Solo. As this episode begins, she’s in physical pain due to the bends — just as Solo had warned — and she’s trying to stay out of sight while she figures out who might’ve abducted or killed the silo’s only resident.
The Juliette sequences are spooky and unnerving, but frustratingly short. Altogether, the half-dozen or so scenes in Silo 17 cover about eight minutes, sprinkled throughout the episode, which isn’t enough time for them to become as involved as they should be.
That said, the Juliette parts of this episode do get somewhere surprising and promising by the end. Her attempts to sneak around prove unsuccessful, as she’s shot through the shoulder with an arrow by a shadowy figure who warns, “I killed him, and I’ll kill you too!” Later, wielding a shield and a knife, Juliette finds a body on the ground and checks to see if it might be Solo’s corpse. It turns out to be yet another attacker. After some hand-to-hand combat, Juliette is cornered by three people in total, all of whom appear to be quite young.
Who are these interlopers, and how did they get here? Did they actually kill Solo? Here’s hoping that next week we get to those answers more quickly, and in more detail.
The Down Deep
• Among the relics in Judge Meadows’ apartment: an Etch-a-Sketch, preserved under glass.
• Shirley paints a name on the Down Deep’s secret memorial wall, adding “Cooper” to the list of Mechanical’s martyred rebels.
• Both Knox and Shirley were recurring characters in season one, but neither got enough screen time to make a strong impression. It’s been a sometimes rocky adjustment to see them treated as A-story-worthy in season two, although, on the positive side, it’s been good to see Remmie Milner show more personality as Shirley. The conversation with Billings in the cafeteria isn’t just a way for Shirley to express skepticism about The Pact. It also allows her a moment to make fun of some rock-hard biscuits, and just generally to create a sense of her place within the history and culture of Silo 18’s lower levels.
• Billings’s wife Kathleen gets her feelings hurt when she delivers a meal to Patrick Kennedy and finds out from him that her husband is carrying around a picture of the Blue Ridge Mountains, torn from that forbidden children’s book we first saw in season one. Billings claims he didn’t show it to Kathleen because it’s “dangerous,” but she demands to see it anyway. And why not? Perhaps the only way to save this silo is to stop keeping secrets.