‘Silo’ Episode 10 Recap: The Real World

I can’t remember the last time a show had me gasping and howling and pointing at the screen the way “Outside,” the finale of Silo’s crackerjack first season, did. Actually, no, that’s not strictly true. I can’t remember the last time a show that wasn’t professional wrestling had me gasping and howling and pointing at the screen the way this episode did. Silo is the most purely entertaining drama of the year, and these drum-tight 40-odd minutes demonstrate why.

Getting the plot out of the way as quickly as possible: After a briefly successful attempt to upload her verboten footage of the green and verdant world outside the Silo to as many computers as possible, Juliette Nichols is captured. She agrees to banishment without trial and without protesting her innocence in exchange for the truth about the death of her boyfriend George. To show her, Bernard escorts her into his intelligence network’s secret headquarters, where they play her surveillance footage of George killing himself to keep from being interrogated by Bernard and Sims’s goons. Keeping her end of the bargain, Juliette dutifully heads “out to clean.”

Before she does, we get some quick snapshots of how some of the supporting players are faring. Knox, who turned Juliette in to spare the Down Deep a Judicial raider rampage, is iced out by his best friend Shirley. Deputy Billings is now firmly in hock to Bernard and Sims, who know he has the Syndrome but grant him an exemption, creating the perfect catspaw in the process. Sims himself is back in Bernard’s good graces but seems pretty unhappy all things considered, given that he was ordered to shut his eyes just like all the other grunts, and that his family was traumatized by their encounter with Juliette. Lukas, the stargazing romantic, ratted Juliette out to Judicial, and is repaid with ten years hard labor in the mines rather than being sent out to clean. In Paul and Lukas’s cases in particular, these are bitter denouements for characters I’d hoped better for. 

Anyway, Juliette does go out, though not before Shirley passes her a cryptic message from her mentor Walk, who’s begun living up to her nickname and walking all over the place for equally cryptic reasons. Eventually we find out why: Remember the heat tape Juliette stole from Bernard’s IT department while she was an engineer, because the Supply department had run out? The reason IT made such a fuss about it — Supply’s restocked tape is better if they just needed a role of tape that badly — is because the IT tape, which is used to secure the hazmat suits of people sent out to clean, is the method by which the Silo authorities were killing them out there. (It wasn’t clear to me if it’s poisoned or if it conducts some kind of hazardous transmission or what, but the end result is the same regardless.) Walk ensures that the tape that winds up on Juliette’s suit is the Supply variety.

So Juliette lives long enough to find out the truth: The green world is the lie, broadcast to victims via the hazmat suits’ viewscreens. The real world? Just as dead and horrifying as the cafeteria displays make it out to be. 

The real outside world, that is. The real subterranean world, as we deduce from all the identical airlock hatches arrayed in craters stretching as far as the eye can see, consists of hundreds of Silos, arrayed just yards apart from each other — each presumably filled with ten thousand people who will live an die for generation after generation without ever becoming aware that a million of their neighbors even exist. Either that, or they’re all just giant coffins, and the Silo we know is surrounded by death.

In short: ooooooooh-whee! 

I’ll rattle off all the times this fantastic episode got a physical reaction out of me. My stomach dropped from vertigo when Juliette and her co-conspirators escaped into a garbage chute and started descending a ladder over 100 stories long. I did a full comical gasp when Juliette dodged a huge metal HVAC unit getting dropped on her from above by letting go of the ladder and falling voluntarily, counting on her old colleagues in Recycling to pull her to safety before the box squashes her — another riveting action setpiece with immediately understandable physical stakes in the vein of the great engine-room sequence from episode three.

I laughed in admiration of the show’s appropriately dismissive attitude toward the surveillance state when the illegal footage of the living landscape popped up on every monitor in Bernard’s headquarters. All he can do is yell “Shut your eyes, all of you!” at his operatives like a father trying to prevent his young children from watching something inappropriate. (I’ll quote it, since you know original series author Hugh Howey was thinking of it: “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”)

And when you see that there are all those Silos, parked right next to each other, condemning untold millions of people to lives lived in isolation and ignorance? I popped like I’d just seen Andre the Giant turn on Hulk Hogan. It reminds me of the legend of how James Cameron successfully pitched his sequel to Alien: He wrote that title on a board, then added an “s,” then turned the “s” into a dollar sign. Silo$, folks! Goddamn, that’s good television!

Finally, I would be remiss not to add my reaction to the show’s decision to stage its final act as basically ten minutes of closeups on Rebecca Ferguson’s face: two thumbs way, way up. I mean, folks. Come on. Come on.

So Silo closes out a first season of modest ambition and dazzling execution with its sole big twist. When it comes to the status of the surface world, “everything you thought you knew was wrong” was itself wrong — but there’s a whole other thing we thought we knew about the world, and that was wrong. It’s so clever, like a stage magician’s sleight of hand; what a pleasure to feel you were misdirected by experts. (Specifically, showrunner Graham Yost, director Adam Bernstein, and writer Fred Golan; NB this episode has aired during the WGA strike, and the writers who make shows like this possible deserve fair pay and fair treatment.)

This is going to sound like I’m damning the show with faint praise, but I mean this as a sincere and high compliment: This should be the bare minimum we expect television to deliver. A show doesn’t have to reinvent the medium, and it certainly doesn’t have to bombard you with clues and revelations and dorm-room philosophy, which is what passes for science-fiction plotting on way too many shows over the past few years. It just needs to A) have a good idea and B) skillfully implement it C) without insulting the audience’s intelligence; Silo A) did, and B) did, and C) didn’t. Does it hurt to have a cast this stacked? No, it certainly does not; watching Tim Robbins and Rebecca Ferguson do their delicate dance throughout this ep is worth the price of admission alone. But it’s the writing that got this thing over the hump, and its confidence that you can keep things simple and still enthrall. 

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.