My God, 'Silo'

Spoilers for the season 3 finale of Silo

The thing that has always concerned me about the Before-Times timeline and the present timeline in Silo is that once Juliette and Silo 18 finally figure out who’s running the place in the present, we might lose the connection to the Before Times since those characters lived hundreds of years ago.

Nope. While we didn’t get a glimpse of how everything came together in the silos in the immediate aftermath of the nuclear blast in the Before Times, it was fairly straightforward based on everything that’s come before in Silo to piece together what’s happening in Silo 1. Daniel, Charlotte, Victor, Henry, and the Senator are still alive. They are cryogenically frozen for years — or even decades — at a time, unfrozen to oversee certain shifts and, in the case of Daniel, unfrozen to deal with emergencies within the Silo system. Brother and sister Daniel and Charlotte have become Troy and Susan — their memories wiped so thoroughly they don’t even recognize each other. Victor, the Senator (now the Director), and Henry, meanwhile, have seemingly kept their Before Times memories intact.

Daniel/Troy is a crucial cog in the machine he once tried to escape. It’s Daniel/Troy who ordered the execution of 9,800 residents of Silo 17 after their rebellion. The reckonings kept coming: above ground isn’t toxic, at least not until Silo 1 dropped poison gas on them and finished off the stragglers with drones. Daniel/Troy is celebrated for his “External Safeguard.” Charlotte/Susan, though, couldn’t execute his commands. When she hesitated — likely triggered by a vague memory of her previous life when a celebrating couple embraced — Troy/Daniel had to carry out the massacres himself. For her insubordination, he would’ve been fine with her being “neutralized,” but the Senator simply demoted her and put her back in frozen hibernation.

Still, Daniel/Troy did pull Victor aside and ask him about a memory from his previous life. He doesn’t know it, but Daniel/Troy apparently asks Victor about this person every time he’s unfrozen, and we know it’s Helen Drew.

Thirty-five years after the External Safeguard in Silo 17, Daniel/Troy is awakened once more to handle an even messier crisis: Knox and company managed to cap the Safeguard valve in Silo 18 before Silo 1 could release the poison. How? Because Camille double-crossed Silo 1. They chose her as Head of IT because she was a good liar. She made sure they learned that lesson the hard way.

Camille’s communications with the Algorithm finally revealed it to be human — Troy/Daniel and Victor in the conversations we witnessed. The slightly merciful one, the reluctant killer, was Victor, who retained his memories. As he reveals before taking his own life, he was relieved when Silo 18 capped the pipe. He did not want to exterminate an entire silo. And when Camille pressed him on why the Safeguard exists, his only answer was this: “The human species was in a terminal cycle of self-annihilation. The Silo was the last best hope to ensure the survival of the species.” Murder on a mass scale to save humanity apparently passed for moral philosophy in Silo 1. It didn’t sit right with Camille, nor really with Victor either, who could only add that “Questioning the Founder’s prerogatives is a violation.”

All of which clarifies Per Stensen’s original motivation for the Silo project. The richest man in the world appointed himself God. He used his money to build the Silo project and wipe out the rest of humanity to “ensure the survival of the species.” This is what happens when you let narcissistic, egomaniacal billionaires substitute their judgment for humanity’s. Per Stensen doesn’t appear in the episode, but he’s undoubtedly lurking in his cryogenic chamber somewhere.

Meanwhile, back in Silo 18, Juliette and company are finally free — thanks in large part to Bernard’s sacrifice — so long as they don’t venture outside. But Juliette knows it’s only a matter of time before Troy/Daniel figures out how to attack Silo 18 and exterminate the population. She assumes (rightly) that Silo 1 will think they’re preparing to defend themselves. What she actually proposes to do — in a setup for season 4 — is to attack Silo 1 and take them out. Presumably, there’s a pathway below ground to Silo 1 through that vault below the digger barrier.

The wildcard? Before Victor took his own life, he left a brief video for Daniel/Troy revealing the name Helen Drew, and it seemed to trigger a flood of memories from his past life. My guess is that since Helen went into Silo 18 pregnant, either Juliette or Allison Becker — the character Rashida Jones played in the pilot — is a descendant of Helen and Daniel. That’s the explosive wrinkle season 4 is waiting to spring.

The brilliance of this finale is that it transforms Silo from an escape narrative into a revolution narrative. Juliette isn’t just fighting to survive anymore; she’s fighting to dismantle the entire apparatus of control built by a man so wealthy and so convinced of his own righteousness that he decided the only way to save humanity was to play executioner. Season 4 becomes a question of whether one person, possibly descended from the very conspiracy she’s fighting, can tear down what took centuries to build.