I Was So Wrong About 'Silo'

Last week, I complained. At length, and with some hard feelings, about the damn amnesia storyline Apple TV’s Silo dropped on us in its season three premiere. Not one but two amnesiacs, both sitting on exact the information we’ve spent two seasons trying to learn. I called the show’s pace frustrating. I demanded to know where the hell Steve Zahn was.

Two episodes in, I have to eat it. The amnesia isn’t a stall. The amnesia is the reveal.

Here’s what “It’s All Good” hands us, almost casually, in a conversation between Camille and the Algorithm: the memory suppression isn’t a solution specific to the Juliette problem. It’s policy. The Algorithm cites 352 years’ worth of data indicating that memory reset works. Six silos have undergone a full reset — including Silo 18, 140 years ago. And Camille isn’t just dosing the Mayor; she’s preparing to expand the program to the entire silo through the water supply.

Six silos. This has happened before, at population scale, and everyone currently living in Silo 18 is walking around inside a different draft of themselves.

Meanwhile, in the before times, Daniel learns that his sister’s memory loss isn’t the plane crash — it’s Dr. Victor Crnkovich, who’s suppressing Charlotte’s memory of a trauma he’s decided she can’t survive remembering. He describes it as building a moat around her past and pulling up the drawbridge. He also mentions he’ll need objects from her life to rebuild those memories, because artifacts get to the brain faster than words. That explains the technology, the philosophy, and the reason a duck-shaped Pez dispenser could get you sent out to clean.

And Crnkovich (Matt Craven) isn’t a villain. He’s a doctor, not necessarily a villain. He saw a woman who’d seen something unbearable and decided that she’d be better off not knowing (and the vague memory that Helen triggered suggested he might be right).

And that has left me wondering: What if the Algorithm is right?

We are all rooting for Juliette to remember because that’s how these stories work. The truth good is good! Lies are bad! That’s what the reporter, Helen, represents. But what if …?

Charlotte flew into a cloud of black goo at 50,000 feet and watched her entire squadron die. That’s the memory Crnkovich moated off. And whatever the silos exist to survive, it was catastrophic enough that the people who built them concluded the species could not be trusted with the knowledge of its own extinction event. Hmmm.

Six resets. Six times a silo full of people learned something, and six times the correct response was apparently to wipe them and start over. That’s not a system covering its ass. That’s a system that has run the experiment and keeps getting the same answer.

So what happens when Juliette gets it all back? Everyone finds out that the sky is a lie, the past is a lie, and the world outside is a horror they helped created. What do people do with that. There’s already a banner reading “The display is a lie.” There’s already unrest. And there’s already a Safeguard Protocol standing by to poison everyone if the Silo is compromised, which suggests that somebody, long ago, ran the numbers on what a fully informed population does and didn’t like the result.

The scary version of this show isn’t an AI that erased history to control us. It’s an AI that erased history because a human being looked at us, decided we couldn’t handle it, and it wasn’t wrong.

So, Yes. I was wrong. I thought the show was withholding. It’s not. It’s showing us! And when Juliette finally remembers, I don’t think it’s going to feel like a victory. I think it’s going to be a sh**show.

(Still don’t know where Steve Zahn is.)