On 'Silo,' Bernard Finally Asks the Question No One Else Will

This week’s episode of Silo, Season 3, Episode 8, “Gray Goo,” confirmed several questions the way we mostly anticipated. In the Before Times, Per Stensen reveals to Helen, Daniel, and Charlotte — Daniel’s sister — precisely why he engineered the Silos: to preserve humanity in the event of an apocalyptic event. Stensen fears someone will weaponize nanotechnology — the gray goo Iran developed and deployed against the Dulles Tech Corridor that the government claimed was a dirty bomb. This nanotechnology proves remarkably cheap, easy to produce, and, according to Stensen, a more existential threat to humanity than nuclear war. He contends that someone will unleash it within the next few years, and while he concedes it might not happen, he declares it safer to prepare than to ignore the risk. He’s bankrolling the entire Silo system himself. The catch being that if Stensen owns it, he dictates the terms, and those rules will almost certainly persist several hundred years forward.

Neither Daniel nor Helen, both asked to join the project, want any part of it. Daniel insists to Helen that he’d rather die above ground in the gray goo than waste the remainder of his life underground in the silos. They kiss, for good measure, for those who are invested in their romance.

Meanwhile, in the present timeline, Lukas and Kennedy survived the ambush, and they’ve now reached Silo 17 with Jimmy and the younger survivors. They discover the Safeguard pipe, only to find that Jimmy’s mother was welded inside the chamber. She sacrificed herself to save the Silo. They have a very sweet service for her, and Lukas and Kennedy pass along to Silo 18 how to cap the pipe in their silo.

Back in Silo 18, Juliette surrenders to Camille so that Shirley — who, we learn, removed her birth control implant and is now pregnant with Knox’s child — can continue searching for the Safeguard pipe. Camille imprisons her alongside Robert, her husband. Camille has adopted Bernard’s old rigidity; she’s either embraced the Algorithm’s logic or simply decided that compelling Silo 18 to swallow the memory-wiping drugs beats allowing the Algorithm to deploy the Safeguard. She remains ignorant of Robert and Juliette’s plans to neutralize the system, leaving a sliver of hope she might relent once she grasps what they’re attempting.

Elsewhere, Orla Kent’s killer has been identified, and the answer feels like a head scratcher. Gus, Knox’s father, confesses to engineering a tunnel system Harwood employed to conceal supplies. Harwood began hoarding supplies during the rebellion, fearing chaos would prompt people to rob the stockpiles and endanger the silo. Orla discovered him, and she was murdered, but the killer proved to be neither Harwood nor Glenda, his daughter. It was Mike, Orla’s boyfriend, who was stealing from supplies. Orla caught him, and he killed her. The revelation is disappointingly anticlimactic. I’m hoping — with two episodes remaining — that the show hasn’t closed the door on this story entirely.

Honestly, the most interesting thing about this episode, at least to me, was that conversation between Juliette and Bernard, the latter of whom has gone full Bernie (huzzah!). Juliette asks Bernard why Silo 1 built in the Safeguard, the ability to kill off the entire Silo, and Bernard suggests, at least, that there’s a possibility that they have a good reason. But, he very much wants to cap the pipes to prevent the Safeguard so that they have leverage to have a conversation, force them to tell them why the Safeguard exists. “And if their reasons for having the power to kill the silos is sound, then we will restore the pipes and drink” the forgetting drugs.

“But,” he continues, “I can’t imagine what reason would justify what they’ve done.” Bernard has reached a point that Camille has not: She, like the old Bernard, feels that the terrible things she’s doing are “justified and virtuous,” but Bernard’s thinking has evolved and now he will “do everything I can to stop this tyranny.”

And that’s what’s most interesting about this episode. Bernard sits in the moral middle ground between Camille — who will do anything the Algorithm says because she thinks it’s the only way to save the Silo — and Juliette, who will do anything in her power to prevent the Algorithm from implementing the Safeguard. Bernard’s pivot, however, isn’t from “defend Silo 1” to “destroy Silo 1.” It’s to demand accountability from Silo 1. He’s asking Silo 1 to justify itself rather than assuming it’s either infallible or irredeemably corrupt.