Gettin' My Eps In: Silo S1E7-8
Things heat up as we near the end of the first season, and even if I'm not 100% satisfied, I'm still finding this series to be quite good.
Silo
Season 1, Episode 7: “The Flamekeepers”
Written by Jessica Blaire
Directed by Bert & Bertie
Streaming on Apple TV+
As this show has proceeded through its first season, it has mostly remained free of material related to conspiracies, which was an aspect of the story that I had some concerns about in the first episode. Stories about conspiracies aren’t necessarily bad, but I tend to find them bothersome, since the prevalence of the idea that there’s some sort of secret, powerful cabal of figures hiding the truth from the general public has metastasized into a pretty ugly undercurrent in modern society. It’s led to a whole spectrum of harmful beliefs, ranging from the generally benign but idiotic flat earth movement to the much more dangerous QAnon community.
Silo probably isn’t going to send anybody off the deep end into wearing tinfoil hats and complaining about fluoride in the water supply (or stockpiling supplies in a bunker for the coming apocalypse, which would be kind of ironic), but as it gets closer to the end of the first season, it’s heading back into territory involving secretive figures spying on everyone, cracking down on dissidents, and exerting control over people’s bodies and minds. This does make for an exciting and tense plot, but I’m not sure if it’s meant to fit into any sort of ongoing social commentary or not.
This episode’s plot sees our main character, Juliette (Rebecca Ferguson) searching out more information about some of the secrets she’s uncovered and maybe getting close to some of the answers that led to the deaths of her predecessor and his wife, not to mention the murders of several other people. At the end of the last episode, she managed to find a book that was an illegal relic, since it provided information about the silo’s past and what life was like when people still lived outside. It’s a children’s picture book about Georgia, with images of forests, the ocean, the stars in the night sky, and other things that people who have been living underground for over a century don’t know about. So now she wants to find out who might have encountered this book in the past and what they may know about what’s been going on.
Her search leads her to Gloria (Sophie Thompson), the woman who provided fertility advice (and warnings about control by secret authority figures) to Rashida Jones back in the first episode. However, Juliette can’t talk to her because she’s being kept in a long-term care facility and administered drugs that addle her mind and prevent her from sharing her ideas with anyone. It turns out that Judge Meadows (Tanya Moodie) is responsible, but Juliette can’t get in to see her either because she’s taking some extended sick leave.
Meadows is ostensibly the head of Judicial, and while we haven’t seen much of her in the series so far, she seems to exert a great deal of power over other high-ranking officials in the silo. In fact, when Juliette meets with acting Mayor Bernard (Tim Robbins), he lets her know that the Judge is not only angling to get rid of Juliette as Sheriff, but she has also indicated that she’ll replace him as Mayor if he doesn’t go along with her plans. This is frightening for Bernard, since as the head of IT, he’s yet another person who believes he holds the most important position in the silo. While the generator operated by Mechanical is responsible for powering the silo, the servers maintained by IT distribute this power, making sure crucial systems like life support are operating correctly. With the Judge in control of this power, who knows what she could do?
However, when Juliette finally manages to get an audience with the Judge (she simply brings a food delivery to her door and insists on coming in to talk to her), it turns out that Meadows isn’t exactly the all-powerful figure she seems. She’s just as impotent and helpless as everyone else seems to be, forced to carry out the orders of unseen people working behind the scenes. It looks like her authority mostly comes from her tendency to stay out of the public eye as she issues orders to others, but she seems to just be passing those orders on from Sims (Common), who probably has his own bosses pulling his strings as well.
We only get a hint of who those figures may be when we see Sims enter a secret surveillance facility where people watch the goings-on throughout the silo using technology that seems to be a bit more advanced than what is available to the general populace. However, these people seem to be functionaries themselves, workers who keep an eye out for trouble and report it to the higher-ups. Throughout this episode, we keep cutting back to them as they monitor Juliette, meaning that they know about her forbidden book and her efforts to get information from Gloria. Why Sims and whoever else is in charge have let her get this far in her investigation is unclear; you would think they would have sent the troops after her well before they finally decide to do so.
Juliette ends up recruiting her father (Iain Glen), who she hasn’t talked to in years, to help her get to Gloria. She convinces him to sneak Gloria out of the room where she’s being held and give her a stimulant that will reverse the effects of the drugs that keep her sedated. It takes a little while, but eventually Gloria becomes lucid enough to deliver a whole exposition dump about a secret society known as The Flamekeepers who have done everything they can to preserve information about what life was like in the past. However, the authorities have been cracking down on the Flamekeepers and preventing them from breeding, hoping that they will eventually die off and that the silo’s populace will consist solely of docile, order-following drones who will be content to just go about their lives without worrying about whether there could be something more.
I’m still considering whether there is a deeper message to all of this, if any. The show is obviously on the side of people knowing the truth and being in control of their own destinies, which is true of pretty much any story in which rebellious individualists stand up against the forces of oppression and control. But there’s also some indication that control is necessary to maintain order. Of course, that’s the stated goal of most authoritarians, but order seems especially crucial in a closed system like the silo where everyone plays an important role in keeping things working and keeping the populace alive. We get hints at the dangers of the breakdown of order in this episode when a fight breaks out and Juliette isn’t there to help stop it because she has turned off her radio while conducting her investigation. Her focus on her individual goals is harmful not only to her coworkers who get injured when breaking up the fight, but also to society as a whole, since rampant violence and unrest may affect crucial work that people need to perform.
I’m curious to see whether the show will delve into the need for balance between freedom and control in this society. As with all conspiracy stories, we’re meant to cheer for people who want to get out from under the thumb of oppression, but some measure of control and responsibility is necessary to keep society operating. The current system of control seems to have been put in place in response to an existential threat, and it appears to have gone too far in the direction of keeping people in line. But even if it suddenly went away, people would still need to fill the crucial roles of maintaining life in the silo and making sure everyone is fed and can live comfortably. Is it possible to remake this society in a way that’s beneficial for everyone? That might be where the concerns of the show can be extrapolated out into our world, although I’m not sure if that’s really what is on the minds of the creators. If we get a big reveal showing that there’s nothing wrong with the outside world, and everyone has been living out their lives in the silo for no reason, I guess all bets are off. Well, we’ll see how it goes.
Season 1, Episode 7: “Hanna”
Written by Jeffery Wang and Ingrid Escajeda
Directed by Adam Bernstein
After the previous expository episode, this entry gets a bit more action-packed, although it also returns to the well of backstory-filling flashbacks. It’s a bit clunky, raising questions about how much power the totalitarian forces of the silo actually have. We’re probably supposed to avoid questioning these things and just go along with the excitement, but certain aspects of the story do leave me wondering about whether it should be so easy to get past heavily-armored forces or why powerful authority figures are sometimes willing to flout the law but sometimes seem honor-bound to follow it.
Much of the story here follows Juliette as she evades Judicial’s security forces, tries to access the forbidden hard drive she finally got her hands on, and attempts to expose Sims as the figure who seems to be in control of the forces of oppression. She manages to evade the soldiers who came looking for her through the surprisingly easy tactic of hiding behind a desk, but when Billings (Chinaza Uche) radios her to come to the Sheriff’s office, she just shows up, as if she’s not a fugitive. Thugs from Judicial are ransacking the office looking for the hard drive, but because they’re doing so without following the proper procedures, Juliette heads over to Judicial and arrests Sims for this violation. And surprisingly, he agrees, allowing himself to be handcuffed and placed in a cell.
This gives Juliette time to retrieve the hard drive she had hidden, but she can’t access it without help, so she grabs Lukas (Avi Nash), a guy from IT whom she had been flirting with over the past several episodes. She tries to convince him to help, even smashing a mirror in her apartment so she can show him one of the cameras that Judicial has been using to monitor everyone, but he’s too afraid, and she has to run away anyway, since Judicial has decided to send soldiers after her again. And on she goes with her attempts to evade capture and access forbidden information, with some revelations about who the real bad guys are and some especially dramatic developments that will surely figure into the climactic moments of the season.
I’m probably complaining too much, since this is all generally pretty exciting, even if it seems kind of inconsistent. You could make the case that Judicial is letting Juliette move about freely while keeping an eye on her in hopes that she’ll lead them to the hard drive everyone wants, but it seems kind of contrived. Still, it’s always fun to see a character we like go up against overwhelming odds and try to prevail, and the cliffhanger ending of the episode indicates that we’ll get more action and excitement along those lines.
The other interesting aspect of the episode involves some flashbacks that give us more information about Juliette’s mother, Hanna (Sienna Guillory). After the death of Juliette’s brother, Hanna started pursuing forbidden knowledge in hopes that she could prevent others from suffering similar tragedies. She ended up developing a magnification device similar to a microscope, which, as we learned in a previous episode, has been forbidden by the silo’s Pact for some reason. She and young Juliette (Amelie Child Villiers) secretly obtain a rabbit, and then she uses the device to operate on the rabbit’s heart and save its life. But when Judicial gets wind of her activities, they search the family’s apartment and destroy the illegal device.
The focus of these flashbacks seems to be to resolve some of the drama between Juliette and her father, who she and her mother believed had reported Hanna’s illegal activities to the authorities. But now that Juliette has learned about how Judicial is spying on everyone, she knows that her father wasn’t to blame. This leads to a reconciliation scene that is supposed to be tender and emotional, but left me kind of cold, seeming to be a bit of extra character drama that was tacked on and kind of detracted from the main thrust of the episode. The question still remains of whether Hanna committed suicide in response to the crushing of her dreams or whether she was killed by Judicial because she represented a threat to their control, but unless more revelations are coming, it seems kind of moot. Juliette knows that her mother died due to the silo’s oppressive authority figures, and regardless of how it happened, she’s going to have to fight to try to avoid a similar fate.
While this episode wasn’t fully satisfying, it was still pretty good overall, providing some excitement and moving the plot closer to what’s sure to be an action-packed climax for the season. Even if I wasn’t too enthralled by the dramatic revelations, they still served to provide more information about Juliette, making her a more well-rounded character who is worth spending time with. Not every episode can be a banger, but fortunately for this series, even those that are sort of subpar still have a lot to offer. As the season comes to a close, I’ll be pretty satisfied if things stay at this level of quality.