Summary
Silo Season 2 slows down a little in Episode 5, but it remains riveting, dense, clever television.
By the high standards already set by Silo Season 2, “Descent” is comparatively slow-paced. But don’t mistake Episode 5 for filler, since it’s anything but. It’s the kind of patient, dense episode that you sometimes get in really great TV shows, where a couple of monologues (shout out to Iain Glen), a handful of great performances (shout out to everyone), and several developing plot threads and mysteries are enough to carry the hour in the absence of any stand-out suspense sequences, deaths, or set-pieces.
After Mayor Holland’s deft maneuvering, Knox and Shirley are still on the run from the rest of the Silo, with Judge Meadows’ murder having been pinned on them. Meanwhile, Juliette continues to bond with Solo, whom she met properly back in Episode 3, but there’s nothing to rival her extended underwater adventures last time out or even her near-silent spelunking session in the premiere. She’s mostly tiptoeing around an increasingly incessant Solo while trying to find a helmet that fits the suit she recovered from the liquid bowels of Silo 17.
I Told You He Was Lying
For probably the first time in this season, the brewing rebellion in Silo 18 is more interesting in “Descent” than Juliette’s adventures in Silo 17, so we’ll get to them second since I want to prove a point.
I said in a previous recap that it was obvious Solo was lying about something; it turns out to be who he really is, at least as a starting point, but he’s probably lying about a whole bunch of other stuff too. What I can’t tell quite yet is whether it’s all his deceptions that are making him so frantic, or whether he’s just like that anyway and his long solitude and potential PTSD have made him buy into the fiction in a way that seems more sinister and hostile than it really is.
In other words, he’s either lying about being Solo because he believes that’s who he is now, or because his real identity is worth some secrecy. Those are two different propositions, and I’d prefer the latter for drama’s sake. But we’ll see.
Juliette figures this out because while she’s roaming around the silo looking for a helmet she finds a photo in the domestic quarters that depicts the real Solo and his friend, Tiny. The real Solo is visibly not Steve Zahn, which gives him away. Earlier, Solo had recounted a very specific story about how he picked up that nickname, so I think he’s probably co-opting the explanation for how the guy in the photo ended up being called Solo because he doesn’t strike me as the type who could come up with something so credible. As if to prove this point, when Juliette confronts him about not being Solo and not being the IT shadow, he goes absolutely ballistic and starts screaming in her face.
To be honest I don’t think Solo means Juliette any genuine harm, I just think he’s gone a bit mad being cooped up all this time. We don’t get to find out, though, since Juliette passes out from her injury, which is now so badly infected that she can barely move or think. Given that there’s nobody else in Silo 17, Juliette’s going to have to rely on Solo’s good graces to recover from this, at least in the short term.
Rebecca Ferguson in Silo | Image via Apple TV+
A New Job For Robert, and A Surprising Turn For Camille
The Sims’ face some new challenges in Silo Season 2, Episode 5. After discovering Mayor Holland pottering around their apartment trying – and failing – to make coffee, Robert is sworn in as the new Judge, a promotion he’s not entirely thrilled about since it means rescinding control of Judicial. And it doesn’t seem like Camille’s too keen on it either since she helps Knox and Shirley to escape, without Robert’s knowledge (though Holland finds out later.)
I’m not sure about this development. Part of me wishes we spent more time with these two in general so Camille going behind Robert’s back had a little more grounding. And it’s not totally clear where Robert stands on everything either. He’s visibly unhappy about being a Judge and spends most of the episode lurking around Judicial trying to do his old job. It’s difficult to pin everything down, but I do think that if Holland takes action against Camille, Robert will turn on him.
The System Is Crumbling
Despite Holland’s efforts and Sims’s complicity thus far, it’s also pretty clear that Silo 18 is descending into chaos at an alarming rate, and the institutions designed to maintain order within it are close to collapse.
We obviously see this when Camille helps Knox and Shirley. We see it in Pete’s scene-stealing monologue to Holland about how the Silo has taken everything from him, even his profession, but he won’t allow it to decide what his daughter means to the people. But we mostly see it in the fact that the Sheriff’s Department is beginning to see the truth. And that’s a big deal, since historically Mechanical can’t carry off a successful uprising on its own. A bit of officialdom on-side is a major turning point.
Hank and Billings know immediately that Shirley and Knox are being set up, so they set about proving it by tracking down Patrick Kennedy, who was forced by Robert to throw the firebomb that led to Cooper’s death. He’s badly wounded and has been hiding in the dark for a while, but he’s totally coherent and willing to come clean about everything if the two of them can get him patched up by a proper doctor. I wonder where they might find a sympathetic medical professional in Silo 18?
Common and Alexandria Riley in Silo | Image via Apple TV+
The Hard Drive
Bernard isn’t stupid, and he spends all of Silo Season 2, Episode 5 working towards preserving his own status – and the lies it demands he tell – in the ways described above and in a crucial new one. He frees Lukas from the mines, tells him that Meadows slashing in sentence in half was a tokenistic gesture since life expectancy in the mines is only five years anyway, and then offers him true salvation in exchange for repairing the hard drive that Juliette stole.
Lukas gets to work, and he’s able to recover some stuff from the drive. Of note is a map of several different Silos, including (I think) Silo 17. Interestingly this has some unique features in its blueprint. There are some lines leading directly into IT from outside, which marries up with what Solo told Juliette earlier in the episode about the IT department having its own external and independent power supply. But there’s also a tunnel leading off from the very bottom of the silo. Leading where? I have no idea, but it could be an exit for Juliette, perhaps one taking her all the way back to Silo 18.
The drive also contains a love letter written by Salvador Quinn – the former head of IT during the previous uprising 140 years ago – that contains some kind of code. Meadows implied she had deciphered this code before she died, but didn’t reveal its contents. That will, one assumes, be Lukas’s next task.
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