Summary
Silo Season 2 threatens to become laborious in Episode 7, but a hair-raising deep dive from Juliette helps the whole thing stay afloat.
It only seems like two minutes since Juliette last ventured into the flooded bowels of Silo 17, and yet an extended high-pressure diving sequence is once again the highlight of Silo Season 2, Episode 7, fittingly titled “The Dive”. This is perhaps just as well since Rebecca Ferguson’s underwater aptitude spares the installment from feeling a little longwinded.
This is despite some progress in the overall worldbuilding and some nice individual character moments, but forgive me – Silo is graded on a bit of a curve, so I can’t be expected to sing and dance in praise about the things it always does well. By the standards of any other show, “The Dive” would be excellent; by the standards of this one, it’s mostly adequate, buoyed by a watery set-piece and the suggestion that now Juliette’s mission to save Solo’s silo is actually completed, she might finally leave.
Into the Deep
We’ll start with Juliette. As ever the point-of-view in this episode ping-pongs back and forth, but it’s fairly easy to summarize the stuff in Silo 17. After revealing his plan to keep her suit hostage until she repairs the pump that is flooding the silo, Solo hasn’t exactly found a firm friend in Juliette. She’s openly annoyed by his heel turn and desperate to return to Silo 18 to save the day. Despite him technically having a longer safety timeline, Solo makes some reasonable points about why the pump needs repairing before Juliette leaves. Either way, she isn’t getting her suit back until she agrees, so it’s kind of beside the point.
After a crash course in the bends, Juliette descends several floors with the help of some makeshift goggles and a rope that Solo is monitoring so she can be pulled to safety with a quick yank. This is an odd thing to say, but Ferguson is really physically well-suited to the practicality of this scene. She looks like she’s doing everything she’s supposed to be doing, and you totally buy she could swim that distance, fix a machine underwater, and pull herself back to dry land.
Of course, she wouldn’t have needed to pull herself back up if Solo was in his agreed position, but when Juliette surfaces, she realizes he isn’t. In fact, he’s gone, seemingly without a trace except for some blood that implies he was injured or, more excitingly, taken away by someone else who is lurking in the seemingly deserted silo. This subplot has taken its time to a fault, so the possibility of a third, more dangerous occupant of the silo is very good news, especially since it doesn’t seem like Juliette will be making it back to Silo 18 this season.
Mayor Holland Loses A Key Ally
As predicted, this is the episode when Robert Sims turns on Mayor Holland, or at least crosses a line that it won’t be easy to come back from. Holland wants Sims to authorize a warrant to search Supply after Mechanical manages to float a gunpowder parachute full of conspiratorial notes to the upper floors, but Sims gives him a big, fat “nope” on that, apparently not buying into Holland’s claims that Judicial only have performative, tokenistic power and that he’s the one who’s solely in charge.
The problem I have with this development is that Sims hasn’t switched sides for moral reasons like Billings and Hank have. He doesn’t really see why Holland’s in the wrong, he’s just salty about being sidelined and overlooked as Bernard’s shadow. He’s raging when he discovers that Lukas now occupies that position, but Bernard makes some compelling counterpoints about why Sims wouldn’t have been suited to the position in the first place.
Because of this, I don’t think we can consider him a potential ally of Mechanical and the “good guys”, he’s just a potential obstacle to Bernard, which isn’t the same thing but fulfills roughly the same plot purpose. I was initially curious to hear how Camille was going to spin the fact she helped Knox and Shirley escape, but it turns out Sims is so utterly uninterested in her justification that she needn’t have bothered coming up with a good excuse.
Common in Silo | Image via Apple TV+
Mechanical Solidarity
Since everyone in Mechanical is in the same boat, you’d think it’d be easier to get a proper rebellion going. But Silo Season 2, Episode 7 is a good reminder of why that’s easier said than done. Since everyone in Mechanical has nothing, it’s easier to tempt them with the allure of something. It’s also easy, failing that, to threaten them, since all the power to tackle injustice is concentrated elsewhere.
It wasn’t much of a surprise to me, then, when Billings and Hank learned of a plot to assassinate Knox and Shirley. This turns out to be connected to the plot to poison the food in the previous episode – it’s the chef at fault, but only because her mother is being threatened if she doesn’t play ball. Luckily, Knox and Shirley know that, so they’re willing to let bygones be bygones as long as she agrees never to turn on Mechanical again, which she does.
Before that little confrontation, Shirley and Knox have to be isolated in a prison cell for their own safety, which lets their burgeoning romantic connection percolate a bit. I’m still not sure how much I buy this angle, but we’ll see how it goes.
Off to See the Wizard
One suspects that the real key to whatever happens next exists in the pages of The Wizard of Oz. It was suspicious enough that Meadows cryptically referenced it to Holland, but now that Lukas has figured out that Salvador Quinn’s message is a numeric cipher and pertains to a page in a book, the pieces all seem to be fitting together.
Lukas spends the entirety of Silo Season 2, Episode 7 in the vault after being sworn in as Bernard’s shadow. It should be a fascinating space, since it’s chock full of all kinds of “old world” relics, making it look like a present-day study with some fanciful sci-fi accoutrements. But Lukas, on Bernard’s instructions, is only focused on one thing, which is figuring out the message Salvador Quinn left behind. It’s especially pressing since, as Bernard explains to him, it might detail a currently unknown problem that is even more severe than the brewing rebellion.
The next episode looks set to be a banger.
