Martha Gets the Spotlight In ‘Silo’ Season 2, Episode 8

By Jonathon Wilson - January 3, 2025
Remmie Milner in Silo
Remmie Milner in Silo | Image via Apple TV+
By Jonathon Wilson - January 3, 2025

WARNING: THIS ARTICLE CONTAINS MAJOR SPOILERS

3.5

Summary

Despite languishing on Juliette’s storyline, Silo Season 2, Episode 8 delivers strong character work across the board.

I’m getting a little fed up with Juliette’s storyline in Silo Season 2, if I’m being honest. It’s like the showrunners haven’t quite realized that Rebecca Ferguson is always the best part of anything she’s in. Episode 8, “The Book of Quinn”, does manage to progress the overarching story with surprisingly even-handed consideration for everyone, especially the many residents of Silo 18, but Juliette’s starting to feel a little tacked-on by this point. The glacial pace of the Silo 17 subplot is getting on my nerves.

Luckily, there’s plenty of intricate drama going on elsewhere to keep us satiated. Mayor Holland is morphing into a really deplorable villain, for instance, and Martha Walker gets a welcome spotlight that has the endlessly capable Harriet Walter acting through a crisis of conscience. This is one of a few stretches of understated drama that the episode’s script, by Remi Aubuchon, pulls off with aplomb. But we’ll get to that in due course.

Let’s start with Juliette.

Juliette Isn’t Alone In Silo 17

I think you can tell we’re killing time here by the fact that in the few scenes Juliette has in this episode, she spends a good chunk of time curing her decompression sickness by submerging herself in the water. Biologically accurate? Yeah, maybe. But the previous outing ended with her discovering that she wasn’t alone in Silo 17. We should be pursuing that instead!

I do wonder if the point of this is to put us in Juliette’s headspace and make us feel frustrated by the inaction, but I mostly just felt irritated in general. When we check back in with Juliette after her meditative soak, she’s able to get moving and resume following the blood trail with an axe in hand. A shadowy figured claims to have already killed Solo – not sure I’m buying that – and threatens to kill her too if she doesn’t leave. To prove a point, they loose an arrow that lodges in Juliette’s chest.

A bit of impromptu self-surgery later, Juliette takes a makeshift spear and shield (see the image below) upstairs and gets ambushed during an incredibly obvious fake-out with a supposedly dead body under a sheet. The strangers who jump her – there are three in total – all have a very youthful quality about them that is surprising, but either way, the thing to worry about is the nocked arrow pointing in her direction. More next week.

Rebecca Ferguson in Silo

Rebecca Ferguson in Silo | Image via Apple TV+

Down Deep

The word of the day in Silo Season 2, Episode 8 is “justice”, especially in the Deep Down, where the idea of fairness and due process doesn’t really exist. Agents of control can’t allow these notions to flourish, since they unearth all kinds of issues with how everyone is forced to live; the lie they’re conned into believing.

This is why one of the most powerful scenes in “The Book Of Quinn” features Paul and Kathleen Billings crying over the picture of the Blue Ridge Mountains that Paul carries around. It’s a lamentation of how deep the rot runs. Within the Silo, even the idea of natural beauty has been stamped out. There is nothing beyond the walls.

This connects thematically to Shirley solemnly adding Cooper’s name to Mechanical’s remembrance wall for those whose lives were lost in previous rebellions. It underscores the importance of the rebellions and the validity of the anger that stirred them up. It also relates in a roundabout way to why Salvadore Quinn’s means of achieving peace were so effective but also so cruel. Denying the Silo’s own history brushes away the reality that those fallen revolutionaries strove for.

Up Top

Bernard relates this story to Lukas as a heroic narrative, when really it’s the furthest thing from the truth. Quinn’s family – Lukas meets his currently living descendent Terrance, and Terrance’s daughter-in-law and grandson while he’s trying to throw his new IT shadow weight around in search of Quinn’s old copy of the Pact – have lived with the consequences of Quinn’s actions for generations. To them, he’s a stain on their legacy, so they want to hear the rewritten narrative that he was really a hero. They’re ready for it. But I’m not so sure.

As Bernard explains it to Lukas, Quinn ushered in peace by erasing the history of the previous rebellions. He took away the examples that would-be rebels had to look up to. He wiped the slate clean. But he also drugged the water, ensuring that over time, the memory of the uprisings would disappear. He took reality even further away from the residents of the Silo, and then scapegoated Mechanical. He hid from the truth.

But Terrance and his family buy this new idea of Quinn being a hero. They hand his original copy of the Pact over to Lukas, who is able to use it to translate the first sentence of Quinn’s message  — “If you’ve gotten this far, you already know. The game is rigged.” – before Sims turns up with an ominous warning not to trust Holland. He’s speaking from first-hand experience, as we know, so you can take the warning as unusually charitable for him. But he leaves with the Pact.

Harriet Walter in Silo

Harriet Walter in Silo | Image via Apple TV+

Martha’s Choice

As mentioned up top, Silo Season 2, Episode 8 puts a spotlight on Martha, who is grappling with a single, incredibly difficult choice – whether to put her love for Carla ahead of her loyalty to Mechanical. She chooses the former and comes to regret it pretty much instantly.

She tried, to be fair. She made several pleas for Mechanical to focus their efforts on saving Carla, but the needs of the many outweighed the few. A planned raid on Medical Supply was given more precedent, understandably. By the time she’s lured upstairs by Bernard in what is an obvious trap, she’s almost ready to turn rat.

But in true Bernard fashion the offer isn’t presented as a fair deal. Martha can either report on what Mechanical are up to or watch Carla be horrifically tortured. Nobody in that position would make any decision other than the one Martha makes, which is to let on about the plans to raid Medical Supply, leading to Teddy and a small group of allies being arrested at gunpoint.

But Martha gets nothing in exchange for this other than a brief glimpse of Carla through the window of her cell. She’s stuck for the long-term now, confined to her workshop and warned that it’ll be Carla who pays for a potential change of heart. And all this while Shirley has realized that someone among them is a snitch. The fact she doesn’t even consider Martha will make the eventual revelation sting all the more.

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