Just one episode into Silo Season 3, and the show has already radically reinvented itself. In the Silo itself, Juliette is now mayor, though thanks to a nasty bout of amnesia, she can’t remember anyone there (or even anything about herself). But the more intriguing addition is a pre-apocalypse timeline, introduced briefly in the Season 2 finale, designed to shed some light on the Earth’s downfall. And it has already gotten started doing that by introducing a dangerous black/grey goo that really represents a world-ending threat.
Readers of the Hugh Howey books on which this series is based will have a good idea of what this development means, but for many viewers it’ll be a compelling mystery, and even then, where the show chooses to take the idea remains anyone’s guess. Either way, it’s obvious that this development is intimately connected to the downfall of civilisation and, of course, what’s currently going on in the Silos, so it’s worth some closer examination.
A Mission Gone Wrong
Our point-of-view character in the pre-apocalypse timeline is Congressman Daniel Keene, whose sister, Charlotte, is a U.S. Navy pilot flying an F-35 from an aircraft carrier called the Nimitz. In the show’s storyline, Iran has recently detonated a dirty bomb in the U.S., and a retaliatory strike is planned that includes Charlotte.
The Season 3 premiere shows us this mission, which goes badly wrong when Charlotte and her squadron fly into a mysterious cloud 50,000 feet in the air. It seems to defy any established atmospheric physics, and once inside it, the fighters immediately begin to malfunction. Total instrumentation and mechanical failure soon follow, and Charlotte crashes.
The only glimpse we get of the substance comprising the cloud is of an oily black goo that stretches between Charlotte’s fingers like tendrils.
A Weapon Revealed
While the show hasn’t clarified any of this yet, as per Howey’s books, the “goo” is actually a cloud of self-replicating nanobots. This is the pressing apocalyptic threat in the original story, with the U.S. – or at least a faction within its government – believing that adversarial nations would weaponize nanobots and eventually wipe out the human race. The Silos were established as a preservation countermeasure against this existential threat. There’s a lot more to it, but I won’t explain it in any great depth since it’ll give too much away and ruin the fun of the show’s remaining revelations (of which there will be many).
Needless to say, though, the introduction of this threat transitions Silo from a survival drama about an implied nuclear apocalypse to one about much more complex sci-fi and political ideas, completely shifting the thematic texture.
How the Nanobots Relate to the Silos
Understanding the presence of nanobots in the plot helps us to deduce a couple of enduring mysteries surrounding the Silos. Most obviously, it explains the so-called “bad air” outside the Silos, which is seemingly toxic to humans, despite enough time having elapsed that any nuclear fallout would have dissipated. These are easy to imagine as swarms of hostile nanites designed to dissolve the cleaning suits and target their human occupants.
Nanotechnology also provides a good excuse for how human life has been preserved within the Silos in the form of inoculation. If humanity were to be preserved long-term with extremely limited resources, it would stand to reason that certain measures would be implemented to prevent, say, the entire population from dying of a plague. Any technology can be utilised for good or ill, and just because we’ve seen the negative connotations of the nanobots doesn’t mean there aren’t also positive ones.
The Clues Are There
While it’s being stingy with its revelations, Silo is also putting enough clues out there for us to draw our own conclusions on many things. It’s also deploying familiar cinematic techniques to create the right impressions in the viewer’s mind, allowing us to put the plot together.
For instance, while it isn’t clear whether the nanobots or the crash caused Charlotte’s memory loss, it cannot be ignored as a mirror of Juliette’s own. And since we know that Juliette is being fed memory-suppression drugs disguised as vitamins by Camille, our unconscious assumption is that the nanobots are the unifying quality between these two characters.
This ties in with Senator Thurman’s clandestine intervention after the mission went bad, ensuring that Charlotte was rescued and that she was then spirited into a secure, specialised facility. It all reeks of a cover-up, creating distrust around the powers-that-be in both timelines.
The idea of memory has also been a recurring means of control within the Silos. IT’s primary mechanism of keeping information under wraps has been pretending it never happened, sometimes, in the case of the tunnels, erasing the information that proves it ever did. Juliette being force-fed new, politically convenient memories is a more localised version of this same phenomenon.
Answers Are Coming
For now, Silo is content to leave the goo as a mystery to be solved later, but it’s undeniable that it represents a major technological and tonal shift in the show’s framework. We don’t know whether the cloud that Charlotte encountered was a weapon manufactured by an enemy – Iran, in this case – or a domestic experiment that had spiralled out of control, which would explain Thurman’s interest in it and attempts at controlling the situation.
It could be, and possibly is, a combination of both, with the cautionary tale of rapid advances of dangerous technology in the middle, being pulled this way and that by competing national agendas. It’s all doing the same job of keeping key details in our minds so that we can put together the show’s macro plot, which should be unveiled more concretely as Season 3 progresses.
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