‘Silo’ Season 3, Episode 1 Recap – How Do We Feel About Juliette’s Amnesia?

I know what you’re going to say — there’s nothing more contrived than an amnesia plot. However true this might be, though, and as weird a way as it is to kick off Season 3, if there’s a show I trust to pull something like this off, it’s Silo. And the signs in Episode 1, “Who Are You?”, are pretty positive. It doesn’t seem like it’s going to take long for Juliette to get her memory back, and there’s enough intrigue in the new status quo — not to mention a dual-timeline structure — for the premiere to be compelling.

Picking up from the Season 2 finale, which briefly introduced us to our POV character in the pre-apocalypse timeline, “Who Are You?” is cleaved pretty much down the middle, with one half tackling Juliette’s current predicament as the clueless mayor of Silo 18, and the other following Congressman Daniel Keene as he attempts to embroil himself in the U.S.’s retaliatory strike against Iran for the dirty bomb attack that was briefly mentioned last season. It’s a new style for Silo, but it works pretty well, especially with some neat — albeit rather obvious — parallels and mirroring conjoining both timelines.

Juliette Has Amnesia

Unavoidably, our first order of business is Juliette’s memory loss. As is briefly explained to her by Sims, she spent three whole minutes in the burning airlock with Bernard. While her insulated cleaning suit saved her from the flames, she was deprived of oxygen for pretty much all of that time, resulting in her total amnesia, aside from snippets of flashbacks that creep through on account of certain triggers.

Nonetheless, Juliette is now the mayor and is very much a hero, credited with her return having brought peace to Silo 18. This is mostly due to the fact that Sims and Camille are secretly running things and using Juliette as a political symbol to keep the rank and file in line. They’re feeding her a lot of nonsense alongside her nightly soup, including the fact that Bernard supposedly died from poisoning after the fire burned through his suit, when in reality, as a flashback reveals, Sims murdered him to seize power.

A New Beginning

Sims has implemented a lot of new policies and procedures, most of which are entirely tokenistic. Most of the cameras have apparently been removed, except for the ones necessary for public safety and security. Billings is rewriting the Pact. There’s a newly formed Council that allows the heads of each department to express their views and give updates, but whether anything will be done about any of the concerns is another matter entirely.

We hear from Ed Harwood, Head of Mining, who is moaning about the safety of 300 years’ worth of tunnels that have only been further destabilised by the rebel bomb and the Pact’s limitations on how far out they can go (Juliette is curious about this, highlighting how obvious some of the Silo’s weirdnesses are to someone who isn’t institutionalised). We hear from Orla Kent, speaking on Carla’s behalf for Supply, who notes that all sectors are back to pre-rebellion levels (this gives Juliette a minor flashback). We hear from Knox with a Mechanical update, and Billings with a summary of law and order. Crime is down, apparently, but there are fugitives on the loose — including Lukas Kyle — and masked Outsiders are making trouble.

It has been three months since the Season 2 finale. Juliette is concerned about a memory she had of Bernard and is adamant that there’s something she must do, but all her old allies are creeped out by her inability to remember them, especially Shirley. She also has multiple problems to be dealing with in the meantime, including stuff going missing from Critical Supply, and an Outsider attack on IT that took a helmet from the suit room and left a banner reading “The Display Is A Lie”. This, too, gives Juliette another flashback, where she recalls, vaguely, using a crowbar to enter another Silo.

Memory Manipulation

Silo Season 3, Episode 1 casts Robert and Camille as villains, pretty explicitly. The latter, especially, has been almost single-handedly responsible for essentially “programming” Juliette with memories, mostly by showing her footage — ostensibly taken from inside her cleaning helmet — that suggests that when she left Silo 18, she simply waited in a refuge hut, where she happened to find the insulated cleaning suit.

However, we also learn that Camille is in cahoots with The Algorithm and has been giving Juliette memory suppression drugs. Since they’re not entirely working — Juliette shouldn’t be having any flashbacks at all — the Algorithm insists that Camille double the dose. When we next see Juliette take her “vitamins”, it’s in a new context. She must have an ally somewhere, though, since in her special chowder she finds a hidden capsule containing a message that instructs her to turn the bowl upside down if she wants to know the truth.

Juliette hands Tony the bowl, upside-down as instructed, and then burns the note. She has a meeting to get to.

Retaliatory Strike

In the pre-apocalypse scenes, we follow Daniel Keene, first as he meets clandestinely with his sister, Charlotte, a U.S. Navy pilot who flies an F-35 off the USS Nimitz and is likely to be involved in a retaliatory strike against Iran following the dirty bomb attack. She pushes Daniel to try and secure a place on the Iran Committee of Senator Thurman, but he’s a bit late. Charlotte is flying out that night.

We get to see the mission, or at least a bit of it, which is derailed by a giant cloud at 50,000 feet and a strange substance like magical oil that sends all the jet’s systems haywire and eventually brings it down. This, I suppose, is the first sign of the plague of self-replicating nanobots that caused the apocalypse in Hugh Howey’s books, but there’s no confirmation of any of that for the time being.

Charlotte survives and is rescued by a rescue team from Turkmenistan, but with one crucial problem. She has a traumatic brain injury and, like Juliette, has completely lost her memory. Towards the end of the premiere, Daniel goes to see her in a state-of-the-art facility, and she has no idea who he is.