Summary
Silo crams a lot of information across two timelines in “It’s All Good”. The pace suffers a little, but this is necessary groundwork to get the rest of Season 3 moving at a more exciting clip.
Well, we have lots to discuss, don’t we? Silo really isn’t being shy about moving the plot along at quite a clip in Season 3, and Episode 2 strongly supports the suspicions that Juliette’s convenient amnesia is only going to be a short-term thing. As with the premiere, “It’s All Good” rattles between two timelines, with Juliette trying to figure things out in Silo 18 while Daniel’s story in the “before times” sheds some more light on the origin story of the Silos themselves – not to mention a potential world-ending nanobot threat, but to be fair, there’s nothing about that in this episode, so we’ll save it for later.
Don’t worry, though, as there’s plenty to be getting on with in the meantime, in both timelines, so let’s get on with breaking all of that down.
Surveillance State
The last-minute cliffhanger of Juliette receiving a mysterious note immediately turns out not to have been especially secretive, since Camille and the Algorithm are watching her apartment and know all about it. Camille knows Juliette is lying about it, though, which the Algorithm identifies as a much bigger potential problem, since while the memory suppressants erase the past, they don’t stop her from disbelieving the new narrative that she’s being fed.
This is apparently not the first time that entire Silos have been “reset” – according to the Algorithm, it has happened six times, including to Silo 18 140 years ago. And there are always people like Juliette who won’t play ball. Interestingly, this ends up being a kind of inverse of what’s going on with Charlotte in the before times, but we’ll get to that. In the meantime, Camille is to keep up with the medication and tighten up Juliette’s security so that she can’t cause any problems, two tasks she fails at pretty much immediately.
Missing Person
Briefly, it’s worth mentioning that Orla Kent is missing. This is a problem raised to Billings by Orla’s sister, who is worried about her having missed a nightly check-in. Billings is initially reluctant to investigate, since he saw Orla at the Council meeting the day prior, but he eventually acquiesces and sends Carla a message saying that Orla needs to check in with her sister.
It isn’t until the end of the episode that Billings gets a message back saying that there has been no response from Orla. His search for her will presumably pick up in the third episode. He also has some issues at home to consider, but we’ll get to those.
The Medication Drawbridge
In the before times period, Daniel is trying to jog Charlotte’s memory by recounting details about their past and parents, but nothing seems to be working. He meets her doctor, Victor Crnkovich, which seems for a while like it’s going to be a good thing. But it becomes pretty apparent that Dr. Crnkovich’s unconventional methods, which involve giving Charlotte medication that functions like a drawbridge between her and her memories, are a little bit suspect. He alludes to Daniel that he can essentially rebuild his sister by picking and choosing which memories to help her recover, while tactically leaving out the ones that might be problematic or painful.
For some reason, Daniel doesn’t see any red flags in this. Anna, whom I only realised in this episode was Senator Thurman’s daughter, is a big fan of the doctor too, since he has apparently been treating veterans free of charge for years. But Helen, the reporter who Daniel met with in the Season 2 finale and who shows up randomly here, is wildly suspicious of Crnkovich and his experimental human guinea pig treatments. She finds him – and the fact that Charlotte was conveniently admitted to the swanky treatment facility in the first place – highly suspicious, and since Daniel is obviously not a very good politician, he gives enough away that Helen is able to later infiltrate the facility and try to prompt Charlotte to recall details of the Iran mission.
As Helen explains to Daniel after she’s caught and thrown out, Charlotte had originally approached her with serious concerns about the whole Iran thing and had directed her to Daniel in the hopes that he could use his political influence to try to figure out what was what. He still has that chance, and Helen’s hoping that he takes it, since there are certain things that definitely aren’t adding up.
Old Friends
Back in Silo 18, Juliette looks through old notes from when she was sent out to clean, including one from Martha Walker, which prompts her to go looking for her. After a brief chat with Knox, who tries to explain why Shirley finds it almost impossible to speak to her at the moment, she sits down for a coffee and an instructive lesson with Walker, whom she has figured out is a potential ally from the tone of the note (and the implication of her having swapped the heat tape, for which she could have also been sent out to clean).
Walker didn’t send Juliette the note, but she has some good advice for finding out who did – follow her gut. Juliette can sense on a core level that something’s amiss, so she decides to head to the marketplace and give Jerry the slip in the hopes that her mysterious interlocutor approaches her. And just like that, a Raider who turns out to be Sandy lures her away to a storage room where she’s greeted by Patrick Kennedy and Danny.
This is mostly a fact-finding mission. Kennedy and the others want to know what Juliette saw outside, but it takes Kennedy roughly five minutes to deduce that Juliette’s amnesia is a consequence of having been drugged, mostly because Robert Sims offered him the same drugs. With the helmets that the Outsiders stole from IT, they’re able to jog Juliette’s memory a bit, but things are still unclear. However, they also mention Lukas Kyle, who Knox had mentioned earlier, so if you think about it, Juliette comes out of this situation armed with much more information than she entered it with. She knows she’s being drugged and force-fed a false narrative; she knows she didn’t write the sign she returned to the Silo with, and she knows that Lukas Kyle is important to everything that’s going on, though nobody seems to know where he is.
Destabilization
Silo Season 3, Episode 2 finds a lot of characters playing both sides, some wholly committed to doing so and some not. But it’s all in service of the same overarching idea of Silo 18 being a powder keg, with only a single spark necessary – one that, at this point, might come from anywhere – to set the whole thing off.
Jerry, for instance, tells Juliette that he’s sick of treating her like a prisoner and is willing to bend the rules to give her some of the freedom she’s looking for. This will put him in Camille’s crosshairs, but that seems like a risk he’s willing to take.
Similarly, Billings’s wife, Kathleen, is in the thick of the Outsiders, and his tenuous position as Sheriff, not to mention the person helping to rewrite the Pact, is threatened by her actions. But they’re both responding differently to the same stimulus. They discovered that their lives were a lie; that their belief system was a mechanism for control. The centre cannot hold. As with Juliette spitting out her pills, there’s an awakening afoot, and it’s threatening to destabilize everything.
The Algorithm shows Camille a visual representation of this, a line graph depicting the level of social tranquillity if Juliette keeps playing ball, and the possible disruption that will be caused if she doesn’t. If Juliette becomes more trouble than she’s worth, she’ll have to be removed, which will only cause more destabilising effects. But the Algorithm’s plan to avoid that seems to be dumping the “vitamins” into the main water supply, giving everyone in the Silo the same memory issues as Juliette. I imagine everyone who really doesn’t like the amnesia plot won’t be thrilled at the possibility of that development.
