Summary
Silo Season 3 pumps the brakes just a touch in “Whatever You Do, Don’t Go Home”, edging several subplots along without committing to any major developments in any, aside from a pretty major last–minute cliffhanger.
How deep does the rabbit hole go? This is a sentiment that is expressed all over the place in Silo, in multiple different forms. It’s also the sentiment that binds the disparate timelines and plot threads of Season 3 together, both thematically and, in the case of Episode 4, “Whatever You Do, Don’t Go Home”, quite literally. Juliette spends the hour descending through Silo 18 to uncover bigger and bigger secrets, including a doozy at the bottom. In the “before times”, meanwhile, Daniel and Helen realise they’re part of a much larger conspiracy than they realised.
The Great Escape
Picking up from where we left off, Camille still intends to kill Juliette at the Algorithm’s behest, and Sims, playing nice, offers to do the dirty deed for her. If you were thinking this doesn’t exactly mesh with some of the sentiments he expressed last week, you’d be right, but we’ll get to that in a minute.
In the meantime, Amy the nurse heroically sedates Emerson instead of Juliette — Camille wants her unconscious to finish her off, clearly not as about this life as she’s pretending — and helps Juliette to sneak out of Medical. She also reveals that she was already swapping out Juliette’s memory suppressant drugs at the behest of someone else, before Juliette started spitting them out, which explains why they didn’t seem to be working. But there’s no time to dig any further into that, since she allows herself to get captured so Juliette can escape.
Juliette’s next assist comes from Shirley. Knox helps her get into Medical by punching a Raider who antagonises him, so she overhears Sims and Camille discussing Juliette’s escape. She follows, and when Juliette is cornered by Sims, Shirley helps her get away. Now, it seemed fairly obvious to me that Sims was trying to help Juliette, but you can understand why she wouldn’t think that. She asks Shirley to take her as close to the sealed-off Digger Void as they can get, and when they get there, they realise that Martha didn’t seal it quite as tightly as it seemed. Juliette pops the door open and heads down even deeper.
The secret at the bottom of the shaft is a big one — a quaint little living area containing none other than a badly burn-scarred Bernard. Evidently, Sims’s claims of murdering him were untrue. And thus, it seems like he has been secretly working against his wife this entire time.
The Investigation Continues
As predicted, Billings is pretty torn up about Orla Kent’s fate, and as such is taking the investigation — now a murder instead of a missing persons case — rather more seriously. According to the closest thing Silo 18 has to a pathologist, she wasn’t killed by the rat poison that Camille had pumped into the mines. Instead, she was struck in the back of the head by a length of rebar a couple of days prior, outside of the mines. Her body was dumped there, way down a closed-off tunnel in the hope she’d never be found.
Billings tells Murphy to pass on a message to Carla, asking her to meet him in Supply. She doesn’t turn up, though, since she’s missing, too. Instead, Billings meets Orla’s “boyfriend”, Mike, and Mike’s ex — not to mention the former Shadow to the Head of Supply — Glenda. Both of these characters are suspicious, but we’re probably a ways away from the truth of this matter revealing itself. Either way, Billings is on the case.
Off the Grid
Silo Season 3, Episode 4 checks back in with Daniel and Helen regularly, though it doesn’t move the before times story on a great deal. After finding Steve’s lair wrecked and Steve himself missing, the two of them realise that they’re in a pretty serious situation, so they hole up at an apartment belonging to Helen’s out-of-town ex, Palmer. Their only lead is the username of whoever Steve was playing chess with while they were there. Thanks to some illogical moves, they think the chessboard might have been a form of secret communication. Perhaps it could even lead them to the person in Moldova who recorded the unencrypted comms in the first place.
The next morning, Daniel sets up a meeting with a contact at the Pentagon named Sam Ramsey to see if he can trace the chess username, which ends in “big foot lives”, since of course it does. However, Sam isn’t keen on the idea of risking his own life. Instead, Daniel and Helen attract the attention of a white-haired older dude who was at Alameda’s funeral and in Helen’s office the day she got fired. When he invites them for coffee, it quickly becomes apparent that he’s a kind of government fixer who has been paying off anyone associated with the conspiracy to keep things quiet. He offers Helen a job at the Times, and threatens to withdraw Charlotte’s medical funding. Helen is compelled by the offer, but you can see why she would be, since she very much got the longer end of that particular stick.
Either way, Daniel and Helen go their separate ways to regroup, but while he’s back at the office, Daniel gets a call from Sam, who decided to look into the matter after all. And he has some big news that we don’t get to hear. However, it’s clearly important enough that Daniel immediately grabs Helen, and they get back to work. I guess we’ll find out what they’re up to next week.
