What is it about Steve Zahn that makes the middling into the memorable and the good into the great? I watched this week’s Silo with my youngest, who is home from college for the holiday break. The kid had never seen any of Silo before but had encountered Zahn previously in That Thing You Do! and as the voice of “Bad Ape” in War for the Planet of the Apes. We talked afterward about how Zahn’s scenes in “Solo” — playing the title character, the lone survivor of what he calls “Silo 17” — absolutely riveted us. He brings a certain unpredictability and vulnerability to nearly every part he plays, but here, he’s so shaky and raw that we both wanted to climb into the screen and give Solo a hug … if he didn’t try to kill us first, that is.
About half of this episode — the better half — concerns Juliette’s efforts to earn Solo’s trust and to find out more about what happened in Silo 17. She has some success with the latter. Solo, while wary, wants to talk. He rocks Juliette’s world right off the bat when he tells her there are 50 silos. He shakes her up even further when he tells her that the inciting incident for the ultimate destruction of Silo 17 was when a man named Ron Tucker went outside and didn’t clean.
Immediately, Juliette’s mission changes. She had no idea — how could she? — that her decision not to clean might doom everyone she knows. Now she’s anxious to find another suit, find some good tape, and hustle back home. To do that, though, she’ll need Solo’s help. So she’s back to step one: winning him over.
It’s remarkable how much tension, warmth, humor, and drama Zahn and Rebecca Ferguson are able to coax out of their scenes together, with him behind a locked door (seen only from behind or through one narrow window) and her in a dim, rubble-strewn room. Hat-tip to this episode’s director, Aric Avelino, and the credited writer, Cassie Pappas, who preserve many of Solo’s mysteries while also hinting at what a tough life he’s led so far, alone in his vault. He’s obviously one of the handful of in-the-know IT people distributed throughout the surviving silos. He’s not surprised when Juliette tells him about the fake images she saw in her helmet when she walked outside. And he has access to the books and music that ordinary silo citizens don’t.
He’s also, apparently, had to protect his home in the vault before, given that Juliette finds some corpses in the hall outside that are “not as old as the other ones.” Did life in the Silo 17 survive for a while after the rebellion? Or did these visitors come from yet another silo? Solo isn’t volunteering any information about that yet. Instead, he cooks up some chicken stew for Juliette — not just to put her at ease but to make sure she’s a real person and not a figment of his imagination. Once she’s convinced him she’s a corporeal being who can consume food, she asks a favor. The materials she needs for her excursion back to her silo are on a flooded level of Silo 17. Will Solo come out and provide oxygen to her while she navigates through the water?
The Solo and Juliette parts of this episode end with the haunting image of a haggard and hairy Solo finally emerging from his vault, venturing further out in the center of Silo 17 than he has in a very long time — or perhaps ever. He takes it all in: the cavernous space, the wreckage. And we leave the two of them there, for now, sitting on a crumbling walkway. I look forward to seeing them again next week.
As was the case with the season premiere, there’s an unfortunate and inevitable imbalance in this week’s episode between the scenes of Juliette’s adventures in Silo 17 and, well, everything else. Silo 17 is new. Solo is new. That old silo next door? Even with a rebellion brewing, it is — comparatively — a bit tired. It doesn’t help either that the action in the old silo is so diffuse this week, with subplots galore and only a couple getting their due.
That said, it’s worth acknowledging just how bad things are getting in the Down Deep, where the judicial’s decision to supplement the sheriff’s deputies with Sims’s goons and raiders is making everyone edgy. The locals are pushing back against martial law, defiantly spraying “Juliette Lives!” graffiti and demanding the release of people they see as political prisoners. They’re also — distressingly, but also predictably — starting to fracture.
So that’s all something to keep track of — along with Knox’s suggestion that he thinks he knows what the long-unexplained “wall of names” in the silo’s lowest levels might mean. But the more intriguing parts of the main silo story this week involve two characters: Sims and Judge Meadows.
What’s fascinating to me about Robert Sims is that here’s this loving family man with a totally reasonable ambition to be a leader, yet to get what he wants, he’s had to cultivate an identity as someone whose “parents threaten their kids with if they don’t eat their broccoli.” Sims throws his muscle around twice in this episode. First, with the rebellious Patrick (Rick Gomez), he offers a compromise wherein Patrick will head down to mechanical as a literal bomb-thrower, stirring up problems in accordance with how The Order suggests uprisings be handled: by making the mechanical department into a public enemy. In return, Patrick will be given a special drug that will make him forget as far back as he wants: before Juliette’s escape, before the death of his wife Doris, or even before he met Doris.
Later, he drafts the retired raider Reggie (Kieron Jecchinis) back into service, reminding him of how he once gave him extra time alone with an especially creepy criminal to dole out private punishment. While Sims may not have the secret knowledge that Bernard or Judge Meadows possesses (though goodness, does he ever want it), he has learned from them that in the silo, power affords privileges — to be exercised or to be bestowed.
As for Meadows, her request to go out comes with a lot of preparation and settling of affairs. Among other things, she needs to understand exactly what happened with Juliette. How did she become so savvy about the silo’s secrets, like the hidden cameras? And did Juliette actually say she wanted to go out? Meadows needs to pin all this down for a couple of reasons. She needs to know what kind of nightmare might be in store for the silo in her absence, after Juliette’s departure triggered The Order’s “prepare for war” warning. She also needs to know if Bernard is lying to her.
The answer to that second concern is easy. Of course, Bernard’s lying. He lies constantly. It’s how he controls information, which is how he controls people. But he does seem to care about Meadows genuinely and does seem sincere enough when he explains how he’s going to help her leave the silo. There will be no announcement or ceremony. The display screens will shut down momentarily. He’ll handle everything himself, right down to measuring her for her suit — in a moment of physical intimacy that is both awkward and sweet.
Can Bernard be trusted? Probably not. But as Meadows pulls out a forbidden video projector and watches some mysterious and beautiful images, she’s surely seen hundreds of times — of people playing on beaches, in the snow, or at a birthday party — she knows she has no choice. She’ll risk oblivion for a chance at paradise.
The Down Deep
• Among all the scantly developed subplots in this episode, there’s one that particularly bears watching. Dr. Pete Nichols (Iain Glen) has a pleasant conversation with a woman named Phoebe Wells (Caitlin Innes Edwards), who has mixed feelings over entering the lottery to have a child, because she knows the only reason the lottery reopened is because Pete’s daughter Juliette left the silo. While doing the operation to remove Phoebe’s birth control implant, Pete is prepared to replace it with another implant (as he is required to do when the silo’s government determines that a parenting candidate is undesirable) but chooses not to. A small rebellion, but significant.
• Judge Meadows has a nice moment with Sheriff Billings in which she admits that she knows he has “the Syndrome” but that he shouldn’t feel ashamed about it because it’s probably the most natural human reaction to living underground. (“It’s time to get rid of the stigma tied to a few discriminatory phrases in the Pact,” she says.)
• Solo’s song of the week: “Red Rain,” from Peter Gabriel. How does this music sound to Juliette? Can she even wrap her ears around what she’s hearing?
• I try not to overthink what the silo’s residents do and don’t know about the world outside, but I couldn’t help but notice that Solo explains the concept of birds to Juliette in one scene and then, in a later scene, serves her chicken stew.
• Speaking of that stew … did anybody else think Solo had poisoned it? Especially after he seemed alarmed by how quickly and unquestioningly Juliette ate it? Or maybe I’ve just been watching Silo too long. I’ve got trust issues.
