Now, that’s what I call a flashback! One week after I complained that Silo had denied us the full Salvador Quinn backstory I wanted, this week’s episode begins with a much more recent flashback, putting all of Juliette’s adventures in Silo 17 into a surprising new context. Add in one whopper of a closing cliffhanger in Silo 18, and “The Safeguard” delivers all the tension and plot development missing from “The Book of Quinn.” If this episode were a chapter in a book, it’d be hard to resist plowing straight ahead to the next chapter. (But it’s TV, sorry. Unless you’re reading this after the season has finished airing, you’ve gotta wait.)
Let’s start in Silo 17, where last week, the action was so chopped-up and spread out that it never really got going. This week Juliette and Solo’s story gets more attention, beginning with a flashback to the day she arrived in Silo 17, under the wary and watchful eye of those mysterious young people who later shot her with an arrow and claimed to have killed Solo.
It turns out that these aren’t newcomers. Apparently, when the Silo 17 rebellion went sour, Solo wasn’t the only one who survived. A handful of residents established a kind of shantytown on one of the intact levels and lived there long enough to produce another generation who have never known any other kind of life. Two of these kids, Audrey (Georgina Sadler) and Rick (Orlando Norman) coupled up and had kids of their own.
In the flashback scenes before the opening credits, we see these two — and another young scavenger whom Audrey derisively calls “Eater” (Sara Hazemi) — tracking Juliette and Solo and performing acts of sabotage. During Juliette’s initial exploration in the season premiere, when the wire she used to swing between levels broke? That was Audrey’s doing. The trio messed with her big dive to the water pumps, too. But from these snippets, we also learn that Rick and Eater aren’t as hardcore as Audrey when it comes to declaring every outsider an enemy.
The opening of this week’s episode reminded me of vintage Lost, where new characters and new locations would get introduced unexpectedly, simultaneously answering some questions and raising others. The rest of the Silo 17 scenes reminded me of the central conflict in The Walking Dead, where episodes often featured rich debates about whether or not the people blocking the heroes’ objectives should be killed. On the one hand, a postapocalyptic world is so dangerous that survival must take precedence over kindness. On the other hand, humans are a scarce resource, better cultivated than wasted.
The latter point is something Audrey has trouble understanding. She blames Solo for the death of her parents, who are those fresher corpses that Juliette found just outside the Vault many episodes ago. Audrey sees anybody new in the silo — plus some old-timers like Eater — as a drain on the dwindling food supplies. So a lot of the drama in the Silo 17 scenes comes from Juliette trying to talk Audrey out of impulsively murdering folks.
Juliette is mainly trying to save Solo, who is not dead but merely wounded and imprisoned. While poking around Solo’s old living quarters with Eater, looking for any clues to the Vault’s entrance code, Juliette pieces together Solo’s real story from what she finds scattered around the room. She confirms that he was just a kid when the rebellion happened and realizes that he was the son of the head of IT, who was ordered by his dad to stay in the Vault and not open it for anyone. A preteen Solo — real name Jimmy — watched his own father die through the Vault window. As for Audrey’s parents, they figured out the Vault’s code through trial and error, entered while Jimmy was sleeping, shot him with his own gun, and then died when they entered the airless food pantry and Jimmy locked them in.
Juliette gets the whole truth out in an emotional scene, where she anxiously keeps Audrey from killing Jimmy while convincing him to let these youngsters into the Vault. (The interrogation scene is beautifully lit, with Jimmy’s face appearing as just a sliver amid deep shadow.) There follows a sweet sequence where Jimmy plays host, giving everyone ice cream and showing off the wonders of his home (which looks way more lived-in than Silo 18’s Vault). The most touching moment comes when Juliette tells Jimmy that she found his father’s emergency evacuation suit in the apartment. Jimmy asks her, “Why didn’t you just leave?” When she doesn’t say anything, he pats her tenderly on the shoulder.
Keeping people alive. It matters!
As for Silo 18, the action there really starts ramping up as well, as Mechanical begins making plans to escalate their rebellion, while Lukas scrambles to decode and interpret Salvador Quinn’s secret messages before it’s too late.
On the rebellion side, there are some wins and some losses. Working in Mechanical’s favor: Sheriff Billings and his wife have decided they’re on board for the fight and are willing to reach out to Judge Sims and his wife Camille to see if they’ll be allies as well. Billings shares his rumpled Before Times picture of unspoiled nature with Sims, as a way of making his case. And while Sims is hesitant to commit — in part because he knows nearly everyone in the silo fears and loathes him — Camille once again sees this moment of crisis as an opportunity to seize power.
Working against Mechanical? Well, Walker, apparently. After feeding intel to Bernard last week, she now sits in silence as Knox lays out all of the Down Deepers’ traitorous plans in her apartment, in full view of Bernard’s cameras. (I will note, though, that at one point Knox seems to hesitate while talking with Walker, as though he senses something’s fishy. Could he be intentionally lying?)
As for Lukas, a lot of what he learns from Quinn and passes on to Bernard is — to Bernard — old news. Oh, there are 50 other silos? Yeah, Bernard knew that. Oh, there’s some kind of deadly “Safeguard” for when rebellions get out of hand? Yeah, Bernard’s been warning about that in private conversations for two seasons now.
But one thing Lukas discovers, which Bernard may not know, is that there’s a tunnel under the silo, hidden by pools of water way down in the Down Deep. Lukas convinces Shirley to guide him to the water by promising to tell her what he knows about Juliette (that the camera in her helmet never recorded her dying, so she may still be alive).
And here comes the cliffhanger. At the end of the tunnel, Lukas finds a door. Before he can open it, lights flash on, and a booming voice asks, “Lukas Kyle, why are you here?” The voice then says that only Salvador Quinn, Mary Meadows, and George Wilkins have ever made it to the door before and that if Lukas reveals what he is about to be told, the Safeguard will be initiated. Cut to black. The credits roll.
Secret Silo 17 survivors! Secret tunnels and doors! A secret no one else can hear! For an end-times bunker governed by so many intricate rules and long-range plans, it sure seems like messy, unpredictable humanity keeps finding ways to assert itself in the shadows.
The Down Deep
• Bernard assembles the deputies for a briefing, in which he accuses Billings of leading the rebellion and orders the force to deploy en masse to one of the cafeterias, which is about to be converted into a makeshift jail. But has Bernard overestimated his power here? The last time he met with the deputies, they seemed pretty skeptical about everything he had to say.
• Remember those numbers on the chalkboard in the Silo 17 classroom, which Juliette wiped away so that she could design her underwater breathing apparatus? Turns out those were written by Audrey’s parents, who were recording every guess they made at the Vault’s entrance code. Unwittingly, Juliette sabotaged herself, making it more difficult for her to get into the Vault without Solo’s help.
• I just met Eater, but I would protect her with my life. I was haunted by the scene in the classroom with Juliette, where Eater pockets a little puppet (presumably for the kids back in the shantytown) and looks wistfully at the lunchboxes. She’s also confused by the names on the cubbies because she’s only ever had one name, and these children had a first and a last.
• I respect Solo’s choice to play some music for his guests, who have never heard music before. But if he’s going to describe the art form as “better than ice cream,” he needs to put on a better song than “Monster Mash.”
• I’m going to write at length in next week’s review about how fantastic Rebecca Ferguson has been this season, but I didn’t want to end this week without singling out one particularly sharp line-reading. When Juliette discovers that Solo failed to tell her about his father’s suit, and that he instead made her go swimming to get one from the fire department, she says, wryly, “That’s fine. I, um, almost drowned and I got shot with an arrow …”
• I always watch these episodes a second time with the closed captions on to confirm quotes and to check the spelling of characters’ names. Usually, when a character is introduced, the captioning won’t include their name until after the first time it’s spoken aloud. (Before then it will say something like “[woman’s voice].”) But at the end of this episode? When the booming voice is talking to Lukas? The captions referred to the person speaking as “The Algorithm.” Make of that what you will.