Juliette Nichols has inspired a movement. The problem is that it’s a movement in the wrong direction.
Look, it seemed like a good idea at the time: fix up a sabotaged life-support suit and step outside to see the real world behind the illusions of the Silo. Unfortunately, the only illusion was the one of the green and verdant world broadcast on the suit’s viewscreen by Silo leadership, in order to convince the banished that they have nothing to fear. Realizing the ruse, Juliette “refuses to clean” — wipe the grime off the lens that provides the Silo with its view of the outside world, since after all, the view is not so hot — and walks off over the hill and out of sight.
What she fails to consider, until the topic comes up a couple of days later, is that while she knows the outside world is a poisonous hellhole and the green version she briefly hacked the system to display to everyone is bullshit, everyone inside the Silo who watched her wander off is going to assume it’s safe out there.
That’s exactly what happened in the Silo of Solo (say that five times fast), the lone survivor of a revolution that left everyone dead. Some guy refused to clean and waltzed off, an uprising overthrew the government and threw open the doors, and…everyone was dead within minutes when the wind shifted and kicked up poisonous particles directly into their respiratory systems. When Solo (a childlike Steve Zahn) tells Juliette what happened, you can see the realization that she may have inadvertently set up the deaths of 10,000 people hit her in real time. In professional wrestling, this is the part where the crowd chants “YOU FUCKED UP! YOU FUCKED UP!”
Now Juliette must return to the original Silo — one of 50, Solo informs her, and part of a little cluster of three or four nearby ones — and warn her fellow citizens not to follow in her footsteps. To do so, she’ll have to jerry-rig a new suit, which means retrieving firefighter uniforms, which means diving underwater for so long she’ll need a respirator, which means Solo will have to exit the Vault where he’s been living alone for god knows how many years and help her. He makes it as far as the rickety bridge she’s constructed over a gap in the platforms, then just…sits for a while. Like a deep sea diver, he needs time to depressurize before he can truly enter the great wide open of the rest of the Silo. (If a mile-deep tomb is the great wide open for you, please consult a medical professional.)
Juliette, however, is not the only person aware of the potential consequences of her actions. The Order, the top-secret book that only Bernard — and his former shadow, Judge Mary Meadows — knows about, has this whole situation gamed out. If someone fails to clean? “Prepare for war.” If graffiti pops up, especially graffiti celebrating the person who refused to clean? Erase it and arrest the artists. Be sure to increase tensions with Mechanical, the deepest layers of the Silo, so they can be scapegoated by the rest of the population when they rise up in rebellion. Either the authors of the Order had been through this before, or the Silo system is a product of human behavioralists with a tremendous level of insight. Or both!
Not much of this really registers with Judge Meadows, whose only real goal now is to “go out” herself. But she’s also interested in the key question of whether or not Juliette requested to go out in the first place. If she had, why would she have run? Why would one of the Raiders who arrested her be so coy and “well, if that’s what they say what happened, I guess it’s what happened” about the declaration? The answers, of course, all point in the direction of Bernard, who more or less admits he was booting Juliette out no matter what she said or didn’t say.
Meadows’s ally in all this is Sheriff Paul, who’s in way over his head as more and more deputies and Raiders get pulled into the crisis — a crisis Bernard and his lackey Sims are deliberately inflaming by sending agent provocateurs into the Down Deep to lob firebombs and get innocent people shot to death by the trigger-happy ex-cop types called out of retirement to help quell unrest. Paul actually admits to Meadows that he’s got the Syndrome, which she says is not a traditional illness but rather a natural human reaction to the unnatural situation of humans living their entire lives underground. (Maybe if the Silos had been designed by the brilliant Dwarf craftsmen of Khazad-Dûm we wouldn’t be having this discussion. Next time, Silo makers!)
Yet rebellion manifests itself in many ways. Out late one night with insomnia, Juliet’s father, obstetrician Pete Nichols, encounters a potential patient who’s excited the child-conception lottery has reopened thanks to Juliette’s death or disappearance or whatever you’d call it. (The woman isn’t aware Dr. Nichols is her dad until deeper into the conversation.) Dr. Nichols knows this is all bulllshit, that he’s been instructed only to pretend to remove the birth-control capsule from whomever wins the lotto. But he goes ahead and actually does it, almost certainly placing himself in Bernard’s crosshairs once this woman has a forbidden birth.
My favorite scene, one of the best non-thriller scenes in the entire series in fact, has little do do with any of this. It’s just Bernard, stuttering and stammering and awkwardly telling Judge Meadows that he has to measure her for her surface suit. He does this with obvious sensuality, implying a whole universe of emotions between the two characters who were once so close, and giving actors Tanya Moodie and Tim Robbins a moment of serious displaced sexiness. In a way, it’s an echo of the later sit-down between Solo and Juliette: a man and a woman in intimate company, each glad for the presence of the other despite the dire circumstances. These are lovely notes for the show to play; considering the likelihood we’re getting an old-fashioned “Juliette does some engineering and some death-defying” sequence next episode as she goes diving for those firefighter uniforms, let’s enjoy the loveliness while we can.
Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.
The post ‘Silo’ Season 2 Episode 3 Recap: The Order of Things appeared first on Decider.
