‘Silo’ Season 2 Episode 9 Recap: The Magical World of Silo

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” I’m thinking about this line from 2001 author Arthur C. Clarke a lot while watching Silo these days.

For one thing, characters in both of the Silos in play are continuously discovering bits and pieces of the past that look like artifacts from another dimension to them, so alien are they from these people’s customary cramped and enclosed existence. 

The existence of a lush natural world, proven on a page torn from a verboten book, bedevils Kathleen Billings, her husband Sheriff Paul Billings, relic dealer Patrick Kennedy, and pretty much anyone else who comes into contact with it. It’s beyond anything they ever dreamed. Characters react to the names of various species of animals — elephants, monkeys, birds — like they’ve just been told unicorns exist. 

The Legacy, the innermost chamber in each Silo’s vault, is arrayed like a wizard’s study. A huge scale model of the solar system hangs from the ceiling, surrounded by walls lined floor to ceiling with centuries-old tomes, all lit up in gold. Hitting a snare drum, spinning an old zoetrope, playing “The Monster Mash” — to the handful of survivors of Silo 17, this might as well be Merlin’s workshop. And that’s before we get to the marvelous voice-activated tech Lukas Kyle has access to in his Legacy via its tablet computer. You could probably make yourself the founder of a new religion with that thing at your disposal. No matter how traumatized or hard-bitten or cynical any of these people are, they always wind up gazing in awe.

All of this flips Clarke’s Law on its head, in a way: These items may be far beyond the capabilities and imaginations of the Silo residents, but they’re not “advanced” in the sense that they come from a future civilization, or one with hundreds or thousands of years of evolution on us. They’re only advanced because Silo civilization has devolved from what once was. The tablet may as well be from the Lost Kingdom of Atlantis. 

But we’re learning that this doesn’t account for everything you can find in the Silo’s most secret places. When Lukas finally cracks the code of disgraced Silo leader Salvador Quinn, he receives instructions from the dead man to travel to a tunnel at the base of the structure. This requires winning the trust of the Down Deepers, who are in open rebellion and are unlikely to pay much attention to his precious blue ID card. He manages to win their trust by convincing them he knew Juliette, their friend and martyred icon. 

But Lukas knows she isn’t so martyred, at least not with any definitive proof. Bernard informs him early in the episode that she made it to one of the other 50 Silos (why 51? Why any at all? Bernard says he doesn’t know), and she was still alive when her helmet-cam conked out. He promises to reveal this truth to rebel leader Shirley in exchange for safe passage to the bottom, and with her help he plunges into the subterranean lake to see what he can find.

What he finds is that the water is only waist deep, bearing out his theory that there are outflow pumps at work down there that not even the Mechanicals know about. There’s also a tunnel that no one, except for three people, has ever reached: Salvador Quinn, future Judge Mary Meadows, and Juliette Nichols’s slain boyfriend George Wilkins.

He knows this because the tunnel talks to him. It’s obviously some kind of advanced computer technology, but it’s a scene straight out of one of the later volumes of A Song of Ice and Fire (not seen in Game of Thrones), when Samwell Tarly and his gal Gilly pass through an enchanted gate that speaks. Meanwhile, the whole sequence takes place in an underground cavern filled with water and enormous spiked drills, like something you might see in the Mines of Moria. See what I mean about science and magic?

There’s a similarly fantastical feel to Juliette’s continuing misadventures in Silo 17. This week, we meet the Silo’s other residents, the ones that have been attacking her and Solo: Rick (Orlando Norman) and Audrey (Georgina Sadler), a young couple; the two little children they support, one a baby brother and one their own infant; and Eater (Sara Hazemi), a kid given into Rick and Audrey’s parents’ care by her own dying mother before they died, too. Audrey blames Eater for their parents deaths during a search for more food, hence the nickname. They live in a science-fantasy Star Wars bunker overgrown with underground vegetation. They use bows and arrows, for crying out loud. 

But Audrey’s quest for vengeance against Solo, their parents’ killer, is mitigated by Juliette’s own discovery. She learns that the rebellion took place several decades ago, not more recently as Solo implied. He was only 12 when it went down, entrusted by his father, the head of IT, to keep the Vault locked. He witnessed the rebel-leader sheriff shoot his dad to death inches away from his face when he wouldn’t give up the code. He blames himself, and he cut off the air supply to the chamber he locked the kids’ parents in because to do otherwise would be to fail the memory of the father he failed to save. All of this comes out in a Steve Zahn performance that radiates pain and guilt even beneath a shadowy, blood-caked beard.

It all works out beautifully: Audrey, Rick, Eater, and the kids get to visit the vault, eat ice cream, hear music; Juliette gets her suit back from Solo; she even finds an extra (I’m presuming Eater will go through with her expressed desire to leave this place), and Solo realizes she didn’t simply take it and leave because she wanted to save his life. He simply puts his hand on her shoulder in silent acknowledgement, a simple gesture speaking volumes for a man unaccustomed to talking to others.

There’s some less fantastical political plotting going on back in Silo 18. Sheriff Paul Billings and Deputy Hank are now all in on the rebellion, which Bernard learns because Paul tells this to Walker in her bugged shop. Paul’s also making overtures to Robert and Camille Sims to back the rebellion, having gotten the sense they may care more about the common good than staying in power by keeping their secrets. Whether or not this is an accurate assessment of either Mr. or Mrs. Sims is left up to the viewer, but they do decide to throw in with the rebels, using the more trusted Camille as a point person. 

Meanwhile, Knox tells Walker he knows who the rat is…and says it’s the mother of Teddy, the young rebel who got pinched last episode in the failed raid on the supply room. Is he telling the truth? Or has he in fact figured out it’s Walker, and is he doing this to either spread false intel or guilt her into confessing? It puts her in a horrible bind either way: She knows there’s a chance that what her friends are planning might work and help free her wife, but she already made her own arrangements to make that happen, arrangements which will doom the rebellion. 

Speaking of doom, this episode has one more magic trick left up its sleeve. The talking tunnel door tells Lukas that if he breathes a word of what he learns here to anyone else, it will have no choice but to “INITIATE THE SAFEGUARD.” Lukas says he knows what this means, but I sure don’t, and the way that door sounds I don’t think I want to find out, either. Whatever it is, the knowledge of it caused Judge Meadows to quit being IT shadow, convinced Salvador Quinn to destroy the concept of history, and triggered George Wilkins’s murder and Juliette Nichols’s resultant rebellion. What magic spell will it cast this time? Only one episode remains to find out before this highly engaging season of science-fiction suspense is sealed shut.

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.