‘Silo’ Season 2 Episode 2 Recap: Meanwhile…

For every Silo, there is an equal and opposite Silo. After spending its first episode of Season 2 following a single character in near-total silence, the second season of Graham Yost’s post-apocalyptic mystery crams enough characters, dialogue, and plot catch-up in Season 2 Episode 2 to choke a horse — or fill a Silo, if you prefer. If it’s less effective than its predecessor, it’s because it’s too busy to follow the show’s guiding principle: keep it simple, stupid. 

But it’s hard to find too much fault with “Order,” so named after the secret tome that Mayor Bernard Holland (Tim Robbins, soft-spoken and incredibly tall) consults regarding the true nature of the Silo in a hidden vault only he and Judge Mary Meadows (Tanya Moodie) have ever entered. Back in the day, she was his apprentice, or “shadow,” until some incident 25 years ago drove her to quit, then drove her to drink. 

Now Bernard needs her help again. Ever since they saw Juliette Nichols refuse to clean the Silo’s external camera and just…turn around and walk away over the hill and out of sight, instead of dropping dead like everyone else ever, the place is bedlam. Raiders, commanded by Bernard’s right-hand man and would-be shadow Robert Sims (Common), and deputies, under the nominal control of the newly minted (and secretly very sick) Sheriff Paul Billings (Chinaza Uche), have their work cut out for them enforcing curfews and quelling rebellion.

Their real problem is the Down Deep, as the mechanical bowels of the Silo are called. That’s where Juliette’s friends and accomplices all live: Walker (Harriet Walter), her mentor; Shirley (Remmie Milner), her best friend; Cooper (Matt Gomez Hidaka), her shadow; and Knox (Shane McRae), the chief of mechanical, the man Juliette shadowed back in the day — and the man who ratted her location out to the authorities. Knox wants to keep things quiet, afraid of retribution if they commit any kind of sabotage against the Silo. Shirley’s out for answers, and barring that, blood. Walker, who is briefly arrested by the Down Deep’s sweet-natured deputy, Hank (Billy Postlethwaite), simply wants cooler heads to prevail before anyone does anything stupid. If they’re really gonna rebel, they gotta play it smart.

Bernard certainly does. In a deft bit of political maneuvering, he gathers everyone in the Silo to hear a big speech on the seemingly miraculous event that took place earlier that day. Naturally, he can’t reveal the truth: Juliette, with help from Walker and her ex-wife Carla (Clare Perkins), replaced the defective tape used by the IT department (once Bernard’s fiefdom) to deliberately kill anyone they send “out to clean” with tape that worked. So he takes credit instead, saying IT developed incredible new tape that can help people survive the outside world’s “toxins” longer than ever before. It’s the first day of a new era! The first step back to the surface! Hooray!

Even Judge Meadows is impressed, despite her distaste for Bernard — and, I’d imagine, no shortage of physical withdrawal symptoms from quitting booze cold turkey. She agrees to co-sign his lie in front of everyone, and throws in a little monetary gift to everyone in the Silo to keep people happy. In exchange, she has one simple demand: She wants to go out, using the same heat tape Juliette used. She’s tired of being the Wizard of Oz, the man behind the curtain, she says; now she wants his hot air balloon, his escape. 

Somewhere in the middle of all this we also get a brief glimpse of Juliette’s semi-estranged father, Dr. Pete Nichols (the ever-soulful Iain Glen), who deals with the apparent loss of his daughter by throwing himself back into his work as an obstetrician. (Her discovery that the authorities are routinely sabotaging the fertility chances of families with rebellious ancestors is one of the reasons Juliette fought the power to begin with.) But other residents of the Silo aren’t as sure as the doc that his daughter is dead. All over its brutalist concrete expanse, graffiti has begun popping up reading “JL” — Juliet Lives. 

Might it have been nice if she lived in this specific episode? Sure. Robbins, Common, Moodie, and Walter are lively screen presences, but Juliette’s steely glare is the show. I completely understand the decision to bifurcate these two storylines, for the time being anyway. Still, no doubt writer Fred Golan and director Michael Dinner knew they had an uphill climb, or upstairs in this case, facing them with this episode. There are defects in the script beyond that to be sure: Shirley’s rebelliousness is fairly rote, and I heard the word “tape” more in this 45-minute episode than in the hundreds of hours of TV I’ve watched all year long. 

But — much like this review! — this episode has a task to perform: It has to reintroduce the world, the story, the plot (from the big picture to the nitty-gritty storytelling mechanics), and the characters to the audience. All episode one had to do was show Rebecca Ferguson Indiana Jonesing herself through an abandoned Silo. The degree of difficulty was higher here, in other words, and for fewer rewards. If the task was just to refresh my memory and recommit me to the story, mission accomplished.

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.