The third episode of AppleTV+’s latest sci-fi show sees a rebellion bubbling underneath. Here’s our Silo season 2 episode 3 review.
Juliette is back! Or, technically, we’re back with Juliette in the third episode of Silo season 2. As I mentioned in last week’s review, episodes 1 and 2 almost acted as a two-part opener for the season and now that we’ve had our update with the original Silo, we’re back with our heroine.
As you’ll remember, episode 1 ended with Juliette finding silo 17’s vault and a strange man inside it threatening to kill her. Trying to make friends with the man, Solo (played by Steve Zahn), Juliette asks about what happened to the other people in silo 17. Solo, who got his name just as simply as you think, explains that the people decided to leave and at first, things seemed to be okay. Judging by the bodies though, their voyage took a turn…
Season 2 of Silo, in just three episodes, is finding a nice balance of expanding the world and digging deeper into the lore of the premise. The brilliance of throwing the audience into a situation with very little information and background creates a fascinating mystery that seems ripe for plot.
If Juliette is finding out more about the world and the other silos, back in silo 18, aka the original silo where Juliette was so unceremoniously thrown out of, rebellion is brewing. Shirley (Remmie Milner) is one of the leading voices in protesting against the power imbalance and the injustice. Shirley is quickly becoming one of the central characters of the season as she clashes with Knox (Shane McRae) again and again.
Silo is set in the near-future, but no specific date is ever given. The vision of the future here is similar to that of Alien; you still need people to operate things and machinery, there’s dirt and rust, no modern, sleek appliances to be seen. There’s also a particularly timely element to the show in how they show the conflict between the Mechanical and security. It feels painfully kindred to the protests across the world after the brutal murder of George Floyd in 2020.
There are almost really nice moments of humanity scattered across the episode. Solo offers Juliette, who left her silo two days ago, some chicken stew. While his offer at first seems friendly and selfless, it turns out to be a devastating effort on Solo’s part to make some sense of the world outside the vault.
Elsewhere, Dr. Nichols meets a woman desperate to get pregnant. As we know, the silo operates a birth lottery in order to control population numbers, another example of a government controlling women’s bodies specifically in dystopian settings. Oh wait, that last part is true of our own present day too!
Anyway, back to the nice moments of humanity in dystopian times. Dr. Nichols genuinely feels for the woman who shares her dreams of having a daughter, knowing she’s doomed to never have a child. It’s a nice moment of two individuals sharing their grief and the episode’s end shows that there’s still decent people left in the silo.
Silo shares a lot of DNA with Prime Video’s Fallout. Both put a really humane spin on the dystopian future while also managing to balance that with pretty high flying plots. Episode 3 ends on an intriguing note as shit hits the fan in silo 17 and Solo is forced to make a big decision. The aim of the season is still a little clouded; what exactly is Juliette trying to find and how will that affect silo 18? Episode 3 particularly drills into the possibility that all of this might have happened before and Juliette’s action will just make history repeat itself.
I suppose we’ll have to wait to see if that’s true.
Join us again next week for another recap of Silo.
