Three episodes into Silo season 3 and we cannot figure out if we hate Camille Sims or kind of respect her, and that is a very uncomfortable place to be. There have been some chilling revelations in the last couple episodes about how far Camille is willing to go to keep the truth buried, but we also got a pretty clear idea of the reasons driving her actions.
At the end of season 2, Silo 18 had just survived the threat of a full-scale wipeout thanks to Juliette, who made it in time to warn the people of the silo against going outside. Bernard is dead and Camille Sims, wife of Robert and former Judicial Raider turned IT worker, got chosen by the Algorithm as the new Head of IT.
Season 3 picks up three months later. Juliette is now mayor of Silo 18 but she has no memory. She doesn't know her friends, doesn't know what she did outside (that she went to another silo and made it back). Since the season premiere, Camille has been keeping Juliette that way by managing her medication and feeding her a tidy little story about a refuge hut while the Algorithm is in Camille's ear constantly. And the things it's asking her to do are getting darker with every episode.
By episode 3 "A Dark Web," Camille knows Juliette has stopped taking her memory-suppression pills and is trying to find Lukas Kyle (who everyone thinks is dead but we do see in the final moments of episode 3 is very much alive). She ordered the mines flooded with poison gas without warning the workers to try to flush Lukas out. She was also prepared to use Vitamin D+ as well, which is a mass memory-erasing drug the Algorithm wants pumped into the entire silo's water supply.
And at the end of the episode, the Algorithm pitches her something even worse. With Juliette unconscious and hooked up to oxygen after nearly dying in the gas-filled mines, it suggests that it would be very easy to let her die from "her injuries." A martyred mayor, according to the Algorithm, might calm the silo better than a living one who keeps pulling on loose threads
Camille seems to have said yes to that last one in the final scene of the episode.
So is Camille Sims a villain?
On paper, yes obviously. She's so far the primary antagonist in season 3. She's drugging Julliette and nearly killed a bunch of miners. She's considering memory wiping the entire population of the silo. Villain checklist, basically complete.
But the show made it pretty clear in the latest episode that Camille knows things now. She is seemingly on a clock against the Safeguard Procedure and is trying to avert that from happening. Most importantly, she's also on direct beck and call of The Algorithm. From what we have in the first three episodes, the place Camille is operating from seems to be that if the alternative is the total extermination of 10,000 people, then maybe forgetting who you are isn't the worst outcome. And as we've seen so far, she's holding things together with increasingly terrible tools.
Now what makes Camille so very compelling and what actress Alexandria Riley is doing really well, is that she's not enjoying any of this. The whole thing is straining her, and her marriage and her relationship with her family. We as the audience can feel her discomfort very well in episode 3. The Algorithm essentially tells her that she was chosen for her capacity to deceive and do harm (something that only makes her more uncomfortable), because she knows how to set aside her moral compass. And most importantly, the survival of the entire silo is on the line here.
There's also a theory floating around that Camille might be playing a longer game than it looks. That someone who spent 12 years as a Judicial Raider and then transferred to IT specifically to understand the silo's deeper systems isn't just blindly following the Algorithm's instructions. And maybe she has a plan of her own.
Is that too optimistic? Yes. But the show keeps dropping little hints that she's not fully bought in. She pushed back on the Vitamin D+ plan and clearly hesitated on the "let Juliette die" suggestion.
I don't think Camille Sims is a villain in the traditional sense. I think she's someone who got handed a set of impossible choices and keeps picking the least catastrophic option by a definition of "catastrophic" that prioritizes the silo's survival above everything else, including individual people's minds and lives.
Whether she is a villain or not, Camille is a pragmatist at heart, and pragmatists are the most unpredictable characters in any story because they can switch sides just as quickly.
New episodes of Silo season 3 premiere Fridays on Apple TV.
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