Silo's second episode of season 3 tightens the screws on both timelines at once. Juliette's search for the truth gets more dangerous, and the "before times" storyline gives us hints about a greater conspiracy from centuries past.
It's quite interesting that the episode is titled "It's All Good," because nothing here is. Quick reminder of where we left things: Juliette (Rebecca Ferguson) survived her forced cleaning but came back with no memory of the last three months and Camille (Alexandria Riley) has been feeding her a fabricated story about a "refuge hut" while secretly giving her memory-suppressing medication behind the scenes on command of the Algorithm.
Alongside that present-day plot, the premiere introduced the show's new dual-timeline structure jumping back to the "before times" to follow Congressman Daniel Keene (Ashley Zukerman) and his sister Charlotte 'Charles' Keene (Jessica Brown Findlay), a Naval aviator whose squadron flew straight into an unexplained otherworldly cloud during a mission near Turkmenistan, leaving her the sole survivor. Episode 1 ended with Juliette finding a note hidden in her chowder instructing her to head to the marketplace if she wanted the truth.
Episode 2 picks up literally seconds after that note-burning cliffhanger. FULL SPOILERS ahead for Silo season 3 episode 2, "It's All Good."
A lie about pizza
Juliette has only partially burnt the mysterious note when Camille knocks to check on her. Asked about the smoke smell, Juliette lies and says she was reheating pizza.
Of course, the silo doesn't really allow for privacy. We cut to the Algorithm communicating with Camille while watching Julitte through the cameras hidden in her quarters. They already know about the note, and the Algorithm isn't happy Juliette chose to lie about it. When Camille asks why the "protocol" (the memory conditioning and replacement Juliette's been subjected to) is taking so long, the Algorithm tells her that six silos have undergone a full reset, including their own, 140 years ago. It urges Camille to double security around Juliette and to work harder at convincing her that Camille is her most trusted ally.
Dr. Victor Crnkovich
The flashback timeline spends some time with Charlotte Keene as she recovers at the Fairfax facility. Daniel visits and tries to jog her memory the old-fashioned way by showing her photos of their childhood home, telling stories from growing up and college. Charlotte calls him "Donald" at one point, which book readers will recognize immediately. This is confirmation that the show's congressman is indeed Donald Keene from Hugh Howey's Shift.
Daniel also meets Charlotte's doctor, Dr. Victor Crnkovich (Matt Craven) who explains the treatment medication acts like a drawbridge between her memories, creating a controllable gap that doctors or whoever's directing them can raise or lower at will, choosing what comes back and what stays buried. To retrieve memories once the "drawbridge" is lowered, Dr. Crnkovich says, they simply tell Charlotte her own story over and over again, which is a little too on the nose given what we're watching happen to Juliette in the present. Dr. Crnkovich also drops one of the episode's more ominous lines almost in passing, that storytelling is our only real superpower.
We also get outright confirmation here that Charlotte is the sole survivor of her squadron's crash from episode 1. Dr. Crnkovich tells Daniel they can simply exclude what happened to her unit from her memory entirely, sparing her the trauma and filling the gap with something else instead. He also tells Daniel he'll need to bring in artifacts from Charlotte's life to help rebuild her memory, since objects can shortcut neural pathways faster than words alone, which retroactively makes every relic this show has fussed over since season 1 — that duck Pez dispenser included — feel a lot more purposeful.
Juliette goes digging in Mechanical
Back in the silo, Sheriff Paul Billings (Chinaza Uche) is reviewing the Pact when Orla's sister comes in to file a missing persons report. Juliette, meanwhile, still turning over the note, gets a flash of an older memory of another note which we saw in the past season from Martha Walker (Harriet Walter), about changed heat tapes in her suit before her cleaning.
She heads down to Mechanical, trailed by a security detail named Jerry, clearly under strict orders from Camille (by way of the Algorithm) never to let her out of sight. Shirley (Remmie Milner) isn't ready to talk to her yet and Juliette instead has a conversation with Knox (Shane McRae).
This amnesiac version of Juliette goes so far as to ask Knox outright if they even used to get along, and he assures her they did, just fine. He eventually tells her that during the rebellion, Mechanical crossed paths with Bernard's shadow, Lukas Kyle (Avi Nash) who claimed he knew Juliette and that Shirley had taken him to the Digger Void because he was searching for something that might hold answers.
Juliette also catches up with Martha over coffee, her first real one-on-one with her since returning. She asks if Martha sent her the note and Martha says no but Juliette insists she remembers Martha giving her a note before her cleaning and asks why she'd risk something like that. Instead of a direct answer, Martha tells her about how stubborn and gut-driven Juliette used to be, and hands her an old Swiss Army knife. It's a bit frustrating at times watching how her real friends keep trying to hand her pieces of a self she can't access.
Helen closes in
In the past timeline, Anna Thurman (Morven Christie), Senator Rosalind Thurman's daughter, is talking with Daniel about his sister when reporter Helen Drew (Jessica Henwick) arrives looking for him. Helen is openly suspicious of the Thurmans and of Dr. Crnkovich. She points out to an oblivious Daniel that doctor's first clinical trials were run on prisoners of war and first-year DOD recruits, neither of whom had any real ability to refuse. After Helen leaves, Anna fills Daniel in, claiming Helen's no longer with the Post and is now writing for a disreputable online outlet, a clear (and none-too-subtle) attempt to discredit her.
Undeterred, Helen goes around them entirely, showing up at the facility pretending to be sent by Daniel's office to take Charlotte out for some air. In the garden, she tells Charlotte the truth that she's a reporter, and they've actually met before back when Charlotte first confided that something about the Iran mission was bothering her. Helen presses her to remember what she knows, notepad and pen in hand, and the pen itself seems to trigger something (a relic might I say, in this situation?). Charlotte flashes back to a rainy night with Helen, the two of them talking in a car, with Helen scrubbing with the pen on her notepad, which feels like the missing piece that led Charlotte to point Helen toward Daniel in the first place.
They apparently don't get far, because soon after Helen is detained until Daniel arrives, who ask whether Victor called the police. Charlotte, for her part, is visibly agitated.
Julliette goes in search of the truth
Juliette finally acts on the note from episode 1, heading to the marketplace with her security escort Jerry in tow. She asks for thirty minutes alone and he tells her Camille would "use his intestines as dental floss" if he agreed. Before he can argue further, a crowd of star-struck admirers (because Juliette's become something of a local celebrity) swarms them, and Juliette seizes the chaos, falsely claiming the guard touched her. The crowd turns on him and Juliette slips away in the confusion. The ever resourceful Juliette! I actually laughed out loud at this. Her instincts for getting out of a tight spot seem still very much intact.
She's led by a raider deep into a storage room where she finally meets Patrick Kennedy, Danny Bly and Sandy, though she doesn't recognize any of them. They confront her about the video footage they'd seen of a lush, green outside world moments, and why she keeps insisting it isn't safe. When Sandy asks whether that's genuinely what she remembers or just what she's been shown, it clicks for Patrick, who clocks that these are the same kind of memory-suppressing drugs Robert Sims once offered him to help forget his wife's death. He asks Juliette if she's under heavy medical supervision and being handed "a whole bunch of pills to swallow." She admits that she is.
More questions regarding Charlotte and her squadron's mission
Outside the facility in the past, Daniel confronts Helen about digging for a story and she finally lays it all out to him. According to her, Charlotte came to her first, having read Helen's reporting and deciding she could be trusted, and it was Charlotte who pointed Helen toward Daniel so he could use his congressional access to dig into what was really going on with the Iran mission.
Helen reveals what Charlotte told her: that the mission near Turkmenistan was never really about nuclear sites, and the jets were loaded with bunker-busting ordnance. Their modern comms had been swapped out for outdated equipment and Charlotte herself had joked they "might as well be flying Tomcats." Helen points out the obvious that everyone else in Charlotte's squadron is dead and the sole survivor is now in a facility designed to make her forget everything. Charlotte wanted the truth badly enough to risk her career for it, and now the only real question left is whether sending Helen to Daniel was the right call.
Helmets and the warning whistle
Back in the silo, Sandy shows Juliette the helmets stolen from IT back in episode 1. Standard-issue helmets are marked "18," matching the hard drive but the one Juliette wore coming back from outside was marked "17." It jars loose a fragment of memory for Juliette, who recalls something akin to being suited up in Silo 17, as seen back in season 2, and being handed the helmet.
While Juliette's meeting with the group, a hooded figure with a wrist injury is keeping watch nearby. It appears to be one of the raiders hurt in the scuffle with security back in episode 1, based on their bandaged wrist. When Camille and Paul's security sweep closes in on the storage room, the hooded lookout glances up and whistles a warning and it's revealed to be Kat, otherwise known as Kathleen Billings, Paul's own wife.
Juliette's pushed out of the room by Sandy before security starts chasing the group of raiders, and Camille immediately presses Juliette about what Patrick said. Juliette lies again, claiming Patrick only kept insisting she was lying and needed to tell the truth about it being safe outside, and assures Camille it won't happen again. Once they're alone, Jerry finally confronts her (super awkward but well, that was coming). He told her that the stunt she pulled to ditch him wasn't cool, and that he takes his badge and his marriage seriously. However, he also confides in her, admitting that the way she's being treated feels more like she's a prisoner, and that he's willing to help his Mayor even if it means going against the orders from Mrs. Simms.
Elsewhere, Paul confronts Kat while she's changing her bandages, telling her she needs to keep her arm covered since security is looking for someone with exactly her injury. He doesn't understand why she's aligned herself with Kennedy's people and tells her things went too far today, and that they can't just attack IT and grab the Mayor like that.
Vitamins, again
The episode closes on two more quietly devastating beats. First, Juliette is handed her daily "vitamins" and, once the medic leaves, she spits them out in the sink and goes out to the cafeteria claiming to be hungry. On the screens showing the outside world, she spots the same constellation pattern from earlier in the season and gets a flash of memory involving Lukas Kyle showing her something similar.
Finally, Camille checks in with the Algorithm, reporting that things seem back on track. She tells it that Juliette even apologized for hiding the note. The Algorithm's response tells us pretty much what we had been suspecting for the better part of the episode: Juliette's survival was never really welcome, but the numbers have been good enough, even beneficial for stability, to justify keeping her alive for now. If that changes, it says, she'll have outlived her usefulness and it hopes that "the introduction of the vitamin compound into the water supply" happens before it becomes necessary to do anything more drastic. The final shot is two large drums, labeled "Vitamin D" being hauled up the silo's steps by a crew of unwitting workers.
We're headed toward something really ominous here in the present times storyline. And the "before times" material earns its keep this week, too. Silo season 3 is about to swing big in the next episodes.
Episode grade: A-
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