Last episode of Silo season 3 left us in about as bad a place as this show has put its heroine in during the season's first three episodes, with the Algorithm ordering Camille (Alexandria Riley) to quietly kill Juliette (Rebecca Ferguson) and pass it off as a heroic death, right after Lukas Kyle (Avi Nash) resurfaced alive for about 30 glorious seconds before vanishing on the run again. Episode 4 "Whatever You Do, Don't Go Home," picks up with Juliette unconscious in Medical, and I spent the entire cold open bracing myself.
Turns out I was right to. This episode is basically one long chase, and I mean that as a compliment. It's the leanest, most propulsive hour Silo has put together in a while and it finally lets Juliette's instincts, the ones we've been hopeful are still in there somewhere, actually prove themselves under pressure.
Amy is not Team Camille
We open with Camille already setting the murder/cover-up machinery in motion. She's told the Judicial process for installing an interim mayor should begin, since Juliette is "unlikely to survive the night." It's a cover story and a chilling one as we learned in the final moments of episode 3. A "heroic death" solves a problem the Algorithm's been agonizing over for months and it means they might not have to dose the entire water supply after all. Sims (Common) offers to do the killing himself. Camille refuses, insisting it has to be her. So Camille has decided she is the one who has to hold the pillow, and the next few sequences sure made my blood pressure spike.
But what Camille doesn't count on is Amy (Jacqueline Berces), the nurse assigned to Juliette's care, turning on her at the worst possible moment. Amy flips sides and jams the sedative on the security guard Camille had installed, and there's a very visceral physical confrontation between the two. Amy admits, while dragging Juliette through a hidden passage she "basically grew up" navigating, that she'd been secretly swapping out Juliette's memory-suppressing pills even before Juliette started spitting them out herself. Someone asked her to do it. She won't say who, not with raiders closing in, and Juliette doesn't get the chance to press her on it either.
Amy ultimately draws the search team off Juliette's trail herself, telling her to head for the pump room on level 76 once it's safe, then deliberately gets caught and lies to Johnny and the raiders about where Juliette actually is. It's a very brave act in an episode full of them and I really hope this isn't the last we see of her.
Orla Kent did not die in the mines
Sheriff Paul Billings (Chinaza Uche) gets his own investigation going at the morgue this week. He asks the coroner to confirm Orla Kent's (Quelin Sepulveda) cause of death as rat poison from the mine fumigation, expecting a routine sign-off, but instead learns her lungs were completely clean. She was struck in the back of the head with something ribbed, likely rebar, days before she turned up and her body was moved into a sealed-off tunnel afterward specifically so it wouldn't be found right away. That's a very disturbing left turn because now we know Orla wasn't a fumigation casualty at all. She was murdered, and someone went out of their way to make it look like an accident. I have a feeling she discovered something, or someone, as we will find out at the end of the episode, beyond the Digger Void.
Paul's follow-up visit to Supply doesn't clear things up so much as multiply the suspects. Carla McLain (Clare Perkins), the head of Supply, is nowhere to be found, and instead Paul runs into two people with reasons to resent Orla: Mike Davidson (Chris Fulton), who was Orla's boyfriend but seems oddly unbothered by her disappearance, and Glenda Harwood (Gemma Acosta), Carla's former shadow who lost her job to Orla and, as it turns out, used to date Mike, too. Glenda's also revealed to be the daughter of Ed Harwood, the head of mining, which quietly ties yet another thread back down toward the mines and the Digger Void. Nobody in this scene is telling Paul the full story.
Before Times: The king has fallen?
Daniel (Ashley Zukerman) and Helen (Jessica Henwick) spend most of this episode running on pure adrenaline after learning that Steve, their contact from the warehouse, has essentially been disappeared. Paranoid about being watched or tracked, and none too subtly reminded of it by the episode's title and an essential line from Helen when she tells Daniel to do anything but go home, the two of them hole up overnight at the apartment of Helen's out-of-town ex Palmer, which leads to a few funny, low-key charming scenes of two frightened people bickering about donuts and rental minivans.
I totally ate up that beat of levity given everything else going on this hour. Their one real lead is a chess game Steve was playing right before he vanished, one where he inexplicably threw away a winning position by exposing his own king. Helen's the one who clocks that it wasn't carelessness and the two of them chase down the tail end of his opponent's username: something, something, "big foot lives." It's a delightfully nerdy little mystery beat and it's Helen who gets to be the sharp one, because of course she is.
Daniel calls in an old military buddy, Sam Ramsey (Elijah Cook), nicknamed "K.G." for his old saxophone-playing days in an '80s cover band, who now works cybersecurity out of the Pentagon. Sam's warm and clearly fond of Daniel right up until he hears exactly what they're asking him to dig into, at which point he gets visibly spooked and backs off, citing his family, his security clearance and the very real risk to his own neck. But he will come around, as we will see.
Then, just when it seems like the trail's gone cold, the man who's clearly been tailing them for a while finally makes himself known, buying them coffee before laying out exactly how much leverage he has, including Helen's old journalistic-fraud scandal, dangled as either a career-ending weapon or a ticket back to a real newsroom depending on how cooperative she is, and a not-so-veiled threat to cut off funding for Charlotte's trauma therapy if Daniel keeps pushing.
Alone together after being threatened, Helen and Daniel have this halting, half-finished conversation where they decide to give up and part ways.
Late that night, Sam calls Daniel on a burner phone. He couldn't let it go either, and he's found something neither of them is going to believe. We don't find out what yet. Rude cliffhanger, in the best way.
Surprise into the Digger Void
Back in the silo, Shirley (Remmie Milner) and Juliette make it down to the Digger Void, aided along the way by Knox (Shane McRae) and a nervous Mechanical worker named Ossie who agrees to stall anyone who comes looking with a cover story about jammed pulleys. Along the way, Juliette gets a quiet, lovely moment with Shirley, admitting that even with everything the drugs did to her head, some feeling about Knox stuck around that they don't get along well and Shirley confirms they didn't. As for Shirley, Juliette admits she feels something like she'd have killed anyone who tried to hurt her. It's a small crack of the old Juliette showing through, delivered almost embarrassed and we love it.
Elsewhere, Lukas, held by the Outsiders, finally tells Kennedy (Rick Gomez) exactly where she's headed: the Digger Void itself. They agree to help Lukas get down there anyway, through a route we're told Lukas is "not gonna like."
Back at the sealed door to the Void, Juliette and Shirley find what looks like a latch, some way through a barrier Martha Walker swore she'd sealed off for good. Before they can get further, a knock at the outer door pulls Shirley away to check who it is, leaving Juliette alone inside. And that's when the episode delivers its gut-punch of a final beat: a cough in the dark, a hoarse voice saying her name and then the reveal I totally, totally did not see coming. Lying in a bed back there, burned but very much alive, is Bernard (Tim Robbins). We were told, flatly, back in episode 1, that he died in the incinerator, but then we saw a glimpse of a scene where Sims had asphyxiated him afterwards. Turns out that was a lie too.
Verdict
By the end of Silo season 3 episode 4, we have so many questions and I am absolutely thrilled about it. I'm loving everything this show is doing right now. It feels like both timelines have finally clicked into gear at the same time. I'm so excited for the next episode I can barely stand it.
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