In episode 6 of Silo season 3 last week, we learned that the Algorithm had approved the Silo 17 rescue mission only to distract Juliette (Rebecca Ferguson) while Vitamin D+ was already being pumped into the water supply behind everyone's back. In the Before Times, Daniel (Ashley Zukerman) and Helen (Jessica Henwick) had just stepped out of that driverless van and into a top-secret hangar, greeted by Senator Thurman (Laura Innes) with an offer to help "save the world."
Episode 7, "Radio," picks from there and true to its title, it centers quite a lot around radio signals. This is one of the tensest hours the show has done, and by the end of it I was holding my breath along with Juliette.
Mission to Silo 17 begins
We see Juliette pull Lukas (Avi Nash) and Patrick Kennedy (Rick Gomez) aside and lay out the real plan. In the last episode we already learned that she'd told Camille they were going to bring the Silo 17 children home, but what she actually needs is for them to find exactly where the Safeguard's poison enters the silo. Kennedy isn't ready to enter another silo and Lukas offers to go alone. Juliette insists on two in case one of them dies, which Kennedy finds exactly as comforting as you'd expect. He admits he doesn't care about the mission itself and just wants to be anywhere but another hole in the ground. Once Juliette agrees he can do whatever he wants once Lukas is safely delivered to Silo 17, he's in.
Sims (Common) rendezvous with Juliette, previously having sent her a note to meet him via her former security detail Jerry (yay! We get to see Jerry again). We see them meeting up in secret and Sims warns her that the drug is already in the water — guards posted outside Water Filtration confirm it — and tells her to start drinking 'milk, juice, wine,' anything except tap water. He also shares that he's being followed, as we saw Camille instructing her security team in the previous episode, and this has to be their last contact for a while.
Before the mission starts, there's a pretty lovely moment between Kennedy, Kat, Sandy and Danny Bly, remembering Kennedy's late wife Doris and how she used to joke that if she were ever sent out to clean, she'd go out singing, happy just to be outside even for one minute. And Kennedy is in for real this time.
The heavens outside, and gunfire?
Once suited up, they assign each other radio code names: Martha is Dispatch, Lukas is Deputy Turley, Juliette is Crane and Kennedy is Calso, though Kennedy protests, wanting a different name. The airlock opens, and we have this eerily beautiful sequence of the outside that first shows us the vast night sky and parts of the Milky Way through Lukas' eyes because that's what he looks up at in wonder and exclaims that it is far bigger than expected. It's a beautiful shot and translates mostly because of the connection Lukas' character feels with the sky we have seen since season 1.
We have an immediate, more realistic assessment of the outside from Kennedy, who comments that there's nothing out there, just nothing. I cannot appreciate enough how well this whole sequence registers because of the contrasting interpretation of the outside as seen by Lukas and Kennedy. Kennedy had always believed that the outside promises a lush, healed world full of life and we can see his hopes get quashed in those few moments. Lukas, the dreamer, is hit with wonder and amazement as he looks up at the vastness of the heavens because his image of the outside does not necessarily conflict with what he had in his head.
And then as the two of them move toward the next level, a buzzing sound builds on the radio, then gunfire, then Lukas screaming, then static.
Juliette and the gang are left shocked. Juliette tries to seem composed and tells Danny to get the cafeteria screens back on (which she had previously asked him to turn off before they went outside), setting up a fallback plan to hide in the workshop and have Sandy cover for her if Camille comes looking. It's also a very gutting sequence watching her instructions get faster and more scattered as the reality sets in.
"Suit malfunction"
Meanwhile, The Algorithm tells Camille plainly that Lukas and Kennedy have been neutralized, then pivots to what it really wants to discuss: Juliette's uncut cleaning video showing what looked like an entire silo's worth of bodies, evidence that a Safeguard was prevented, at least momentarily. The Algorithm is quick to stress that "momentarily" is the key word and that the Safeguard is not actually preventable. It instructs Camille to find out whether Juliette believes otherwise and if she intends to try blocking their own.
Camille goes to Juliette and delivers the news that Lukas and Kennedy never made it to Silo 17. She grills Juliette on the motive behind the mission, but Juliette insists it was always just about the children who saved her life, while holding a gun behind the door. When she asks what actually happened to her friends, Camille's answer is a flat, obviously false "suit malfunction," and she claims that's what happens "when you rush" things. Juliette takes a jab at her saying that yes, they should have given them more time to make the suits "bulletproof," indicating that she's aware that there has been foul play.
Also, have I mentioned all of this happens before the opening credits even start rolling?
Before Times: Sign here to save the world
In the past storyline, Daniel and Helen are led by Senator Turman inside the hangar where surprisingly Charlotte (Jessica Brown Findlay) reunites with Daniel, only briefly, before Anna Thurman (Morven Christie) insists they follow her through a set of doors lined with lawyers and NDAs. I didn't know I missed Charlotte that much until now. We've only seen her in a few episodes and I've already come to love her so much. The immediate concern Daniel shows upon seeing her there and how he completely disregards Dr. Crnkovich were some great pieces of acting from Ashley Zukerman.
We finally meet Per Stensen (Colin Hanks), the world's richest man, casually offering Daniel and Helen a hundred thousand dollars, then a million each just to sign paperwork that will let them in on what he calls the world's biggest secret. He's charming in a creepy way and he jokes about buying Guantanamo Bay like it's a timeshare. Both of them sign, Daniel because he needs to know what happened to his sister, Helen because she needs to know. Thurman insists, with a straight face, that this really is about saving the world.
The sheriff and the miner
We finally get to Paul Billings’ (Chinaza Uche) investigation subplot as he confronts Ed Harwood (Ned Dennehy) directly about Orla Kent's murder and how her body ended up moved without a single camera catching it. Harwood is a highlight here, sarcastic and bitter as he rails against Judicial for sending people to the mines for even ideas, using a magician sent down for supposedly owning a "theoretical relic" as his example. He tells Paul flatly that he respected Holston as sheriff, who at least considered what a mine sentence would do to a family, and needles Paul for opening seven investigations into him that never stuck.
He finally admits he argued with Orla the day before she died, furious that his daughter Glenda had been passed over for head of Supply in her favor, but denies killing her and tells Paul to get lost without better evidence.
Blow Judicial's walls
Back with Juliette and the gang, the plan finally comes together in full. They intend to use leftover gunpowder from the earlier rebellion to blow open a section of Judicial's wall along with the pipe carrying the poison, disguised as maintenance crews in cleaning suits hidden under coveralls. Martha points out they only have six suits left. Teddy takes the lead on execution, insisting it's doable with a good team, though getting passes into Judicial will require Sims's help.
Knox (Shane McRae) estimates that the new suits only buy an hour and depending how long it takes to cap the pipe, anywhere from a hundred to a thousand people on the residential levels above and below could die. Carla suggests just drinking the water and letting the whole plan go. Teddy asks if they should vote but Bernard (Tim Robbins) shuts that down saying the silo already voted when they made Juliette mayor, and the decision is hers alone.
Airborne conversations
In the Before Times, the group is shown now aboard a private jet where Charlotte reveals to Daniel that her memory restoration has been deliberately partial. They started with her most recent memories of the Navy, the mission, Iran, but the actual crash itself is being kept locked away. She knows the facts but says it feels like it happened to someone else. This has been heavily hinted at since we met Dr. Crnkovich in episode 2 of the season.
Helen meanwhile has a conversation with the mysterious man that had been trailing them for episodes, who apparently is Thurman's right hand, and she asks him for his story. There's this part where he questions if Helen is gathering fodder to write a profile on him and she casually replies saying, "That's just my default mode. Everybody's interesting to me." Another of my favorite Helen lines because I can totally relate!
There's also a later scene between Charlotte and Anna on the plane where they tease each other about magic shows and control issues, before the show cuts to Daniel talking with Dr. Crnkovich, who finally admits the technique he's using on Charlotte is something he invented 30 years ago to forget his own daughter's death in a car accident he caused. He insists it worked, that he chose what to keep and what to let go. Except he just told Daniel the whole story in detail, which actually undercuts the claim? It's this ominous little contradiction and it makes us realize how reliable this "cure" really is.
The Mission diary
In the current timeline, Knox presses Mark Chambers about how his father really died and learns the official tunnel-collapse story is a cover. His father had designed something for Ed Harwood, and in exchange, someone else's death was quietly recorded under his father's name. Mark warns Knox that digging further into Harwood's business is a good way to vanish for real.
Meanwhile, Bernard brings Juliette to meet Gloria Hildebrandt, quite recently taken off the memory drug specifically because she's positioned to understand what Juliette's going through. Bernard uses the moment to finally explain the Flamekeepers, a secret group he and Sims once tracked relics for as young IT officials, people who sought the truth about the Before Times and held onto hope for a livable world outside.
George's mother, it turns out, was one of them. Two relics mattered most. One of them was a spiral notebook pursued by heads of IT for three hundred years and never found. The other was the diary of a porter named Mission, the same man who transported the explosives used to blow up the stairs during the original great rebellion 140 years ago. Gloria reads its final entry aloud, and it is chilling and devastating. It's from the POV of a man watching his own memory dissolve in real time, terrified, in a silo that had started hanging nets on the stairwells because so many people were jumping.
Bernard follows it with the hardest number of the whole episode: the last time a head of IT chose to drug the silo rather than let a Safeguard happen, the terror and disorientation from the drug alone killed two thousand people. That's the cost of inaction laid bare and it's clearly meant to push Juliette toward a decision she still doesn't want to make.
Anthony's jacket swap
There's a seemingly small, human detour involving Anthony (Oscar Coleman) and a school jacket that Sims manipulates him into wearing to smooth things over with Camille, except the jacket swap turns out to be cover for smuggling Judicial access passes to Juliette's team, hidden right under Camille's nose.
It's a clever scene that shows Sandy getting the jackets exchanged at Anthony's classroom and bringing back the passes Sims had left there. Now their mission can proceed as planned.
A very large drilling site
In the Before Times, Daniel and Helen's tour reaches its destination, which is apparently something that usually takes a helicopter ride of over 300,000 acres of Georgia farmland; once forty-two family farms, now Per Stensen's private property, where enormous drilling machines are actively at work building what we know will become the network of 51 silos.
There's even a darkly funny aside about a scrapped gene-editing side project, a horse-narwhal-rhino hybrid abandoned after a fellow billionaire wanted to hunt and kill it once it existed, which somehow makes the whole thing feel even more grotesque. Thurman also has a conversation with Daniel where she tells him that Per Stensen is the brain and she's just a believer, and she hopes Daniel will become one too once he knows more.
Radio chaos and mission called off
Camille needs Sims's help interrogating Amy Hansen in Judicial Seclusion as a witness and it's clear something in her has snapped. With the rebellion's Judicial mission underway, Teddy suddenly informs that Sims and Camille had just entered Judicial. Juliette, unwilling to risk Sims, is ready to call off the mission but Bernard asks her whether she would even get another chance.Â
Right as Teddy's team is seconds from detonating the charges, Kennedy's voice cuts through that he's alive, he's got Lukas's helmet and the kids in Silo 17 are okay. Juliette calls off the bombing at the last possible second but radio chaos causes delay and it's a massively thrilling sequence that had me breaking a sweat. It's also easily the climax of the whole episode. Lukas's own fate, though, is left frustratingly unconfirmed.
The episode's final gut-punch belongs to Camille and Sims. She corners him, furious that he used their son to smuggle passes, while he demands she stop putting the drug in the water. When he won't give her a straight answer, she turns her fury on Amy instead, threatening to shoot her right in front of him to force him to talk. It's horrifying to watch and Sims's plea for her to stop only makes it worse. He admits to having done worse when she questions his integrity but he insists that whether their son ever remembers either of them or not, he deserves at least one parent who hasn't killed someone.
Back in the Before Times, the episode closes on a birds eye view of the drilling site as the group watches from the chopper windows. Daniel clearly recognizes what he sees and it has been mentioned in passing during the season premiere that he had invented some sort of 'drills'.
Verdict
The mission structure carried this episode splendidly in the present timeline and we see more of Juliette the leader and strategist in action. Meanwhile, the Before Times finally paying off with the silo construction reveal was perfect, though it was mostly the conversations between characters that kept that storyline moving.
With Kennedy now safely in Silo 17 and Lukas's whereabouts unclear, there's a lot of work for Juliette and the gang going forward. Also, Sims and Camille have reached a point of no return where both of them have admitted to having done horrible things, and it remains to be seen where that storyline takes them.
Overall, this is one of the season's best episodes and it ends on at least three separate cliffhangers. I am not prepared to wait a week to find out what happens next.
Episode grade: A-
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