Review: Silo season 2 grapples with escalating consequences in Episode 203, "Solo"

The third episode of Apple TV+'s sci-fi show Silo is out now, and it's a doozy. The first season ended with a huge shake-up as Sheriff Juliette Nichols (Rebecca Ferguson) left the titular undergound Silo and set out into the wider world, only to discover that it was a wasteland. By necessity, season 2 has had to take a lot of time to re-establish the chess board following those events. The first episode, "The Engineer," was all about Juliette's journey into a neighboring Silo, where she found the last survivor of a rebellion that caused the deaths of thousands. The second, "Order," caught us up with everyone Juliette left behind, showing how her home Silo was turning into a powder keg as people demanded answers and the powers-that-be manipulated events to keep things calm.

In "Solo," Silo is finally able to represent all these plotlines and more onscreen in one episode. The result is probably the strongest episode of the season yet. Silo is now starting to take off as the larger dangers to Silo 18 become clearer, and it's backed up by a number of incredible performances and a sharp production that plays to its strengths.

Read on for our review of "Solo." There will be SPOILERS.

Silo Episode 203 review: "Solo"

"Solo" opens with Juliette, which is never the wrong choice considering how fun it is to watch Rebecca Ferguson in this show. At last, we start to get some answers for the show's many mysteries. The person behind the vault door is named Solo (Steve Zahn), on account of him being the last living person left in the Silo. He was the shadow to the former Head of IT in his own Silo, and when the bloody rebellion we witnessed in the season premiere started, he was ordered to lock himself in the vault and not come out under any circumstances.

What started that rebellion? Someone going out and refusing to clean, then walking over the hill and disappearing...just like Juliette. The bedrock that the "Order" part of the Pact is built on to keep Silo residents in line is predictable human nature, and this episode does a great job of slapping viewers (and Juliette) with that sobering reality as she realizes that she may have just inadvertently started her own Silo on a path to a bloody revolution. And all the scenes we get back in Juliette's Silo confirm it.

We also get a bunch of super-important information about the Silos: there are 50 of them total. Juliette is from 18; the one she's now stuck in with Solo is Silo 17. Silos 15 and 16 are the two other close ones, which makes me think they'll turn up at some point.

Juliette and Solo's interactions are a lot of fun. There's no shortage of gushing to be done about Ferguson's performance, but Zahn's quirky, terminally sheltered take on Solo matches her beat for beat. He injects a lot of humor as well, which is even more impressive considering that he's only got his eyes and voice to work with; we don't actually see Solo fully until the final minutes of the episode, when he finally emerges from the vault to help Juliette in her quest to build a new environment suit to get back to her own vault.

The set design also wowed me in this episode, specifically the small details, such as the section of the wall next to Solo's vault door where intruders had tried to pickaxe their way in. Juliette mentions a few bodies in the hall that are fresher than the rest. If those came through after the rebellion, I'm wondering if they're from another Silo? Hopefully we'll get that full story in future weeks.

Juliette Lives!

Back in Silo 18, things go from bad to worse as the population draws ever closer to rebellion. Silo deserves credit for deftly balancing its storytelling between a number of plotlines here without dropping the ball on any. Judge Meadows (Tanya Moodie) proves how invaluable she actually is to Bernard Holland (Tim Robbins), only to end up breaking with him by the end of the episode after she discovers that he lied to her about Juliette asking to go outside. Unrest stirs in Mechanical as Holland arrests a young man named Teddy for spraying the graffiti "Juliette Lives" on the wall, a common phrase which is appearing all over the Silo. Robert Sims (Common) tries to prove himself a worthy shadow for Holland, only to end up causing the death of Cooper (Matt Gomez Hidaka) in a staged firebomb attack outside of Teddy's jail cell. There's just a lot going on here, and it's amazing that it's all as coherent as it is.

One of my favorite storylines of "Solo" followed Juliette's father, Dr. Pete Nichols, played by Game of Thrones veteran Iain Glen. Glen doesn't always get a lot of screentime in Silo, which just makes it even better when he does show up. Here, we see him reflecting on his part in rigging the birth lottery to weed out undesirables from the Silo — in season 1, we learned that he was faking the operation to remove people's birth control devices depending on whether they had radical views, such as being curious about the outside world. In "Solo," he takes a hard turn after a surprise run-in with a prospective mother, who is being given another shot at the birth lottery thanks to Juliette leaving the Silo and lowering the population. The scenes where he talks to her and then later decides to actually remove her birth control device against orders, are resonant and emotional due in no small part to Glen's top notch acting.

Speaking of acting, that's another place Silo really excels this episode. Beyond Pete Nichols, Juliette, and Solo, plenty of other characters get lots of time to shine. Chinaza Uche has some great scenes as Sheriff Billings, including one where he reveals he has the syndrome to Judge Meadows. Her rebuttal, which ruminates on the fact that the syndrome is a natural response to humans being forced to live unnaturally underground, is another powerful moment. Especially the line "None of us have walked a straight line for more than 200 feet," which is a great reminder of how utterly constricting life in the Silos is compared to life on Earth before.

I've enjoyed all of Silo season 2 so far, but "Solo" is the episode that really pushed me to the edge of my seat. Now that we know Juliette's absence is setting up events which could lead to the deaths of every single person in Silo 18, the stakes have never been higher. She just needs to find some way to get an environment suit and return before the uprising inadvertently leads everyone to their deaths.

Silo Bullet Points

• Knox tells Shirley that he thinks he's figured out what the names etched on the wall near the bottom of the Silo mean. Hopefully we find out more about that next week.
• Silo 17 has the graffiti "Ron Tucker lives." That's the guy who went out to clean there and then walked away like Juliette, which shows how predictable these events are.
• That predictability raises a lot of questions about the Pact, and who created it as well as the 50 Silos. This is the big mystery at this point in the show, and I'm here for it.
• I loved the little moment where Juliette starts describing little flying creatures, and Solo tells her they're called birds. Those sorts of little reminders of how sheltered the people of the Silos are from Earth as we know it go a long way toward building the world.

Verdict

"Solo" is a fantastic episode of Silo, the strongest (and longest) of the season yet. The music, the set design, the acting, the writing...there was just a lot of good in this episode, and practically nothing that fell short. It delivered an hour of television that was heavy as well heartfelt, intense and humorous. If this is foreshadowing the sort of quality the show has in store in the weeks ahead, we may be in for a hell of a season of television.

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