Last week's episode of Silo ended with one of the biggest twists the show has thrown at us all season as we learned Bernard (Tim Robbins) is alive and hidden away in the Digger Void, despite Sims (Common) telling the entire council back in episode 1 that he'd died from his injuries. Silo season 3 episode 5, "Memory," picks up that thread immediately and it does something I totally did not expect, in the best way possible.
As we saw, Juliette (Rebecca Ferguson) escaped an assassination attempt in Medical with nurse Amy Hansen's (Jacqueline Berces) help, Orla Kent turned out to have been murdered rather than killed in the mine fumigation, and in the before times story, Daniel (Ashley Zukerman) and Helen (Jessica Henwick) were left chasing down a mysterious Pentagon contact after being explicitly threatened into silence by a shadowy operative. And then, in the episode's final seconds, Juliette found Bernard alive in the Void.
Present day: how Bernard ended up alive
The episode opens on a flashback sequence of Shirley (Remmie Milner), Knox (Shane McRae) and their friends rushing to pry open the incinerator doors after the season 2 finale, building a makeshift stretcher out of the doors themselves and lowering Juliette and Bernard down through the levels while the silo gathers to sing. It's an almost ceremonial sequence and it's the perfect way to bridge into where we left off. Juliette, awake now, asks Bernard how he's even alive if everyone thinks he's dead, just as another figure steps out of the shadows behind her. Sims.
We jump back further, to the end of season 2, when the vault only let Camille (Alexandria Riley) inside, sealing Sims and their son Anthony (Oscar Coleman) out. Sims reassures Anthony that his mom is fine and that they need to find somewhere safe. When Camille finally emerges, she can't tell Sims what she heard in the vault, only that Juliette and Bernard have come inside and things are calm, that the rebellion effectively ended the moment Juliette appeared on the hill but that Bernard and Lukas Kyle (Avi Nash) still count as loose ends. Sims asks, point blank, if she's asking him to handle it. Her answer is chilling in its practicality that he should finish off whichever of the two, Juliette or Bernard, is more likely to talk first.
Sims goes to do exactly that, and this is where the episode completely, totally, unexpectedly flips the script. He finds Bernard badly burned but alive, wraps him in the plastic the doctor left behind for moving contaminated bodies down to the incinerator, which seemed like the asphyxiation cut we saw in episode 1. Bernard warns him that "the voice" wants him dead and that it can kill the entire silo, and that Juliette might know how to stop it. And instead of finishing the job, Sims saves him. He accompanies the porters who carry Bernard's body down to the Digger Void himself, brings him to Martha Walker (Harriet Walter), tells her flatly that his own wife is the new head of IT and wants Juliette dead, and asks for her help faking Bernard's death for good.
He also sends one of his men out to propose Juliette for mayor to the anxious crowd gathered outside, and the chants for her grow louder and louder until, functionally, he's made her untouchable. I have to say, watching Sims go from "the man we were terrified of" to "the man secretly running the most competent rescue operation in the whole silo" was one of the best rug-pulls this show has ever pulled off.
A (found) family of secrets in the Void
The next sequences are a season's worth of world-building packed into one hideout. Martha nurses Bernard back to health and the two of them talk about the other silos and why nobody's been able to communicate with them. Bernard's answer is that they've been listening to the wrong signal.
When Sims returns to tell them Juliette's taken her oath as mayor from her hospital bed and will be discharged within the week, Bernard immediately clocks what that means. She'll be put back on the memory-suppressing drugs. Martha asks if there's any way around it and Bernard reveals that The Order, essentially a Pact for the head of IT and their shadow, specifically warns that people on the drugs need to be kept away from personal artifacts, since objects can trigger memory the drugs are meant to suppress. It's the same theory Dr. Crnkovich gave Daniel back in the before times storyline in episode 2 and it retroactively explains an enormous amount of what this show has been building since season 1 about artifacts.
Martha puts it together instantly that this is why Sims had his people scouring the silo for Juliette's childhood relics, which we saw in episode 1. The sheer scale of the planning this man has been doing this entire season is staggering once you see it laid out, and needless to say we're in awe of Robert Sims.
Sims tracks down Regina, returns her missing cat, and asks her to relay a message through an intermediary to Amy, Juliette's nurse: swap her medication with a container of sugar pills. Regina asks if she really has a choice. Sims tells her yes. When she pushes, asking whether her family would be harmed if she refused, he seems almost offended by the question, no, he says, he's only asking for help. The amount of character development we've been getting for this man is crazy in barely half of an episode.
He also asks her to start trading for Juliette's relics and Regina warns him that the women who've turned Juliette into something of a local icon have already snapped most of them up. It'll take something valuable to trade, she says, something like 10 of Juliette's old sheriff badges. Bernard later teases Sims for apparently having a market craftsman who forged those in his pocket who owed him a favor. Watching these two banter like old colleagues again, after everything, was unexpectedly lovely.
We also learn Martha's cracked the silo's communication problem entirely. All fifty silos were issued the same radios, just on different frequencies, and she's rigged theirs to talk without being overheard. Bernard warns that Silo 1 monitors every active frequency, so whatever they say needs to be brief and coded. And the reason Sims has been able to move freely between Bernard and Martha this whole time turns out to be almost darkly funny. He's officially in quarantine, having supposedly come into contact with Bernard's contaminated "corpse" before it was cremated. Bernard, genuinely touched, tells Sims they can't risk losing him, that he'd have made a great shadow, though he's glad Bernard never actually gave him the job since heading IT is a brutal, thankless position and being shadow to it isn't much better. He adds that he thinks Camille has it worse. She knows about the Safeguard now and hasn't had anyone to talk to about it, and he suspects she's quietly burning up from the inside. That single line also explains the efforts Sims has been trying to put into making her open up to him, and failing, over the past two episodes.
The watch
Back in the present, we finally get the full context for the pump room detour from the last episode. It was Sims who had been trying to get Juliette to Bernard the whole time, a plan Juliette and Lukas accidentally derailed by finding their own way down. Sims confirms that her memory of the airlock with Bernard wasn't a dream, it happened, and that whoever's behind "the voice" can kill everyone in the silo whenever it wants. Juliette had said that it isn't true, though she can't remember why she believed that. Sims just tells her that it's okay and they have a plan.
Elsewhere, Lukas and Patrick Kennedy (Rick Gomez) sneak into the mines through a trash chute, while Paul Billings (Chinaza Uche) finally corners Carla McLain (Clare Perkins), the head of Supply, to ask about Orla Kent. Paul practically camped out in her office overnight to get an immediate meeting, and Carla's visibly shaken when he tells her Orla's body is in the morgue. Her reaction is the real gut-punch: "It's all my fault."
Down in the Void, Lukas and Kennedy get ambushed and subdued the second they arrive, Sims handling the physical work while Juliette holds a torch behind him. What follows is a warm, crowded little family-ish reunion of a scene. Regina's brought a haul of relics, but none of the toys spark anything real for Juliette. It's Lukas who figures out what's actually needed and that it must be something tied to the question Juliette was really asking when they first met, as in what happened to George?
Regina says the one object that matters, George Wilkins' watch which he had given to Juliette, has always been impossible to get. Sims explains that it is because it was taken from Juliette before her cleaning and was given to her dad, who was wearing it the day he blew the stairwell. Martha corrects him that her dad actually gave it away before that, to Hank (Billy Postlethwaite), who steps forward and hands it over to Juliette along with George's final message: that he loved her, and that she should never change, because she's perfect exactly as she is.
The second Juliette hears the watch ticking, some fragments of memories start hitting her, fragments of George and their time together. Sims asks if she remembers more. She doesn't, not yet, but he tells her they've been gone too long, Camille will be looking.
Critical supply is almost empty and the silo has two years at best
Paul and Carla, meanwhile, are shown heading to Critical Supply, which only the head of Supply or their shadow can access. Carla explains it's been sealed since the silo was built and holds things they simply can't manufacture more of, meaning once it's gone, it's gone for good.
Most of the boxes inside are already empty but they're kept in place so nobody realizes exactly how little time is left. There's been ongoing theft from both regular and Critical Supply, which is why Carla made Orla her shadow in the first place to find out who was stealing. Paul asks how long the silo actually has left. The answer is a chilling two years. Well, I gasped and so did Paul.
The duck Pez dispenser, again and finally
Sims and Juliette head back up together, and this episode gives us one last lovely beat between them. Juliette suggests that maybe he should put her in handcuffs and make a show of it; his answer is that Camille wants her dead, and handcuffs won't cut it. Juliette jokes that maybe they still have some time for him to shove her over the rails and he says he's too tired for that.
Then he stops on the stairs and, almost out of nowhere, tells her that something's been different in both him and Anthony since the day she held his family at gunpoint. Juliette starts to apologize but Sims tells her that's not what he's getting at. He shows her the duck Pez dispenser that he had given to Anthony telling him that as long as it's with him, everything is going to be okay. He thought it might be a way to help Anthony remember about their father-son bond if Camille decided to release the Vitamin D plus. But he admits it was never his to keep, that George gave it to Juliette originally, and hands it back to her.
The moment she snaps the dispenser, it all comes rushing in: George's words that objects like this hold the answers to the silo's biggest questions, and finally, the full memory of the Safeguard itself. She tells Sims it's a pipe, the poison comes from outside and it was capped in Silo 17, though she doesn't yet know where the pipe actually enters their own silo. She hands the dispenser back and runs off to find the others just as Camille comes storming down the stairs with security in tow. The episode ends on Camille and Sims simply staring at each other from opposite levels, and it's very unsettling how much dread that wordless shot drove into us.
Before times: someone else is driving
We finally return to the before times, picking up exactly where episode 4 left off there. Daniel tells Helen that Sam confirmed Per Stensen, the world's most prominent advocate for AI control, was aboard the Nimitz the night of Operation Righteous Vengeance, which was what they named the retaliatory strike launched in response to the "dirty Iranian bomb".
Before they can fully unpack what AI control might have to do with any of this, the car takes a sudden dangerous turn. Helen snaps at Daniel to warn her next time. He says it wasn't him, he's no longer steering, the car is driving itself. And that's where the episode leaves us.
Verdict
This might be the best episode of the season so far and it's almost entirely because of Sims. Turning him into the season's secret architect, the guy who's been quietly out-maneuvering his own wife, the Algorithm and half the silo for weeks now, is such a bold swing and it completely recontextualizes everything he's done since the premiere.
I'm loving all of this, and the way both timelines have put the pedal to the metal. Between Sims turning into the show's most compelling anti-hero, the duck Pez dispenser finally cracking Juliette's memory wide open, and Daniel and Helen's car apparently possessed by something with a very active interest in where they're headed, I have no idea how they're going to top this next week, and I cannot wait to find out.
Episode grade: A+
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