There have been quite a few relics in Silo that have mattered eventually in the show, but none of them have worked harder than one small, battered duck Pez dispenser. It's turned up in the hands of George Wilkins, Juliette Nichols, Robert Sims, Anthony Sims, and, generations earlier, Daniel Keene himself, threading its way through the two timelines centuries apart.
With Silo season 4 confirmed to premiere on July 9, 2027, and its teaser already showing Juliette facing down a dishevelled and apparently memory-shattered Daniel with a gun in her hand, it feels like exactly the right moment to lay out why we think that duck is what finally brings him back.
Daniel doesn't remember much of what happens between shifts
As we saw in the season 3 finale, Daniel (Ashley Zukerman) has been conditioned into the persona Troy over and over and over again, and he retains very little memory between each "shift," as the finale itself calls them.
We see this pretty clearly when he doesn't remember what he did to Silo 17. By the time he wakes for the shift, he is awakened 35 years later and briefed on the situation like a total stranger before Juliette (Rebecca Ferguson) and her friends come knocking on Silo 1's front vault.
The finale also showed us that Dr. Victor Crnkovich (Matt Craven) has been keeping an entire folder of notes in his drawer. Every single one of them reads, "Who is she?" That's the question Daniel has been asking every time he wakes up.
Daniel's clearly been conditioned back into Troy after asking that same question countless times, but it's the one thing that never seems to fully leave him, no matter how many times they wipe him.
Another detail I caught in the finale was that right before he's put back into cryo after the Silo 17 sequence, Daniel is given a pill before going under, which is eerily similar to the memory-suppressing drug that Juliette was being given in the first few episodes of this same season.
Daniel seems to have become aware of the memory conditioning in the season 4 teaser
In the season 4 teaser, toward the end, there's a brief sequence where Juliette appears to have gotten into Silo 1, or at least breached some kind of passage between silos, and confronts the person walking in from the other side, which happens to be Daniel.
Juliette, understandably wary, picks up a gun and points it at him, asking who he is. His answer is a confused and heartbreakingly sad "I don't know."
So, by the looks of things, at some point in season 4 Daniel's own memory conditioning will have dawned upon him, leaving him just as confused inside the Troy persona, and he'd likely be actively hunting for answers about himself, too.
So what could actually trigger his memory back? In our view, it's the duck Pez dispenser that's eventually shown up in Silo 18, currently sitting in the hands of Sims (Common) and Camille's (Alexandria Riley) son, Anthony (Oscar Coleman).
The Pez dispenser has had its lovely moments through the Before Times
In the Before Times storyline, the Pez dispenser first shows up back in the season 2 finale, when Daniel and Helen (Jessica Henwick) first meet, seemingly at a bar sometime after the dirty bomb hit. Realizing it wasn't meant to be a blind date and that Helen had only been fishing for a story, Daniel jokes that it wouldn't have worked out anyway given their two colleges clashing. Remember, he's Bulldog from the University of Georgia, while she is a Duck from Oregon.
Not long after that, right as Daniel's about to leave, he hands her a brown packet as a parting gift, half joking that it's something he panic bought at a convenience store around the corner from his apartment. Once he's gone, Helen finds the unopened little duck Pez candy & dispenser.
We see it again in season 3 episode 6, when Daniel and Helen are stuck in that self-driving van and Daniel, trying to hack the car's electronics to stop it, injures his hand. Helen immediately empties her bag out looking for first aid, and the Pez dispenser rolls out along with everything else. Daniel jokingly asks why she'd kept it this whole time, and Helen claims she'd only just noticed that she still had it, and they both smile all-too-knowingly about it. That's the last time we actually see the dispenser on screen in the Before Times storyline.
At this point, we're fairly convinced Helen had kept the Pez dispenser by the time of the silo unveiling ceremony and that it had become something of a small, sweet, meaningful object between them over the years by then.
We're also fairly confident she still had it on her when the nuclear explosion goes off and Helen gets pulled into Silo 18 while Daniel gets pulled into Silo 1, given it would have to show up all those centuries later. We say this because this object has been such an important relic in Juliette's own timeline, too. In fact, it's the exact relic that eventually triggered Juliette's memories back in season 3 episode 5, and we got our very own Juliette Nichols back.
Daniel now has a name to go looking for, but he will need more
At the very end of the season 3 finale, in Daniel's last couple of moments, he gets the encrypted message from Victor revealing the name of the woman he keeps getting fragments of flashbacks about: Helen Drew. Now, he has a name. But as we've seen with Juliette, names aren't the thing that actually rings any bells for these characters when they are memory conditioned.
The relics, as the show loves to call them, something physical from their own past memories, is usually what has done the real work so far. Dr. Crnkovich had quite a bit to say about the role of such objects in the process of regaining one's memories during the sequence where he first meets Daniel in episode 2.
Speaking of which, we also saw this play out in season 3 episode 8, when a sprig of rosemary triggered Charlotte Keene's (Jessica Brown Findlay) memories of her childhood and her parents.
The show has given quite a few nods to these small, seemingly insignificant yet ultimately hugely significant objects all through season 3, and we're convinced that in season 4, the Pez dispenser is going to be the ultimate relic that finally brings Daniel back.
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