Spoilers below.
The second Silo season finale turned out to be even more of a brain-scrambler than its first, if such an accomplishment can be believed. The futuristic dystopian saga based on Hugh Howey’s book trilogy clearly prides itself on its mind-bending, Lost-adjacent antics, and while I don’t think its puzzles are always well-constructed, I remain hooked on Silo’s gritty, technical approach to disaster and revolution. Season 1’s entire plot hinged on a good batch of heat tape. Season 2’s depends on ropes and pulleys, suits and helmets, gunpowder and codes, tunnels and pipes—reminding me more of the mechanics of a video game than your average Hollywood showcase. That, thankfully, is to Silo’s benefit.
Season 1 ended with Juliette Nichols’s (Rebecca Ferguson) startling venture into the Outside, where she discovers a) that the verdant paradise depicted on her helmet’s screen is a lie, and b) that her Silo 18 is surrounded by dozens of other underground safe havens. In the season 2 premiere, she drops down into one of these silos, later revealed to be Silo 17, only to spend much of the remaining episodes in desperate pursuit of home. She needs to get back to Silo 18 in order to prevent what happened in Silo 17: rebellion, then mass extermination.
It takes Juliette some time to piece together how and why this extinction event took place, and as she uncovers the clues in season 2, so do her friends and enemies back in Silo 18. But while Juliette’s investigation begins in hindsight, Silo 18’s has no such benefit. They surge collectively toward hopeful resistance as only a handful of key players peel back the layers of a long-kept secret known as the silo’s Safeguard Procedure. Before we dig into the rest of the finale’s events, it’s best we lay out what the Safeguard Procedure means.
In the opening scenes of season 2, we watch a flashback montage of what we now understand to be Silo 17’s revolution and its residents’ daring escape from underground. Moments later, we witness Juliette—in the present timeline—trudge through a desert littered with their corpses. Clearly, the Silo 17 rebels didn’t make it as far outside the radius of their prison as they’d planned.
Flash forward, and in the penultimate episode, we watch Lukas Kyle (Avi Nash) reach the end of a tunnel at the bottom of Silo 18, the same tunnel discovered by George Wilkins (Ferdinand Kingsley) in season 1. There, a voice identified simply as “The Algorithm” tells Lukas that only he and three others have discovered the same location before: the mysterious Salvador Quinn; Judge Mary Meadows (Tanya Moodie), murdered earlier in season 2; and George, Juliette’s former lover. Lukas informs The Algorithm that he knows about The Safeguard, but we audience members only get that same insight in the finale, when Solo (a fantastic Steve Zahn) shares his traumatic childhood memories with Juliette.
Apple TV+//Apple
Solo’s real name is Jimmy Russell, the son of Silo 17’s now-deceased head of IT. Jimmy was only 12 when 17’s rebellion struck, which explains the character’s childlike mannerisms, comically short attention span, and fixation on books like 10,000 Leagues Under the Sea. From inside the safety of The Vault, the 12-year-old Jimmy watched his own father get shot in the head, and he’s remained inside that same vault ever since. But such horror didn’t wipe his memories completely, and Solo/Jimmy recalls midway through the finale that his parents used to whisper about The Safeguard: a gas pipe that pumps poison into the Silo, triggered in the event of rebellion. Terrified by such a revelation, Juliette’s mission to get back to Silo 18 becomes only more urgent—especially once she and her new Silo 17 comrades hear a bomb go off in nearby 18.
As the finale reveals, that bomb was set off by Juliette’s own father, Dr. Pete Nichols (Iain Glen), who sacrificed himself in order to trap Silo 18’s raiders in the Down Deep. Mechanical’s burgeoning resistance is better orchestrated than audiences were initially led to believe, as multiple twists throughout the finale make clear. Let’s break those down:
- Walker (Harriet Walter)’s supposed betrayal of her Mechanical family was a sham. I never quite bought into the idea that the headstrong Walker would doom her loved ones, even if it meant saving her ex-wife. She taught Juliette to be ferociously loyal; certainly she would live by her own lessons. Sure enough, Walker knew what to do when Mayor Bernard Holland (Tim Robbins) tried to manipulate her. While seemingly feeding rebel plans to Bernard through the hidden camera in her workshop, she used Mechanical’s secret language—mainly achieved through hand signals—to communicate with Mechanical resistance leaders Knox (Shane McRae) and Shirl (Remmie Milner) about Bernard’s trickery. They knew all along they were being watched.
- Sheriff Billings (Chinaza Uche) amassed a conspiratorial army. Using messages sent through the Down Deep barricade, Billings managed to sway the other sheriff’s deputies to the rebellion’s side, and they soon free him and the other rebels from their makeshift prison cells.
- Knox never intended to destroy the generator. Although Knox and his allies lay out a plan to bomb the silo generator—so as to mislead Bernard—they instead focus their firepower on the silo’s only set of stairs. Bernard, thinking he has the upper hand through Walker’s intel, sends all his raiders rushing to the Down Deep to protect the generator. But when Dr. Nichols opts to detonate the stairs, those same raiders are trapped—and Bernard has lost his muscle.
Soon, Bernard realizes he has forfeited control of Silo 18 completely. But as Mechanical works to secure its newfound bargaining power, Patrick Kennedy (Rick Gomez) waylays their well-laid plans when he overwhelms a portion of their rebel faction with claims of Bernard’s lies. He believes it’s actually safe to go Outside, as evidenced by the (fake) helmet display Juliette broadcast to a handful of Silo 18 computers in season 1. As Patrick convinces others to believe him, these wannabe escapees surge toward Silo 18’s air lock…the air lock where Silo 17’s residents met their doom decades ago.
Bernard, informed of The Safeguard by Lukas and convinced there’s nothing more he can do, puts on a protective suit and prepares to greet the Outside himself. In the wake of Lukas’s big reveal, Bernard names Judge Robert Sims (Common) his new “shadow,” a.k.a. protégé, and hands Sims the key (and the code) to the IT Vault, where Sims will have access to the Legacy: the treasure trove of relics that reveal the Earth’s ill-fated history to the head of IT. Inside that Vault, Sims is met with his own dramatic plot twist. When The Algorithm acknowledges him as the new IT shadow, Sims shares his intentions to rescue Silo 18 from its own destruction. But The Algorithm responds by ordering Sims and his son to leave the Vault. Only Sims’s wife, Camille (Alexandria Riley), is allowed to stay.
Bernard knows nothing of this unanticipated development. He’s too busy wallowing in his failure, clutching a gun in his palm as a last-minute insurance policy: “For the end, if the pain is too much.” But just as he accepts his imminent failure, Juliette makes her own heroic return from Silo 17. All of Silo 18’s residents watch—some cheering, others weeping—through the cafeteria cameras as she presents them with a symbolic gesture (cleaning the camera screen) and a literal one (a rag scrawled with the warning, “NOT SAFE DO NOT COME OUT”).
Rekha Garton//Apple
As she descends the Silo 18 stairs to reunite with her people, she finally encounters Bernard, who tells her that her mission is pointless. The Safeguard will be triggered; the poison is coming. He knows who created the Safeguard, but not why. Juliette can’t be too pressed about the “why” either, not when she knows there might be a way to counteract The Safeguard. “I think I figured something out,” she tells Bernard, only for them both to become trapped inside the air lock, where a sanitizing fire rains down around them. The Silo season 2 finale then fades to black, leaving us unsure if Bernard or Juliette have survived the onslaught.
And yet—that’s not the end. Silo loves a cliffhanger, but it especially loves two cliffhangers. My jaw actually dropped when episode 10, “Into the Fire,” revealed its first pre-silo flashback, set in a rainy Washington, D.C. eerily recognizable to audiences. When exactly this flashback is meant to take place, we can’t yet be sure. But judging from the clothes, technology, and expressions of its inhabitants, the scene looks as though it could be pulled straight from the 2020s. We watch as a young Georgia congressman is scanned for radiation before he steps into a bar, where he meets with a Post reporter who wants to question him about a “dirty” Iranian bomb. He refuses to give her much information, but he does leave her with a parting gift: a novelty Pez dispenser, the same one we know will eventually become a significant relic in Silo 18.
And so Silo season 2 ends with that answer—and many more questions. Who was the congressman? Is he connected to Juliette, or perhaps to Sims? What about the dirty bomb? Did it trigger an eventual nuclear war, leading to the ravaged Earth forcing citizens underground? (Probably.) Are Juliette and Bernard dead? (Remember, Juliette’s suit once belonged to a firefighter.) Why does The Algorithm only want to speak to Camille? (Maybe because she’s more compelling than her husband?) What is The Algorithm? What will the Silo 18 rebels decide once Juliette, supposing she lives, returns inside? Will they believe her warnings about The Safeguard? And if she actually can disable it, what comes next?
What’s The Deal With Tape In the ‘Silo’ Finale?Season 2 has been a fascinating, if uneven, chapter in the Apple TV+ sci-fi series. Split between two primary settings (three, if you count the final D.C. locale) and an ever-growing cast of recurring characters, season 2 struggled to maintain its momentum as it juggled what felt like 15 different sub-plots, each made more intricate by the secrets and subterfuge that govern Silo 18. Miraculously, those struggles did nothing to lessen the ultimate impact of the finale. That’s, in large part, thanks to the performances: Ferguson’s balance between panicked and resolute, agonized and tender, grounds Juliette as the series’ foremost (and well-deserving) protagonist, while co-stars including Uche, Moodie, Robbins, Walter, and Glen help make the mysterious, often dismal Silo feel colorful and consequential. Zahn, in particular, was an inspired addition to the season 2 cast; his performance as Jimmy/Solo infused humor, innocence, and pain into what can occasionally become an emotionally stilted, plot-focused tale.
I won’t pretend to have any idea what will happen in Silo season 3. Perhaps The Algorithm is the disembodied spirit of the congressman we met in the finale! If there are massive underground silos that sustain tens of thousands of lives for decades, maybe there are also robot brain transplants! Or maybe all of this is a Severance crossover, and Lumon created the silos in the first place. Anything can happen! Let’s just hope, in the meantime, that Juliette was taught how to stop, drop, and roll.
Wool: Book One of the Silo Series by Hugh Howey
Credit: William Morrow & Company
Shift: Book Two of the Silo Series by Hugh Howey
Credit: William Morrow & Company
Dust: Book Three of the Silo Series by Hugh Howey
Credit: William Morrow & Company
