Silo Season 3 Stuck the Landing Despite the Odds

[Warning: The following contains spoilers for the Season 3 finale of Silo, “Troy.” Read at your own risk!]

Is there any present on tv proper now as concurrently irritating and fascinating as Silo? The Apple TV sequence based mostly on Hugh Howey’s novels simply wrapped its third season, which appeared to explode the longstanding adage, “It isn’t concerning the vacation spot, it is concerning the journey,” as a result of the journey of Season 3? Plodding and exasperating. The vacation spot? Fairly freaking cool. Silo additionally pulled off this seemingly unattainable magic trick in Season 2, one other slow-moving season that delivered a game-changing, world-expanding finale. You could not assist however need extra. Season 3 sticks its touchdown regardless of the chances, and for higher or worse places an terrible lot of strain on the present’s fourth and remaining season to stage up one final time.

Do you recall that twist ending to Silo‘s sophomore season? After two seasons spent within the Down Deep of Silo 18 and our heroine Juliette’s (Rebecca Ferguson) eye-opening jaunt to the decimated Silo 17, we had been immediately thrown again in time to our current day, the place we met Congressman Daniel Keene (Ashley Zukerman) on a clumsy non-date with reporter Helen Drew (Jessica Henwick), who was actually after some intel following a grimy bomb that Iran had deployed in Washington, D.C. He gave her that iconic Pez dispenser that may reappear 300 years later within the silo. It was a scene that blew open the world of the sequence and supplied up extra questions than solutions, in a very engaging manner. 

Season 3 follows up on that reveal by bouncing between timelines all through its 10 episodes. Sooner or later timeline, we watch as Juliette returns to Silo 18 with details about a “safeguard” Silo 1 can deploy to homicide all 10,000 residents of a silo and instantly has her reminiscence wiped with some useful tablets. Within the current day, Daniel and Helen seek for solutions once they understand one thing is not including up after Daniel’s navy pilot sister, Charlotte (Jessica Brown Findlay), is the only survivor of a covert mission to Iran, which leads them to trillionaire Per Stensen (Colin Hanks) and Senator Rosalind Thurman’s (Laura Innes) plan to construct 50 silos exterior Atlanta to avoid wasting the human species when the apocalypse inevitably arrives, probably as a result of similar factor that introduced Stensen his wealth: nanotechnology. 

The penultimate episode of the season finds Daniel and Helen three years later, now married and anticipating their first little one, arriving in Atlanta for the massive silo public unveiling. The 2 are break up up — Daniel is distributed to satisfy with the highest brass exterior Silo 1 and Helen to a tour of Silo 18 — when, would you have a look at that, a suspiciously well-timed nuke is dropped on Atlanta, forcing everybody to hunt cowl within the silos nearest them. Whereas it sheds mild on what occurred to make shifting humanity into the silos mandatory, the storyline additionally brings up a number of questions — primarily, did Stensen and/or Thurman do that on goal?

The finale operates in an identical method, answering some questions however leaving us with an entire bunch extra to agonize over forward of Season 4. Fortunately — correctly — the questions it does reply are satisfying ones. Lastly, after 9 episodes through which each timelines started to really feel like they had been stalling for time, the 2 storylines converge. The foremost reveal, after all, is what Silo 1 has been as much as this complete time. Utilizing nanotechnology, individuals in Silo 1 are being cryogenically frozen in pods and woken as much as work particular shifts after which put again to sleep as soon as that shift ends. Some individuals, “specialists,” are woke up randomly to take care of main crises. Daniel is considered one of these specialists, however, properly, he is not referred to as Daniel anymore; he is Troy, and he has no recollection of his previous except for some pesky visions of a mysterious lady (Helen). We have no idea what they did to Daniel after ripping him away through the explosion as he referred to as out for Helen, however we are able to most likely guess it concerned an entire lot of these memory-erasing medicine. He works with Victor (Matt Craven), the inventor of these medicine and the person who was working with Charlotte within the current, however he has no concept he is aware of him. He works with Charlotte, now referred to as Susan, and neither of them remembers one another. That is all fairly curious, as is the truth that the “director” of this centuries-long “challenge” is not Stensen however Senator Thurman. 

However we get some solutions, too. We lastly, horrifyingly, study what really occurred to the Silo 17 insurrection that ended with virtually all of its 10,000 inhabitants murdered exterior of the silo doorways. It was Daniel/Troy, unsettlingly good at his job, ordering his drone pilots to take all of them out by each spraying a poisonous nanotech compound and taking pictures them. Is it extra stomach-churning after we see all of this violence and homicide occurring on display screen or when Daniel/Troy turns the display screen off video to thermal view after which cuts the audio so they do not have to listen to them scream? Other than what occurred to Silo 17, this act additionally reveals one other game-changing reality: that the air exterior is completely tremendous and that everybody who has died exterior throughout a cleansing was executed by Silo 1 deploying that nano-gas. Daniel/Troy is put again to sleep after performing his obligation, however earlier than Victor provides him a tablet to pop and closes his pod, Daniel asks him about these visions and asks if he may help him determine who this lady is. 

The subsequent time they get up Daniel, it has been 35 years, and he is dropped proper in the midst of what we have been watching go down in Silo 18. It has been Victor, principally, chatting with Camille (Alexandria Riley) because the “Algorithm.” (Bernard was proper; it wasn’t an omniscient being, however an individual.) When she methods him into believing that she’s attempting to cease the capping of the poison safeguard pipe that Juliette and her pals try to drag off, shopping for them extra time so they can render the poison pipe inert and finish the specter of that form of “safeguard,” Victor is left in shock, which turns to aid that he does not should mass homicide 10,000 extra individuals. Victor kills himself and leaves Daniel a video message informing him that the girl’s identify is Helen Drew. The identify leaves Daniel visibly shaken. 

For as a lot info as we get in “Troy,” the episode leaves so many inquiries to be answered within the remaining season. Daniel is principally left to run the present so far as the disaster at Silo 18 goes, and he makes a compromise with Juliette: There will likely be no extra makes an attempt at a “safeguard” so long as they by no means try and contact one other silo. (Stopping any kind of cross-contamination between silos is the highest precedence of the “challenge,” one other curious element!) However now that he’s on the trail to remembering his previous life and what has been carried out to him (and his household), how lengthy till he turns into an ally for Juliette and Silo 18? How far will the remaining “founders” (we have seen Thurman and Henry, however are Anna and/or Stensen nonetheless concerned?) go to cease him? And the query maybe probably the most in want of answering is the one Camille immediately hurls at Victor of their final dialog (Riley has been a standout all season however particularly steals the present on this episode): Why would they wish to homicide hundreds of individuals once they say they’re attempting to avoid wasting humanity? 

These questions and the finale as an entire completely tee up what’s poised to be a wild showdown as Silo finishes its story. You wish to be mad that this season took its time attending to its most fascinating parts, however by the point the credit roll on “Troy” — by the point Silo has reminded us that it does know how you can dole out info in an attractive manner — it is all so compelling that it is easy not solely to forgive Silo for some missteps, however to join extra. Let’s hope that the ultimate season of Silo picks up precisely the place this one left off, in each sense of the phrase. 

Silo Season 3 is now streaming on Apple TV.