Each week Joe and Terry discuss Apple TV’s Silo Season 3, alternating between our respective sites. Spoilers follow for S03E09…
Catch up on Season 1: 1.01-1.02 / 1.03 / 1.04 / 1.05 / 1.06 / 1.07 / 1.08 / 1.09 / 1.10
Catch up on Season 2: 2.01 / 2.02 / 2.03 / 2.04 / 2.05 / 2.06 / 2.07 / 2.08 / 2.09 / 2.10
Catch up on Season 3: 3.01 / 3.02 / 3.03 / 3.04 / 3.05 / 3.06 / 3.07 / 3.08
S03E09 “Farewell”: The entire silo is stunned by an announcement from Camille. Daniel and Helen attend a special event.
JOE
I’ve got whiplash, Terry! After spending the first half of “Farewell” moaning and groaning about the redundancy of it all, the back half – spent in the Back Then timeline with Daniel (Ashley Zuckerman) and Helen (Jessica Henwick) – blew my socks off.
I’ll tackle the stuff I’m less interested in first, which was the semi non-event of Bernard (Tim Robbins) revealing himself to Camille (Alexandria Riley), posing as a distraction for Knox (Shane McRae) and Shirley (Remmie Milner) so they could pull off another rebellious attack. Initially this frustrated me because it played so anticlimactic, then I got excited by the prospects of Bernard’s sacrifice, then I got bored again because Camille immediately accused Juliette (Rebecca Ferguson) of being involved.
The best part of the present day Silo stuff was probably Bernard’s disintegrating hubris and his subsequent conversation with Camille about The Algorithm’s human-like reaction. This isn’t the first time Silo has floated the idea that there’s a potential Wizard of Oz-like situation going on with the all-knowing AI, but here it feels like Jeffrey Wang’s teleplay is really leaning into the idea. Even Camille starts to question the computer’s frustrated, angry responses to Bernard, which could be an exciting development for the finale.
The problem is that virtually nothing else in this timeline generated much interest. Juliette and Sims (Common) have a non-starter conversation in lock-up where Common tries to sell the line “the only way this ends differently is if my wife stops taking orders from that fucking screen!” Camille admits that she plans to execute Jules no matter what happens because even if the Mayor takes the Vitamin D+ memory drug, she’s so dogged that Camille knows they’ll just end up back in conflict again down the road. And yes, Bernard dies after being made to clean without a suit, prompting one woman watching in a cafeteria to exclaim “where’s his suit?”
It’s all a little bit ho hum. Which left me minorly annoyed and bored up until around the ~36 minute mark, when the show jumped back to introduce a new timeline and (literally) explode the narrative.
In the Back Then, three-ish years have passed since Helen and Daniel rejected Per Stensen’s (Colin Hanks) offer to join the silo project. In that time they’ve used their NDA hush money to buy a house and get pregnant; Daniel is still a Congressman and Helen owns the Oregonian newspaper. Meanwhile Charlotte (Jessica Findlay) is married to Anna (Morven Christie) and helped her battle cancer, and both continue to work on the project.
When Helen and Daniel arrive for a tour on the opening day for all of the silos, the red flags start immediately. Sure, Daniel and Helen can’t get much out of the married couple, but we learn that Anna wrote a book with Dr. Victor (Matt Craven) about how society could hypothetically live underground for 500 years called…The Pact.
Then when they arrive on-site, Daniel can’t reach Charlotte (hmmm) while Helen is sent to tour a different silo (18) than him (1), which…hmmm. And then, of course, there’s the closing image of the nuclear blast, which Senator Thurman (Laura Innes) didn’t seem to know was coming, but Henry (Reed Birney) clearly did.
So all that talk about “hope we never have to use it”, plus fighter pilot Charlotte’s absence, makes me think your predictions in our “Gray Goo” review were 100% correct, Terry.
But that’s enough from me for now. How did you feel about the division of screen time between the timelines? Were you as enthralled as me by the Before Times’ slooooowly escalating tension? And why does all of the stuff with the rebellion, and Camille, and the mystery machine simply not click?
TERRY
It was only a couple episodes ago (Episode 6, to be exact) when I commented that The Algorithm suddenly grew a personality. That it was becoming sassy. I should have tugged on that thread a little harder, Joe, because I realized the AI probably wasn’t AI just a couple moments before Bernard mentioned it. I’m a little miffed at myself for not realizing it sooner because “Farewell” has fully introduced the end game, both in the present, as well as in The Back Then.
You had messaged me before I watched this episode to tell me that you found the first half of “Farewell” to be a snoozefest before finding yourself on the edge of the seat for the last half. Maybe that colored my perspective of this episode because I did not find the first half boring, Joe!
I can’t even really explain why! Because you’re absolutely right. A lot of what the first 35ish minutes gave us wasn’t anything truly new. It appears on the surface that Camille has truly gone complete fascist (more on that in a bit) in how ruthlessly she dictates the upcoming deaths of Bernard and Jules. All pretense seems to be gone. Jules will help Camille, but she will still be killed. And Bernard? Well, he’s been barely hanging on by a thread this entire season and I had a feeling he would end up sacrificing himself in some way for the cause.
It’s kind of funny, really. The old adage of live long enough as a hero and you’ll end up the villain is turned on its head here. Bernard, the ever-villain of the first two seasons, has lived long enough to become a hero. As with everything else this season, I still don’t think these narrative threads were given enough time to marinate before being tossed on to the proverbial grill. Unlike a novel that has ample room to really spread out a story, a 2026 TV show is lucky if it gets ten episodes a season. And when you’re balancing the number of plates that Silo has been trying to keep spinning – The Back Then, Silo 17, multiple character arcs and stories in Silo 18 – it’s virtually impossible to pay them off satisfactorily.
When this is all over, I’m going to have to read Hugh Howey’s books. I’m curious how much of the story Silo’s writing room had to connect the dots.
Before we get to The Back Then segment of this episode, I do want to talk about Camille. “Farewell” opens with a quick, secret conversation between Camille and Bernard where he tells her that he doesn’t think The Algorithm is actually AI. Before this, it turns out, Camille was starting to believe it herself, as she brings up the fact that the AI was trying to console her at one point.
Side note: this is directly in line with why Victor in The Back Then signed up and stayed on with the program. Even Daniel remarks that it’s strange. But if we are to look at what Silo has presented us time and time again, it’s that structure maintains the order. Everyone in Silo 18 has a job and the important jobs have shadows to learn and be able to take over to maintain the status quo. It’s not a stretch to think that that same mentality stretches to Silo 1…it’s just that Silo 1’s jobs are probably more in the line of Psychiatrist that deals with trauma, Weapons/Armory that sends out drones, Engineer that deals with issues within each silo, etc. Silo 1 is the brain to Silos 2 through 50’s body.
Back to Camille, though. The conversation between her and Bernard is intriguing because it leaves us with the statement: “a person can be defeated.” The cold open ends on this sentiment, but then when we’re back from the opening credits, it seems like that conversation never took place. Camille is back to being her ruthless self and Bernard is on the way to clean. There has to be something more to it. Camille seems genuinely shocked when the explosions happen and the real rebellion starts…but I can’t help but think that she’s somehow onboard with what Juliette’s team is about to do.
But let’s dig into what’s arguably the most meaty part of this episode, the ceremony Daniel, Helen and company attend before the massive mushroom cloud obliterates everything. We are completely in sync about the slowly mounting dread that builds in the last half.
I’ve been waiting for this moment all season. So the way in which Daniel and Helen are separated, followed by Charlotte not responding to Daniel texts all morning had me on the edge of my seat. As you mentioned, I’ve suspected that Helen would end up in a silo not of her own volition but rather that The Event forced her into going underground.
But what “Farewell” really does subtly well here is draw comparisons between the roles of the silos’ creators with the way things operate hundreds of years in the future. Earlier this season, Lukas and Patrick are hunted by a drone; the buzzing sound gives it away immediately. That draws a direct correlation to Charlotte’s role in the silo’s development.
Per, meanwhile, laments that Daniel, the expert engineer, wasn’t around to help. “I could have used you,” he tells Daniel. “You have a gift for seeing things other people missed.” Per is going to need someone like Daniel in Silo 1 to come up with solutions to problems no one else anticipates. And Victor, well, they’ll need a psychiatrist or whatever it is that Victor actually does to help calm and placate the masses after “mass trauma.”
Helen, meanwhile? It reminds me of a 30 Rock episodes, where Liz Lemon laments that her team doesn’t respect her. To which Jack, her boss, asks what her role would even be in a post-apocalyptic world. Liz, the head writer, imagines she’d be a traveling bard. Jack retorts she’d be a “radiation canary.” What good does a reporter do in Per Stensen’s new world order? To the trillionaire who buys knowledge at the drop of a hat, nothing. So she gets relegated to Silo 18, unlike her husband who has engineering knowledge; something tangible that Per can rely on.
But like Jack in 30 Rock, Per Stensen misunderstands the power of words. And Helen? While she won’t become a traveling bard like Liz, I’m going to suggest she becomes something similar that stretches from The Back Then to hundreds of years into the future.
She becomes the rebellion.
But holy crap, I’ve written a lot. I want to throw it back to you, Joe, because this feels like a turning point in the series. We’ve seen a number of mushroom clouds in narratives recently, from our time covering Twin Peaks to Fallout and Oppenheimer. How did this moment play out for you and were you surprised, given the nanotechnology mumbojumbo just a few episodes ago, that it seems to be a nuclear bomb? Per Stensen absolutely knew something was going to happen (the episode even suggests he has Charlotte’s phone)…do you think he planned it? Finally, I’m going to toss you a hard one. Bernard and Jules ask the most important question haunting the show since its inception, so I’ll ask you the million dollar question on everyone’s tongue: Why?
JOE
I’ll confess that I was anticipating a nuclear explosion, Terry, in large part because it’s the one unifying image that, despite how often we see it in media, has the ability to shock and awe (yes, I’m using those words deliberately). There is no other image from the last two centuries that so quickly and clearly conveys the same world ending devastation as an Atom bomb. Hell, despite everything the world has gone through in even these last few decades, the nuclear option remains the one piece of warfare that is never on the table.
So yes, when the two separated lovers both climb to the top of the hill and that sense of urgency really kicks in because it’s so evident that their time is up, it was an atomic blast I was waiting for.
And it works! (to the point that I gasped, and then immediately went “well, they’re both dead.” Lol)
The lack of nanotechnology, however, is peculiar. My belief is that nanotechnology was definitely the inciting incident, as Per explained last episode, but – to combine your questions – this is Per’s attempt to get ahead of the situation.
Do I believe that he facilitated this? Absolutely – the timing is too suspicious not to suspect that every single one of the people on these tours were hand selected like Noah’s arc. He simply kicked things off to get ahead of it so that he maintained control of the future by way of ensuring only the folks he, Dr. Victor and others presumably deemed worthy (which is very Fallout).
Which is the answer to “why?” If you had all of the wealth (and we bring up again how expensive this project is when Helen asks how much it all costs and everyone kinda looks away) and the ability to prioritize how it was spent (don’t forget, there was a specific mention of cancer, and what did Anna wind up getting?) These are the sacrifices that Per was comfortable making for what he still considers the best failsafe: in order to guarantee the safety and security of the human race, he was willing to do all of this…and now he also gets to be the saviour of mankind.
So really, it’s two birds with one stone: the human race will persevere and Per gets to take the credit for saving it. What could be better than that for a rich narcissist with a god complex?
Back to you, Terry: what do you expect to see in the finale? If Camille is, in fact, kinda/sorta on Bernard and Juliette’s side, will we unmask the AI version of the Great and Powerful Oz? (If they bring out the frozen cryosleep body of Per, or even worse, a super old, artificially extended lifespan of him, I will flip a table). Will all of the teasing in the last few episodes about “the machine” that was built and hidden have a satisfying pay-off? And is there any danger that Jules will be sent out to clean or that the rebellion will start up anew again?
TERRY
Your mention of an artificially extended lifespan reminded me of something I took a note of. What I love about a number of Apple TV’s screeners is the option to turn on subtitles. And Silo is one that does. I had it on this episode and towards the end when people start running, a computerized voice gives a warning. Well, the subtitle attributed the warning to The Algorithm. Every time The Algorithm speaks, I feel just a little closer to figuring out who the voice is based on. I’m wondering if it’s modeled after Victor or Per?
I have to say I did have a moment of panic when Bernard was getting ready to be sent to his death. I was afraid for just a tiny moment that the “Farewell” of this episode was that Jules would also be killed/sent to clean. What an audacious way to end a season. It’d be as surprising as the way the first season spent an episode building up David Oyelowe’s Holston and Rashida Jones’ Allison before unceremoniously killing them.
All that to say, when it’s at its best, Silo is very good at, to name drop the book series, pulling the wool over our eyes. I would imagine that a reveal of the man/woman behind the curtain will be revealed as a way of propelling us into the final season.
As for the machine they are building…gosh, I hope there’s a payoff! They’ve spent enough time not showing us what it is that I think they’d almost have to, right? But then again, when Silo is at its worse, it just drops storylines once it’s outlived its usefulness (see: Orla Kent).
Who knows. One way or another, I’m hoping this season ends with a bang in the way it has the last two seasons. We’ll find out next week when we go back to Gayly Dreadful for the finale, “Troy.”
Silo airs Fridays on Apple TV
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