[Silo S03E10 Recap w/ Joe Lipsett] It's the Finale and "Troy" is the Beginning of the End

Each week Joe and Terry discuss Apple TV’s Silo Season 3, alternating between our respective sites.

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

Spoilers follow for Silo S03E10 “Troy”: Season finale. A leader wakes to a new world.

TERRY

Well…in ten episodes and a year (give or take) we’ll be at the end of Silo, Joe. “Troy” caps off a season of incredible highs and…well, incredible lows (like the two episodes spent on traveling). All of it leading up to a finale that completely encapsulates this third season. “Troy” had some excellent moments AND a number of heavy sighs from me. I found this to be a good episode of Silo but a bad finale because, honestly, it didn’t give me the “WTF?” thrills of the previous two finales. Instead, it limply ends with a small revelation for a character and a “well, duh” with the rebels of Silo 18. 

“Troy” opens with a 25 minute cold open (the longest, I believe, in the series so far) that skillfully and quickly establishes what’s happened in Silo 1 since the end of the world. I appreciated this opening for showing us and not telling us about the intervening decades since the silos were established. It allows the audience members to think through what’s happening instead of laying everything out. It was subtle and a lot of fun piecing together the missing pieces. 

First, we have “Troy” AKA Daniel (Ashley Zuckerman) waking up from cryo sleep with memories of Helen (Jessica Henwick). A much older Victor (Matt Craven) greets him, calls him Troy and tells him it’s been 7 years since his last shift as he’s carted to what basically amounts to the control center of Silo 1. “Troy” meets his forgotten sister Charlotte (Jessica Brown Findlay), who calls herself Susan. This tells us a couple things, like how the two of them are viewed merely as tools and that they’ve been presumably dosed with a lot of Vitamin D+ to keep them docile when they’re needed. 

At the command center, we witness the death of Silo 17 from the outside perspective. We’ve been under the impression that the outside world is poisoned, but here we see the rebellion spilling outside of the silo and cheering at their freedom, while Silo 1 cuts off communication with the hidden Jimmy because he can’t offer them any additional information. This scene suggests that the air really isn’t poisoned outside and that they use drones to drop the killing compound on those who leave. 

After Charlotte/Susan tells Daniel that she won’t kill them – that there are women and children there, she’s dismissed and we are forced to watch a gruesome mass killing of 9,832 “fugitives.”

The way Daniel asks for the tally of survivors before telling the drone pilots “let’s get that number down” comes across as corporate speak; as if the CEO of a company tells his underlings they need to get costs down. 

Afterwards, Daniel is put back into cryosleep, but not before he has a conversation with Victor about the woman he keeps having memories of. Victor promises to look into it for him, but when Daniel leaves, we see Victor put a note “who is she?” in Daniel’s folder where it’s revealed that this is far from the first time Daniel has asked about Helen. 

So basically, the team that Per Stensen created to run the silos are put asleep for years/decades at a time and are awakened only when needed. For Daniel and Charlotte, the time hasn’t done much to them. But Victor looks much older, with liver spots on his forehead, suggesting that he’s been awakened a whole lot more. 

I loved this cold open because it expected the audience to keep up. Yet, I’m also a little bummed we don’t get to see the immediate aftermath of the world’s ending. I would have loved to see what transpired to make Victor and Co feel the need to dose Daniel and Charlotte, change their names and make use of them as needed. By the end of the episode, Victor has killed himself and sent Daniel a video message, telling him that the woman he’s been dreaming about is Helen.

That’s the minor character revelation “Troy” gives us. And the “well, duh” moment involves what happens after the cold open: Silo 18 realizes the only way they can survive is if they take down Silo 1.

Well…duh.

These two episode-ending “revelations” feel more like a setup for the season finale, rather than the actual finale. The fact this season ends on these rather muted epiphanies dampened what was otherwise a pretty thrilling episode. I walked away from “Troy” feeling a bit bummed, Joe.  

Unless I’ve completely missed something, we still don’t know what it is that Harwood and co used the stolen goods for. We still don’t know what’s behind that damn door that Lukas found eons ago. I spent the previous couple of episodes wondering why the plan to cap off the Safeguard seemed to be tossed to the side, only to realize that that was going to be the finale’s exciting moment of duplicity. 

But over to you, Joe. Did you like this extended cold open? Did Camille’s (Alexandria Riley) deception “twist” give you visions of Martha’s (Harriet Walter) secret plans last season? Did the scene at the so-called Forward Vault under the digger work for you as a way to up the stakes? I need to know your thoughts!

JOE

Oh, this is so interesting because I’m completely on board with this finale! If anything, this has kinda rescued a large swath of this season for me (though, yes, I will never forgive those two travel episodes!)

I’m kind of surprised at how non-plussed you are about some of these revelations, Terry! My jaw was on the floor when I realized that Daniel/”Troy” was still alive in Juliette’s timeline because I thought there were hundreds of years between the two storylines. And yes, thanks to the cryo sleep technology in Silo 1, it may have been a very long time, but we do get confirmation that, in the world of the show, the events of S01 were only three months ago and the massacre in Silo 17 - when young Jimmy (Steve Zahn) locked himself in the control room - was only 35 years ago.

The significantly reduced time period between the “Present” and the “Before Times” opens up at least one tantalizing possibility that I wouldn’t have considered had it not been for my husband (and then seemingly confirmed when Daniel/Troy pauses the video of Juliette after assuming command following Victor’s suicide): Juliette Nichols is Daniel and Helen’s daughter.

Casting is important here because Ferguson and Zuckerman actually look kinda similar. Throw in Juliette’s tenacity, which is clearly meant to evoke Helen’s investigative drive, and suddenly it’s clear why Juliette is “The Chosen One” who can’t be dissuaded from pursuing truth and justice. 

*If you’re like, wait, no, we know Juliette’s parents, think again: this is why we’ve had to suffer through Sims’ storyline this season worrying that his son Anthony will forget him if Vitamin D+ is introduced into the water supply. RIP Juliette’s doctor “father”…you were a great surrogate!

So yes, while the blocking of the Safeguard pipe by Knox and Shirley isn’t particularly unexpected, nor is Camille’s decision to join this new rebellion, the tantalizing possibility of reuniting Daniel and Juliette as father and daughter in the fourth and final season (when Silo 17 inevitably storms Silo 1) suddenly becomes a great deal more interesting. 

I’ll confess the other reason I was locked into this episode is because I’ve come to dread the rebellion storyline in Silo 17. Camille has been insufferable for most of the season, and many of the other subplots, including Knox’s newly introduced father, the missing supplies, the murder of Orla Kent - it just never gelled for me. The stuff with Daniel and Helen and Per and Victor definitely eclipsed Juliette’s silo for me, but now that they’re IN THE SAME TIMELINE, I’m suddenly much more forgiving. 

Plus: all of the stuff about Silo 1 is pretty compelling. I have so many new questions as a result of this finale, including who got Vitamin D+ and who didn’t; presumably “Director” Thurman (Laura Innes) hasn’t and I wouldn’t have expected Henry (Reed Barney) to, though Daniel/Troy refers to him as Andrew so <shrug> maybe he did get a new identity?

I guess I’m just fascinated by the details of this project: clearly the attack in 3.09 was orchestrated to get the desirable people to lead the future of humanity underground, but as Camille exclaims, why are they still willing to kill 10K people if the surface is, in fact, totally hospitable now? 

Turner mentions that Charlotte/Susan will play a crucial role “at the end of the Project”. Now this could be bullshit; I wouldn’t put it past Turner saying this simply to keep Daniel from killing his sister…but it could also suggest that the experiment does have a finite time limit and people won’t be kept underground forever (Turner even comments that they’re running out of supplies in Silo 1).

I dunno, maybe I’m misunderstanding my timelines, but I’m so intrigued by the possibility of where we’ll go in S04. I agree that isn’t a wholly successful season finale, but I think that’s because it’s actually setting up the final season, Terry. 

We may still see what happened in the days after the blast, how Helen (maybe?) gave birth to Jules in Silo 18 before she was sent out to clean, how and when Victor and Turner gassed Daniel and Charlotte into submission, etc. I expect that’s all yet to come next year.

What do you think? Have I done enough to convince you that this was actually much more cleverly set-up than you initially realized? Does it make you care any more about the storylines outside of the Jules, Daniel, Helen stuff? 

TERRY 

We definitely have different readings on the timeline, Joe! I agree that Jules is related to Daniel and I’m glad you brought it up because in this busy episode I didn’t even get to mention it (it didn’t help that I was already close to two pages in my initial recap and I desperately needed to hand it off). So, yes, we are in agreement that Jules is related but I think we are (were?) in separate silos when discussing the timeline.

I mistakenly took it at face value that we were still hundreds of years in the future with the main thrust of the storyline. It made sense to me that they would keep Daniel iced so that they could use his expertise on a limitless timeline. Bring him out, have him do his thing, put him right back and his body would have only aged for the time he spent helping out. Which is why, in my mind, Victor looked much older. 

There was a comment that Victor seemed to want to be “unfrozen” at the same time as Daniel, and Daniel’s file shows multiple “Who is she?” notes. Enough that it satisfied my curiosity about the timelines because Per mentioned that his expertise was crucially missed in the lead-up to the silos. So in a future where you need to have his expertise, you would only unthaw him when needed the most. Otherwise, it’s sleepy time for him. 

That said, the idea that maybe we’re only 35+ years instead of 300+ years makes a lot of sense to me. The biggest question, and one I posed to you last episode, was why? Why is all of this happening? 350 years is an awful long time to keep an experiment running. Additionally, I was starting to find it hard to believe that they would have packaged 300+ years of irreplaceable supplies in each of the silos. 

Sure, they can grow crops and food supplies could be self-sustaining…but lightbulbs and things of that ilk? I know the silos are massive and Per Stensen probably, to quote another famous and fictitious rich person, “spared no expense” in its creation…but that’s a very long time that would require a mind-boggling amount of lightbulbs. 

On another note, can you imagine how inbred the people living in the silos would be with generation after generation of procreation? Fallout did a good job of establishing that the vaults would open up to allow other members in so that they wouldn’t be fucking their cousins…but that’s never once mentioned here. After 350 years of inbreeding, it would make the Hapsburgs look completely normal. 

So it would make sense if the timeline is actually condensed. But that would also reframe everything we’ve watched up to this point, Joe! Because this group of people would have had to have Vitamin D+ in their water already to create a fictitious past that stretches back hundreds of years. Bernard and co. have talked about previous revolutions that occurred many decades prior so that would have had to be completely made-up and implanted in their memories. 

That’s a lot of mind control! 

Okay, so let’s assume you’re correct and this timeline is actually condensed and has actually been somewhere around 35ish years. We know that Jules’ “mother” died by suicide when Judicial raided their home and found the magnifier she created to try and help people like her son who died from a hole in his heart. Either she wasn’t really Jules’ mom or “Hanna” was actually “Helen.” The alliteration would be on point, at least. I guess I’m struggling with that idea, if I’m being honest. 

It sure would be something, though, if everything that happened in the past was a fake memory; a mass hallucination.  It’d mean that everything in Jules’ past was a very big, very complicated lie. 

I’ll admit, I am buzzing at the possibilities. 

I am left with a couple questions, though. The shots of Silo 17 celebrating their escape from the silo weren’t killed by the air outside. Which, as I mentioned above, means that Silo 1 actually drops the compound to make them believe it’s poisoned. If that’s the case, what killed Bernard? Are we to believe the drones dropped the compound to kill him? I would have thought that the times we’ve been outside to witness the cleaning we would have heard the buzzing drones that make a big appearance this season. 

The other question I’m left with is still focused on the why. A lot of twists in this show have centered around what has been shown versus what is true. The title of the original book the show is based on is Wool. We discussed in the Season 1 finale that the title was brilliant in that it subverted the expectation that the outside air wasn’t poisoned. I went into the Season 1 finale thinking the air wasn’t poisoned, only for the twist to be that it really was. And if what we’ve witnessed this season is true, it’s actually a double reversal and the air actually wasn’t poisoned. 

Taking that into consideration, we saw the mushroom cloud suggesting nuclear apocalypse. But what if that was just a localized explosion to create the urgency for the unwitting silo participants? And that outside of the now destroyed area of Atlanta, the rest of the world is still moving on. Was Atlanta closed off as an American version of Chernobyl? Is that how Per has managed to keep his experiment secret? 

I’ve been wondering what an ending would look like for this show. It would be quite something if the finale of the show mirrored the beginning of Kimmy Schmidt: these mole people are forced to reintegrate into a society that didn’t know they were held hostage. 

Okay, Joe. You’ve made me more interested in how this season ended. But I want to know your thoughts on some of the things I’ve brought up! And do you think that the hundreds of years of history were actually a mass brainwashing? If it really has only been dozens of years instead of hundreds, do you think Helen is dead? Or will she spring up in the final season (and if so, where has she been??)? Do you have any lingering thoughts on the season? And, finally, what do you rate this season as a whole?

JOE

Full confession: it’s possible that we’re completely out on a ledge and have misinterpreted all of this (I’ll be so curious to see if we hear from readers who clear this up easily! Lol)

The reality is probably that the truth is somewhere in between our readings. It probably has been 100-200 years; Daniel/Troy has been brought out of the freezer whenever there’s an uprising, and it’s just been 35 years since Jimmy stormed IT. 

Vitamin D+ was probably used regularly to help the general populous forget, and it’s absolutely used each time there’s a threat of rebellion.

As for the death of people sent out to clean, you’ve got it: Daniel/Troy explains when he orders the destruction of 17 that they have high flying drones that can stay out of sight/earshot in order to drop the killer Safeguard drug. This is absolutely how folks like Bernard and the former Sheriff were dispatched.

I’m hoping that we’ll get a sense of whether Per was actually behind the bombing, and whether that means this is a controlled experiment (and yes, the rest of the world has continued blissfully unaware) or if he, Henry, and others simply instigated the nuclear destruction of the world in order to get a headstart on what they knew was inevitable. 

I’m already predicting that the finale will simply be all of the people from the various silos emerging into the wild, milling about with hope for the future (much like what we saw of those poor 10K before “Troy” ordered them all executed). I wouldn’t be surprised to see showrunner Graham Yost pull back from confirming anything else about the current state of the world, though.

Overall, it seems like Silo keeps <barely> pulling off its seasons, Terry. S03 wasn’t great; S02 wasn’t great. At least S04 has an ending to build to! Overall, I’m giving this a B-.

What’s your grade for S03, Terry? And do you think that we’ll see Helen again?

TERRY

I absolutely think we’re going to see Helen again. If nothing else, we will witness her demise, if she’s no longer actually alive. She’ll get some kind of send-off, at the very least. I wouldn’t be surprised if she and Daniel will reunite to give us some kind of happy-ish ending when the show ends. 

But for this season? I think I’ll be a little more generous than you. When this season was great, it was fantastic. But those lows, man. They weren’t worse than Season 2 but I still pine for that excellent first season. I also think that some of the low points (i.e., the slowest kidnapping in history) might work better when binged and not week-to-week. So I’m going to give this season a solid B. 

And I can’t wait to see how it will all end.