‘Silo’ Season 3 Episode 1 Recap: Down the Memory Hole

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The last we saw Juliette Nichols, she was on fire. Played by Rebecca Ferguson, Juliette is the working-class hero of the post-apocalyptic bunker called the Silo and the protagonist of the series. Expelled by former mayor Bernard Holland (Tim Robbins) for investigating the Silo’s secrets, she survived the poison atmosphere of the outside world long enough to make it into a different Silo entirely. Its few residents helped her make it back home, leading to a fiery confrontation with Bernard just outside the original Silo’s airlock before her storyline cut to black.

Three months later, it’s a whole new world down there. Juliette has been elected mayor. Hell, some people seem to view her as a kind of messiah. In addition to miraculously surviving both the poison air and the fiery reentry chamber, her return to alert the Silo residents that it was deadly to go outdoors ended the facility’s brief civil war. 

What’s more, her actions exposed Bernard’s schemes to society. Though he himself died during the fire, his surveillance camera system is being dismantled, his abuse of the governing Pact has been curtailed, and the Pact itself is being rewritten by Sheriff Paul Billings (Chinaza Uche). Now there’s a whole governing council comprising representatives of every level and department in the Silo: Juliette, Paul, Judge Robert Sims (Common), and his wife Camille (Alexandria Riley), Juliette’s handler and chief of staff.

There’s just one problem: Juliette doesn’t have the first clue how any of this happened.

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That’s right, it’s an amnesia plot, and a doozy of one. For a long time it simply seems as though loss of oxygen during the fire injured her brain. Her weird, woozy, not-all-there way of interacting, coupled with her newfound authority, leave her old friends Shirley (Remmie Milner), Knox (Shane McRae), and Deputy Hank (Billy Postlethwaite) at odds over how to treat her. She, in turn, has no idea who they are.

But in the Silo, there’s always more going on than meets the eye. At the end of last season we discovered that the heart of the Silo is a vault called the Legacy, preserving knowledge of the world before the Silos were first constructed 350 years ago or so. No one else in the Silo has any clue how long they’ve been down there, or why. But a tiny handful of people have learned the secret from the Legacy’s artificial intelligence system. One started a rebellion and went down in infamy. One became an alcoholic and was murdered by Bernard. One, Bernard himself, became suicidal. And the fourth and final one, Juliette’s erstwhile love interest and Bernard’s unexpected “Shadow” protégé Lukas Kyle (Avi Nash), has simply disappeared. All we know is that the Silo itself will kill everyone inside if its secrets are divulged.

Secrecy, of course, breeds more secrecy. It turns out Juliette doesn’t have amnesia at all: She’s being slipped memory suppressants by Camille and Robert, who murdered Bernard and are now manipulating Juliette to their own ends. We’ve heard of these drugs before, and they appear to be largely responsible for the Silo society’s slippery sense of its own past, while targeted applications can blot out specific time periods the powers that be would just as soon someone forget. Camille and Robert don’t want her revealing that there are other Silos with other people in them, but we still don’t know why.

Meanwhile, a secret society of sorts is at work. Known as the Outsiders, they’re running around in masks, doing smash-and-grab robberies and leaving (incorrect) banners hanging from the central stairway claiming that the outside world really is lush and vibrant. Meanwhile, Rebecca finds a note in her soup setting up a secret meeting, then telling her to burn the note once she’s read it. Who knows if this shows up on the Sims’s cameras, which are very much still up and running in Juliette’s quarters. 

Maybe we’ll find our answers in the past. In the final scene of Season 2 we met Daniel Keene (Ashley Zukerman), a fresh-faced congressman and veteran of the Army Corps of Engineers who finds himself out on a date-turned-interview with journalist Helen Drew (Jessica Henwick). There’s some secret plan brewing, involving an attack on Iran in retaliation for a radiological attack on Washington that may or may not have really happened. 

Daniel, it turns out, really does know as little as he said he did, although we do learn a bit more about what he did in the Army. Reading between the lines, it seems he dug flood-control tunnels using an experimental drill that doesn’t disturb the soil above it, replacing New Orleans’s levy system and potentially saving coastal cities worldwide. 

But his sister Charlotte (Jessica Brown Findlay), an Air Force bomber pilot, wants him to learn more. Using some real cloak-and-dagger methods, she arranges a meeting with him to urge he get on the committee dealing with the response to Iran, led by Senator Thurman (Laura Innes), from Daniel’s rival party. By the time he’s looped in, the attack is already underway, with his sister in one of the cockpits.

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But while she and her squadron are flying over Iran, they run into a particle storm. I know that’s not what the scientific term means, but that’s what they run into: a storm generated by particles that are halfway between a powder and a goop. “Halfway between a powder and a goop” isn’t a scientific term either, but nevertheless, it seeps into her plane and she crashes. And when she’s rescued and flown home and Daniel goes to see her at some billionaire’s brain clinic, she says exactly what Juliette’s been saying all episode long: “Who are you?”

So there’s the origin of your memory loss drug right there. I also wonder if perhaps whatever that stuff is was introduced to the population at large, causing the memory loss that forced humanity to bury all its most important stuff in 51 holes in the ground just to keep it from disappearing forever. Maybe the Silo is filled with poison gas it can squirt out into the atmosphere to keep the memory-loss virus from spreading. Without reading Hugh Howey’s source novels, I’m as in the dark as the people inside the Silo itself.

Perhaps the biggest problem with this episode isn’t one of its own making. Its present-day material takes place in a Washington D.C. that’s unoccupied by Donald Trump’s shock troops, in a world where attacks on Iran still require even a flimsy pretext like a false-flag dirty-bomb hit, as opposed to being something you can do just because. Sadly, the real world is growing more dystopian — I’m sorry, I mean “America is becoming more great again” — at a rate that even post-apocalyptic shows like Silo can’t hope to match. 

Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play? So much is up in the air right now, up to and including the main character’s personality, that it’s a bit hard to say. I appreciate that, as always, Silo is a mystery-box show in which the box contains just one mystery: Why are they down there? 

I also appreciate the show’s use of actor Rebecca Ferguson’s perfectly angular face as a sort of special effect. Seeing her dressed in full Star Wars sci-fi mode — a bit Dedra Meero, a bit Mon Mothma — makes you realize just how unearthly her beauty is. It adds to the uncanny effect of her memory loss: She really does seem like she was beamed into the Silo from some other place. She has a fascinating face, not just a pretty one. Considering how sturdily this show has been constructed, I don’t mind following it into the dark for a while.

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Sean T. Collins (@seantcollins.com on Bluesky and theseantcollins on Patreon) has written about television for The New York Times, Vulture, Rolling Stone, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pain Don’t Hurt: Meditations on Road House. He lives with his family on Long Island.