Silo Recap: Judge Not

After a stellar premiere followed by two straight episodes of grinding setup, Silo’s second season really gets rolling this week, with one of the most gripping hours of the entire series. We get a major character death and one pulse-pounding action sequence, balanced by some quiet, well-observed character moments that actually advance the plot rather than slow the momentum. There’s so much to discuss with “The Harmonium” that I almost don’t know where to begin.

So let’s begin with an ending: the sad and shocking farewell of Judge Mary Meadows.

I feel like we’ve just gotten to know Judge Meadows over the past two weeks, and we get a couple of scenes in this episode to make her loss even more meaningful. First, she has an extended conversation with Lukas, who’s trying to avoid being sent to the mines. Before she makes her decision, she asks him what he’s learned from watching the night skies in the dining hall, and when she realizes his knowledge is rudimentary, she lectures him on what stars are and how our world both revolves and orbits, changing how the skies look each night. Then Lukas asks if there are other worlds too, and Meadows immediately calls in the guards, sentencing him to the mines for five years. (She doubts he’ll survive even one.)

Meadows’s other big scene happens with Bernard, who is clinging hard to the Order and trying to follow its step-by-step instructions for “How to Prevent a Rebellion That Kills Everybody in the Silo.” Although he clearly has (reciprocated!) romantic feelings for the judge, he’s wary of many of Mary’s moves, including her agreeing to review Lukas’s case and her agreeing to meet with a delegation from Mechanical. She tries to explain that she’s just defusing tension through bureaucracy, but the “IMPEACH MEADOWS” signs (hung at Sims’s secret command) make Bernard too nervous about what might happen next. It doesn’t help when her thoughts about her impeachment are, “I don’t care; I’ll be long gone before it could happen.”

So he invites her over for a dinner date, promising to let her try on the suit he’s ordered for her excursion outside the silo. After some pleasant chitchat and some Erik Satie, Meadows asks to see the suit, and when Bernard stares at her for a long time, she realizes he’s poisoned her. (The man does love to poison, folks.) In the minutes they have left together, they have a plot-relevant conversation as Bernard asks about the time she disappeared for four days, and Meadows responds by alerting him to what was on Juliette’s scandalous hard drive, dropping a name — Salvador Quinn — that I’m sure we’ll hear more about later.

Then he pulls out a pair of forbidden VR goggles from his relic stash and lets her spend her final seconds watching Costa Rican wildlife. It’s a nice bit of staging that we don’t see what she sees. We have to use our imaginations — and Tanya Moodie’s excellent performance — to picture it all.

Why kill the judge? This is all part of Bernard’s larger plan to whip up public anger against Mechanical, thus strangling the Down Deep rebellion in its cradle.

The delegation from below works its way up the stairs throughout this episode, starting at one of the lowest levels, where Knox shows his people a list of names that he believes are the people who died in multiple past rebellions, never mentioned in their history classes. They send a message to Meadows to ask for a meeting, in which they’re going to lay out their plan to try out the advanced suit/tape technology and explore outside. (Knox, it turns out, is aching for Juliette and desperate to find out if she’s still alive out there.)

Before they reach the judge’s chambers, there are challenges. Rumors of the meeting have spread through the upper levels, where an angry mob — stoked by Sims and Bernard, of course — has assembled to stop them. The delegation then flexes their muscles by dropping a red ball down the silo’s center, signaling to their comrades in Mechanical to shut down the power.

All of this pleases Bernard. The power shutdown reminds everyone how dangerous Mechanical can be. And when Bernard encourages the mob to let the delegation through to see the judge, he springs his next trap. He and Sims have posed the corpse of Judge Meadows behind her desk with a knife in her chest. Knox & Co. have been set up as patsies for her murder. Bernard lets them start walking back down the stairs for a while before he has Sims whip the mob back into an anti-Mechanical frenzy. The episode ends with a nifty shot of the mob rushing down the stairs, just a few levels above where the Mechanical delegation is fleeing.

It says something about how well balanced this episode is that I’ve gotten so deep into the recap without mentioning Silo 17. But rest assured, while the action in Silo 18 (which is finally identified by number out loud by Solo) is very strong this week, the Juliette story line remains this season’s strongest.

The main thrust of the action in Silo 17 involves Juliette’s efforts to retrieve a firefighting suit from an area of the silo that’s on the other side of a deep pool of water. The title of the episode comes from Solo’s suggestion for how Juliette can get air during her long swim. There’s a harmonium in a children’s classroom, and the bellows from the instrument — operated by Solo — could pump the air Juliette needs.

Juliette’s swimming scene is an outstanding set piece, filled with the kind of unexpected complications that make an already tense sequence more nerve-wracking. Her air tube isn’t long enough. The weight she uses to help pull her down into the water gets stuck. The lockers containing the firefighting suits are locked and have to be pried open. Fantastic plotting and execution here.

But Juliette’s biggest obstacle is Solo. Now that Solo is out of the vault, exploring the silo and talking (incessantly) to Juliette, it’s become obvious that he has the interests and attention span of a little boy. Juliette does the math when Solo’s looking at a child’s backpack in the classroom — and talking about how that kid sat next to him — and she realizes he must’ve gone into the vault at age 11 or 12. Even with all his access to music and literature, Solo has been without any grown-up role models, which may be why his taste has stalled at the level of the circus and adventure stories like 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.

Solo’s sole purpose in life has been to keep the vault safe, so the longer he spends outside the vault with Juliette, the more distracted and anxious he gets about what might be happening back in his little fortress. He almost abandons Juliette mid-swim, then he takes off back to the vault as soon as she emerges from the water. (He then fumbles his passcode and is briefly locked out, which upsets him even more.)

Juliette is able to bond with Solo over their shared feelings of loneliness, curiosity, and fear. But there’s still something uncomfortably off-kilter about their interpersonal dynamic. There’s a heartbreaking moment in this episode when Solo realizes Juliette will have to tear apart the harmonium to make her breathing apparatus. He asks, like a child, “You can put it back together, right?” She responds, like a parent, “We’ll see.” And like moms and kids everywhere, they both know deep down that — in many ways — she’s going to break something that’ll never be fixed.

The Down Deep

• Because of the nature of life in the Silo — where information is tightly controlled from birth to death — the show hasn’t really been plagued by one of Lost’s biggest problems, where characters would inexplicably fail to ask relevant questions about this place where they’d been stranded. But now that we know Bernard and Solo have secret knowledge, it may start to get more frustrating when someone like Juliette (who is smart, savvy, and aware there’s more to the story than she’s been told) doesn’t take advantage of an opportunity to get “answers.”

• Sheriff Billings has a significant subplot this week, investigating the firebombing from the previous episode and finding it suspicious that Judicial (and perhaps some other entity) is hindering the inquiry by whisking away corpses. Bernard may think he has a tight lock on the post-Juliette narrative in Silo 18, but having a sheriff who worked in Judicial and knows its tendencies could inadvertently keep the rebellion alive.

• Keep an eye on Sims as well. He thought his impeachment banners would manipulate Bernard into confiding in him again instead of Meadows. Instead, Bernard now trusts him less. Although Bernard is pleased with the ultimate outcome — the judge’s request to go out nullified and Mechanical properly demonized — he’s not happy his hand was forced. He apparently means to make Sims suffer some consequences. But Sims is a dangerous man who controls his own miniature army, so it may not be the best idea for Bernard to freeze him out.

• When Juliette says she’s familiar with oceans, Solo asks if they let people read books in Silo 18, to which she says, “Uh … no.” Some things are different from silo to silo — for example, Silo 17 had Founders Day and Silo 18 has Freedom Day — but apparently they all see literature as contraband.

• I’m glad they didn’t push this too far, but the combination of terror and fascination in Solo’s eyes when Juliette strips down to her undergarments for her swim was wholly the reaction you’d expect from a man whose life was frozen in preadolescence.

• To play us out, a little harmonium solo from Solo. Take it!