“What if everything you know to be true, everything you’ve been told by the people you love, was in fact just one big lie?” Good question, George Wilkins! And the beauty of it is that like so much of Silo, it has a double meaning. The surface one, the obvious one, is your bog-standard dystopian Everything You Thought You Knew Was Wrong boilerplate, a rebel telling the woman he loves why he’s rebelling, because he believes the Silo is built on bullshit.
The other meaning — the more insidious one for said woman, Juliette Nichols — is that she’s not the woman he loves, because he doesn’t really love her at all. At least according to his ex-girlfriend Regina Jackson (Sonita Henry), George is, or was, a serial user of people, women in particular, who could get him closer to the only thing he really does care about: the forbidden history of the Silo and the world that surrounds it.
Don’t worry, I’m not bragging about sussing out this dual interpretation. The show is not subtle about all this. Nor does it need to be. Silo, as I’ve said before, is a simple show rather than a simplistic one. It has one big central mystery — loosely, “What’s the deal with the Silo?” — as its core support pillar, and wraps everything else around that, from sub-mysteries to world-building to character development — around that pillar like the spiral stairs at the center of the Silo itself.
So in this week’s episode, directed by the team of Bert & Bertie and written by Eric Avelino (friendly reminder that writers are the reason television shows and the studios that make them exist, so those studios should end the WGA strike by paying and treating those writers fairly), the show juxtaposes Juliette’s ongoing quest for the truth about the recent spate of murders with her consequent discovery that George was, perhaps, not the man she thought he was. At least according to Regina, a relics dealer he bedded down then moved on from when her knowledge base was tapped out, George was a great pretender, a charmer who used women not for sex but for information and aid. This is a tremendous blow to Juliette, to the point where she almost quits not only the investigation (which she’s been asked by Mayor Bernard to drop anyway so as not to rile up the hoi polloi) but being sheriff at all until her mentor Walk talks her out of it.
By the time we reach Regina’s revelation, the episode has already been liberally sprinkled with tender flashbacks to Juliette and George’s time together, so it hits that much harder. Their comfortable, familiar flirtation is winningly written throughout; I particularly liked the bit where George jokingly complained that she was paying more attention to her worries about her job than his own “beautiful face.” After all, of the two characters, it’s Juliette who looks like a Tolkien Elf, while George is just a cute guy. Fortunately for a lot of us, being just a cute guy and also smart and funny can get you pretty far. It certainly worked for George, perhaps to a fault.
George, we find out, isn’t the only man living a lie around here. Billings, Juliette’s timid, by-the-book, Judicial-mandated chief deputy, has what’s portentously called The Syndrome, some kind of debilitating disease that causes shaky hands before degenerating into…well, that would be one of those sub-mysteries I mentioned earlier. Juliette figures it out pretty quickly and essentially lets him off the hook — he’s obligated to report these symptoms and forbidden from being a deputy if he has them — in exchange for some extra latitude from him as well. This detail not only humanizes Billings (along with a scene spent with his adorable baby-makes-three family), it complicates Juliette, since minutes earlier she was prepared to throw him to the wolves with Judicial in order to save her own bacon and throw them off the scent of her real aims. Sure, he’s annoying, but he didn’t deserve that.
And Juliette herself is not without her secrets, as we already know. Much of the episode revolves around the verboten Pez dispenser she got from George, which turns up in a search of the murderous Judicial thug Trumbull’s room because she planted it there. This prompts Sims to reveal that Judicial has extensive files — much more extensive than the sheriff’s department, whom Judicial treats as a glorified guy from the homeowner’s association who tells you to mow your lawn weekly — on virtually every relic you can find in the entire Silo, legal or illegal, common knowledge or not.
Before we get to the ending, I want to note a couple more bits of double-meaning dialogue, these ones with meanings salient for us in the here and now. “If these things aren’t worth risking our lives for,” George says to Juliette about his relics, “why do they make it a risk of our lives to have them?” Good question! Kind of reminds me of all the things the government says are perfectly safe for its citizens — Cop City in Atlanta, for example — yet is willing to destroy and even end lives of those citizens to preserve.
“Why don’t they just rip the pages out of the Pact,” Juliette says to Billings when he warns her against defying Judicial’s powerful chief Judge Meadows, “and leave one that says See Judge Meadows?” Good question! Kind of reminds me of how all of the originalists and strict constructionists in our own legal community are strangely okay with ceding final authority over all laws to the unelected Supreme Court via judicial review, a concept that does not appear at all in our own “Pact,” the Constitution these people allegedly love so much.
Anyway, returning to Silo’s dystopia from our own, the episode ends with twin revelations. First, Regina gives Juliette the object George used to bargain with her for the illicit hard drive that has caused all this trouble: a children’s picturebook about the natural wonders of the state of Georgia. It’s surprisingly painful to watch Juliette run her fingers along the smooth pages, staring at all the beauty of the world, all these plants and animals, all these clouds and sunsets that she’s never seen before. Thanks to Rebecca Ferguson’s wire-taut performance in this scene, you can feel Juliette’s turbulent mix of emotions beneath her stone-faced surface: awe, wonder, bafflement, curiosity, grief for the loss of a world she didn’t know existed, anger at those who’ve kept it from her and vice versa.
Finally, the light gets whiter, the camera zooms out, and we discover we’re watching her on a bank of monitors in some secret location that sure doesn’t look Judicial, as you might expect; for one thing, the two dudes monitoring the monitors (watching the watchwoman, so to speak) aren’t in Judicial’s blackshirt togs.
Who are they? Who is the mysterious “he” they report to? Are they friend or foe to Juliette, or to the rebellion in general? I’ll be tuning in next time for the answers — but much more so for the winningly straightforward way in which the questions are asked.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.