The best way I can describe Silo is this: Imagine you’re a baseball player and your thing is that you’re a monster home run hitter, like pitchers are afraid of you, you get intentionally walked a lot, when you take the field they play “Iron Man” by Black Sabbath. You are one home run away from breaking the record. And for some reason, the league has given you a choice: You can take your chances with the best relief pitcher in the game…or you can simply set a tee on home plate, put a ball on it, and knock it out of the park, easy-peasy lemon squeezey.

Silo is a show that always chooses the latter option. It’s not here to impress you with its high degree of difficulty. Why would it, when it’s so much easier to keep things simple and just deliver on what you set out to do, over and over and over?

Written essentially perfectly by Jeffrey Wang and Igrid Escajeda — who like all WGA writers deserve fair pay and treatment from the studios that are currently stiffing them — this week’s episode “Hanna” is another demonstration of Silo’s tight focus and tight execution. It centers simply on Juliette’s efforts to hide her illegal hard drive, and sometimes herself, from the Judicial forces led by Sims. 

Only it turns out they’re not led by Sims at all. Only after she takes him into her confidence does Juliette discover it’s Bernard — mild-mannered Bernard, IT chief turned mayor — who’s really running the Silo. He’s cowed Judge Meadows, he’s turned Judicial into his private army with Sims as its general, and now he’s staging a coup in the Sheriff’s Department, falsely accusing Juliette of asking to “go out” so she can be replaced. 

There’s some real insight in this plot twist. It’s true that I thought Bernard’s officiousness masked a rebellious streak, either one he’s already explored or one that Juliette would bring out. In retrospect this was outrageously optimistic, and way off the mark. After all, Bernard is a tech bro, specifically a tech bro with power. And from Mark Zuckerberg to Marc Andreessen to Peter Thiel to Elon Musk, we’ve seen how that political trajectory works. Most become outright reactionaries — Musk advocated a military coup against Joe Biden earlier this week! — and even the ones like Zuckerberg who still bother to mouth liberal platitudes now and then still knowingly enable a product that makes mass fascist radicalization possible. Facebook helped instigate a literal genocide! Musk and Thiel only dream, presumably wetly, of that kind of thing!

All of this business runs parallel with a series of flashbacks to Juliette’s youth starring her mother, Hanna, played by Sienna Guillory. (With Guillory and Iain Glen as her parents, you can see where Juliette got her looks. I mean, jeez Louise.) In an effort to diagnose and treat the kind of heart defect that killed her son, she builds an illegal magnifying device so she can locate a hole in the heart of a sick rabbit she illegally procures from a farmer. Like clockwork, Judicial raiders show up, trash their home, and finally scare them into producing the magnifier, which they smash into pieces right in front of Hanna. 

She blames her doctor husband Pete, whose complicity with the system she’s aware of on at least some level, for ratting her out. The combination of grief for their son, grief for the magnifier she’d worked so hard to build in order to save lives, and grief for the love she shared with a man she now believes betrayed her drive her to suicide.

But in this case, she was wrong, as Juliette tells Pete years later. Judicial knew about Hanna’s activities not because she was snitched on by Pete or Juliette (whom the show cleverly gets you to suspect for a while), but because they have cameras and microphones everywhere, in everyone’s home and place of business that they can manage. In one of the episode’s most dramatic scenes, she demonstrates this to her potential love interest Lukas (who recognizes she’s using him — just like George used her, ironically) by smashing his mirror and yanking the camera right out to show him. It reminded me of that bit in Die Hard 2 where, in order to prove that the soldiers who are supposed to be fighting the terrorists are actually on their side, John McClane opens fire with one of their machine guns in a crowded airport terminal, demonstrating that they were shooting blanks all along. It has that kind of fed-up, goddammit listen to me energy.

Which is something actor Rebecca Ferguson brings to every scene she’s in. Obviously the first thing you notice about Ferguson is that she’s a preposterously beautiful person, I mean we’re talking Lòthlorien Elf levels of freakish good looks. But the piercing eyes and high cheekbones that make her such a knockout are also what help give her performance such physical intensity. At every moment, she looks both grimly determined, quietly furious, and slightly unhinged. This is the exact right energy for Juliette, a woman with her mind set on using all her newfound power and authority to defy power and authority for the sake of human lives and the simple truth. If it’s true that, as that farmer says, the Silo always wins, you need to create a character who’s convincingly so fixated on beating it that they can actually pull it off, and that’s what Ferguson and the filmmakers have done. It’s a flawless match of performer to material.

I don’t mean to make the show sound monomaniacal about its plot, by the way. The writers still find time to work in subtle humor, for example: When one Judicial raider turns his flashlight toward a crying infant in the darkened nursery, his partner sighs “We’re not looking for a baby”; when Juliette is taken aback by her by-the-book (and increasingly ill) deputy Billings calling Judicial goons “fuckwads,” he indignantly replies “What? I cuss!” 

And despite how far removed it is from any experiences we ourselves may have had, Juliette’s family situation really hangs together psychologically. At one point Dr. Nichols explains that he abandoned Juliette to Mechanical because he hoped that if she had something concrete to fix, she wouldn’t risk her life chasing questions she can’t answer like her late mother did, since after all, doing so is what killed her. Iain Glen is so soulful in this role that you actually sympathize with his bad parenting — his face, his voice, his eyes make it clear that his heart was in the right place.

Anyway, the episode ends with Juliette, cornered with the hard drive in her backpack, jumping over the rail. Besides being a great visual, it reminds you how hard it would be for a fugitive to hide in a completely enclosed structure, even an enormous one with a million nooks and crannies like the Silo. (It’s why thinking, feeling people like Walk and Dr. Nichols wind up sealing themselves away.) And on the level of metaphor? Well, if you believe in something strongly enough, sometimes you have to go over the rail for it.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.