This episode of Silo is a heist episode, only you don’t know what’s been stolen until after it’s all over. Actually, you don’t know anything is being stolen until after it’s all over. But the machinations of Mechanical-level leaders Knox and Shirley as they battle to take back the stairs to the Silo from the Raiders who are blockading them have a purpose beyond just kicking people’s asses. As is so frequently the case on this show, the plot stems from the engineering of a solution to the problem.

When the episode begins, the Down Deep is down and out. The barricade and its phalanx of raiders are designed to cut off the food supply, starving the people until they give up the three fugitives that Mayor Bernard Holland, Judge Robert Sims, and the new head of Judicial Security, Amundsen, are looking for. Walker, one of the three, talks the people out of giving them up, and sympathizers on the higher levels start dropping food down the recycling chute to keep them fed, but it’s only a temporary fix. 

What happens next only makes sense once you reach the end of the episode, with the help of their enterprising underling Teddy (Olatunji Ayofe), Knox and Shirley develop a two-pronged approach to the barricade problem. Knox leads a contingent of fighters wearing secretly constructed arms and armor to their side of the barricade for a faceoff. Shirley and Teddy, meanwhile, use a drill to cut their way up through the concrete and emerge behind the barricade. (At least I think that’s what’s going on; the Silo can be a pretty confusing place to map in your mind.)

But the goal isn’t to ambush Amundsen’s raiders, as Camille Sims fears. After learning from her husband about the secret drill team, she tells him to let Bernard and Amundsen eat shit on it…then hustles down to the barricade to warn Amundsen herself. (Once a Raider, always a Raider, I guess.) All Knox and Shirley really want to do, though, is relocate the barricade from level 130 up to level 120, at which point a truce is declared.

Bernard can accept losing ten floors, maybe. But this is where the heist part comes in. The Mechanicals weren’t looking simply to expand their territory, not any more than they were out to massacre the Raiders. They wanted a farm, located on level 122, so they could have an independent food source and weather the siege. Mission accomplished, much to Bernard’s chagrin.

It gets worse for Mr. Mayor. After much back-and-forth involving getting Dr. Pete Nichols down past the Raiders to secretly remove a bullet from relic dealer Kennedy, Sheriff Paul Billings learns that Juliette’s expulsion was tied to forbidden footage of the old world she smuggled onto the Silo’s system. From Walker, Shirley, and Knox, he learns that Mayor Meadows was dead before they arrived at her office, and that Bernard and Sims had them framed. So instead of ratting out the fugitives’ location, Billings demands a full investigation before Bernard has all the radios in the Silo cut off to keep him from speaking further. Another gambit up in smoke. (Well, hey, at least he has prisoner Lukas getting closer to cracking the code found on the hard drive taken from Juliette, but now Sims is aware of this operation too.)

This plot-heavy episode does make a little room for some personal growth. Paul’s wife points out to him that his muscle tremors from the so-called Syndrome have stopped despite the fact that he hadn’t taken his medicinal herbs in days, indicating a psychosomatic origin for the condition. And Shirley and Knox make out before Paul interrupts them. You had to see that one coming. 

Meanwhile, there are a few loose ends that remain untied. Someone in the Down Deep put rat poison in their existing food supply, but who? Carla, the fourth member of the mechanical team, has been black-bagged and remanded to an undisclosed location, something Walker didn’t even know was possible. How can the Sheriff clear her name if Bernard has him on the shitlist now too?

As for Juliette, she, well, lives. In a scene at the very end of the episode, last week’s cliffhanger is resolved pretty much exactly how you expected it to be: with Juliette waking up back under the care of Solo, who used homemade antibiotics to take care of her infected wound. However, he took advantage of her unconsciousness to hide the suit she put together to return to the surface world. Unless and until she fixes his Silo’s water pump to drain the ever-rising lake slowly swallowing up level after level, he won’t give it back.

The fascinating thing about all this is that we’re spending the season rooting for the Mechanicals to win, even though we know everyone will die if they do. That’s the whole point of the Juliette plot, after all: She’s in a race against time to get back to the original Silo and warn everyone not to come out after her, because the surface world really is poisonous. It goes to show you how much the structure of genre narrative can trigger our sympathies, even when intellectually we understand our sympathies are dumb as hell.

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.