Summary
Silo blows its fiction wide open with crucial reveals about Silo 1, which pulls double duty as a perfect setup for the fourth and final season.
By Silo standards, “Troy” isn’t an especially eventful finale. Sure, plenty happens in it, but most of it was fairly easy to predict, even if the details might not have been entirely clear. The opening credits don’t even roll until 25 minutes in, and only one major thing has happened by that point. But none of this is really the point. Season 3 has been building to the crucial reveal here for its entire runtime, and with it all out in the open, none of this is really an ending. Instead, it’s a brilliant setup for the war to come — a now-rogue Silo 18 against Silo 1, with a potential wildcard double-agent stuck somewhere in the middle.
Perhaps more importantly, it leaves a lot open to interpretation. It doesn’t fill in all the blanks, just lets us see the general shape of the problem. And it’s a big one. Silo 1’s power is much more than we anticipated, and the people running it are more ruthless than we imagined. We don’t know quite how they got that way, but we can guess. We don’t know the exact details of anything. But we now know enough to make some pretty big assumptions, several of which I’m going to make here.
We Were Wrong About the “Troy” Thing
In my predictions piece, I speculated — rather cleverly, I thought — that the title of Episode 8 had a double meaning, and was perhaps referring to Helen and/or some kind of horse-style subterfuge. You can make a case for the latter, which we’ll get to, but Helen isn’t even in the episode outside of extremely brief flashback visions. Troy is a person, and that person is Daniel.
We don’t know why Daniel is suddenly called Troy, but we can guess. His memories of Helen have been (almost) entirely erased. He’s a “Specialist” in Silo 1, which is to say a kind of fixer who is woken up from cryosleep periodically to fix problems with ruthless efficiency. The problems seem to almost always involve Silo rebellions. In the opening scenes of this finale, he’s woken by Victor to address another — the rebellion in Silo 17.
It has been seven years since Daniel’s — I’m not going to keep calling him Troy — last assignment. Charlotte is still around as the senior drone commander, but her name is now Susan, implying that she’s in the same boat as her brother. The way they operate — the way everyone in Silo 1 seems to operate — is extraordinarily callous. People are described as fugitives. “Safeguard” — in other words, mass murder — is used as a casual verb. A lethal death gas is referred to simply as a “compound”. It seems part of Silo 1’s operation is brainwashing the people inside it into being lunatics.
The Purging Of Silo 17
We’ve already heard about what happened to Silo 17 through Jimmy, but here we get to see it. And it’s grim. Daniel allows almost 10,000 people to amass outside, and then orders Charlotte’s drone teams to comprehensively butcher them all with gas and bullets. It’s an unprecedented event, and even Charlotte is hesitant to participate in such butchery. Killing the rebellion leaders would force everyone back inside for cover, and the point would be made. But Daniel is adamant. When Charlotte refuses, he has her suspended and takes control of the operation himself.
The massacre is horrendous, filmed largely in chilling thermal imagery, often cutting to the emotionless detachment on Daniel’s face as he directs the murder of thousands and thousands of people. It’s another day in the office. Thurman, who is Silo 1’s director, even gives him an award for it. But she won’t follow the Directive, which supersedes the Pact, when it comes to “neutralising” Charlotte. She’s too important to Anna, and to whatever is coming at the end of “The Project”. Even in this alternate reality, the higher-ups still pick and choose when the rules should apply.
Even in his stone-cold Troy persona, Daniel often thinks about Helen, though he can’t recall quite who she is. He asks Victor — it’s implied not for the first time — and he makes a note reading “Who is she?”, promising Daniel he’ll let him know the next time he’s woken up. When Daniel is once again snoozing, Victor puts the note in Daniel’s file, which contains loads of identical notes. This has been going on a while.
Camille’s Face Turn
When we finally pick up from where we left off, several things are happening at once. Juliette and Sims are still being guarded by Raiders, though Sims is allowed to see Anthony and give him the Pez dispenser. Knox and Shirley are trying to cap the Safeguard pipe, while Camille orders the mines to be gassed double-quick. The Algorithm begins counting down to the deployment of the Safeguard. At Camille’s urging, the Algo — who is really Victor over in Silo 1 — agrees to give her five extra minutes.
This whole sequence is blisteringly tense, but it’s also cleverer than it first appears. Camille is pulling a fast one. The Raiders aren’t delivering poison to the mines; it’s just oxygen. The whole thing’s a ruse. She’s buying time so that Knox and Shirley can cap the pipe. By the time Victor realises, it’s too late. The Safeguard fails. Victor orders a drone to be stationed in the air outside Silo 18, but other than that there’s nothing else he can do, much less answer Camille’s interrogative questions about the Pact. He just shuts down communications and sulks.
Victor’s had enough. He knows the illusion is collapsing around him. So too, it turns out, is his body; a file on the computer screen in his office implies it’s on account of prolonged metabolic stasis. With nothing else to do and nowhere else to turn, he orders Troy be woken up, sends a file to someone, takes a revolver out of his desk drawer, and takes his own life.
Troy Remembers
Daniel is woken up to solve the problem of Silo 18’s rebellion, and indeed of Victor’s suicide, but it isn’t especially apparent how he can do either. The Safeguard pipe has been capped, and thanks to Juliette’s knowledge of what happened in Silo 17, an “External Safeguard” — which is what Silo 1 has taken to calling massacring Silo inhabitants when they venture out — isn’t going to be possible either.
Luckily, Juliette kind of plays into Daniel’s hands. After speaking to Lukas on the radio, she decides she wants to venture into the Digger Void and check out the door he mentioned, so she takes Shirley, Knox, Camille, and Hank to do exactly that. When they reach the door, the Algorithm — Daniel, obviously — kicks in. He offers Juliette a deal. If she agrees never to attempt to make contact with another Silo, no Safeguard of any kind will be deployed. She accepts, but she’s bluffing. She intends to take the fight directly to Silo 1. And there’s an indication that Daniel can sense she’s not to be trusted. The cat and mouse game has begun.
In an interesting closing detail, though, Daniel opens the file from Victor, which he sent right before his suicide. He doesn’t explain his reasoning much, but he does finally reveal who the woman in his visions is. Her name is Helen Drew, and the name alone is enough to visibly trigger Daniel’s memories of her. Now, he might want to take down Silo 1 just as much as Juliette does.