Following the stunning final scene of Season 2 of Silo, the third season has diverged into two timelines: one with Juliette (Rebecca Ferguson) and company in Silo 18 fighting for their survival, and another unfolding before the silo program began.
The season’s penultimate episode delivered some big revelations: The all-knowing Algorithm program that ensures the survival of the silo isn’t actually a digital algorithm, but a person watching from Silo 1, deciding everyone’s fates. Before he dies in Episode 9, Bernard (Tim Robbins) offers some hope: “A person can be defeated.” Meanwhile, in the past timeline, Daniel (Ashley Zukerman) and Helen (Jessica Henwick) discover the origins of the silos, only for a shocking nuclear explosion to separate them.
That’s a hell of a way to end an episode, and the Season 3 finale of Silo, “Troy,” brings us straight into Silo 1, where those running the system live, far in the future. How far, exactly? “Three hundred and fifty years,” says series creator Graham Yost. “It’s revealed in Episode 9 that the silos were part of a 500-year plan. And they're 350 years into that.”
A memory suppression system
Inside Silo 1, we see Daniel waking from cryo-sleep. Except he’s no longer called Daniel: He is now Troy. And while Troy looks physically the same as Daniel, he’s completely changed. That’s made crystal clear when he settles into his shift and has to deal with the outbreak in Silo 17, the same silo Juliette ventured to in Season 2. Troy, without hesitation, delivers a ruthless decision to execute every single person—man, woman, and child—who left the silo. A top priority of Silo 1 is to prevent silos from discovering that any other silos exist. His decision to unleash drone warfare is met with disapproval by drone pilot Susan, who is actually Daniel’s sister Charlotte (Jessica Brown Findlay). Neither of them recognizes one another from the past. “He’s completely bloodless about it. Totally unemotional. It’s just his job,” says Yost. (Yost does suggest that Charlotte’s negative reaction to Troy’s behavior is worth our attention, though he won’t say why).
That lack of emotion bears no resemblance to the past Daniel. It turns out there’s a system designed to keep memories suppressed. Yost divulges some key details behind this Silo 1 initiative. “Your skill set, your skill knowledge, your expertise stays with you, and so that's why Daniel, as an engineer, is someone who can solve problems. There is an effort to wipe and control memory, so people don't know who they were. But they know who they became in the project.” Yost says we’ll discover more about specifics next season.
It’s precisely the same idea the Algorithm pushed Camille to implement in Silo 18, a major plot point of Season 3. If she had done it, the silo would have continued to function, but there would have been huge problems. “People would forget they had kids and not feed them, and people would forget they were married to each other,” says Yost. The memory suppression plotline is influenced by a book by British neurologist Oliver Sacks. “In one of his books, a guy has extraordinary short-term memory loss. He’ll say ‘Hello, nice to meet you’ every 15 seconds or so. But if he sits down at the piano, he can play an entire concerto. So there's something about that persistence of memory; that part of his brain keeps going. We modeled it on that.”
The person behind the Algorithm
We also discover that Daniel reports to Victor (Matt Craven), whom audiences first met as Charlotte’s doctor at the beginning of the season and who is one of the leading minds behind the silo program. Further, we see that Victor is actually the voice behind the almighty Algorithm. Victor seems deeply disturbed by Troy’s willingness to massacre the people of silo. Interestingly, he does not have a different name from the one he had before—and neither does the silo director, Senator Rosalind Thurman (Laura Innes). They have maintained their identities, and unlike Daniel/Troy, they know everything that’s happened in the last 350 years. “Power dictates who is in power, and that power gets to retain memory. But there’s a burden in retaining memory,” Yost says.
Troy comes to Victor with a request. He’s pestered by visions of a woman, who we know is Helen. These flashbacks play on his mind, and he hopes that Victor can help him find out who she is. “The whole purpose and design of the project is to free us from the past,” Victor tells Troy, gently brushing off his request. Victor makes a note of it before Troy goes back to cryo-sleep until his next shift. It’s revealed that Troy has been asking Victor for information about Helen ever since he became part of the silo over 300 years ago, as we see a folder full of the times he’s asked about her.
With Troy back in cryo-sleep, some time later, Victor has a new problem to deal with: the uprising in Silo 18. Victor has put the dreaded safeguard in motion, a fail-safe created by the silo founders to annihilate an entire silo’s population if rebellion or a discovery of knowledge threatens the entirety of the silo system. Camille (Alexandria Riley), Silo 18’s head of IT, now armed with the knowledge that the Algorithm is human, manages to outsmart it, providing a distraction to stop the safeguard by capping the concealed pipe that would flood the silo with lethal poison gas.
It’s a monumental success for Silo 18, and a crushing blow for Silo 1, one that could threaten to destroy the entire system and everything that’s been building for over 300 years. And yet, Victor’s face does not register the disappointment we might expect. “He felt relieved that Silo 18 didn’t die,” says Yost.
It’s a surprise, but given what follows, it makes plenty of sense. Victor ends up taking his own life. “We never land on exactly why he killed himself, but there are a lot of different reasons, says Yost. “It's a constellation, more than one trigger. But I think that for him, a big trigger was seeing Daniel, this guy that he quite liked, do this horrific thing. It's like, ‘Is that what we are? Is that what we've done?’ I think when he realized he was actually happy that 18 survived, he knew he wasn't on board with this anymore.”
Juliette’s plan for Silo 1
Thirty-five years later, Troy is awoken from cryo-sleep again, and learns that Victor is no longer alive. Troy is to take over as the Algorithm, and faces off against Juliette, who’s approached the giant door at the bottom of the Silo 18. In Silo 18, that door is referred to as “the forward vault,” suggesting that the door is actually a path to another silo. This means that the massacre of Silo 17 happened approximately 35 years before we met Juliette for the first time in Silo Season 1.
As Juliette and friends approach the door, the Algorithm (a.k.a. Troy) communicates with them. They strike a deal. If Juliette agrees to stop investigating, Silo 1 won’t attempt any further safeguarding, leaving them in peace. Juliette accepts the offer, but she doesn’t mean it. Troy threatened to kill everyone in the silo should Juliette not agree, and she believes it’s only a matter of time before they try and kill everyone again.
Juliette has the genesis of a plan. “They’re expecting us to defend ourselves, which means they won’t be preparing to defend against us. If we can get to them first, we can protect everyone. We need to take out Silo 1” she declares.
Before the season ends, Troy finds an encrypted message from Victor. The message threatens to undo 350 years of memory wiping: “Her name is Helen Drew,” Victor reveals to Troy. We close in on Troy’s face as tears fall down his cheeks as he says Helen’s name out loud, and the episode cuts to black.
Hints for what’s to come in Season 4
“The big things we wanted to set up at the end of the season were Juliette saying we have to take down Silo 1, and Daniel saying Helen’s name,” says Yost. These events seem to set up a Season 4 battle between Troy and Juliette, one that could topple the entire silo system. But Troy’s realization seems to suggest that he may in fact revert to Daniel, which could mean that he will instead begin to work against Silo 1, opening a possibility of teaming up with Juliette to take the silos down for good.
Yost, of course, will not reveal if this, or anything like it, will happen in Season 4, the final season of Silo, currently scheduled for sometime next summer. But there is one thing Yost will say about the upcoming struggle between Silo 1 and Silo 18:
“This is war.”
