Episode Four (“Truth”) of AppleTV’s Silo gives us more backstory into Juliette and creates an uneasy alliance between two characters. Given the story jumps back and forth in time, I’m going to recap both sections one after the other.
Spoilers to follow!
The episode begins in Juliette’s past, with her brother, Jacob, asphyxiating. His family manages to revive him. Yet, a few years later, Jacob and Jules’ mother have passed away. Jules’ dad asks her to take their stuff to the recycling center, as is the law when someone dies. She heads to the centre and is advised that she can keep one small thing of her brother’s, so she takes a stuffed horse. Upset at having had to do this emotionally brutal task alone, she dives into fixing an office chair at their home. When her dad arrives, she takes her frustration with him to the next level by blaming him for their deaths.
Later, when she’s a little older, we find her packing up. She heads down to Marty in Mechanical, giving her an obviously forged note (who hasn’t tried that when they were a kid?) and asks to shadow her. Instead, Marty sends her to the grittiest job on the Silo: the salvaging team. After working hard, she returns to Marty’s to find her dad waiting. She explains that she’s happy with the distraction from grief that working in Mechanical gives her. Marty tells her this is a permanent decision, and Jules claims she’s good at fixing things and wants to stay. Her dad, though it’s clear it breaks his heart, lets her go.
Back in the present, Jules, on her way to take the sheriff’s job, is told there’s been an accident and heads to the mayor’s room. She finds Marnes going on an impassioned rant to Bernard about how Jahns was poisoned. After he calms Marnes down, Bernard tells Jules he’ll swear her in.
Jules heads to the police station and, in the cafeteria, spies a man sitting and staring at the windows (did anyone else who is a fan of the books know immediately who this was?). Inside the cop shop, Jules tries to get information from her assistant, Sandy (Chipo Chung), who drops some pretty harsh prejudice against Jules for being from the lower levels of the Silo. Jules verbally destroys her and demands George’s file.
Jules wanders her new digs, checking out the path to the Silo door, followed by her apartment. Bernard arrives and points out that Jules’ fan is rattling. She tells him she’ll fix it herself, then switches the topic to the heat tapes he accused her of stealing. He backs down and suggests they move on from it.
Afterward, he signs her in as sheriff, and her first duty is to deal with Marnes, who was beating up a guy and demanding where “he got the poison from.” She takes him aside, and they have a bit of a quid pro quo about why she took the job and his belief that Jahns’ murder is being overlooked.
They make a pact to help one another figure out their mysteries.
Jules heads to recycling to look for any of George’s effects that were thrown away. Marnes, after a pretty dark fake-out shot, is working out with a homemade punching bag when Sims shows up. He explains an altercation with a man named Patrick Kennedy (Rick Gomez), whose wife he had gone to interrogate, only to find she’s dead. Sims tells him to kick Jules out of the job and replace her with Billings, as per Judge Meadows’ preference. Marnes says that Jules will eventually just quit on her own.
Jules heads to the cafeteria and runs into Lucas, the man who had been sitting there earlier. Jules is really awkward with him and takes off as fast as she can. Meanwhile, Marnes, wasted, is overcome by memories of Jahns but is interrupted by Jules and Marty on the radio.
In the final scenes, Marty fixes the video camera, Marnes fights off an attacker, and Jules opens her fan to discover that a washer tied to a string was causing the rattling. She pulls it up to find George’s citizen record tied to it.
Overall Thoughts
While enmeshing us further in the mysteries of the silo, this episode also reveals more details about how the Silo functions. Small details, like how the recycling centre functions off criminal labour, how rare paper is, and the prejudices between levels, help broaden the show’s world-building. The slower panning of the shots also serves to highlight the design style of the silo and how furniture and other facets are arranged to save space. The time this episode took on these aspects made the show even more immersive.
The next episode airs on May 26 on AppleTV+!
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