In episode ten (“Outside”) of AppleTV’s Silo, the show finally comes “clean” with some answers but also leaves us to speculate on what a future season could bring. This is a recap and a review of the episode.
Spoilers to follow!
Silo Finale Recap and Review
The episode starts as Jules, Patrick, and Danny watch the Jane Carmody file again. Jules wants to share the video with everyone, but they worry about the security teams closing in.
They flee, hiding in the trash chute, then climb down to another level.
During the search, Sims finds out Billings went behind his back in going to Jules’ house. He interrogates him, and Billings claims he went there to help find her. Sims doesn’t believe him, flips out briefly, then calmly points out that Billings has the Syndrome.
Danny plugs into a hub and links the screens in the silo to show the file to everyone. Bernard orders the IT team to cover their eyes when the image appears. He takes over the system, initiating shutdown.
Bernard tells everyone to forget what they’ve seen, then figures out that Jules is in the trash chute. Sims orders the cops to throw stuff at her in the hatch (luckily, one of the cops warns her). Unfortunately, Sims suggests they chuck down an air conditioner. To avoid it, Jules lets go and falls into the trash at the bottom.
Having been pulled out of the way just in time, Jules recovers back in Mechnical. Knox enters and admits that he told Judicial where she was. When everyone else leaves, Jules turns to Martha and tells her presumably all she’s discovered.
Upon arriving at Martha’s house with Bernard, Sims begins to scream at Jules but Bernard kicks him out. He then smashes the hard drive and proposes that to prevent rebellion in the silo, Jules needs to admit she said she wanted to go outside and waive her right to a judicial hearing. She says she wants him to tell her what happened to George.
As she’s taken away in shackles, she stares pointedly at the dented fan they repaired earlier in the season.
Marty and Shirley argue over Knox’s decision. After she leaves, Martha gets out and inspects the heat tape Jules had stolen from IT years before.
Martha opens the door to her room and forces herself to take a step outside despite her phobia. She makes her way to the stairs and up to the house of her ex-wife, Carla, in Supply. They talk about the heat tape, how Mechanical’s tape is actually stronger than the rolls up top.
After climbing several flights, Bernard has Jules’ restraints removed. He and Sims take her to the janitor’s closet, which is, in fact, a secret passageway that leads to the IT room. They bring up George’s death on the screens. They zoom in to show him climb up and fall off the bannister to his death as a way to escape what he claimed was torture.
When she’s behind bars, Jules’ dad shows up with dinner for her, a stew that her mom used to make. They truly reconcile, and he asks why she said she wanted to go outside. She starts to tell him the truth but realizes she’s being watched on camera.
Bernard has Lukas to his office again, telling him he won’t be sent out to clean but instead sent to the mines for ten years. I’m not sure which Lukas thinks is worse, to be honest.
Shirley shows up at the cell with snacks for Jules, hinting that there’s something in the box aside from treats. She asks how Jules is, to which Jules replies that she’s okay (likely to avoid crying). Turning away from the camera, she removes the snacks to find a note from Walker. It says, “Have no fear. They’re good in supply.”
Billings tells his wife Sims knows he has the Syndrome and that he’s going to be given an exemption and won’t be fired. This puts him very clearly in their debt and, thus, their pawn yet again.
Jules and Bernard talk about her past. He explains that her parents weren’t supposed to have kids, according to his system. She asks whether she was being watched before being sheriff, and Bernard says it was once she started messing around with the secrets. He tries to argue that doing so has put everyone at risk, comparing his job to her maintaining the generator. He claims he “makes adjustments” within the silo, citizen-wise, to keep chaos at bay. She asks why they can’t go outside, what the door George found is, and why Bernard won’t just tell everyone the truth.
He deflects her questions, pointing out that she’s attracted the largest crowd ever for a cleaning. She says she won’t clean, and he says they always do. He provides her last request, which was Holsten’s badge.
Billings brings the team to put on her suit as Bernard, in his office, looks at the broken hard drive and takes out the intact disk.
Given all the focus on ventilation and the tape used to bind Jules’ suit together, it was so much fun to hear my husband’s theories as this unravelled (given I knew the truth already!). What did you think was going on?
Jules listens to the final rites from Bernard. Her last words are, “I’m not afraid.”
Finally outside, she marvels at the landscape but then notices that the birds in the sky flock exactly the same way as in the Jane tape. She says to herself, “The display is a lie.”
She goes to the window, holds up the wool to the lens, and drops it instead of cleaning. She glares in at the inhabitants, then walks towards the tree, where she collapses. To everyone inside the silo, she appears to be dying.
Instead, she’s tripped. She puts her hand toward a rock, but her hand passes through it. She takes out the badge and places it in the rock, proving it doesn’t exist. Like the windows inside the silo, the visor in her suit also contains a display superimposed over the real landscape! She gets back up, checking the tape on her wrists. It turns out Judicial has been deliberately putting faulty tape on the cleaners, but Martha had swapped it for the good stuff.
She makes it to the top of the hill, and the display falters and turns off. The lush landscape is replaced by dull, lifeless soil. She heads away from the Silo. Everyone inside is completely taken aback. Except for Bernard, who races away, using his No. 18 key to unlock a door to … something or somewhere.
We finally get a scenic shot of a wasteland in this post-apocalyptic series, and it pans out to reveal multiple silos near a dead city.
Overall Thoughts
What a fantastic season. I very much enjoyed how the main twists and plot turns were the same as the books, but the show made deviations. During the midpoint of the season, I didn’t know what was going to happen, as there seemed potential for things to change (unlike book adaptation purists, I enjoy when shows/movies differ from the source material). In the same vein, it was so much fun to see such an impactful scene from the book (Jules’ cleaning) play out on screen.
The characters were a delight. Rebecca Ferguson did an absolutely fantastic job giving Jules both vulnerability and utter badassery, and Tim Robbins was a perfect choice for Bernard. At first, I thought Common was overacting a bit, but as the season went on, I believe this was Sims acting a part (the tough guy), as he’s far less stilted in the moments when he loses his cool and when he’s with his family. The other supporting characters, especially Harriett Walter’s Martha, were endearing and well-balanced to Jules. The show also excelled at pacing, and while it did end on a bit of a cliffhanger, it resolved the main question of the season, leaving us viewers satisfied (but still wanting more).
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