Silo: The Safeguard   Show Only 
January 10, 2025 11:13 PM - Season 2, Episode 9 - Subscribe

Billings' faith is shaken. Lukas heads to the down deep. Knox identifies the traitor. Juliette uncovers the truth about Solo's past.

Wikipedia summary:

Juliette is confronted by Audrey, leader of five young survivors, who commands that Juliette open the vault for them so they can access the food. Solo is alive, but Audrey wants to kill him for the death of their parents and the Silo. Juliette realizes that Solo was a child at the time of the rebellion, and Solo confesses that he killed the group's parents out of self-defense when they broke into the vault. At Juliette's urging, Solo and the group make peace, and Solo allows everyone into the vault. In Silo 18, Lukas learns that there are 50 other Silos and, following Quinn's letter, travels to the lower levels. Lukas finds the tunnel underneath the Silo, where at a door a computer warns him not to tell anyone what he has seen, or they will initiate "the safeguard". Billings meets Sims to give him the picturebook page, which makes Camille and Sims consider joining the rebellion. Patrick tells Kathleen his suspicion that the Silo's display is a lie. Bernard blames the rebels' actions on Billings, but not all the top level deputies believe him. Knox confronts Walker and tells her a plan to use the rest of the gunpowder.
posted by tjgrathwell (19 comments total) 1 user marked this as a favorite
 
The epiphany (Solo) killed me.
posted by porpoise at 1:28 AM on January 11


The pace of this season has been pretty uneven. The Juliette/Solo stuff has been kind of glacial, but if you just had the rebellion stuff just as its own separate show it would feel pretty great. It's nice to have them finally meshed together, and this episode really ticked every box for me.

The production design in this show is so good. The way they decorated Solo's vault was fantastic. You really feel all of those decades he spent alone as a bored kid trying to keep himself occupied. And all of the changes they make to various pieces of the different silos, all the underwater stuff was super convincing, like they just built and flooded 100 stories. Amazing job. The team 100% deserves whatever Emmy is headed their way.

Do we think that the water from the first silo got moved over to Solo's silo? Is the pump that she fixed going to fill up and block that tunnel?
posted by ssmith at 6:08 AM on January 11 [1 favorite]


Metafilter’s own Adam Savage does a walk through of the classroom set with the set decorators. Incredible amount of detail and craft was put into this set, sad that a lot of it is hidden in shadow.
posted by nathan_teske at 8:38 AM on January 11 [2 favorites]


Oh also, under bonus content on AplleTV, there’s a tour of Solo’s vault with Steve Zahn. He’s half in character, it’s delightful
posted by nathan_teske at 8:40 AM on January 11 [3 favorites]


So, is the safeguard "so, we'll dump the poison gas into the silo so you uppity fuckers don't manage to storm the control silo", y'think? I mean, whatever it was was enough to make Meadows give up on IT and become a shut-in alcoholic judge in response.

I was sort of annoyed at the bloodthirsty feral woman, like ok fine Solo killed your parents but this new person here wasn't even here, so stop threatening to kill everybody every 5 minutes? Very flat characterization.

And I coulda swore that Juliet fell into the water in her silo at some point in the first season and it was deep enough to actually fall into. Or was that a dream or maybe some other "bottom" part of the silo?
posted by Kyol at 5:39 PM on January 11


And I coulda swore that Juliet fell into the water in her silo at some point in the first season and it was deep enough to actually fall into. Or was that a dream or maybe some other "bottom" part of the silo?

Jules dropped her flashlight into the water and got spooked. Are you possibly thinking of the generator repair scene where she's cooling the door with a firehose?
posted by nathan_teske at 6:58 PM on January 11 [1 favorite]


Solo's childhood experience was kind of tipped off for us viewers from that first episode, but Jules had to work for it. Sorry Jules.

The aggressive passion that Katniss Audrey had for killing Juliette was kind of wild. I could sort of understand it from the perspective of after they saw her working with Solo, who they blamed for their parents' death, but not before then. We can only speculate that it was driven by experiences of life in a failed silo prior to that time, when we can at least clearly appreciate resources were running low. Then there's Rick, "Uh, maybe don't kill her?" about three different times. The flashbacks of the survivors watching Juliette were more interesting to me from the perspective, "I guess they had another camera at that POV spot filming the same time, or they must have re-shot that scene again while shooting the original with a camera up there or over here." In a way, it almost felt like Audrey and Company were Wiley Coyote and Juliette was the Roadrunner with the repetition of attempts.

The resolution for Solo, sharing his own story, and then also, the softening up when he learned there was a baby, was kind of nice in its own way.

I third/fourth? agree that the set design for the vault and Legacy area were fantastic. I get making Silo 17 dark, but I guess because they already shot Silo 18 as kind of dark to begin with, they had to go even darker. That's another production aspect I wondered a lot about this season, did they just shoot the two Silo storylines back to back, redressing the sets from one to the other, or did they shoot them simultaneously and build two silo sets?

My assumption is that Knox figured out the leak was Walker and was basically sharing with her by way of analogy he knew and that he had a plan to manipulate the situation to their advantage?

Another question is why didn't Lukas tell Shirley about the other silo? Was this a plot-driven omission? Are they waiting for Juliette to come charging back to share that information instead?

I loved Peter's retort to Sims, "I didn't cross the line, the line moved."
posted by Atreides at 7:41 AM on January 13


Then there's Rick, "Uh, maybe don't kill her?" about three different times.

Yeah, I was saying to my wife that on the one hand "hey, I'm not cool with killing a perfect stranger the minute we see them" is a thing, on the other hand, in a small group with someone already half cast out as an Eater, do you really want to rock the boat with the mother of your children and someone you can't really get away from? Eccch, I get the dynamic, even if I don't like it.

I hadn't particularly noticed this season being dark, but the OLED screen we have does so well in the winter when the sun goes down at like 3 in the dang afternoon, so I only usually notice when the subtitles get to be to overwhelming that they sear our eyes, and the really dark scenes were pretty quiet too.
posted by Kyol at 8:37 AM on January 13 [1 favorite]


Another question is why didn't Lukas tell Shirley about the other silo? Was this a plot-driven omission? Are they waiting for Juliette to come charging back to share that information instead?

Lukas is likely very highly aware that revealing the existence of other Silos would cause a violent rebellion and the death of the silo. He is decoding the message and he’s obviously curious, but he’s also doing it for Bernard as part of his job as shadow. Who knows about the other silos in Silo 18? Bernard knows, Lukas knows. Among the living, that’s it. It’s very closely guarded information, so there’s 10,000 people in 18 who think they’re the only silo and 2 that know otherwise. Lukas isn’t handing that information out without a VERY good reason.
posted by azpenguin at 5:25 PM on January 13 [3 favorites]


Something else to remember with all these characters is that it's only been about a month to six weeks since Sheriff Holston cleaned. Lukas went from sketching the stars in the cafeteria to being condemned to the mines to the second most powerful person in the silo in the span of a few weeks. He just learned that there's another 500,000 people alive, that his Silo isn't alone, and that his crush might still be alive. And now... he's having a conversation with a voice that might as well be god.
posted by nathan_teske at 6:24 AM on January 14 [6 favorites]




When we think about the voice being essentially “god” to Lucas, the show did establish that AI exists via Bernard and Lucas entering their vault. I have only read half of the first book, but I’m wondering now if we’ve got a Matrix sort of thing going on with AI put people away just in case/to control and nuked the rest of the world.

Then Information Technology become the caretakers of the gods since they’re naturally acolytes of technology.

Thematically, it’s a bingo for me. The precise nature of what the voice said in the tunnel also seemed like a computer to me.

For the bloodthirsty GoT wildling lady knock off (I just keep seeing a younger version of that character… Ygritte? I forget her name.)… at first I wondered if she didn’t want to share the only potential young dude with anyone else. Guess it was just plain old I want to murder people cause I’m mad about my parents death. Very Batman, sure sure.
posted by OnTheLastCastle at 1:08 PM on January 15 [1 favorite]


I also found the characterisation of bow girl a bit annoying. Alongside her abusive naming of another character, I don’t really feel like I can care about her - an abusive murderous bully isn’t somebody I can stan.

I’m also finding Walker’s character development pretty weak. For a character that gave no fucks, she’s suddenly let herself get boxed in really quickly without fighting back.
posted by The River Ivel at 3:10 AM on January 16


I get it from the perspective of her love for (ah, what's her name?), she was finally reunited with her former partner, a connection was reforged, and then pulled away at the last second. Throw in the guilt that she was partly responsible for her partner being in one of the worse places in the Silo (I guess other than the mines?), and you can see how Bernard got her in that box. I do kind of agree, it would have felt more in character if there was some evidence she was immediately turning around and working to figure out how to get her partner and herself out of the box. We didn't get that and it had to be Knox strolling in to appear to do so.
posted by Atreides at 6:58 AM on January 16


Walker instantly flipping is bad writing. This season has not been nearly as strong on characterization, these are paper thin cut outs in service of a hasty plot right now… which is a real bummer. Season 1 actually cooked and was a tight mystery mostly.

Here the world is growing flimsier with how it’s contrived (remember when going up and down the levels was a huge deal? Now some characters are basically teleporting.) … and the pace of the action/characters running parallel and when they intersect. It’s been a bad season overall IMO.

I hope they can recover for the final two seasons.
posted by OnTheLastCastle at 7:56 AM on January 16


I’ve been binging and yeah it’s been ok. This show is not good enough for me to wait week to week, so I picked the perfect time to start watching as the season is almost done!

(My significant other and I have a running joke, how many episodes does it take before it’s just factions fighting factions? I honestly have no interest in the war between the top and the bottom. Seen it in a million shows already. I want to see how this leads to people thinking it’s safe outside or exploring the mysteries of the silos, but no, it’s always humans fighting humans with some other stuff going on the in background.
posted by LizBoBiz at 1:48 AM on January 17


My pent-up questions because I binge watched and lost track of what showed up in which recent episode:

Why didn't Walker put a sign up on her door before she turned her camera back on, warning people that she was being filmed? (Or maybe she did and that will be revealed!)

Had there been anything at all earlier to hint that Walker and Carla were exes? I feel like they suddenly tossed that into the story a few episodes ago.

The computers are how old?

What is the economic system? That's not a complaint about the show, that's me being curious. Like, did we see how the cafeteria works? Do people pay? Is there money? They have classes, but is there cash?

How much cleaning fabric do they go through? They seem to be making huge amounts of it.

Why does everyone have such a lack of curiosity? Is there still something in their water supply?

Why are there still regional accents, not tied to their floors?
posted by The corpse in the library at 4:55 PM on January 17 [2 favorites]


Mod note: One comment and a response to it removed for seemingly revealing a spoiler. If this isn't the case, please contact the mods and let us know.

Another removed comment temporarily removed for revealing book spoilers. posted by azpenguin, I'm reaching out to you via MeFiMail to see if we can edit out a spoiler and repost the comment.

Finally, people this is a show only thread. Please don't mention or hint at anything from the books, as it can spoil things for others.. Some folks really just want to experience the story as it unfolds and don't want a hint of what happen in the future, so please, just don't mention the books, thank you.
posted by Brandon Blatcher (staff) at 6:29 PM on January 21 [1 favorite]


Still catching up. After the last episode I complained about the structure of Juliette being alone so much. I felt vindicated by this episode, it's so much more interesting with other people for her to interact with! Particularly the younger Eater girl.

The presence of a baby with the feral kids sure implies a grim reality.
posted by Nelson at 11:48 AM on February 7


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