‘Silo’ Episode 3 Recap: Lights Out

I enjoyed the first two episodes of Silo just fine. I did not expect the third to contain the tensest television sequence I’ve seen since Andor, however. But boy do I love being pleasantly surprised!

Titled “Machines” for reasons which quickly become apparent, Silo episode 3’s centerpiece is, well, the centerpiece of the Silo itself: the massive facility’s correspondingly massive generator, which is slowly but surely headed for total breakdown. In order to head this off, Juliette Nichols and her team of mechanics will have to go inside, figure out what’s set it off balance, and fix it. In order to do that, though, they’ll have to shut the generator down, which means the Silo will be without lights for the first time in its recorded history.

That’s a tall enough order as it is, but there’s a twist. Though the team receives eight hours’ license to work with the generator off, what only they know is that they don’t have eight hours. In order to shut off the generator, they have to shut down its power source, a reservoir of subterranean steam…a reservoir which they can only hold back for half an hour maximum before the whole thing overheats and blows up, likely killing them all and leaving everyone else in darkness forever, or until the backup generator dies and the life support systems shut off, whichever comes first.

What follows plays out like a class demonstration in how to execute a thriller sequence. The mission? Simple: Shut down the generator, fix it, and start it back up. The risks? The steam could blow, the repairs could fail, the workers could die. The stakes? The future of the Silo. That’s all you need to know to enjoy the white-knuckle stuff that follows. Keep it simple, stupid.

What’s more, every individual step within that simple plan is described, depicted, and executed with clarity and verve. The show establishes the major players — Juliette, her boss Knox (Shane McRae), her apprentice Cooper (Matt Gomez Hidaka), and her colleague Shirley (Remmie Milner) — and gives them all easily understood jobs to do — Juliette IDs the problem and then descends into the steam hatch room to cool it down with a fire hose; Cooper reinstalls the repaired rotor blade he and Juliette remove; Shirley monitors the situation in the steam room; Knox watches over the whole thing, communicating messages from one person to the next.

It’s easy to understand where everyone is in relationship to one another in the space of the big machinery chamber. It’s easy to understand the kind of damage they’ll incur if things go wrong — from a fall, from getting hit by machinery, from drowning, from burning. It’s easy to understand how much time they have left, and to feel the tension mount along with them as that time ticks away faster than they’d anticipated. And finally, it’s easy to feel the same relief and triumph they do when they pull it all off just in the nick of time. 

Meanwhile, the recognizable, analog, industrial nature of all the machinery — it’s all blades and bolts and pipes and valves and big steel plates — only helps us intuit exactly what could go wrong and how bad going wrong would be. This goes double or triple for Juliette, whose fear of drowning (presumably that’s how her mom and/or brother died) has already been established; Rebecca Ferguson’s guttural shrieks of terror as the water rises around her in the steam hatch chamber are convincing and effective.

Seriously, from top to bottom, it’s crackerjack genre filmmaking. It’s also a marked contrast from the main-character switcheroos that characterized the first two episodes. This one’s based on action, and the action is damn good.

Which is not to say that’s all this ep has on its mind. Most notably, it more firmly establishes the entire supporting cast. Down on the machine level, you’ve got Knox, Shirley, Cooper, the kind working stiff Deputy Hank (Billy Postlethwaite), and the intellectually curious wise-woman repair room shut-in Martha (Harriet Walter). On the middle level, there’s Sims (Common), a smooth-talking Judicial goon who’s also a caring (single?) father, and Dr. Pete Nichols (Iain Glen), Juliette’s semi-estranged ob/gyn father. (Why she descended from “The Mids” to Mechanical is as yet unknown.) 

And among the so-called “Up-Toppers,” there’s Bernard (Tim Robbins), the soft-spoken and menacing head of the IT department; Sandy (Chip Chung), a receptionist in the sheriff’s office who’s among the many people who notice the sensor window glitching out and accidentally showing a real picture of the outside world for a split second when the power switches off; Deputy Marnes, on his way to retirement; and Marnes’s newfound love interest, the gorgeous Mayor Ruth Jahns (Geraldine James) — last seen suddenly spasming and coughing up blood in the sheriff’s department restroom, likely the victim of an assassination attempt, to Marnes’s horror. 

Granted, there are times when the episode’s simplicity borders on the simplistic. Holston carving some kind of message into the back of his badge in order to persuade Juliette to take the sheriff job? You’d have to turn the generator off and go lights out not to see that one coming from a mile away. Ditto Mayor Jahns being in deep trouble the moment she paused from bringing Deputy Marnes back to her place to use the restroom. And we’ll see if I’m right, but I’d bet a reasonable amount of money that Bernard’s sinister Lawful Evil affect is a cover for his involvement in, perhaps even leadership of, a current-day rebellion. 

If that stuff takes you out of the story, well, I get it. As I mentioned in my review of the premiere, this isn’t Raised by Wolves, or Dark, or (despite what I said earlier) Andor, or if you wanna take things back further, Battlestar Galactica or even Lost. It’s not innovating, it’s just executing. The thing is, it’s executing well. Innovation is great, but a pleasant hour of legit thrills and chills is pretty good, too.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.