‘Silo’ Episode 9 Recap: Good Cop/Bad Cop

Last week, right here in this safe space for Silo Squad, I singled out the praiseworthy performances of Rebecca Ferguson, Iain Glen, and Tim Robbins — the show’s perpetually on-edge protagonist, the quietly broken man responsible for much of her pain, and the mastermind antagonist who mostly acts like the IT guy he is at heart. But this Silo is supported by more actors than those. This week’s episode (“The Getaway”) turns the spotlight on two other core characters and the talented performers behind them, for results that are as unpretentiously compelling as ever.

Let’s first focus on the man who appeared to be the show’s big bad before Bernard revealed his true nature: Sims, the Judicial commandant played by Common. Actually, Sims is just “Rob” to his friends and family, who from his boss Bernard to his wife Camille (Alexandria Wiley) appear to view him with legitimate love and respect. Of course, Bernard’s willing to look past all that when he reprimands Rob for sending unauthorized guards to escort Camille and their son to his apartment, but be that as it may: The point is that this jackbooted thug is just some guy, a guy with a wife and a kid and a tiny apartment and dreams beyond his station. Kind of like literally everyone else in the Silo, in other words.

It’s up to Common to pull off this contrast, and he does so using the same tools that make him intimidating. Take his black-leather-jacket-and-turtleneck wardrobe, for example. On one hand, it’s secret-police chic. On the other, the cut and styling are reminiscent of the 1970s-indebted clothing often worn by musicians who emerged from the same conscious-rap/neo-soul circles Common himself did as a hip-hop artist back in the day. Scary but sexy, that’s our Sims.

Common’s made two separate careers out of using his voice, and that helps him here too. Like George Clooney, he’s blessed with pipes that make him sound handsome as well as look it, and that mellifluous baritone makes him an attractive figure as well as a convincingly caring parent and spouse. But any guy who can speak that softly and still sound that commanding is a perfect villain from an aural perspective, and that’s a big part of what makes him believable as a guy who will stop at nothing to acquire his target, runaway Sheriff Juliette Nichols.

Sims’s opposite number is Billings, the by-the-book sheriff’s deputy who seems not to have an intimidating bone in his body. Actor Chinaza Uche is following in the footsteps of quiet characters like Noah Emmerich’s Stan Beeman on The Americans or Michael Mando’s Nacho Varga on Better Call Saul, using calm and restraint to force the viewer to lean in when he’s on screen, and to pull back impressed when he leaves. You can see how his mild affect is a coping mechanism designed in part to keep him from standing out and thus drawing attention to the Syndrome, the debilitating nerve condition that by rights and by law ought to keep him from physically demanding jobs like sheriff’s deputy. 

You can also see how it leads everyone (except his wife Kathleen, played by Caitlin Zoz) to underestimate him. Juliette always thought he was a by-the-book pain in the ass. Sims thinks he’s someone who can be easily intimidated into falling in line. In actuality, I think, Billings’s need to protect his own secret at all times has led him to develop the habit of introspected individual thought; in other words, he’s more unorthodox than he looks, as his decision to save a page from the verboten picture book Juliette left behind for him before burning the rest makes clear. Uche gives Billings a sense of indignant dignity, developed over years of being thought of as less than he is, that makes sense whether he’s doubling down on his duties to prove his worth or slowly being won over to Juliette’s righteous cause.

And where is Juliette this whole time? After surviving her plummet over the railing — hilariously, she falls a grand total of one flight of stairs — she breaks into Sims’s apartment, where she holds his wife prisoner and uses his computer clearance to crack open that forbidden hard drive. So forbidden, in fact, that Bernard has a special light-up doodad with its serial number, “18,” emblazoned on it, presumably to warn him if this artifact is in use someplace. That’s how damaging its information is.

Juliette gets little further than an introductory “video” — I put it in quotes because she’s never heard the term before, much less watched one — from her late boyfriend George, who admits that he used her but also admits he legitimately fell in love with her too. She has to cut things short when Camille escapes from her handcuffs. But the woman lets her leave not despite having worked as a Judicial raider herself, but because of it: She knows just how trigger-happy those cops can get, and doesn’t want them coming into her home guns blazing, putting the life of her and Rob’s child at risk. 

Juliette relocates to the home of Patrick (Rick Gomez), the black marketeer who factored into earlier episodes as a suspect in the murders that led to all this. With the help of Danny (Will Merrick), another member of Patrick’s smuggling ring, Rebecca goes back into the hard drive while bogus signals send Judicial on a wild goose chase around the Silo. (Bernard bets he’s better than whoever’s responsible for the ruse; we’ll see if he’s right.) It’s then that they find the key file: a video recording that shows the outside world as the verdant place it really is. Then, boom, the episode’s over. As always, and to its great credit, Silo says what it has to say and then shuts the hell up.

But it doesn’t do so without moments of humanizing humor, as per usual. “How am I supposed to know where to start?” Danny asks Juliette of the hard drive, before she points him to a folder labeled “START HERE.” “…yeah, that’s actually very helpful,” he replies, comically understating the case. Earlier, when a Judicial underling insists to Bernard that serial numbers like the one on the hard drive marked “18” are longer than two numbers, he cattily replies that “This has two: a one, followed by an eight, otherwise known as 18.” I even like the contrast in how the Sims’ kid sees his parents present in the nameplates he’s made for them: his father’s reads ROBERT SIMS, while his mother’s simply says MOMMY. The whole thing smacks of gender!

Subtle chuckles or no, we’re nearly at the end of the road for Silo’s first season. So there’s only one hour or so to go before one of the year’s best TV viewing experiences goes out, for now anyway. (The show was recently greenlit for a second season, luckily!)I’ve said it before, but I find myself keenly looking forward to each week’s new episode, as the show’s simple design helps it drill ever deeper into its central mystery and into the characters trying either to solve or preserve it. Silo is such a brisk, fun watch, and I hope to watch it until the last file is decrypted.

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.