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You can feel it in the air, not just the advent of the fresh new year, but the narrative momentum building towards a turbulent climax in Apple TV+’s “Silo” Season 2 as we entered this eighth episode Friday night titled, “The Book of Quinn.”
Last week’s chapter called “The Dive” found Juliette resurfacing from successfully starting the ground water pump to find Solo missing and a trail of blood and hatchet providing ominous clues to his disappearance. Lukas Kyle is inching closer to decoding Salvador Quinn’s secret letter, while Bernard is quickly losing supporters with the rebellion gaining serious steam.
In this interesting “Silo” installment, medical supplies and general living materials are running low for the Down Deepers, causing Knox, Shirley, Teddy, and Dr. Nichols to organize a covert mission to bust into a supply room above to steal the necessary items. But they’re ambushed by Rick Amundsen and his armed Raiders since Walker tipped them off after she made a dirty deal with Bernard to be a snitch in exchange for keeping her incarcerated Carla safe.
Sheriff Billings is somewhat lost in who to trust and what to follow. The Pact is the immovable law to him. There’s a beautiful moment between Billings and his wife where he shows her the page with colorful photos of the outside world that they’ve never known, yet both feel the sad loss of this paradise nevertheless.
Across the wasteland in Silo 17, Juliette is puzzled by Solo’s absence and begins suffering from effects from The Bends as she rose too fast and painful nitrogen bubbles are now forming in her body tissues. She recalls Solo’s warning and how returning to the water for a spell can alleviate the decompression sickness. Dropping back deep underwater with an air hose, she hovers in the watery abyss until her symptoms fade, but must head back up top when her oxygen stops again where she finds a masked assailant. The mystery attacker warns her off, then someone offscreen fires an arrow into Juliette’s shoulder. She grapples with the aggressor and removes their mask to reveal a teenage boy who’s joined by two other teenagers.
Who is this trio of hostile persons who’ve apparently been living in Silo 17 unbeknownst to Solo? They seem to be too young to have been children when the tragic rebellion occurred three decades earlier, so they must have come from an adjacent silo. And are they tribe-like nomads wandering from silo to silo, somehow immune to the toxic air of the barren outer world?
Back in Silo 18, Lukas Kyle is hunting for a contraband book that can help him decode Quinn’s letter, so he starts with a descendant of Salvador Quinn’s named Terrance Pembroke. Trying to play the part of the IT shadow tough guy in his interrogation, Pembroke easily sees through the ruse. The book is later discovered to be Quinn’s copy of The Founder’s rule book, The Pact, that was kept by Judge Meadow after trading with the family for it. It was established that the word cypher was on page 77, which leads him to page 99, where Lukas cracks the letter’s first sentence: “If you’ve gotten this far then you already know the game is rigged.”
It’s explained earlier by Bernard that it was Quinn who was the main orchestrator of the Great Cleanse of all the books and information regarding the past and the outside world to bring about a more stable silo environment and cut down on inevitable rebellions that sprouted up every 20 years or so. As the former Head of IT, he devised a plan to drug the drinking water with memory-erasing chemicals to block off any connection to previous times. Quinn had been branded a villain, but really he was a sort of hero that did what had to be done for preservation’s sake.
But what’s meant by Quinn alluding to silo life all being a rigged game? Could this be a reference to the Founders’ true intentions for building the network of silos centuries before? Is there a “man behind the curtain” lurking somewhere?
With just two more episodes remaining in this second season, we’re rising to a crescendo where a full blown riot might erupt in Silo 18. Lukas will undoubtedly decode more of Quinn’s letter, and since Solo is gone somewhere for the immediate future, Juliette won’t get her suit back that he hid but she might gain access to the vault where she might be able to send messages home if she can make new friends.
“Silo” airs Fridays on Apple TV+, with the season finale arriving Jan. 17.