While it was nice to mostly stay put in Silo 18 last week and watch Knox and Shirley storm up the staircase with the Down Deepers to commandeer ten extra floors (plus a food farm!) to prevent being starved out and captured for Meadows’ murder, we missed our favorite platonic post-apocalyptic couple in Silo 17, Juliette and Solo.
Sure, we did visit them for a minute or two to set up “Silo“‘s new chapter titled, “The Dive,” which will have anyone with a morbid fear of deep water running back to watch Frosty the Snowman cartoons before Father Time heralds in the new year.
But first, across the pitted landscape in Silo 18, Bernard pulls back the wizard’s curtain and allows his new shadow, Lukas Kyle, to enter the sacred vault room that’s the gateway to The Legacy. It’s a magnificent repository of cultural artifacts and record of known human history all housed in an elaborate library like a posh European museum. In addition to fine art paintings, leather-bound books, music recordings, glass-domed inventions, photographs, and a model of the solar system, the entire collection is stored digitally and linked to an advanced AI interface.
Key questions are answered here as Bernard explains what The Legacy is and what it contains. He tells Lukas that Silo 18 was built 352 years ago, but beyond that no information is available. It’s implied that Salvador Quinn’s complex letter code contains a secret potentially far more dangerous than a routine silo rebellion, and that it must be unravelled at any cost using the AI.
In attempting to decipher the code in Quinn’s mystery letter, Lukas guesses that it’s a numeric cipher and that a book was used to craft it. Each number corresponds to the appearance of a word on a specific page of a specific book. There were no matches in any of the books in The Legacy and so the book must have been an illegal relic located in the silo somewhere still. A book that’s more than 140 years old!
We now realize that Solo lived inside Silo 17’s own self-contained The Legacy vault, which explains his detailed knowledge of things like trapeze artists, circus animals, and “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.”
Down below in Mechanical, Knox and Shirley create a gunpowder-launched propaganda bomb that they fire up to the Up Toppers containing strips of paper asking for answers about what happened to Juliette and how Judge Meadows really died. Power is immediately shut down except for in IT, causing more division and distrust between Bernard and the citizens.
Bernard is feeling the pressure and starts putting the squeeze on Walker using Carla as leverage, not yet knowing Walker’s intimate relationship with the incarcerated Supply Manager. Bernard visits poor Carla in Judicial Seclusion to make a deal about how much gunpowder the Down Deepers are in possession of. She refuses until she’s told what happened to Knox, Shirley, and Walker but Bernard refuses. Later, Rick Amundsen shows Bernard video evidence that Walker and Carla still have a deep emotional bond, one that Bernard definitely intends to exploit.
In Silo 17, Juliette realizes that Solo is not going to return her survival suit and helmet until she helps him flip the power switch on the ground water pump that will halt the silo flooding. It won’t be easy since the switch is eight levels underwater. She’s not happy about being coerced but has no choice, so they rig a breathing tube apparatus for her tied to an escape line and bell for her to be reeled back in “like a fish.” But she must come up slow due to the risk of The Bends, a lethal decompression sickness where nitrogen bubbles form in the body’s tissues after being at depth. Solo explains that if she does exhibit symptoms, she can go back underwater at least 20 feet down until the symptoms dissipate. (Seems that info might come in handy later!)
Juliette takes the plunge and gets lowered down into the murky water wearing special weighted boots and glass goggles. The spectacular set design here is a spooky submerged nightmare of shifting shadows and decay frozen in time. Like exploring a hellish version of the infamous Titanic disaster, Juliette locates the pump switch and plugs the power cord in that activates the silo-saving pump.
Mission complete? Not quite! Juliette’s return rope gets cut and her air supply abruptly stops, requiring her to ascend fast… too fast. She recalls Solo’s description of swimming and employs that method of propulsion to reach the surface. When she pops up gasping, Solo is gone. She hustles up the stairs to find him but only discovers a hatchet that severed her return rope and a trail of fresh blood. From a balcony one level up, a shadowy figure is watching her!
Eagle-eyed fans with exceptional recall might remember that this is the second time Juliette’s swim rope was cut, as someone sliced it in this season’s first episode when she went into the water. Does Solo know who this person or people are that are trying to kill Julia? Probably, since he’s still reluctant to reveal his identity and knows a lot about working and breathing underwater, which also indicates that he’s been emotionally manipulating Juliette into taking the big plunge for him.
And don’t forget all those IT vault combination codes written on the classroom blackboard, showing that Solo was attempting to guess the correct sequence at some previous time, something the real IT’s shadow would have already known by heart. Remember how flustered he became when he couldn’t remember it when trying to get back inside earlier in the season?
The rebellion is growing. Bernard is flailing. Solo is not who he says he is. Quinn’s letter probably holds a horrid secret about how humanity became doomed. And Juliette just wants to get back to Silo 18 to prevent another disaster like Silo 17.
Series creator and showrunner Graham Yost (“Speed,” “Justified,” “Band of Brothers”) has really put his foot on the narrative gas in this seventh episode, confidently raising the stakes and revelations that will lead to the final three installments of this engrossing sophomore season. And with the recent news that AppleTV+ has ordered up two more seasons, Yost and his ace team will be able to do service to Hugh Howey’s source novels and finish up Juliette’s saga properly.