‘Silo’ Season 2 Episode 8 Recap: “The Book Of Quinn”

A century and a half ago, Silo leader Salvador Quinn faced a dilemma. A rebellion had risen up, as such rebellions did almost like clockwork every twenty years or so. Each rebellion risks a breach of the airlock and the death of the Silo’s 10,000 residents. And each rebellion is built on, and builds from, the knowledge of all the rebellions before it. There’s only so many times this can happen before a failsafe fails, the door is opened, and death comes for everyone.

So, Salvador Quinn, hero, took one for the team. He confiscated all of the Silo’s books and burned them, wiping all of its data servers too. He blamed the destruction on the rebels, and the blame stuck, although his name also became mud for his perceived stupidity in allowing all this to happen on his watch. And all the while, memory-suppressing drugs were slowly introduced into the Silo’s water supply. After a period of “weeks, months, years” as Mayor Bernard Holland puts it to his shadow, Lukas Kyle, the truth about the rebellion and all that had come before it was forgotten.

Salvador Quinn saved the Silo, then took the rap for its near destruction. And with all records of the past either destroyed or concentrated in the hands of IT’s most trusted servants, there was no possibility of remembering things any other way. That’s the story Bernard tells Lukas, and it’s the truth, so far as it goes.

But Salvador seems to have been unhappy with how things worked out. Otherwise he’d never have stuck a cipher in that hard drive Juliette recovered last season. Otherwise he’d never have based the code on a page from his personal copy of the Pact, which was passed down from generation to generation in secret until Judge Meadows traded his family for it years ago. (Presumably this is the genesis of her falling-out with Bernard and her resignation as his shadow.) Otherwise he’d never have made this the first line of his cracked code: “If you’ve gotten this far, you already know the game is rigged.”

How to play a rigged game, how to operate under conditions of arbitrary and unfair control, is the theme of this episode of Silo. (Timely!), Much of it involves scheming between and against the people who know the real rules of the game best: Bernard; Lukas, his shadow; Amundsen, his head of Judicial Security; Judge Robert Sims, Judicial’s figurehead; and Camille Sims, Robert’s Macbethian wife. Camille and Robert persuade Amundsen to reveal what he knows of Lukas’s doings, but then Amundsen cuts off his and Robert’s friendship permanently. Robert warns Lukas that Bernard’s mind is essentially unknowable, and that when the old man is through with him, he’ll toss Lukas back into the mines just as surely as he demoted Robert to a ceremonial position when he ceased to be useful. Lukas tells Quinn’s descendants that he’s not sure if the most-wanted Mechanicals really killed Judge Meadows at all, and there are only two other people who could be responsible, Bernard and Rob, so I’m sure they can fill in the blanks. No one trusts anyone at this echelon, and they especially don’t trust Bernard.

Why would they? The guy’s a cutthroat. Luring Walker out of Mechanical with a bogus message about a broken pump, Bernard offers to let her see her ex-wife Carla in exchange for serving as his new spy among the Down Deep’s rebels. (Her first act is ratting out young Teddy’s raid on level 119’s supply room.) But even then he keeps only to the letter of the agreement — he allows Walk to see Carla unconscious through a cell-door window before slamming it shut again, that’s it — before adding tons of conditions to it to keep Walker under 24-hour surveillance when she goes back home. All this under the threat of torturing Carla just to punish Walker for going back on her word. 

Maybe this is in some roundabout way justifiable, if not justified, considering the precarious position of the Silo’s 10,000 souls. But the thing is, we know Bernard’s a liar, because we’ve seen him lie all the time! Who knows if saving the people of the Silo is his real concern at all?

Even stranded in the Down Deep with his wife, Sheriff Paul Billings gets caught up in all the duplicity. His wife Kathleen learns from relic smuggler Kennedy that Paul has a page from a forbidden book depicting life as it was on the surface in the Before Times, a page he didn’t tell her about, let alone show her. When she does look at it, it moves her to tears. What happened to all that beauty? He doesn’t know. What’s he going to do now? “I don’t know what to do, baby. I…I don’t know what to do,” he says, crying. Take a look at the world, folks. This is relatable content.

Meanwhile, the Perils of Juliette continue unabated. Not long after she surfaces from her dive to jumpstart an outflow pump and discovers a bloody mess where her pal Solo used to be, she contracts a bad case of the bends and has to stagger back down to the water and dive 20 feet under to equalize the painful pressure in her joints. But someone cuts off the air supply, and she’s reduced to hunting around in the dark to find the culprit…who shoots her with a freaking arrow. This poor woman’s troubles never end, man.

Arming herself with a makeshift shield and sword, she winds up in a hand-to-hand fight with someone in a Raider’s uniform. But when she gets the advantage and rips off her attacker’s riot-gear helmet, she finds a teenager — with two more coming down the stairs toward her, bow at the ready. So Silo 17 had more survivors than just Solo, and she’s got to pray they kept him alive so she can retrieve her hazmat suit and warn her own Silo what the hell is going on. 

Now, keep in mind that the goal of Juliette, a person we root for, is to stop the rebellion led by her pals Shirley and Knox and (until now) Walker, who are also people we root for. It leads back to the thorny question of whether or not Salvador Quinn really did do everyone a favor by committing enough crimes to ensure “140 years of peace,” as Bernard puts it. In a conversation in the cafeteria, Sheriff Paul Billings debates this with rebel leader Shirley.

“Have you ever considered,” she asks, “that the Founders, whoever the fuck they were, were lying through their teeth about everything?”

“No!” he barks, then follows it with a softer “No. If we don’t respect the order of things, then it all falls apart. The Pact is what we have. Those are the words we live by.”

“There comes a time,” Shirley responds, “you need to stand up and call bullshit!”

The Pact is what has kept things in line all these decades. It may well stop a catastrophe even now. But it led to this catastrophe too, with its lies and deceptions and bias toward the Up-Toppers. Does such a document deserve to govern a people who have outgrown it? Do its handmaidens in power deserve to rule us? I mean, them? 

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.