‘Silo’ Season 2 Episode 5 Recap: Getting to the Bottom of It

The smile on my face when I saw this week’s episode of Silo was called “Descent” could have powered every level above 125. After all, Silo excels when it digs deep into some simple, specific challenge — get from Point A to Point B despite Obstacle C; use Thing 1 to acquire Thing 2 by powering up Thing 3 — and it’s set in, y’know, a pair of massive underground Silos. I figured, well, someone’s gotta get from the top to the bottom of one of these suckers, and when it comes to that kind of action, this is a show you can trust.

The solution devised by our four wrongfully accused heroes from Mechancial — Knox, Shirley, Walker, and Carla — as they race to return to their home levels after being set up for the murder of Judge Meadows by Mayor Bernard isn’t a strictly physical one. This isn’t that magnificent Season 1 episode focused on the task of swapping out a busted generator component nearly at the exclusion of all else. Mostly, the foursome’s eponymous descent back to the Down Deep is a matter of person-to-person networking, bargaining, threatening, cajoling, improvising, asking for help, receiving it from unexpected sources, getting double-crossed, hiding out, running for it, and — only then — utilizing a dangerous mechanical doohickey that’s as likely to kill them if it works as it is if it doesn’t. 

Fate winds up taking the foursome in different directions. Walker and Carla order Knox and Shirley to split up, arguing their age is slowing the younger pair down. Carla, who has a prominent position as the Silo’s head of Supply, knows she can’t travel incognito, so she then sends Walker off on her own, too. By living as a hermit for 25 years, Walker has ensured that virtually no one in the Silo knows who she is or what she looks like. As a lone, older woman, she can probably just stroll right back on down without anyone batting an eyelash, as indeed she does. Carla, meanwhile, gives herself up, which presumably buys the rest of the gang a bit of time and leaves a few fewer Judicial Raiders to chase them.

This leaves Knox and Shirley, who are the crux of Bernard’s plans right now. With Juliette’s controversial departure still revving up high spirits and hot tempers within the Silo, Bernard murdered the Judge and framed the Mechanicals to provide the Silo residents with a feeling of collective catharsis and justice…but only if it’s the Silo’s residents, not the official channels, who string them up. Bernard feels his hand was forced here by his right-hand man Sims’s decision to gin up an impeachment campaign against Meadows, with that same goal of unifying the Silo. He demotes Sims from head of Judicial Security to the figurehead position of Judge as a result.

But Camille (Alexandra Riley), Sims’s ambitious wife, is not going to let her husband go down without a fight. Dressing up in her old Raider togs, she arrives at the choke point where undercover Raiders have arranged a lynch mob and rescues Knox and Shirley, claiming she wants to see official justice be done. 

Instead, Camille just stashes them in some poor sap’s apartment to buy them additional time, which they use in an unexpected way: They run up, not down, the stairs in order to retrieve a forbidden winch-and-pulley mechanism from an ally of Carla’s who sold them out earlier in the episode. If they can make it back down low enough, they can attach themselves to the cable and basically freefall as far as it will take them, hoping they reach safety in the Down Deep without splattering themselves or breaking their necks. This is Silo, so it works, but it’s as nail-bitingly near a thing as you’d expect. 

The man who comes closest to killing them is Amundsen (Christian Ochoa), Sims’s replacement as head of Judicial Security and (I think?) Bernard’s new shadow. Desperate to prove he can handle this major case on his own, he bigfoots Sims, preventing his former boss from entering the Watchers room where secret cameras broadcast all the Silo’s doings. It’s this ill-advised power play that inspires Camille to sabotage Amundsen’s search and capture mission on her husband’s behalf. Not off to a good start!

Other Silo officials keep plenty busy while all this is going down. Sheriff Billings and Deputy Hank, who are becoming quite a team — Billings reveals his forbidden medical condition to Hank, even — track down Patrick Kennedy (Rick Gomez), the relic smuggler used by the authorities to start the riot down in Mechanical a few episodes ago. If they can find a doctor to heal his wounds, he’ll tell them everything he knows…and fortunately for them, Juliette’s dad, Dr. Pete Nichols, has just told Bernard where he can stick it. I smell a team-up!

Then there’s Bernard himself. He too has a simple problem he needs solved in a practical way: He wants to repair the forbidden hard drive he retrieved from Juliette and then destroyed, to see what’s on it. For this, he turns to Lukas Kyle, Juliette’s fair-weather friend, serving his sentence in the mines. Lukas manages to piece together a map of the Silo that includes several external features — a tunnel on the lowest level, lines leading out from Judicial and IT to places unknown. We can deduce from what we hear elsewhere in the episode that the latter are connected to independent surface-level power sources, maybe solar or wind perhaps. What would that mean for the indispensability of the Mechanicals and their generator, I wonder?

And where is Juliette herself during all this? Really going through it in the other Silo. She’s getting sicker and weaker from a gnarly-looking wound on her forearm. She’s come to distrust Solo, her only companion, because she’s learned he’s lying about his identity and seen how berserk he’ll go when challenged or facing a perceived threat. And when she finally locates the missing cleaning-suit helmet she’s spent the entire episode searching for, she immediately passes out. I assume Solo will save her despite their mutual misgivings, because otherwise this would be a short season, but I wonder what the setback will cost her. 

That’s the thing about Silo: Like the structure after which it’s titled, it’s a closed system. A misstep here will cause a larger problem there; a problem fixed now will make a solution possible later. This is as true of gizmos like Knox and Shirley’s winch as it is the human relationships manipulated by Bernard in accordance with The Order, the Silo’s secret rulebook. (“The Pact” is just an opiate of the masses.) This is an everything-in-its-right-place show, a far harder thing to pull off than it looks.

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.