A Dark Web
Season 3
Episode 3
Editor’s Rating
3 stars
***
The increasingly fraught working relationship between Camille and the Algorithm develops into something more mysterious and dangerous this week.
Photo: Apple TV
Let’s talk about the Algorithm, that mysterious voice in the Vault that keeps feeding Camille Sims prompts and warnings. I’ve been wondering: Is that voice attached to a real person sitting in some master control silo, sifting through historical data and making decisions informed by its own human observations and biases? Or, as its name implies, is the Algorithm some kind of AI agent coldly processing data?
These questions should matter to all of us Silo watchers, as we work to fill in the gaps between what happened with Congressman Daniel Keene and his sister Charlotte over 350 years ago and what has been happening in Silo 18 since season one. But the nature of the Algorithm should also matter to Camille. Who exactly is she responding to, whenever this dispassionate, faintly metallic voice advises her to give memory-wiping “Vitamin D+” to everyone in Silo 18? And does she really need to do what the Algorithm says when it tells her to pump poison gas into the mining tunnels, to flush out any “Outsiders” who may be putting the silo at risk?
This week’s Silo episode is primarily about Camille’s increasingly fraught relationship with the Algorithm, which is crucial to the way this season’s story line is developing. Even though this show is usually better at action than it is at exploring interpersonal relationships (assuming the Algorithm even is a person), we do need to know how Camille feels about what she’s being asked to do.
That said, the pronounced emphasis on characters’ feelings in this episode does make it draggier than usual — at least until the last 15 minutes or so, when the pace speeds up dramatically. There’s a laboriousness to the way the writers set up Camille’s growing disillusionment through multiple scenes where the full implications of the Algorithm’s plans begin to dawn on her.
The change of heart partly hinges on Camille’s conversations with her husband, Robert, who is freaking out over what’s been happening to Juliette. He doesn’t like that she gets to walk freely around the silo as some kind of hero, while his son, Anthony, remains traumatized by memories of Juliette holding him and Camille at gunpoint. But as a father, Robert is also rattled — and empathetic — when Juliette tells him, “I don’t even remember what it feels like to have a dad.” Robert knows about the existence of Vitamin D+, and he knows that the level of tension in the silo could lead to it being deployed, which would leave him with no clear memories of his own family. It’s no wonder that he wants Camille to be careful.
The problem is that Camille may not have a choice. The Algorithm is telling her that Silo 18 is dangerously close to having “Safeguard” protocols triggered — which would go beyond mere memory loss and into the realm of mass murder. Juliette is making the powers that be very nervous, almost forcing them to pull the trigger on the Safeguard. She’s off her meds and ducking around the people assigned to watch her, so she can talk to some people who might tell her things the Algorithm doesn’t want anyone to know.
Juliette’s urgent race toward the truth provides this episode with much of its action, although even here, the story stops regularly — too regularly — so that she can have frustrating conversations with people who don’t want to say anything. We start with Kathleen Billings, whom Juliette now knows is one of the rebellious Outsiders. Juliette asks about Lukas Kyle, who, during the uprising in Silo 18 at the end of season two, disappeared into the mining tunnels with Shirley’s help. Kathleen insists that Lukas was likely incinerated, along with all of the other corpses that piled up in the Down Deep during the rebellion.
Juliette later makes a stop to see Shirley, who is still being unreasonably pouty about her amnesiac friend not remembering her — and is, again, curtly dismissive of Juliette’s search for Lukas. When Shirley proves useless, Juliette hops onto some ropes to zip past the staircase gap and meet with Knox, who shares her curiosity about where Lukas went. They agree: If Bernard took Lukas out of the mines, he must’ve learned something important when he was down there. So Knox introduces Juliette to the acerbic ex-miner Mark Chambers, who also tells Madame Mayor to forget about Lukas.
The further Juliette heads down this road, the more suspenseful this episode becomes, since we know that Camille and the Algorithm are anxiously watching her progress. Juliette’s obsession with Lukas and the tunnels makes Camille wonder: Is it possible that when Lukas fled back to the mines during the uprising, he started tunneling to another silo? It’s when she ponders this aloud in front of the Algorithm that she gets the order to gas the mines.
The whole gassing sequence is equal parts exciting and horrific, beginning with the moment when Camille orders an underling to “send a rat extermination team to the mines for an immediate fumigation,” and that underling, understandably aghast, asks, “Is that code for something?” As coughing miners — hardworking Silo 18 citizens! — come tumbling out of the tunnels, Juliette rushes in with a gas mask. Someone on the way out steals that mask, leaving Juliette in danger of succumbing to the poison. And so, finally, we get our first season-three appearance of Lukas Kyle (Avi Nash), who drags Juliette to safety and then flees with Camille’s goons, with some help from the Outsiders.
The flashbacks this week are also quite thrilling, even if there’s not much to say about them yet, given that what’s happening to the Keene siblings remains shrouded in mystery. The big events in this episode involve reporter Helen Drew, who gets fired from her job, most likely because of her investigation into the irregularities surrounding Charlotte Keene’s flying mission. Helen and Daniel also spend some time lurking on the dark web, looking for an audio recording of the final minutes before Charlotte crashed. At the end of the episode, the hacktivist who lets them hear the recording has his secret lair trashed.
Thematically, there’s a connection here between the forbidden recording and the silo’s mining tunnels. The more our heroes learn, the more their lives are in danger. In an ironic twist, though, in Silo 18, Juliette’s brazenness offers Camille and the Algorithm an opportunity. The Algorithm tells Camille that she was chosen to be the silo’s secret enforcer because she’s good at lying and spinning stories, which means she could use tales of Juliette’s bravery as a unifying, Safeguard-skirting event … after making sure that Juliette dies of her injuries, of course.
We all know that it’s unlikely Camille will actually kill Juliette, given that we’ve now spent over two seasons with Juliette as Silo’s main character. But whatever or whomever the Algorithm actually is … Can it be overridden? Does Camille actually have any power, or is she just an instrument of the machines?
Questions, questions….
• The latter half of this episode works well as science fiction/action television, with one exception. After the poison clears and Juliette is rushed to Medical, the authorities assess the human toll and discover that one of the dead bodies they pulled out of the mines isn’t a miner at all. It’s Orla Kent, the acting head of Supply, who went missing in last week’s episode. We saw her briefly in the season premiere, and I’ve been waiting to write about her until her character became more prominent in the series. Now she’s dead, and I can’t help but wonder whether we could’ve used less of Robert and Camille this week and more explanation of whatever Orla’s been up to. As it is, her death barely registers. Perhaps we’ll double back to her story later?
• Knox makes the same point about Juliette that I did in last week’s recap. Memory loss or not, he says to her, “You still act like yourself.” It’s fascinating to think that Juliette’s personality remains unchanged, even though it’s no longer tethered to a lifetime of experiences. Now maybe Shirley can cut her a break?
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