Farewell
Season 3
Episode 9
Editor’s Rating
-12 stars
Daniel and Helen tour the silo complex in the 21st-century timeline and take a little too long to realize something is off.
Photo: Apple TV
The structure of this Silo season has been frustrating at times, with all the jumping back and forth between scenes from the 21st century and scenes in the silos. The choices of what to put in each episode — and when to cut from one timeline to another — have sometimes felt arbitrary, and have often disrupted the story’s overall flow. Or at least that’s been my take. And as Exhibit A for my point of view, I’d like to present this week’s episode, which features a clear division between the timelines. All of the silo scenes take up the first half-hour. All of the scenes in the past fill the second half-hour. Friends, this works so tremendously well that it almost makes me mad that the whole season wasn’t built this way.
It’s especially dramatic when the episode retreats to Daniel and Helen’s relatively sedate world right when Silo 18 seems on the verge of getting purged. The big storyline in the silos involves Bernard coming out of hiding to surrender himself to Camille. The Algorithm then runs the numbers and determines that the only way to save the silo is for Bernard to go out to clean. But Bernard’s move is a gambit, meant to create a distraction while the Mechanical guerrillas set off dynamite charges in the mines, for reasons as yet unrevealed. It’s a risky play, given that the Safeguard pipe remains uncapped. The whole silo seems in danger of a mass poisoning. And Camille is pissed.
I’ll talk more about Bernard’s sacrifice in a moment, because it’s a powerful sequence and relevant to what happens at the end of the episode. But first we need to talk about Camille. Alexandria Riley’s performance as Camille this season — coupled with the way the character has been written — has provided some of this summer’s most crackling television. Camille’s self-righteous anger, so understandable yet so misguided, has burned through the screen every week. Riley plays it with such fervency.
Last week I wondered if maybe Camille was starting to doubt the Algorithm and considering working with Juliette. The answer? Nah. Camille only wants Juliette to help her manage Silo 18’s transition into memory loss. She’s convinced there’s no way to stop the Algorithm from killing everybody without doing what that scary voice in the Vault says.
But also? Camille bears grudges. She insists she’s only doing what she must to protect her son. But that doesn’t justify her venomously warning Robert, “Before long all Anthony will know about you is what I tell him.” Nor does it explain the particular vitriol she has toward Juliette. In one of my favorite moments in this episode, Camille tries to put on a “poor me” act in front of Juliette, asking her nemesis to consider how hard it’s going to be when Camille’s the only person in Silo 18 who still has her memories, and when Juliette (rightly) responds with a sarcastic “awwww,” Camille slams her hand on the table angrily.
Even her decision to send Bernard out to clean feels more vindictive than logical. Yes, the Algorithm is telling her that using Bernard as a scapegoat will help unify the silo and tamp down the growing unrest. But Bernard is telling her to listen more closely to that mechanical voice’s tone. It sounds testy, annoyed — as though it’s not a computer program at all but instead a human pretending to be a computer program, making petty human judgements. Bernard even rasps accusingly at the Algorithm. “If you were actually omniscient, you wouldn’t have led us here to begin with.”
Which brings us to the flashbacks, which this week — unexpectedly, thrillingly — end with the moment when Per Stensen’s silo project abruptly went live. We pick up three years after Daniel and Helen huffily fled Stensen’s compound. Those two are now a couple, with a baby on the way. When they get invited to the public unveiling of the silos, they make the trip to rural Georgia partly out of curiosity and partly because Daniel wants to check in with his sister Charlotte, who stayed on with the program.
The contrast between Daniel’s world and the Silo 18 world has been stark all season. In the 21st century, someone can make a casual remark about getting takeout chicken, and it’s a reminder of all the simple things we take for granted in our lives — all the things that the people in Silo 18 don’t even know they’re missing. Similarly, when Daniel and Helen are walking the neatly manicured grounds of the silos, bemusedly watching everyone getting ready for the grand opening, it’s remarkable to see the lovely painted markers everywhere, as though the silo complex were just some high-end modern gated community and not the post-apocalyptic bunker it will become.
Yet even here signs of unease abound. Sure, it’s all very upbeat and super-chill as Senator Rosalind Thurman practices her speech, and as tour guides explain how Stensen has invited “at least two people from every country on Earth” to live in the dirt. But Daniel also hears for the first time about The Pact, which his sister describes to him as “a book of rules about how to live underground for 500 years without killing each other.” What the hell?
It’s also discomfiting — if more to us than to them — that Helen is assigned to tour Silo 18 while Daniel’s expected to hang out with the bigwigs at Silo 1. (Y’know, Silo 1… the place where 500 years later something calling itself “The Algorithm” will be threatening to kill everyone in Silo 18.) After Daniel texts Charlotte the start of their usual dark sibling joke about their parents and gets a response that muffs the punchline, he suspects something’s wrong. He and Helen each decide to bail, and they spot each other on the rims above their respective silo craters. But before they can start walking toward each other… BLAMMO. The sky lights up. A mushroom cloud blooms on the horizon. Everybody is ordered into the silos immediately — and, presumably, forever.
Before the blinding nuclear flash, we can see that Helen is in the same spot outside Silo 18 where — just 30 minutes earlier in the episode and five centuries later in the timeline — Bernard succumbs to the poisoned air. He dies, leaving unanswered the one question he’d most wanted to learn while Head of I.T.
That question: “Why?” Why were the silos built this way? Why are they run this way? We could take Stensen at face value, believing the world was bound to collapse and that he just wanted to keep humanity alive. But how does that square with what Victor tells Daniel about the origins of The Pact, which he reportedly co-wrote with Senator Thurman’s daughter Anna? “A.I. wrote most of it,” Victor chuckles. “We just did some editing.”
So there’s Bernard’s “why.” The rules that governed him? That killed him? Afterthoughts. Just something a computer threw together while the humans’ minds were elsewhere.
• Hey, Peter Gabriel was invited to the silo opening! He was going to perform his very apt song “Here Comes the Flood” for the attendees, but then the world blew up. That’s the bad news. The good news? It’s now canonical that Peter Gabriel and his family survived the apocalypse in Silo 17!
• Did you catch the voice of the Algorithm telling everyone to seek shelter in the nearest silo?
• One sign that Camille is hopelessly hooked on the Algorithm’s know-it-all certainty? When Bernard tells her that rumors are spreading about her brainwashing Juliette, she immediately turns to the screen and asks, “Is that true?”
• Bernard, ever the politician, still takes the time to say everyone’s name as he’s walking into Judicial to turn himself in. And Camille, likewise, makes sure to end even her most ominous silo-wide announcements with, “As always, be courteous and safe on the stairs.”
• Farewell (the title of this episode!) to Bernard, a formidable villain for two Silo seasons and then an unlikely sympathetic figure in season three. He died knowing he was “hated by every man, woman, child and sanctioned pet.” But he also died knowing that Juliet and her friends may force some real change in the silos. If the Algorithm’s a machine, it didn’t leave room in its calculations for Juliette, which means it’s flawed. And if the Algorithm’s a person? “A person can be defeated.”
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