Silo Season 3 Stuck the Landing Despite the Odds

[Warning: The following contains spoilers for the Season 3 finale of Silo, "Troy." Read at your own risk!]

Is there any show on television right now as simultaneously frustrating and captivating as Silo? The Apple TV series based on Hugh Howey's novels just wrapped its third season, which seemed to blow up the longstanding adage, "It's not about the destination, it's about the journey," because the journey of Season 3? Plodding and exasperating. The destination? Pretty freaking cool. Silo also pulled off this seemingly impossible magic trick in Season 2, another slow-moving season that delivered a game-changing, world-expanding finale. You couldn't help but want more. Season 3 sticks its landing despite the odds, and for better or worse puts an awful lot of pressure on the show's fourth and final season to level up one last time.

Do you recall that twist ending to Silo's sophomore season? After two seasons spent in the Down Deep of Silo 18 and our heroine Juliette's (Rebecca Ferguson) eye-opening jaunt to the decimated Silo 17, we were suddenly thrown back in time to our present day, where we met Congressman Daniel Keene (Ashley Zukerman) on an awkward non-date with reporter Helen Drew (Jessica Henwick), who was really after some intel following a dirty bomb that Iran had deployed in Washington, D.C. He gave her that iconic Pez dispenser that would reappear 300 years later in the silo. It was a scene that blew open the world of the series and offered up more questions than answers, in a truly enticing way. 

Season 3 follows up on that reveal by bouncing between timelines throughout its 10 episodes. In the future timeline, we watch as Juliette returns to Silo 18 with information about a "safeguard" Silo 1 can deploy to murder all 10,000 citizens of a silo and immediately has her memory wiped with some handy pills. In the present day, Daniel and Helen search for answers when they realize something isn't adding up after Daniel's military pilot sister, Charlotte (Jessica Brown Findlay), is the sole survivor of a covert mission to Iran, which leads them to trillionaire Per Stensen (Colin Hanks) and Senator Rosalind Thurman's (Laura Innes) plan to build 50 silos outside Atlanta to save the human species when the apocalypse inevitably arrives, most likely due to the same thing that brought Stensen his wealth: nanotechnology. 

The penultimate episode of the season finds Daniel and Helen three years later, now married and expecting their first child, arriving in Atlanta for the big silo public unveiling. The two are split up — Daniel is sent to meet with the top brass outside Silo 1 and Helen to a tour of Silo 18 — when, would you look at that, a suspiciously well-timed nuke is dropped on Atlanta, forcing everyone to seek cover in the silos nearest them. While it sheds light on what happened to make moving humanity into the silos necessary, the storyline also brings up a lot of questions — mainly, did Stensen and/or Thurman do this on purpose?

The finale operates in a similar manner, answering some questions but leaving us with a whole bunch more to agonize over ahead of Season 4. Thankfully — wisely — the questions it does answer are satisfying ones. Finally, after nine episodes in which both timelines began to feel like they were stalling for time, the two storylines converge. The major reveal, of course, is what Silo 1 has been up to this whole time. Using nanotechnology, people in Silo 1 are being cryogenically frozen in pods and woken up to work specific shifts and then put back to sleep once that shift ends. Some people, "specialists," are awakened randomly to deal with major crises. Daniel is one of these specialists, but, well, he isn't called Daniel anymore; he's Troy, and he has no recollection of his past aside from some pesky visions of a mysterious woman (Helen). We do not know what they did to Daniel after ripping him away during the explosion as he called out for Helen, but we can probably guess it involved a whole lot of those memory-erasing drugs. He works with Victor (Matt Craven), the inventor of those drugs and the man who was working with Charlotte in the present, but he has no idea he knows him. He works with Charlotte, now called Susan, and neither of them remembers each other. This is all quite curious, as is the fact that the "director" of this centuries-long "project" isn't Stensen but Senator Thurman. 

But we get some answers, too. We finally, horrifyingly, learn what actually happened to the Silo 17 rebellion that ended with almost all of its 10,000 inhabitants murdered outside of the silo doors. It was Daniel/Troy, unsettlingly good at his job, ordering his drone pilots to take them all out by both spraying a toxic nanotech compound and shooting them. Is it more stomach-churning when we see all of this violence and murder happening on screen or when Daniel/Troy turns the screen off video to thermal view and then cuts the audio so they don't have to hear them scream? Aside from what happened to Silo 17, this act also reveals another game-changing truth: that the air outside is totally fine and that everyone who has died outside during a cleaning was executed by Silo 1 deploying that nano-gas. Daniel/Troy is put back to sleep after performing his duty, but before Victor gives him a pill to pop and closes his pod, Daniel asks him about those visions and asks if he can help him figure out who this woman is. 

The next time they wake up Daniel, it's been 35 years, and he's dropped right in the middle of what we've been watching go down in Silo 18. It's been Victor, mostly, chatting with Camille (Alexandria Riley) as the "Algorithm." (Bernard was right; it wasn't an omniscient being, but a person.) When she tricks him into believing that she's trying to stop the capping of the poison safeguard pipe that Juliette and her friends are trying to pull off, buying them more time so they are able to render the poison pipe inert and end the threat of that kind of "safeguard," Victor is left in shock, which turns to relief that he doesn't have to mass murder 10,000 more people. Victor kills himself and leaves Daniel a video message informing him that the woman's name is Helen Drew. The name leaves Daniel visibly shaken. 

For as much information as we get in "Troy," the episode leaves so many questions to be answered in the final season. Daniel is basically left to run the show as far as the crisis at Silo 18 goes, and he makes a compromise with Juliette: There will be no more attempts at a "safeguard" as long as they never attempt to contact another silo. (Preventing any type of cross-contamination between silos is the top priority of the "project," another curious detail!) But now that he is on the path to remembering his old life and what has been done to him (and his family), how long until he turns into an ally for Juliette and Silo 18? How far will the remaining "founders" (we've seen Thurman and Henry, but are Anna and/or Stensen still involved?) go to stop him? And the question perhaps the most in need of answering is the one Camille directly hurls at Victor in their last conversation (Riley has been a standout all season but especially steals the show in this episode): Why would they want to murder thousands of people when they say they are trying to save humanity? 

These questions and the finale as a whole perfectly tee up what is poised to be a wild showdown as Silo finishes its story. You want to be mad that this season took its time getting to its most interesting elements, but by the time the credits roll on "Troy" — by the time Silo has reminded us that it does know how to dole out information in an enticing way — it's all so compelling that it's easy not only to forgive Silo for some missteps, but to sign up for more. Let's hope that the final season of Silo picks up exactly where this one left off, in every sense of the phrase. 

Silo Season 3 is now streaming on Apple TV.