Silo, season 2

Some thirty-five years earlier, Silo 17’s rebels storm IT, and their sheriff leads the people up the ramp and out into the air, without suits, under a flag. In the present Juliette crosses the waste to that flag and finds thousands of dead fanned around the entrance. Inside, her air running out, she smashes in her helmet and finds she can breathe. LIES is painted across the cafeteria’s display; below, the bridge to IT is blown and the lower levels are flooded. She nearly drowns, then follows music to IT’s round vault door. A slot slides open on a pair of eyes, and a man promises to kill her if she tries the door again. Flashbacks show her as a young teen, new to Mechanical, learning the trash line beside young Shirley.

From the books: The Unraveling has the ramp of bodies, Juliette cutting herself out of the suit, the dead silo, and a wild-haired man at a stuck door on level thirty-four. Shift tells 17’s fall from inside, in 2312, ended when Silo 1 shuts the silo down. The book’s 17 is flooded below too; the march, the blown bridge and the threat at the door are the series’.

In Silo 18, Bernard watches Juliette’s helmet feed reach the other silo and opens The Order to a page that tells IT, after a failed cleaning, to prepare for war. A curfew follows, and the deputies answer to Sims. Down Deep, Martha Walker turns a fire hose on a furious crowd; later she is arrested, and in the jail finds her ex-wife Carla McLain, head of Supply, locked up for smuggling Juliette the good tape. Bernard tells the silo Juliette was a hero and is dead; Judge Meadows backs him, for a price. She wants a suit with good tape: she wants to go out.

From the books: The Unraveling has Bernard’s rage, Walker’s favours with Supply and Mechanical’s anger. The Order is a book in Wool too; its war page is the series’, as are Meadows and the ex-wives: Wool’s Walker is an old man, its McLain an old woman who keeps dogs.

Through the slot the man tells Juliette there are fifty silos, that 17’s people walked out smiling, and that he was the shadow of Russell, 17’s head of IT, ordered to keep everyone out. He suggests a firefighter’s suit for the walk home, but will not help fetch it from the flooded levels; when she walks away, he finds the nerve to come out. In 18, Patrick Kennedy, doing Sims a favour in return for a drug to forget his dead wife, throws a firebomb at the deputies facing a protest led by Juliette’s friend Shirley, and in the chaos the young engineer Cooper, once Juliette’s shadow, is shot dead.

From the books: The Unraveling’s Solo, alone thirty-four years in a hovel of empty cans, talks freely and shows her on an old map how small a silo is; the series’ hides behind his door and lies about who he is. The firefighter’s suit, the firebomb and Cooper’s death are the series’.

To breathe through fifty feet of hose underwater, Juliette builds a pump from a harmonium’s bellows and goes under for the fire gear. In 18, Bernard gives Meadows dinner instead of a suit, and poison. As she dies he lets her see an old-world forest through a headset, and she tells him of a coded letter on Juliette’s stolen drive from Salvador Quinn, head of IT during a rebellion 140 years before. Mechanical’s leaders, let in to see her, find her with a knife in her chest, and Sims rouses the silo against them.

From the books: The Stranded has the dive gear and Solo on an air compressor; the harmonium, and a dive this early, are the series’. Wool has a poisoning too, the canteen meant for Marnes that kills Mayor Jahns, which Juliette lays at Bernard’s door; Meadows, the forest and Quinn are the series’.

Bernard makes Sims Judge in Meadows’s place, a demotion in Sims’s eyes. Carla is captured, but Camille quietly lets Knox, head of Mechanical, and Shirley slip away from a mob, and they get back down deep disguised as porters. Bernard pulls Lukas up from the mines to repair Juliette’s smashed drive, and on it Lukas finds Quinn’s love letter, which turns into code. In 17, Solo says the water will reach his vault in ten months and asks Juliette to fix the pump. In the silo’s staff records she finds the shadow he claims to be, with another man’s face. Then she collapses: the cut on her arm is infected.

From the books: The Stranded has Juliette reckoning the years of pumping it will take to dry 17’s Mechanical. Shift’s Jimmy renames himself Solo but never pretends to be another man; the false identity is the series’, with Judge Sims and the letter.

Bernard blockades the lower levels. Dr. Pete Nichols takes a bullet out of Patrick Kennedy, who tells Sheriff Billings he threw the firebomb for Sims. Knox and Shirley push the raiders’ barricade ten floors up the stair and take a farm level. Billings, his tremor gone, hears Mechanical’s side, believes it, and radios Bernard to open an inquiry into Meadows’s death; Bernard cuts the radios. Lukas’s work on the cipher makes him Bernard’s shadow. In 17, Juliette wakes, nursed through the fever by Solo, and finds he has hidden her suit until she fixes the pump.

From the books: Mechanical’s armed march up the stairs is Wool’s. Its Peter Billings stays on IT’s side and is shot in the assault; the series’ Paul crosses over. Wool’s Bernard makes Lukas his shadow at once, and its Dr. Nichols is a nursery doctor; Pete’s part in the war is the series’.

In the vault, the Legacy, a voice and a computer, verifies Lukas as shadow and opens a room of old-world relics. Mechanical fires a rocket of leaflets up the shaft accusing IT of lies, then cuts the power: only IT’s lights stay on. Lukas finds that Quinn’s code is a book cipher that needs a book more than 140 years old, and Bernard hands him Meadows’s The Wizard of Oz. Walker switches on one of IT’s cameras to ask after Carla, and Bernard sees a lever. In 17, Juliette dives to restart the pump, breathing through a hose while Solo works the pump above. The air fails; she starts the pump anyway, and surfaces to blood and no Solo.

From the books: The Stranded has the dive, Solo on the compressor, the hose going limp and Solo falling silent, though the book’s Juliette goes down in a suit and helmet, weights strapped below her knees. In the books the old world survives as hidden books; the speaking computer, the rocket and the cipher are the series’.

Bent by the bends, Juliette meets a figure dressed as a raider who says Solo is dead and shoots her with an arrow; she tracks her attacker to three young people. In 18, Bernard offers Walker Carla’s safety for her help, and Walker becomes his informant; Mechanical’s next raid walks into an ambush. The Oz book leads Lukas to Quinn’s descendants; with Quinn’s own copy of the Pact, which Meadows had got from them, he decodes the letter: the game, it warns, is rigged. Bernard gives him IT’s version: Quinn destroyed the records and drugged the water so the silo would forget, ending rebellions that had come every twenty years.

From the books: The Stranded has feral children who survived in 17’s farms and struck Solo down. Cyclical uprisings are the books’ too, but Shift’s forgetting drugs are the founders’ design, run from Silo 1. The arrow and Quinn are the series’; and Wool’s Walker listens in on IT, the reverse of informing for it.

The young survivors have watched Juliette since she came: they cut her rope in the first episode, and Rick threw her the container that saved her. They hold Solo for the vault’s code, and their leader, Audrey, gives Juliette until her baby cries again to open it; the outcast Hope, whom the others call “Eater”, helps her. Then Solo tells the truth. He is Jimmy Conroy, son of Russell, 17’s head of IT; at twelve he would not open the vault door, and watched the sheriff shoot his father. Years later two intruders shot him, and he shut them in to die: they were these young people’s parents. Peace made, Jimmy lets them all into his vault for ice cream and music. In 18, Lukas and Shirley go down to the bottom of the silo, where the deep water is only knee-deep. At a round door a voice warns Lukas that if he tells anyone what he learns, the Safeguard will be initiated.

From the books: Shift’s Pact is Jimmy’s own story: the IT man’s son locked in the server room in 2312, who sees his father shot outside the steel door and then, with the men threatening his mother, gets the code wrong; men who break in later die at his hand. The series makes him a Conroy (the book’s Parker), twelve rather than sixteen, and the intruders the survivors’ parents. Wool’s children include a Rickson; Audrey’s armed band and the voice in the tunnel are the series’.

The rebels’ real plan is a bomb on the stair. When its timer falls off, Pete Nichols sets it off by hand and dies, cutting the silo in two and trapping Bernard’s raiders below; the deputies up top turn, and the prisoners walk free. Lukas whispers to Bernard what the tunnel told him, that the silo can be poisoned at any moment, and resigns. A broken Bernard makes Sims his shadow, and in the vault the Legacy keeps only Camille. In 17, Solo tests the firefighter’s suit for Juliette underwater, and she promises to come back for him. She walks home, cleans the lens, and holds up a warning to the cafeteria, where Patrick Kennedy has been rousing a crowd to go outside. Inside the ramp’s door she finds Bernard, suited and armed, going out for a moment of peace, and tells him she knows how to stop the Safeguard. The doors close, and the fire comes.

Then, in Yost’s words, “from the sound of flames to the sound of rain”: Washington, D.C., today. In a crowded bar a freshman congressman from Georgia, Daniel Keene, meets a journalist, Helen Drew, and leaves her a PEZ dispenser with a yellow duck.

From the books: The Stranded has Juliette crossing back, a suited figure in the airlock as the doors grind shut, and the fire: Bernard, sent out by Peter Billings in Lukas’s place, burns, and she survives badly burned. On screen Bernard goes of his own will. The book’s uprising is crushed, Knox among the dead; the series’ wins. The coda draws on Shift’s first chapter, Washington in 2049, where Donald Keene, a freshman congressman from Georgia, is married to Helen. The series renames him (“we just didn’t want anyone named Donald in that role,” Yost said) and makes Helen a journalist he meets on what he took for a date.