Episode 1 of Silo ended with Sheriff Holston Becker meeting engineer Juliette Nichols, who believes that George was murdered. Fast forward two years and Holston has decided to go out and look for the same truth that his wife Allison died searching for. Let’s see what he finds outside.
Mayor Ruth Jahns reads the oath to Holston before he can step outside the Silo. Two guys fix their helmets in position, and a sad Deputy Sam Marnes opens the airlock, bidding his dear friend a final goodbye. The hatches separate, and dust and sunlight fall on the face of Sheriff Holston Becker. Juliette Nichols watches, along with her peers, on a screen as Holston walks out onto the wasteland. Holston can see the blue sky, the lush greenery, and the birds in the air. Allison was right. The people need to see what Silo has been keeping them from. He walks over to the camera that is sending the footage to all the screens and cleans the lens. He then starts walking toward Allison’s lifeless body. As he approaches her, the poison hits. He is unable to breathe and takes off his helmet. He collapses and somehow drags himself beside Allison before turning still. Holston thus breathes his last beside his wife. Juliette is frustrated and goes down to the generator chamber and starts screaming at the top of her voice. All the work goes to waste.
Sam is in his office. After telling his assistant to go home for the day, he opens a note left by Holston. In it, Holston nominates Juliette Nichols as the next sheriff. He visits Mayor Ruth Jahns and asks if she has decided who she will make the new sheriff. She hasn’t. She has been going through the ledgers maintained by the mayors before her to learn more about the time before the rebellion and what led to it. She fears instability among the people, especially now that there is no sheriff to keep things under control. People have already begun buying hammers and pipes for security. It is curious why Sam doesn’t show her Holston’s letter. What could be the reason for it?
Three months have passed since George’s death—this means that it has been three months since Holston’s death too. This makes the total duration between Allison’s death and that of Holston’s 2 years, 3 months, approx. Juliette is with Martha Walker at the latter’s workshop. She tells Martha that Holston lied to her [we do not know about what yet]. George, with whom she was in a relationship, wanted to show her something.
Spoilers Ahead
George’s Secret
One day, after work, she visits George’s place and finds a note mentioning a location and that he has found what he was looking for. Later on, she finds out from one of her peers that George was found dead. It was apparently a suicide. She is in shock and tells Hank that it is murder [this occurs maybe a day or two before Holston finds out about it from Sam]. The next day, while she is working in the generator room, Hank brings in Sheriff Holston Becker and Deputy Sam Marnes.
Hank brings them to the spot where George’s body was discovered at 3 a.m. It looked like George had fallen to his death. Holston and Juliette then arrive at the morgue. Holston tells Sam to contact dispatch and see if the porters saw anything in the middle of the night. Holston checks George’s wrists to see if he tried to slit them. He asks if she can identify anything by looking at George’s body. But she is too shaken to say anything. Sam and Hank arrive a few minutes later. Sam informs Holston that no porters were around that night. Hank tells them that the judiciary will soon be coming for a briefing on the suicide. In the cafeteria, Holston asks Juliette why she didn’t get sanctioned by George. He guessed that she and George were together, but how? She doesn’t tell him anything but takes him straight to George’s place and shows him the note. However, it is torn. Only the first part mentioning the location is visible. Juliette has torn off the part where George states that he has found what he was looking for but lies to Holston, saying that what he sees is all George left. She then takes him to the lowest level of the Silo. She removes the board with a warning sign, and she and Holston enter a dark passageway.
Holston’s Lie
Juliette and Holston make their way down a set of steps and arrive in a huge chamber. She turns on the lights and reveals what she thinks is the machine that built the Silo [this seems to be a concrete-proof area containing the tunnel that George found in the digital blueprint of the Silo on the hard drive]. They head down further to the base of the digger, and Juliette shows Holston the small workshop that George had built there. She brings out a box full of relics, including a camcorder, a tennis cork, and a Statue of Liberty figurine. Juliette reveals that George used to visit the place and search for something, although he didn’t know what. She then follows a wire by pulling at it, which she knows is connected to something. The wire brings her and Holston to the edge of a metal platform, underneath which is a water body. She keeps pulling, and up comes a bag inside, which has a hard drive and printouts of an article on how to recover lost data [so this is where George hid them]. Holston recognizes his wife’s handwriting on the back of the document. That’s when Holston tells Juliette that Allison did some work for George a few days before she went out. He has met George only once. Juliette thus realizes that Holston could guess that she and George were dating because he had seen the watch she was wearing on George’s wrist. That’s why he checked George’s wrists at the morgue. This is why Holston followed Juliette, i.e., to find out if George had something to do with Allison going outside. Holston will have to tell the court that George’s death was an accident, but Juliette is against it. She knows he was murdered, and maybe the drive will reveal why. After much convincing, Holston agrees to find out more about George’s death and see what’s in the drive, but only if she keeps quiet about it and stops wearing George’s watch, which might just catch someone’s eye and raise suspicion. If and when he finds something, he will send her a signal.
‘Silo’ Episode 2 Ending Explained: Does Juliette Go To The Bottom Of The Water?
Juliette waited and waited, and now Holston is gone. As soon as Holston leaves, Juliette lets Martha check the other half of the note that she didn’t show Holston. George was looking for something more dangerous than a relic. Martha tells her to be careful because things are getting dangerous. Juliette leaves. Sam arrives at Mayor Ruth Jahns’s office and hands her a file containing the names of four candidates for the sheriff’s position. She still has no idea who the right person will be. That’s when Sam reads Holston’s note to her. Ruth has no idea why Holston wanted Juliette Nichols, an engineer, to be the next sheriff. She decides to see her.
Juliette is in George’s workshop at the base of the digger. A look at the ropes lying nearby reminds her of the time they were both down here, and George told her about a door that lies at the end of a tunnel at the bottom of the water under the digger. She had told him that she wanted him to tell her about it only after he had found it and come back. But now, with neither George nor Holston to help her, she decides to look for the tunnel at the bottom on her own. She puts on a headlamp, ties the rope to the bolts at the edge of the platform over the waterbody, and uses it to climb down to the surface of the water. She is almost at the bottom when she slips but manages to prevent herself from falling. However, she loses her headlamp due to the jerk, and it falls and drowns in the water right beneath her. It is dark, and she is now stuck. Silo Episode 2 ends with Juliette hanging on a rope in the dark with water beneath her. She can either climb all the way up or let go and fall into the water. The former seems like a better option, no matter how hard, because no one knows what’s lurking in the dark waters.
George’s drive is missing. It is supposed to be with Holston. He must have seen something in the drive that made him decide to go outside. As for Juliette, we have no idea what her plan of action is. We do not know what Holston told the Judicial about George or what they told him. It is possible that they confiscated the drive. Silo Episode 3 will hopefully shed light on the matter.
Silo doesn’t waste a second establishing characters by giving each of them their own stories. Instead, it follows the plot and lets us decide who we want to trust. Also, a steady pace is maintained throughout, just like in Silo Episode 1, and it holds onto our attention right till the very end and leaves us wondering what will happen next.
