Episode 8 of Silo is all about Juliette and how she tries to find out what’s on the hard drive. But it isn’t an easy feat. Not only is the hard drive encrypted, but she has the Judicial desperately looking for her. Both of these prove that the hard drive contains sensitive information. Alongside this plotline, there is another one that revolves around Juliette’s mom, Hanna, and shows why she committed suicide. Both of these plotlines take the urgency of the story up a notch as we realize just how suppressive the Judicial is and has been.
Spoilers Ahead
Hanna’s Death
Hanna and her daughter, young Juliette, bring home a rabbit so that Hanna can operate on it. She has made a magnifier, which Martha had earlier mentioned to Juliette, to operate on the rabbit and cure it. Juliette has turned out just like her mother, totally into machines. One might address Hanna as a potential Flamekeeper because of how she wanted to explore what was outside the Silo. Her short conversation with Mosley proves that he brought her many other things earlier as well. Unfortunately, the Judicial comes to know about it. This makes us wonder if someone alerted them about what she was doing or if the Judicial had the cameras installed even back then. She thinks that it’s her husband, Pete, but he assures her that it wasn’t him. However, he requests that she hand over the piece of equipment as the Judicial won’t stop mistreating them. One does not know the extent to which they can go. They might even take their child away from them. So, Hanna gives up her equipment, which is immediately broken into pieces by the officer. This only stresses how we have come to know the Judicial: anything that a person might use to gain knowledge that has even the slightest chance to compromise the Judicial and its proceedings shall be destroyed. Thankfully, they didn’t find the rabbit, or else they would have killed it too. Hanna and Pete lie about it. However, Hanna’s pain forces her to kill herself. What’s painful is to see young Juliette address her mother at her grave as a coward. It seems that Hanna’s obsession with machines detached her from her daughter, and somewhere deep down, Juliette hated her for not being there. She didn’t even think about her daughter before killing herself. Her husband, as Pete reveals, was never there for them, so it was just her and Juliette. And now Juliette is left all alone. She knows her father won’t be around. With all this pain inside, she sets the rabbit free in the artificial farm inside the Silo, where they buried her mother.
Juliette’s Truth
It comes as a surprise when we find out that Gloria helped Sims have a son. So it is clear that she is on good terms with him and it makes sense that she tells him about the hard drive. Surely, Juliette didn’t expect this. So when she finds officials from the Judicial Branch carrying out a search in her office ordered by Judge Meadows, she is shocked. She knows Judge Meadows couldn’t have ordered this search. So the only person who remains and is capable of pulling this off is Sims. Citing articles from the Pact, she arrests Sims for carrying out a search of a sheriff’s office. This is the first time we get to see Sims’ dark side. The way he speaks to Juliette and Paul Billings shows that he is angry. Juliette finds her mother’s file in Sims’s office, and from her expressions, it seems that she comes to know something that makes her apologize to her father for how she behaved with him her whole life. It is only when she tells her father about it that we come to know that the court indeed had cameras installed behind mirrors. This is how they learned about what she was working on.
Pete’s words to Juliette prove just how much he loves her, and the reason he sent her to Mechanical is that he didn’t want her to be deprived of what she loves to do. Hanna committed suicide because she was forced to give up doing what she loved most: fixing things and working on machines. But as fate would have it, Juliette, despite being in mechanical engineering, ends up in the middle of all this chaos. As for the hard drive, the only person who can access it is Martha. But it won’t be easy to get to her, as the Judicial has put guards everywhere. They are checking everyone’s IDs and their belongings. In other words, they are looking for any relic. But if Sims is in prison, who is the one ordering all this? It doesn’t take much time for Juliette to find out. We had our doubts about Bernard when we first saw him, but the guy seemed to be okay until now. He brings Juliette to the artificial farm and, deliberately or not, reveals that he knows about the hard drive. He has also gotten Sims out of prison, and Juliette is surrounded by guards on all sides. She cannot escape, but more importantly, there is no way to hide the hard drive anymore. It is surreal how we feel helpless as we see Juliette struggle to escape but get beaten by the guards. What comes to mind is how whatever is happening is in the same place where she buried her mother and set the rabbit free many years ago.
Does Juliette Find What’s On The Hard Drive?
Well, she comes very close to it but fails. She is taken into custody while Martha waits for her arrival, as per the message she received from Pete. Then out of nowhere, as if fate itself were interested, Paul’s tremors hit hard as he was taking Juliette to prison, after which she would be sent out of the Silo—another conspiracy hatched by both Harold and Sims. That they intend to kill her proves that there has to be something very crucial inside the hard drive, and they cannot risk not knowing whether Juliette has already found out about it. [With Juliette’s death, all this mayhem will come to an end.] Juliette takes advantage of Paul’s tremors and escapes with the drive. It seems that she jumped off the stairs into the abyss. But she cannot die. She will survive. Now it’s all about how soon she can escape from the courtroom, hide, and make her way to Martha. Paul will probably help her disappear, and so will Judge Meadows. No matter what happens, she needs to hide the hard drive for now.
Silo Episode 9 will raise the stakes. Juliette has found out about the Judicial’s wrongdoings, and it knows this. It is only a matter of time before Juliette figures out a way to access the hard drive. On the other hand, she doesn’t have much time before the Judicial finds out her position. Will the Judicial use her father to lure her in? If this happens, Juliette won’t be able to hold back. She will have to come out. We have no idea what will happen now and can only hope that she survives and finds the truth she has been searching for for so long.
