Silo – Season 2 Episode 1 “The Engineer” Recap & Review

The Engineer

Episode 1 of Silo season 2 starts with a young boy called Tim running up with a note from engineering. Inside the Silo, he hands it over to his father, and it reads “generator will flood in 15 minutes”.

Five bells are chimed and those inside the Silo end up attacking the authorities. They want to get out, and through sheer, brute force they manage it. They open up the doors to the outside, and with a flag in hand, step into the wasteland.

This ties in nicely with Juliette, who stumbles across that very same flag. There are numerous dead bodies strewn across the land, picked clean and laid out like a dirty, horrible mosaic of death. Juliette finds another Silo, and unfortunately, the dead bodies here are too numerous to count.

Juliette heads down into the depths, crunching over numerous skeletal remains, as she heads deeper inside. There, she finds the layout is almost identical to her own Silo. The air isn’t toxic, thankfully, and after removing her suit, Juliette discovers cameras behind the mirrors and the word “LIES” scrawled up on the observation deck.

The crops here are all but dead, but there’s at least some form of water coming from a leaky pipe. These survivor skills are something Juliette picked up while working with Gladys in the Silo we became familiar with in season 1. She offered plenty of tips within their time in Recycling, and even helped out with directing Juliette’s excellent repairing skills.

Juliette has always been somewhat of a loner though, so being on her own isn’t something she’s unaccustomed to. Even so, the few friends she did make as a kid have definitely left a big impression on her. Gladys is one of them, while Shirley is another.

Now, this Silo that Juliette happens to have stumbled upon is the same one that we saw at the start of the episode. There have been subtle hints of an insurrection throughout her exploration, and the turning point comes from her falling into a deep pool of water after swinging across a large gap to the other side of a broken path and falling down.

She’s still alive, thankfully, but Juliette is also now freezing cold and sporting a nasty cut up her arm. Juliette manages to patch herself up and then makes a makeshift bridge, courtesy of her engineering skills. This time, she manages to scramble over to the other side, just before the bridge collapses.

Juliette’s curiosity leads her along the hallways to a rhythmic clanging sound. This, as it turns out, is simply someone’s ID card clanging against a desk fan. Finding nothing, Juliette makes another bridge, a much more sturdy one this time, and heads back to the central pillar. Or, at least she’s about to.

The sound of singing draws her back whence she came, where she eventually finds another person. This guy is not the friendly welcoming party she may be expecting however, as he threatens that he’ll kill her if she opens the door again.

The Episode Review

Silo is back and after the intense and shocking finale we received before, things slow right down as we follow Julia on a methodical odyssey across the surface and into another Silo.

Now, a lot of this episode relies on flashbacks to tell us what we kinda already knew from before, but simultaneously, it also works to flesh out more of the world through visual storytelling. Seeing the aftermath of this Silo that’s been flooded is fascinating to see and it all builds up to that crazy final scene where it seems there are some pretty unhinged and angry individuals in this Silo.

Seeing more of what happened in here, and what led to the subsequent rebellion that caused all those people to die is definitely going to be one of the key draws for this story.

It’s a pretty slow episode though, all things considered, without much going on beyond that though, to be honest. Did we really need 10 minutes of Julia building a bridge for example?

Hopefully next week’s episode will step it up a gear though as there’s definitely potential with this one.