‘Silo’ Season 2 Episode 4 Recap: “The Harmonium”

Juliette Nichols is an engineer by trade, helping to power the Silo. But what her job really does is power Silo, the show. Thanks to her background of mechanical know-how and pragmatic problem-solving, the show can serve up one seemingly insurmountable problem with a so-crazy-it-just-might-work solution after another. Then all it has to do is sit back and point its camera at a sweaty Rebecca Ferguson and a bedraggled coworker or two, and the result is some of the tightest, tensest action setpieces on television.

Though much happened on this episode plotwise, the physical action centered mainly on Juliette’s attempt to traverse a flooded Silo level in hopes of tracking down leftover firefighter suits, with which she could perhaps improvise a hazmat suit to reenter the upper levels and the surface world. Thanks to the rock-solid script by Sal Calleros, everything else kind of clicks into place like a machine.

First, she needs some kind of underwater breathing apparatus, a concept introduced to her by her garrulous new companion Solo as he recounts such pre-Silo wonders as the circus, elephants, and the book 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. But when he explains that she could perhaps use his harmonium to pull it off — well, you might as well put “harmonium” in quotes, since she has know idea what one is. 

It takes him a long time to convince her that for once his ranting is worth listening to, but finally she relents and sees that there’s a bellows within the instrument. If she affixes a tube, and Solo keeps pumping for however long she’s down there exploring, she could conceivably use it as a breathing mechanism. So she goes about constructing exactly such a device.

Problems and solutions continue to bubble up. If she’s going to try to walk around on a submerged floor, she needs a weight to keep herself anchored, one heavy enough to do the trick but light enough to lift back to the surface in a pinch. She ties this to her waist…which becomes a problem in itself, when she swims past the range of the breathing tube and tries to resurface on the other side of divide, only for the weight to get snagged, trapping her. The solution here: grabbing the metal railing at the edge of the surface, having it give way, then using the jagged shard to cut herself loose when the knot won’t give way on its own. 

Even then the ordeal doesn’t end. Once she arrives at the unsubmerged firefighters’ locker room, her only way to get into the lockers is to bash and tear at them with her bare hands. It quite obviously hurts like hell. Of course, “Juliette Nichols gets hurt like hell” is half the show.

But only half. When the previously agoraphobic Solo flees back to his vault and has a hard time getting the passcode right, he flips on Juliette, sealing himself in and refusing to speak to her. It takes her desperate begging to get him to tell her more about the circus and its long-nosed animals whose name she can’t remember, then turning to leave, to coax him back out again. It’s a moving and melancholy moment. There’s a lot of that going around. 

Much of the action in the main Silo centers on Judge Meadows, who desires nothing else now but to go out like Juliette did. Lukas Kyle (Avi Nash), the star-gazer who received a sentence to the mines for his involvement with Nichols (he didn’t report her, but he also didn’t help her when she needed it), has his sentence partially commuted by the Judge after the two of them share a passionate, wondrous conversation about Copernican astronomy, which Lukas had extrapolated from observation alone and which the Judge rapturously confirms. But it’s small mercy: She has the man whisked away for five more years down there, and she doubts he’ll make it a single one.

Sims, the Silo’s enforcer, begins playing politics by initiating an IMPEACH MEADOWS campaign. Meadows has agreed to meet with a small group of people from Mechanical — Knox, Shirley, Walker, and Walker’s ex-wife Carla McLain (Clare Perkins), the head of Supply. With distrust of Mechanical and the denizens of the Down Deep running high on the higher levels, the Judge’s decision is controversial, and Sims figures making her an impeachment target will unify the unstable Silo.

But the unwanted spotlight on Meadows forces Bernard’s hand, or at least that’s his own grisly internal logic. He hosts the Judge for a delightful dinner, one which more than hints they had romantic feelings for each other that the Judge knew he would never fully deliver on. There’s also some mystery about a four-day disappearance prior to her decision to quit being Bernard’s shadow, and about what was on the hard drive she confiscated from Juliette. 

But Bernard never gets his answers, because he poisoned her food. And since she’s so desperate to see the outside world and has so little time left, he relents and instead of demanding answers, provides her with his own top-secret relic: a VR headset, showing the jungles of Costa Rica and its animal inhabitants. He walks her through every inch and every moment without even needing to see it himself — it’s clear he’s gone to this lost place and time a thousand times on his own. “What did they do, Bernard?” she asks, dying. “How did they lose this world?” How indeed.

Anyway, Bernard killed the Judge with a plan in mind. He instructs Sims to make the death look like a stabbing within her own Judicial headquarters, allow in the two youngest visitors from Mechanical, then frame them for the murder and let the mob lynch them rather than having his Raiders carry out the sentence themselves. This is the unifying act called for in The Order, the top-secret book only he and the Judge have ever seen as far as we know: scapegoating Mechanical, for rebellion after rebellion after rebellion back through the ages. 

But even during this alternately heartbreaking and infuriating chain of events, there’s still some practical physical business going on. The foursome from Mechanical have a secret weapon for getting past angry mobs of people on the upper levels: They can shut down the Silo by turning off the power. But how can they let their comrades know to pull the plug from a hundred levels up? Easy: by dropping a red rubber ball over the railing into the pool all the way at the bottom as an “OFF” switch, and green one for “ON.” It’s the kind of common-sense, problem-solving thinking Juliette would really appreciate, if she or they live long enough to talk it over.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.