Brutalist architecture is misleadingly named. When people think of the stark, colossal buildings that are the hallmark of the style, they think brutal as in overpowering. In fact the term comes from the french word brut, meaning “raw,” referring to the style’s tendency to display rather than mask its raw materials, its concrete and steel.
Brutalism is often associated with such massive construction projects as low-income housing or government buildings, and for good reason: It’s a postwar style that emerged from the social-democrat consensus following the conflict, and was embraced by left/liberal governments on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Only when the tail end of the Cold War and its conservative ascendency shook that consensus did these buildings take on the vaguely sinister air with which they are often associated to this day.
The reason for that is simple, as anyone who’s ever seen a crumbling castle or haunted house can tell you. When a system dies, the buildings constructed by that system for the greater good become symbolic instead of the system’s collapse. City halls become sites of faceless bureaucracy. Monuments become gravestones. Shelters become tombs.
On a rainy night in Washington, DC, an ambitious young politician (Ashley Zukerman) meets an ambitious young journalist (Jessica Henwick) for what he believes is going to be a date. He has no problem slipping past the radiation detector wielded by the bouncer; “reds” are rare these days. He and his date get to talking, and amid flirtations small talk they sketch out the contours of a terrible incident, the detonation of dirty bomb in the nation’s capital by Iran.
Only the journalist isn’t sure it’s that simple. She suspects that the congressman, who once served in the Army Corps of Engineers, knows more than he’s letting on — about plans for a counterstrike, about what his people are or were up to, even about “whether or not there really was a radiological attack on the United States.” The congressman, realizing he’s been ambushed, ends the date, but not before politely giving her the little gift he’d brought along as a gesture…a rubber-duckie Pez dispenser we’ve seen many, many times before through the course of this series.
So, there you have it. After engineering a false-flag attack on itself, the United States had its military build a bunch of Silos, then nuke Iran, leading to the apocalypse. Or so it seems now, before the next “everything you thought you knew was wrong” twist comes along at the end of a season to upend things.
But what was the purpose of the Silos, really? Were the built to save some remnant of the human race until such time as the surface world could be reinhabited? Or — and this seems to be what Lukas Kyle and Bernard Holland learn from the Silo’s sentient operating system, to their near-suicidal dismay — were they designed to seal away and control the people? Were they in fact designed not as giant saferooms, but giant gas chambers, complete with enough poison to kill each batch of 10,000 people found within each one? Are they maybe even the reason the surface world remains unlivable to this day?
The plot of “Into the Fire,” the tenth and final episode of Silo’s fine second season, culminates when two rivals meet to share information each of them acquired independently. First, there’s Mayor Bernard Holland, who learns he’s been bamboozled by the rebellion. His double agent, Walker, has been playing him all along, using hand signals developed for use in the deafening generator room to devise their real plan of attack with rebel leaders Knox, Shirley, Sheriff Paul Billings, and Deputy Hank. Paul has completely won over the entire sheriff’s department. Hank has helped Dr. Pete Nichols to transport explosives up the stairs, where the doctor detonates them, losing his life in the process but trapping all the raiders who’d descended to the Down Deep to crush the rebellion. Now the upper level belongs to the rebels — but they’re divided among themselves between those who want to go out immediately and those who want to learn the truth first.
They all get the truth from an unexpected source. In the midst of the melee, Juliette reemerges.
Juliette is the second of the two rivals, of course. She spends the episode in a race against time, trying to juggle several balls at once. She has to say goodbye to the residents of Silo 17, and because she’s who she is, she won’t do that until she chews out Audrey for her cruelty to Eater, and encourages Eater to embrace both her real name — Hope — and her inner strength.
Hardest of all to tear herself away from, Dorothy-and-Scarecrow-style, is Jimmy, aka Solo, her unlikely and occasionally unwilling partner throughout this season-long Silo 17 sojourn. This isn’t just because he’s reluctant to tear himself away from his family’s old quarters, but because in the process he discovers the secret of the Silos. The people in Silo 17 died, yes, but not right away: His parents shut down the pipe that pumps the poison into the air, sparing the citizens, at least temporarily. He makes sure Juliette has all this info, and the location of the poison pipe, before she leaves.
And just when the fight among the rebels reaches a fever pitch, she crests the hill and shows up on Silo 18’s viewscreens again. She cleans the camera lens to make sure everyone can see, then holds up the sign she asked Hope to make her: NOT SAFE, DO NOT COME OUT.
And here’s where the two equal and opposite forces converge. Via Lukas Kyle, his erstwhile shadow, Mayor Bernard Holland has also learned that the Silo itself is willing and able to kill everyone inside with that poison, rendering his lifelong effort to safeguard the Silo and its people at all costs moot. Crushed by the revelation, he decides to “go out” all on his own, though first he hands the keys of the kingdom over to his former lieutenant, Robert Sims. (Sims and his family travel to the Legacy per Bernard’s suggestion, but only Camille is permitted inside, for reasons unknown.)
Meanwhile, Juliette tries and fails to pry her way back into Silo 18’s gate to the outside. Only when Bernard opens the door to leave can she make it in, whereupon she meets her old nemesis at gunpoint. But he’s planning to use the gun on himself, not her. Quickly they realize each has the same information as the other, though Bernard has a bit more. He knows who locked them all in the Silos and set up the controls they’ve lived and died under for all these years, but he doesn’t know why, and he doesn’t care. All he wants to do is leave and taste a little freedom before he dies.
It never gets that far. Juliette has a little more info that Bernard, too: She has the location of the poison pipe. But both of them wind up trapped in the airlock when blowtorches go off, incinerating…well, probably not Juliette, since her hazmat suit is largely constructed from a firefighter’s uniform. Bernard’s fate is a bit dicier. (Tim Robbins, alas, may be following Rashida Jones and David Oyelowo and Iain Glen into Silo Star Heaven.)
The Silo — the Silos, plural — are brutalist in their construction: the concrete is unadorned and enormous in scale. They’re brutalist in their purpose: They were built to safeguard 10,000 souls apiece, recreating society in miniature.
But they’re also “brutalist” in the misnomer sense: They are the site of authoritarian oppression. If indeed they ever really were built to safeguard anything, all they really exist for now, as Lukas and Bernard and Juliette and Jimmy all learn, is to seal off the lives of those within forever, lethally if need be.
The Silos are the brutalist paradox transmuted into sci-fi plot form. Are these massive structures the only hope for humanity? Or are they indeed better thought of as haunted places, places of deceit and domination, because whatever world they once existed to protect is long dead?
Like the porters who carry goods up and down the Silo’s dozens and dozens of levels, the cast carry us back and forth as we confront this question. This show simply wouldn’t work if Rebecca Ferguson, Tim Robbins, Steve Zahn, Harriet Walter, Chinaza Uche, and Iain Glen in particular weren’t conveying us around.
Ditto the genuinely impressive sense of place showrunner Graham Yost and his team convey through the Silo’s dependable, easy-to-parse layout, both physical and sociopolitical. I understand how the Silo works about 40,000 times better than I understood how the world of Westworld worked, and it’s not like that show was all that difficult to follow — it was just bloated and overcomplicated. Silo keeps it simple, which is smart.
I could nitpick for sure, maybe primarily about the murk that characterizes the dimly lit portions of both Silos; this is likely a choice made deliberately to convey the essence of their subterranean artificial lighting, but the brightly lit surface scenes illustrate how well the rest of the show would be served with higher-contrast visuals. Rebel leader Shirley in particular is an underwritten part, lacking even the realpolitik played by Knox at the end of Season 1, and given that she’s holding down the side of the rebellion almost single-handedly at times, that hurts.
But Silo asks a provocative and timely question, one reflected in the controversy of the architectural style upon which it’s based: Are structures of protection really structures of oppression? And when the time comes, will we be able to tell the difference?
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.
