Silo Season 2 Episode 1 Recap: The Engineer

Silo Season 2 is here, picking up where Juliette Nichols left off in her relentless quest for the truth. If you need a refresher on Season 1, here’s a quick recap.

A Brief Recap of Season 1

The story takes place entirely in a massive, man-made underground silo where humanity has been forced to live. According to the rule-makers aka the Judicials, the outside world is toxic and uninhabitable, so everyone must stay underground to survive. However, some suspect this might be a lie. Relics, like recovered hard drives, show glimpses of a beautiful, thriving world beyond the silo.

The show is about, Juliette, a low-level engineer, who gets promoted to sheriff after her predecessor, Sheriff Holston, decides to leave the silo to uncover the truth. Unfortunately, he dies shortly after stepping outside, collapsing next to his wife’s body. Like Holston, Juliette also believes that the Judicial are lying to them, and the outside world is actually beautiful and habitable. 

Months later, she makes the choice to go out herself but unlike Holston, she survives, thanks to an untampered suit. However, what she discovers is both shocking and disheartening. Juliette finds that the world outside is really uninhabitable. Even more unsettling is that there are countless other silos scattered across the land, each housing its own underground population.

From here on out, the recap contains heavy spoilers!

There are More Than One Silos 

Episode 1 of Silo Season 2 kicks off with a flashback to events that took place many years ago. We see a group of rebels—men, women, and even children—rising up against the IT. Their plan is to capture Russell, the head of IT at the time, to uncover the truth about the outside world. Is it really toxic, or is everyone being lied to?  

What follows is a fierce and brutal battle between the rebels and the powers that be. Against all odds, the rebels manage to win, and in their moment of triumph, they open the silo.  

The scene shifts to Juliette, who struggles to believe what she’s seeing. All this time, she was convinced that the Judicial had been lying—claiming the outside world was destroyed and that the only way to survive was by staying in the man-made underground silos.  But the sight in front of her tells a different story. Thousands of lifeless remains that are scattered across the landscape are proof that the world as they once knew it is truly gone.  

To find answers, Juliette makes her way to one of the open silos. Inside, she sees that the entire silo is filled with the corpses of people who died after it was opened. These are the same people we saw at the start of the episode, leading the rebellion against the IT department, and its head, Russell.  

A Glimpse of Juliette’s Past

The episode takes us deeper into Juliette’s past and offers glimpses of her childhood when she first moved to Mechanical. Her very first job there involved sorting through items to separate what could be recycled before being incinerated.  From Season 1, we already know Juliette had a complicated, on-again, off-again relationship with her father after the deaths of her mother and brother.

Their loss created a rift, leading Juliette to move out and start working in the engineering section where people are responsible for keeping the silo running smoothly without any hiccup. One of the scenes shows Juliette finding a broken toy. After carefully repairing it, she decides to gift it to her friend Shirley.

However, Shirley doesn’t show much excitement over the toy. Born and raised in the silo, children like Shirley never experienced the joy of playing with toys or the carefree happiness of a typical childhood. To them, these things are foreign concepts. Even so, Shirley eventually accepts the toy.

Silo Season 2 Episode 1 Review

The premiere episode of Season 2 is here, and the season is off to an exciting start! Right away, we get an answer to one of our biggest questions: the world outside is toxic and definitely not livable. The Judicial and IT have been saying this all along to the people in the silos—and it turns out, they weren’t lying about that part.  

But does this make them the good guys? No! Let’s not forget—they’re the ones who designed the suits with faulty tape that malfunctions and kills anyone who chooses to step outside the silo. Juliette only survived because someone secretly switched her faulty tape with a functioning one.  

So why would the Judicial and IT go to such lengths to stop anyone from leaving, especially when the suits are supposedly made for that purpose? Could it be that they’re hiding something? And maybe, just maybe, the man locked away on the other side of the vault door knows exactly what it is.