Breakdown and review of Silo season 1, episode 8: Hanna

In the eighth episode of Silo season 1, Juliette is trying her best to break into the illegal hard drive that Holston left, but in her attempt to do so, she eventually stumbles on one of the silo’s biggest secrets. She finds out just exactly who’s pulling the strings.

In a flashback a young Juliette and her mother Hanna Nichols walk through the cornfields to meet a mysterious man. She gives him some items inside a small bottle, and in return, he hands over a metal box that looks like one of those military munitions’ containers.

Juliette opens it as they’re climbing levels and inside is a bunny rabbit. Very cute and very illegal.

Flash forward to the present and Judicial raiders in armor are searching the nursery. Fortunately, Sheriff Nichols is good at hiding.

Down a few levels, in the room of the ill Gloria Hildebrandt, Sims comes by for a “friendly visit.” The interrogation is fairly gentle when it comes to Sims.

We find out it’s because Gloria helped Sims and his wife conceive a while back and so he takes care not to be heavy handed about information. He even orders the nurse to give her all the premium drugs once he gets what he wants.

Silo season 1, episode 8 recap: Sounds like an IT problem

Juliette tries to get into the hard drive that Holston left but she can’t crack the encryption. It reminds her of the time with the bunny and her mother.

Turns out Hanna built a high magnification scope and tested it on some heart surgery on the animal. Jules was allowed to assist.

Results were good and the bunny got well. But she’d made an illegal item and the punishment was much more severe as we’ll find out later.

Sheriff Juliette wakes to Billings’ voice on the radio, urging her to come to the office. Once there, she finds Judicial thrashing the place and searching for the hard drive on the premise of looking for “unregistered relics.”

Of course, they can’t find it because Jules stashed it somewhere safe. Incensed, she and Billings go up to Judicial and arrest Sims.

Because Billings knows plenty about the Pact, since he’s a like a three-peat Pact quiz bee champ, it turns out Judicial skipped several protocols to be able to get into the sheriff’s office and search. “They skipped about 10 steps,” which means it was illegal and the head of the raiding team can be arrested.

Silo season 1, episode 8 recap: Sims behind bars

Sims isn’t too pleased to be in cuffs and dragged off to jail, but he lets it happen. After all, he’s confident it’s just a temporary detention.

But Jules plays it smart. Once Sims is in custody, she searches his office for anything relevant.

Bingo! She finds the Judicial files on her mother Hanna Nichols, her mentor Martha Walker, and even Shirley Campbell who was her former colleague in Mechanical.

All the raiding and searches has put Jules into a memory warp, how Judicial also violently thrashed their home looking for the magnifying glass that Hanna built. This caused the original rift between Jules’s mom and dad.

Mostly because Hanna thought Dr. Pete was the one who snitched on them. In the end, Hanna relented and assembled the magnifying device by taking bits of gear from seemingly innocuous household items.

Very clever and very steampunk. The head of the raiding team is shocked but destroys it anyway.

He also wants the bunny. Hanna tells them it died and they ate it.

Later we find out though that the bunny is indeed alive and had been hidden in the metal box under the bed. Still, poor rabbit!

Silo season 1, episode 8 recap: The trauma of a raid

Jules’s deep distrust of her allegedly snitching father and the silo’s brutal authorities becomes clear now. She suffered all this as a young tween, deeply embedded the trauma in her psyche so that any similar encounter is stained with these emotions, inescapable and intense.

Won’t need a psych degree to see all that. After reading her mother’s file though, it’s clear that her father Dr. Pete was not the snitch she thought he was.

It was really through Judicial’s surveillance tech that they found out about the magnifier. Jules goes to the nursery and pays her father a visit.

They have it out and Dr. Pete confesses that Hanna’s suicide and building the illegal magnifier was really more about trying to recover from their son Jacob’s death. Dr. Pete and his daughter finally see each other’s suffering after Hanna’s death, break down their guards in sympathy, and have their long-delayed reconciliation.

Silo season 1, episode 8 recap: Check point issues

Turns out Jules also hid the hard drive under one of the cribs and now intends to take it to Martha Walker down in Mechanical. Heading down though she runs into one of Judicial’s check points.

Going down to the Down Deep will be a problem. Does she try to get the hard drive to Martha or try to crack it?

Jules tries Lukas, the illustrator who likes her but he’s way too afraid to even try. Especially after she breaks a mirror and shows him one of Judicial’s cameras.

It doesn’t help, the guy isn’t used to any kind of dangerous undertaking. Jules tries one last time to get through the cordon and she’s stopped, as per usual.

But this time Mayor Holland runs into her, and he clears the checkpoint with her after some difficulty. She confesses all that she knows so far.

Intrigued, Holland takes them to the agricultural level, and they talk in the middle of the corn stalks. It’s there that the real bomb gets dropped.

Silo season 1, episode 8 recap: Who’s really behind Judicial?

It turns out that Holland is the puppet master behind Judicial. He tells her all, like a Bond villain relishing the moment.

He’s the one who’s been pulling the strings of control and all the tragedies that have been happening, from the death of Marnes and Jahns, to the search for the hard drive that is in Jules’s bag. Figures that the IT guy is the evil mastermind behind all the shady happenings in an underground and low-tech civilization.

It isn’t long until Sims makes an appearance, freed from imprisonment likely under the mayor’s orders. The theft of the heat tape gets mentioned again.

What is it with Jules and the heat tape? Nobody else is that fixated on it, not even Holland the newly revealed villain.

Juliette does the only thing she can. She bolts.

Sims and his raiders run after her. She’s pretty athletic though and outpaces them, even able to fend them off ably in a group fight.

But the sheer number of armored raiders overwhelms her. They pin her down and cuff her.

They’ve got the hard drive. That’s until she reaches the stairs and she starts arguing with Billings. Sims hits her for nothing.

It dawns on her what she needs to do. She shakes Billings off just as he’s having one of his seizures and grabs her bag from Sims.

With a last look back at Sims, she steps on the rail and jumps over. What a cliffhanger!

You can stream episodes of Silo on Apple TV+.