Silo: Rebecca Ferguson, Tim Robbins Preview Major Power Shifts — Plus, Did Juliette Just Learn How to [Spoiler]?
The following contains spoilers from Episode 3 of Silo, now streaming on Apple TV+.
There’s a new sheriff in town on Apple TV+’s Silo, and though her generator may now be purring like a kitten, the subterranean structure will be rumbling louder than ever amid this improbable power shift.
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The first stretch of Episode 3 chronicled Mayor Jahns’ long trek to Mechanics, with Deputy Marnes at her side, and her laying witness to Juliette’s fearless demeanor. When Jahns relayed the late Holston’s wish that Juliette succeed him as sheriff, the engineer politely-ish declined. But when Juliette saw what had been scratched onto the back of the sheriff’s star that Holston left for her — “TRUTH” — she realized it was the message he had promised, signaling that something rotten indeed befell her secret beau George.
Juliette had one condition, though: Before she can leave the generator behind, she needs to fix it once and for all. And that means shutting it down — and blanketing the silo in darkness — for hours. Jahns said yes and proceeded to alert the population of the overnight blackout. The actual fixing of the generator was a white-knuckle ordeal, given that Juliette had barely 30 minutes to get it done (else the closed steam valve go kablooey). And after turning the last leg of the repair over to her shadow, Cooper, Juliette bought them a bit more time by clambering down into the steam reservoir and hosing down the overheated valve. But in doing so, Juliette nearly drowned in the accumulating water, unfamiliar as anyone inside the silo is with the notion of swimming.
So… did Juliette learn to at least doggie paddle on the fly? Because such an ability could pave the way for her to brave the massive, daunting body of water at the bottom of the cavern that George had discovered.
“I mean, that could really come in handy in the future…,” Rebecca Ferguson, who plays Juliette, acknowledged to TVLine with a smile. “Who knows!”
Ferguson went on to note that Juliette’s near-drowning “was one of the trickier scenes to do, because if you know how to swim, your body automatically goes into a motion of knowing how to kick.” Silo residents such as Juliette, however, “have no perception of mass and don’t know what a room filled with water is, so it was interesting to play that.”
Fact is, though Juliette came out the ordeal a bit waterlogged, the job got done — and that clears the path for her to serve as sheriff. But in one last, frightful twist, Marnes and Jahns were readying to resume the canoodling they began during the blackout when the mayor collapsed in her bathroom, bleeding out of the mouth.
If Juliette’s stint as sheriff wasn’t already set to be tested by opposition from the likes of Judicial and even Deputy Marnes, having her No. 1 backer out of commission threatens to worsen matters. And the withdrawn engineer wasn’t any kind of people person to begin with.
“What I really like about [Juliette], and love, is that when we meet her in the beginning she is this introvert, a really hard person who has so much trauma in her life,” Ferguson says. “And when she’s taken out of her comfort zone and is put, or accepts to be put, in another room where she’s ‘Bambi on ice,’ we see her gradual acceptance of the characters around her, which she has never dealt with before.”
In the episodes ahead, “There are moments where she’s being met with harshness and she doesn’t know how to meet it, so she just meets harsh with harsh and gradually she has to realize that that’s not going to get her anywhere,” Ferguson previews. “She has to win people’s love, but she doesn’t know how to do that.”
Given how Bernard, for one, audibly scoffed when Mayor Jahns first floated the idea of Juliette as sheriff (“She’s a thief,” he snarled), you might expect the powerful IT department chief to prove to be a roadblock.
But as portrayer Tim Robbins hinted to TVLine, “Bernard is cool with her being the sheriff — but I can’t tell you the reason why. It has to do with something that is revealed much later… let’s just say that yes, he is cool with her being sheriff.”
Have questions or want scoop on Silo? Email InsideLine@tvline.com and your question may be answered via Matt’s Inside Line.
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