Well, that was Troy.
I am talking about the immediate aftermath of The Event. I suppose they could just slip him forgetting drugs but that would be less interesting. Better story if he remembers her for a while.
Silo 17 and 18 didn’t have cryo chambers; as far as we know, that’s only Silo 1. I assume Helen has been dead for hundreds of years.
And an overall comment on Season 3 – the last 4-5 episodes really made up for a slow and disappointing start. This season definitely finished on a high note.
As I stated upstream I decided to pause early on to let the season finish so I could binge it, rather than slog week by week through some of those early episodes. Now that I’m finished with it, I’m pretty happy with that decision. The binging went quickly and I was overall pretty happy with the season and the show.
Loved the season but the math isn’t mathing for me. There were nowhere near enough people in the silos when the nuke went off. Half a million? More like half a thousand. Color me skeptical that every silo would fill up from 100ish people to 10,000 people in any reasonable timeframe, if ever. Bro paid Peter Gabriel how much to come play a show, and the audience area they showed could only hold a couple hundred at best.
I found it infuriating that there was no specific reason for building the silos. Just a general sense of existential dread. I’m concerned that the explanation for why the safeguards exist will be equally unconvincing. Even worse, the inscrutability/stupidity of the safeguards is an actual plot point.
That said, I found the entire second half of this season propulsive and could not stop watching until I finished it. I’m very glad I chose to wait until after the last episode aired before I binged the whole season.
Can’t wait for next season. Sucks that we have to wait a year.
If you double every generation (4 kids from two parents), it would take about 7 generations or 175 years. But with good modern health care you could easily have ten kids/family in the early generations (drugged into believing that propagation was necessary and a duty). They’ve been in the silos for 350 years according to the show runner. I think that works.
Well, that and, I suspect, a Musk-like technocrat who believes he is so smart he knows exactly how to reengineer society and that it’s totally worth annihilating humanity on Earth so that he can become its savior in the silos.
It’s not science fiction. It’s a horror story.
Well, they are showing us two different time frames in the show. I assume the “past” storyline will pick up where it left off, where Helen has not been dead hundreds of years.
We also don’t know what secret means they might have to move between silos so it’s possible Helen could have been moved. We won’t know what happens until next year.
In this last episode the “past” storyline has already converged with “present day.” I would be surprised if they spend much if any time showing (vs telling) what happened in the first days/years of the Silos. If Daniel ends up recovering his memory, there may be flashbacks from his perspective, but nothing like multi-episode narratives.
There are obviously interesting stories there to tell (origins of the Flamekeepers being one), but I can’t see them introducing a completely new cast of characters to to populate Silo 18 in the final season.
With what we’ve been shown so far with the death gas, this show is basically Snowpiercer with its armholes. Just not quite as egregiously stupid, but close. I had higher hopes for this show than that.
We don’t know how many people were already living in the silos when the bomb went off. The silos already had a population living in them for a year, so it wasn’t just the tourists. Assuming Stenson and Senator Thurman were building the “perfect population”, they’d already have all the chosen people who were willing to work with them, like Charlotte. “D-Day” was then just for the people they wanted but hadn’t come willingly, like Daniel and Helen.
There’s a very good reason to build them if you’re the one that’s going to trigger the apocalypse.
Yeah, this. While Silo does share a lot with Snowpiercer, the two things that come to mind for me are Moonraker and Foundation. In Moonraker, you have the billionaire that thinks he can repopulate earth with the perfect specimens. In Foundation, you have the genius who thinks he can shape society by controlling certain variables and pushing things in certain directions.
Incidentally, I’m loving Colin Hanks as the smarmy Musk type.
We are explicitly told exactly how many people are in the silos. During the pitch dinner, when Hanks is condescending to Helen about not understanding what a trillion is:
100 people per silo – 5000 people total – paid $200,000 per year (“which feels overly generous”) totals one billion/year. With his trillion dollars that means he can “only” afford to pay for “a thousand years.”
Also, if he coordinated that nuke, you’d think he would have at least waited until after Petey Gabriel performed and Senator Kerry Weaver gave her speech. But again, the audience area they set up looked like it only had capacity for hundreds, not even thousands. Google pictures of crowds of half a million people for scale.
“You know, Mr. Thatcher, at the rate of one million dollars a year, I’ll have to close this place in… sixty years.”
--Charles Kane
True. Maybe he was lying, maybe things changed in the 2 years until they started staffing, maybe they ramped up the population significantly in the weeks before the event, or maybe the first generation had a lot of kids. These are all fan-wanks, and the mostly likely explanation is the showrunners didn’t give it a lot of thought.
This is again just me fan-wanking, but the best timing would be when everyone is on their tour and already inside the silos. If you wait for people to gather outside for the concert, it’s a mess.
I don’t know what to say about the planned audience size. Maybe that was the VIP area for people who donated $100K to see Per Stenson in person.
Again, assuming even just doubling:
1rst generation - 100x2 = 200
2nd generation - 200x2 = 400
3rd generation - 400x2 = 800
4th generation - 800x2 = 1600
5th generation - 1600x2 = 3200
6th generation - 3200x2 = 6400
7th generation - 6400x2 = 12800
That’s assuming one couple raising up four kids. What if the 50 original couples had 8 kids each?
1rst generation - 100x4 = 400
2nd generation - 400x4 = 800
3rd generation - 800x4 =3200
4th generation - 3200x4 = 12800
The numbers simply aren’t a narrative problem. 100 carefully screened founders also should be enough to avoid serious inbreeding with a little early effort. Considering they are being actively shepherded by a semi-immortal cult with access to memory erasing drugs and unlimited propaganda to shape outcomes, that math doesn’t bother me.
Now can the purposefully isolated silos actually house and self-support 10,000 people for a dozen generations? That’s a much tougher bit of calculation and potential fan-wankery 
. But reaching that kind of population just doesn’t feel like an issue to me.
I would be surprised if they don’t. I thought the show this season was much improved with the filling in of the back story and I want to know more. But I guess we will find out in a year or so.
You take that back!
I say in jest?
Now this I can get behind:
I see it and Fallout as sharing the same premise …
…very astute.