‘Silo’ Season 3, episode 9’s shocking ending, explained

Well, that was unexpected.

Back in Silo Season 3, episode 7, we were finally shown the founders responsible for building the silos. In episode 8, we seemed to get a clue as to how the world might end — and now episode 9 has gone and turned the whole thing on its head.

So, what happens at the end of episode 9, and what does it all mean? Let’s unpack it.

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What happens at the end of Silo Season 3, episode 9?

A lot happens in episode 9, from Bernard (Tim Robbins) being sent out to die to Camille (Alexandria Riley) having her faith in the mysterious algorithm shaken. The last half of the episode, though, is something else. We cut from chaos in the silo to our flashback storyline, only now we’ve jumped forward in time: Daniel (Ashley Zukerman) and Helen (Jessica Henwick) are expecting a baby, and they’re visiting the now-complete silo system that Per Stensen (Colin Hanks) and Senator Thurman (Laura Innes) have been working on for the past three years.

In this future, the silos are already operational, and people have been living in them for the past year as part of the experiment. Daniel and Helen are there for a tour ahead of the grand unveiling. Only as they’re shown around, it feels like there’s a tension in the air — like the founders know more than they’re letting on.

While Helen is led to Silo 18 (yep, that’s our silo), Daniel is taken by Henry (Reed Birney) and Dr. Victor Crnkovich (Matt Craven) to Silo 1, where he meets with Senator Thurman and Per Stensen, who are busy practising their speeches.

Daniel’s sister Charlotte (Jessica Brown Findlay), however, is nowhere to be found. And when Daniel texts her their family in-joke (“If mom and dad were alive right now…”), she sends the wrong response back.

Sensing something’s off, Daniel gets Helen on the phone. She’s walking up the ramp of Silo 18 to try and get a phone signal. Henry follows him, telling him he has to come back, but Daniel ignores him and climbs to the top of the silo’s berm.

“I got a text from Charlotte, but I don’t think she wrote it,” he tells Helen through a crackling phone line. Finally, she reaches the top of Silo 18’s berm, and they catch sight of each other in the distance. But midway through their exchange, everything suddenly turns white-red. There’s a ringing sound. And once the light dims, we see the horrific sight of a mushroom cloud on the horizon. As Daniel struggles to reach Helen, he’s wrestled back down towards Silo 1 by Henry and another guard, while a robotic voice tells them over and over again to seek shelter in the nearest silo.

At the end of the episode, it’s unclear whether he, or Helen, have survived.

Did we just witness the end of the world?

Yes, that much at least seems clear. The mushroom cloud on the horizon looked like a nuclear missile, presumably the event that triggers a global apocalypse and turns the planet into the wasteland Juliette (Rebecca Ferguson) and the others see outside in the present day.

What’s interesting is the event isn’t what we thought it was going to be: In episode 8, Per Stensen seems convinced that nanotechnology is the biggest threat to humanity — but it appears he was wrong after all.

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Who was responsible for the nuclear explosion?

This is the big question we still don’t have the answer to. In episode 8, Stensen says Iran and the U.S. are at war with each other over Iran’s development of nanoweapons, so instinctively you might suspect Iran is behind the explosion.

But if that’s the case, why are so many of the founders — and those closest to them — acting as if they know something’s about to happen? Charlotte’s partner Anna (Morven Christie), who is also the daughter of Senator Thurman, looks distant throughout the episode, insisting they need to get to the silos early and looking awkward when Daniel suggests they do breakfast the following day. Per Stensen seems distracted. And Henry immediately tries to bring Daniel back to Silo 1 when he wanders away on the phone. What do they know that Daniel and Helen don’t?

And if they do know about an impending nuclear attack, why has nobody informed U.S. intelligence agencies? Why are they just letting it happen?

One final thing worth pointing out is a throwaway line from Helen’s Silo 18 tour guide, who cheerfully tells her about the silo’s capabilities.

“This silo was built to withstand a 30-megaton nuclear explosion as close as two miles,” he says. Given what happens a short time later, that seems awfully specific. The silo was built to withstand a nuclear explosion in very close proximity — which is exactlywhat ends up happening. Surely that’s too much of a coincidence?

Who wrote The Pact?

The ancient document known as The Pact is something akin to a bible for residents of the silo, and now we finally know who was behind it: Anna Thurman and psychologist Dr. Crnkovich, who apparently wrote it together as a kind of psychological survival manual.

“It’s some crazy shit she and Dr. C wrote,” Charles tells Helen the night before the silo visit. “It is a book of rules about how to live underground for 500 years without killing each other.”

Dr. Crnkovich later tells Daniel that the silo project is largely about “managing mass trauma.”

He does admit, though, that he and Anna didn’t write the whole thing by themselves.

“To be honest, AI wrote it,” he says. “We just did some editing.”

What will happen to Helen and Daniel?

Although we don’t see either of them making it to safety, both Helen and Daniel are close to the entrances of Silo 18 and Silo 1, respectively, when the nuclear explosion hits. Given that they’re both main characters, it seems unlikely that their journeys end here. So, what’s next?

Well, the fact that Helen ends up in Silo 18 is surely no coincidence. Although the apocalypse takes place hundreds of years before the events we’ve witnessed in present-day Silo 18, the fact that Helen is pregnant could mean her descendants are still alive in the future. Could she and Daniel be related to one of the main characters in Juliette’s Silo 18?

Daniel, meanwhile, is last seen being dragged towards Silo 1, the core silo that we now know acts as a kind of central hub for the whole silo system. Given the way Henry separates him and Helen at the start of the tour, it seems clear that Daniel has been marked out for Silo 1 intentionally, likely for his engineering brain.

If he survives, our guess is the founders will have had a specific use in mind for him.

<a href="https://zdcs.link/kWx85?pageview_type=Standard&template=article&module=content_body&element=offer&item=text-link&element_label=Silo%20Season%203%20is%20streaming%20now%20on%20Apple%20TV%2C%20with%20new%20episodes%20dropping%20every%20Friday.&object_type=article&object_uuid=07Is6B0oU8adiH4NZBRxlju&short_url=kWx85&u=https%3A%2F%2Fmashable.com%2Farticle-route-prefix%2Fentertainment%2Fsilo-season-3-episode-9-ending-explained&session_uuid=74a76c63-7258-4780-bde2-f01e4ba6a8c6&view_instance_uuid=389d5d5b-c832-47e3-bb7d-db45bb83917a” rel=”nofollow noopener” target=”_blank”>Silo Season 3 is streaming now on Apple TV, with new episodes dropping every Friday.

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Sam Haysom is the General Assignment Editor, UK, for Mashable. He covers entertainment and online culture, and writes horror fiction in his spare time.