What’s Behind Silo’s Giant Door?
Post-apocalyptic is the new hot thing on streaming, with shows like Fallout and The Last Of Us earning critical acclaim and big numbers. Among all the post-apocalyptic streaming competition, Apple TV+’s Silo stands out as one of the more thoughtful and compelling shows currently leading the genre.
The series is based on a book called Wool by author Hugh Howey. Wool eventually spawned sequel novels, and all of that material has been used in creating Apple TV’s Silo streaming series. However, the show doesn’t follow the books exactly, and even if you read them all, you may not understand everything happening in the series.
We’re here to help. Silo Season 2 ended on a big cliffhanger, with much to figure out and understand.
The biggest question left by Silo’s season was both answered and also not answered. That question is this: What is behind the giant door?
We’ll give you a more complete answer and explanation to the mystery of Silo’s giant door in this article. Don’t worry, we’ll also give you a big warning before we hit on any major spoilers for Silo’s next season.
Spoiler-free section to start.
How Silo Revealed The Door
Lukas Kyle (Avi Nash), the ever-curious, newly minted IT shadow, discovers the giant door. He’s led to the door by following a series of codes and clues left behind by an infamous figure from the silo’s past, a man named Salvador Quinn.
The door is hidden deep beneath the Silo, in an area where abandoned digging equipment that first dug out the Silo has been left to rot in what appears to be an underground lake of water. No one in the Silo can swim, so of the very few who’ve made it down there, almost none of them have bothered to explore the lake.
Lukas bets that the lake isn’t as deep as it looks and boldly jumps in, proving his hypothesis that it is only waist deep. He wades to the other side, where he discovers a big door, a giant door attended by what sounds like some sort of computerized guardian.
What The Door Tells Lukas Kyle
The voice speaks to Lukas and informs him that if he tells anyone what he learns there, a Safeguard will be enacted. That Safeguard will kill everyone in his Silo. We later learn that deadly something is poison.
Is there poison gas hidden behind the door? The door seems a little big to be used solely as a poison gas dispenser, and there is no giant door in the Hugh Howey books the Silo streaming series is based on.
For now, the exact nature of the door remains unknown. We do know that the voice behind the door is listening to and watching everything. If Lukas tells anyone about this secret, the poison it controls will be released, and everyone inside his Silo will die.
We learn it may be possible to stop the door guard from releasing its deadly poison, thanks to the work of Solo’s (Steve Zahn) parents in a neighboring Silo. But why would these Silos have pipes full of poison, ready to be dispensed, at all? Why would anyone set something like this up? That’s the thing Silo’s second season doesn’t answer, and that answer is more terrible than you’ve probably imagined.
From here on out, we’re going deep into spoilers for Silo season 3. Go no further if you don’t want to know.
Why The Safeguard Exists And How To Defeat It
The Silo season 2 finale hints at where things are going when it flashes back to the past and shows us a meeting between a young Senator and a reporter.
Those scenes in the past will become a dominant part of the show’s next season as we begin to learn the truth about who built the Silos and why. The secrets of the creation of the Silos have already been revealed in the books, and we’re going to use that source material to clue you in on the secret background hidden inside the Apple TV show.
From the books, we know that there are 50 Silos. Juliette’s (Rebecca Ferguson) original Silo is Silo 18. Solo’s Silo is Silo 17. They’re all the same, except Silo 1. Silo 1 is the control Silo, and it uses cryogenics to keep the founders of the Silo system alive and working in shifts to manage all 50.
The poison pipes, ostensibly behind the giant door Lukas discovers, serve two purposes.
The first purpose is to control possible rebellions. Should a rebellion break out, the poison will be released to wipe out the population of the offending Silo.
You probably assumed the people of Silo 17 died because they went outside. If you stop and think about it, you’ll realize that makes no sense. Opening the exterior door would have killed only the first few of them to exit, at which point the rest would have seen those trailblazers dying and closed the door.
What really happened in Silo 17 is that the poison was released, and the people of the Silo tried to escape. They found themselves trapped between poison rising up from the Silo’s depths and the poison air outside the exterior door. The result was the mass death we saw when Juliette crawled over the population’s corpses to gain entry into Silo 17.
Wiping out rebellious Silos, however, is only a secondary purpose for the poison. The true purpose of the poison, as laid out in Hugh Howey’s books, is to cull the unworthy.
The plan for the Silo system is to wait until it’s safe to go out and then select whichever Silo they think is most worthy to survive in the new world. That Silo’s people will be released from their underground city to repopulate the surface of the Earth. Everyone left in all the other Silos will be killed.
What’s Behind Silo’s Big Door?
What about the door? While we know the poison safeguard exists, we don’t know for certain whether or not the door is nothing but a giant cover for a poison dispenser. The poison might come from somewhere else and if it does, what’s behind the Giant Door?
We’re only guessing here, but the Giant Door could be a way into another Silo. While there is no giant door in the Wool books, at some point, the people of Silo 18 do dig a tunnel to connect their Silo to a neighboring one. It’s possible the series could be planning to simply open this door rather than go through all the trouble to dig a new tunnel.
Or maybe it really is one giant pipe filled with poison.
You’ll likely have to stick around for Silo season 3 to find out. While you wait, go pick up a copy of Hugh Howey’s Wool books. They’re worth reading, whether or not you’ve already seen the show.
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