You have to feel a little bad for Silo. Not too much. After all, it is a prestige Apple TV+ production with Rebecca Ferguson at the wheel, but a little.
Because the underground bunkers, the population kept compliant through manufactured lies, the shadowy organization pulling strings from above, and one hard-headed woman who refuses to accept what she has been told about the world outside?
None of that belonged to anyone when Hugh Howey started self-publishing Wool in 2011.
But Fallout has been squatting on that exact piece of cultural real estate since 1997.
Three decades of games. Games that a very large chunk of Silo’s audience grew up playing, which means they already knew the twist before Juliette ever touched a door handle.
And Silo Season 3 decided that the best response to that problem was to introduce… an AI villain running mind control operations. Sure.
If you feel like all of this sounds too much like Fallout, you’re not alone.
An AI Telling People What to Forget Is Peak Fallout, and Not in a Good Way
So here is what happened in Silo Season 3 Episode 1.
Juliette came back from her forced cleaning as Mayor of Silo 18, which sounds like a win, except she had almost no memory of anything before waking up.
Camille Sims, her nurse and personal assistant, was taking quiet orders from the Algorithm, which was telling her not just to suppress Juliette’s memories but to replace them with fake ones, including fabricated footage of things that never happened.
And Juliette started noticing the holes, asking why she could not have planned to re-enter the silo when she had no way of knowing Bernard would open the airlock, and Camille’s response was to double the dosage.
It is good television! Rebecca Ferguson furrowing her brow at a missed detail and slowly realizing her own mind has been edited is properly unsettling to watch.
But every Fallout player sitting on their couch has already lived through a version of this. Vault 92 used white noise to turn its residents into unwitting sleeper soldiers.
The Prime Video show also had its own adaptation on-screen in Hank MacLean’s secret mind control experiments.
Vault-Tec’s whole thing, since 1997, has been taking captive underground populations and quietly doing terrible things to their minds without asking permission.
An AI called the Algorithm, issuing dosage instructions to keep a dangerous woman’s memories suppressed, is not a twist for these people. It is an average Tuesday.
Yes, Silo has taken the mind control thing up a notch.
Silo Season 3 Episode 2 showed AI instructing Camille to haul barrels of Vitamin D+ up that enormous staircase toward the central water supply to wipe the minds of ten thousand people.
It is, but one image inside a plot that Fallout players have been navigating since before some of Silo’s writers were in high school.
However, this one image has the potential to draw the storyline towards something of its own, if done correctly.
The Reset Is the One Idea Here That Vault-Tec Never Touched
Strip all of that away, and Silo Season 3 has one idea that can steer it in a different direction, and it is the Reset.
Not the Safeguard, not the argon gas flooding the ventilation systems the way it wiped out all of Silo 17, that is just a system killing people who threatened it, which is very similar to Fallout’s exterminations.
The Reset is something different, and far darker.
Trading a massacre for a mass wipe, keeping everybody alive while erasing the mind inside it and starting over from nothing.
Ten thousand people walking around in their own faces with no memory of ever being themselves.
An idea that is controversial in itself and belongs to Hugh Howey and, so far, only to his novels.
For many with a past they’d like to forget, it would be a blessing. And many more who already had a well-established life, it would be an unwelcome punishment they were never even tried for.
As their memories come back in pieces, the shock and horror would divide the faction into two.
And navigating such a civil-war-like situation while trying to keep everyone alive would be a true test for Mayor Jules and a stunning psychological thriller to watch (think Memento).
So yes, Silo Season 3 is still living in the shadow for now.
But the Reset can change that, especially with the timeline moving, and we are only three episodes in.
Give it room. Just maybe retire the AI villain aesthetic before Episode 4 rolls around.
If the Reset plays out the way it seems to be heading, will it finally be enough to separate Silo from the Fallout comparisons for good?
Drop your take in the comments, and follow along every Friday for weekly Silo Season 3 coverage on Apple TV+.
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