MovieChat Forums > Silo (2023) Discussion > Episode 3 timewaster ....

Episode 3 timewaster ....


The first two episodes of Silo were pretty good, and seemed to
mostly follow the book. Episode 3 veered off into moronitude.

They introduced Juliet the blue-collar hardhat who can swing
a sledge hammer and deck a guy with one punch. They filled
her character up with so much politically correct stuff it was
distracting from the show.

Then they put her in charge of a big mechanical monstrosity
at the ass end of the Silo that generates electricity for the
whole Silo filled with 10,000 people. It was like a big
pressure cooker, and they worked on it by gut feeling and
intution - no experts or project planning here, where everyone's
lives are dependent in this single non-redundant energy
generator.

No, documentation, no spare parts, or trouble-shooting
flow-chart, just the folks with the hard hards fighting it out
or yelling at each other about how to attack a problem that
could kill everyone.

Honestly, this episode was beyond stupid, and departed pretty
radically from Hugh Howey's book's vision.

Why are movies made for stupid people. Can't smart people
get a break now and then and watch something that doesn't
make us feel like idiots for wasting the time?

So, if this story appeals to you, I'd recommend reading the
books or listening to the audiobooks. It's a pretty interesting
story, a world full of complex details like "Dune".

I've started this TV series, and since I've read the books I'll
probably stick with it til the end, but that doesn't mean I can't
be critical, because Ep 3 was stupid.

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It's a TV show. I would rather not watch 40 minutes of engineering meta-discussion and planning.

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It needs to make a lick of sense to some degrees...

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I've seen worse. I don't think this show ever promoted itself as hard sci-fi

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Yeah, I was thinking the same. They were banging with hammers and sanding the blades or whatever and that was supposed to be the "repairs". So cartoonish. I'm pretty sure that the Builders left spare blades and instructions (I wonder what the purpose of the blades themselves is, since there was no steam going thru them... making wind?). Besides, it was pretty obvious that the situation will be resolved with a happy ending, because of the way they set it up (too early in the show, expecting the new hero to become the new sheriff, etc). Hopefully this is the low point of the season and it would improve in the following episodes.

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> Hopefully this is the low point of the season and it would improve in the following episodes.

Sadly I've watched too much TV/Movies in my lilfe to hold out much hope. That episode was completely idiotic - a real waste, because that book is so long and detailed that there is really no time to waste of crap like this.

I think what they did was to conflate the ideas in the whole book series and pick and choose the stupid stuff they thought they could make a story 2nd graders could follow, but even 2nd graders are smart enough to know that generator thing was nonsense.

How when they are fixing it the pressure was building up, and they pretended like you can ease the pressure by cooling one small spot or the door. That was stupid.

Then, when they are restarting for drama they show rivets popping out of the pipes and steam venting. But it's all OK when the generator starts again.

There is so much wrong with that episode, with the whole thinking behind it. No backup. Steam coming from some imaginary place that they have no control over. No documentation.

Clearly the steam was supposed to turn the rotor ... but they did not put the cowling back on the turbine, and where is the steam supposed to go after it turns the turbine?

The whole episode was just downright insulting.

Have you read any of the books?

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No, I haven't read the books. Generally YA is not my thing. Maybe with this show they are targeting teens, which would explain the comic book style generator repair sequence.

You have a point. If they went so dumb, we can't expect them to improve by much. Hopefully they will stick to the books as close as practically possible. This episode is a red flag.

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What is YA?

There is also the ridiculousness of the helmets they make the screen
washers wear, and the absurdity of the premise that all the people who
are sent out to clean will think and do the same thing.

The helmets are very sophisticated virtual reality screens that show a
nice green world with thriving nature when in reality the outside of a
nuclear wasteland. The point is though the helmets are supposed to
look like glass, but a screen inside the helmet can only show one view
like any other screen, so it would look unnatural to the wearer who
would quickly realize the same image is being projected to both eyes,
like watching a movie, let alone people outside looking in who would
all see the same image of the wearers face, no matter where they were.

Then there is the fact that the lush green fake world is supposed to have
the same psychological affect on everyone who goes out to clean. They
somehow think if they clean enough the people in the Silo will see the
world as green.

But Sheriff Holston realized he was running out of air, so he took off his
helmet and was poisoned by the outside environment. No one thinks to
react any other way? These criticisms are true of the book as well, yet it
is written so well that the reader suspends their disbelief.

I was hoping they might actually change the story to be more believable,
and cover all 3 of the books, but seems they mean to cram the things they
thought were cool from the book into one season? Maybe, I don't know.

It just seems obvious that if one was going to power a giant fallout
shelter for an unknown time into the future they would use some form
of advanced nuclear reactor, not a steam engine that would have no
place to vent the used the steam.

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YA=Young Adult

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You may want to rewatch the three episodes.

It has been explained in those episodes

here is hint for you uprising destroying history (discovering the hdd and material on it was illegal) so no records and old drill found stripped this could mean they had already used the other parts or destroyed.

What do you expect them to do to repair the blades rub hands over it and magic happens.

Other points made by some of the other user posts I would agree but its a tv show which is not based on reality

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So, they destroyed the instructions and the spare pars? omg... There is no need to guess anything here. TV shows like this one are so simplistic, that they won't leave anything for guessing. If what you say was true, some expendable character would have informed us. If they don't even bother to run their turbine with steam, then they as well could suspend gravity. It is TV show, you know - gravity is dispensable too.

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It's clearly not if you need to keep asking questions or it's a case of you are not listening when watching.

It has been explained maybe you need to go back and rewatch.

An old HDD is found they recover the data having the HDD is illegal and the material on it is old files which was plans etc of the silo plus many other things which had been lost/destroyed long time ago.

I think you have come here to just be stupid and moan it is very common on these boards.

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I wonder what you do here, instead being on reddit. You can't even discern an insultingly stupid scene in a show that wants to be taken seriously. You don't do Fast & Furious scenes in that type of a show. It is pretty formulaic how you have to approach it. I repeat, the relic plotline is unrelated to provisioning for generator repairs. Moreover, this would have been made clear to us, as the good old rules for creating mass entertainment require from the writers to do.

They fucked up in multiple points while making the scene - generator without spare parts, repairing blades by grinding and hammering them, turbine working without steam and with exposed blades... Mostly they fucked up with the uselessness of it, because we know that we won't be losing our heroine that early, that the silo won't go to hell that early (still barely utilized as a plot device), that the guy that got hit in the mouth is just about to prove himself... There was zero tension, zero events. This scene may as well have not existed. Dumb and useless.

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Agreed, this episode was hard to get through without the rolling of eyes.

They had 140 years to figure out how to deal with the eventuality, not possibility--the absolute eventuality for the moving parts in the turbine to need repairs. It is completely absurd that they didn't, and that technical error removes us from the proper immersion. We must believe that the engineering crew that maintains the turbine are morons, which does not make sense.

The steam turning the turbine blades without being sealed was another obvious technical error, but I can understand that the production team wanted to show the blades spinning to non-technical people. So we let that pass, but it doesn't help heal the damage of the previous injury.

The same goes with the rivets popping and the major damage that was occurring to the power plant; it was all just for show to cause suspense, but expected to be instantly forgotten with the assumption that they were able to fix it after the fact, without the need for further footage.

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Good points as I was saying the same thing to the wife. Not that I want serious techno/engineering babble about how the generator works and how they planned to fix it, but it was really asking a lot for us to suspend that much belief. Also, I'm not an expert, but wouldn't the "steam" or splash back from the water on the sealed tank head have scolded or killed Juliet?

Anyway, it was a bit of a filler episode, but I enjoyed other parts of it and so far really like the series. My thoughts:

So with Holston taking off his helmet when he went to clean, and the screen showing lush green space when the power was shut down, was very interesting...confusing. My take was, is that what people see in the helmet is fake video, and that is why he didn't see his wife by the tree. However, once he takes off the helmet, he crawls over to where her body is depicted to be laying. Why? If her body wasn't really there, why crawl to that specific point? But then when the power is shut off, several in the silo saw the green lush space image.

Not a "plot hole" but why would anyone want to "clean" or go outside, when EVERYONE dies within three minutes wearing a suit (what is the point of the suit?).

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Nothing but spoilers here .... be warned
This really didn't make a lot of sense in the book either.

The first hint we get is that the helmets are not just normal protective helmets is that they are packed very carefully in the IT department. Also their packs only have a limited supply of air - so getting sent out is a death sentence if one doesn't take off their helmet, which Holston did.

What I interpreted as happening is that for some stupid reason people who go out to clean see this fake projection of a green living Earth, and only clean because they think the reason the people in the silo don't see it because the lens is dirty. That is such a stupid plit trick I have to wonder if I am way off base.

So, Holston, went out, and saw the nice green view of Earth and did the cleaning? Why not go directly over to where his wife's body was supposed to be - or better yet just take off over the hill?

One thing they did not go into, or didn't go into yet, was that Juliet is mentioned to have stolen tape, that is why she was supposed to be a criminal. The tape she stole was the tape they used to tape up the suits for when people go out to clean. She said the tape was crap, which is correct, it was crap because they wanted the tape to deteriorate when exposed to the outside so the cleaner would die.

The thing that I always questioned about the book was the trips up and down, top to bottom of the silo. That never seemed reasonable to me. But they did do a good job or building the world.

The Empire State building as 102 floors and people race up and down it in way less than a full day. They could have solved some of this by scaling the silo larger. Or maybe the people in the silo are by nature of their environment weak and unhealthy, weaker than we are because they don't get a lot of exercise? Or maybe they break the trip up into two days because they don't want crippling leg cramps for a week to recover.

Then there is always the question of in this incredible Silo built to last hundreds of years, why didn't they just build in a windshield wiper for the camera? And what about if the camera breaks - how does it get replaced? It's just very obvious stupid questions that stick out. But there is a techno elite that runs the Silo, so they may have all these answers and just force the lies on their public.

But the generator ... that was pure stupidity.

The later books go into the past and future of the Silo. The silo(s) are many, many generations old.

Oh, and in the book it is the Will Patton character who dies of poisoning, not the Mayor.

I would really like to be a fly on the wall when the folks who make these dumbass decisions discuss it, and why they decide to stupify movie to the point. Do they talk about deliberately making their movies idiotic?

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I didn't read the books but to me it looks like the helmet has poisoned air and the outside air is clean. The reason they die is not the outside air but the air in the tank.

One thing I didn't get: we see sheriff's wife body on the camera but we don't see her body when he is looking at the location when he is outside. Did I miss it and her body was there or it wasn't?

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In regards to your question, that is the mystery I was trying to articulate.

We indeed do NOT see her body when he is looking through the helmet, however, he crawls to the exact location where her body fell and has been for two years on the screens in the silo. So this leads me to believe it is the screen on the helmet that is fake, otherwise it doesn't make sense they would have him crawl and fall at the same spot. Of course the "glitch" when they shutdown the generator makes it even more confusing as to what is really going on up on the surface.

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Yeah, that was quite weird and supports the theory that outside is clean.

And I still see no body in that position in the "clean" picture while is pretty visible in the apocalyptic one.

Attached.

https://ibb.co/gDgMf8g

I see no reason to use spoilers anyway since we are discussing things that are in the show.

Why would they bother to fake the image on the helmets? Makes no sense to me ...

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No documentation, no spare parts, or trouble-shooting flow-chart, just the folks with the hard hards fighting it out or yelling at each other about how to attack a problem that could kill everyone.


Recently, I repaired an old fan in my home. Nothing was planned in advance. I just disassembled the motor, cleaned the dirt, put on some lubricant, and then did some tuning when reassembling. Now the fan is working properly.

In Ep3, waiting for the generator to malfunction was not an option for them. So, they have to take the risk. Although they never disassembled the generator before, Juliet observed the shaking and listen to the noise from the generator beforehand, which gave her some clue about what need to be fixed- the blades.

It's not rocket science.

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I mean it could've been in more depth obviously, but ultimately it didn't need to be for the shows purpose.

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Maybe there are a lot of amazing plots that follow, but I'd like to see more suspense and action like this too.

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I'm sure you'll be a big shot if you ever repair a generator on TV.

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Right? I wasn't sure if the person was being silly or didn't quite understand the differences in scale are WAY different not to mention the time crunch they were under.

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Proabably a troll-bot.

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Surely. But not if you pull documentation, spare parts and trouble-shooting flow-chart out of your smart ass.

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When Juliet opens the manifold to the interior of the generator it looked like that scene in the Charlie Chaplin movie "Modern Times" where he is sucked into a machine with a lot of gears.

https://youtu.be/ZdvEGPt4s0Y?t=32

It was ridiculous.

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it's 150 years from the start of the silo, that's 7 generations and after one revolt and banning all relics.

Of course knowledge is lost. Plus the feeling that it's just a huge social experiment.

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