The Box Set: "Silo Season 2."

Deconstructing Ep. 3, "Solo."

This is a weekly examination of each new “Silo” episode. It contains spoilers, so if you haven’t watched, come back when you have.

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Just when you think you’ve learned something, in reality you don’t know if you’ve learned the truth.

In the episode “Solo,” Silo gives us the classic “unreliable narrator” in actor Steve Zahn’s portrayal of the (allegedly) last person alive in Silo 17. As viewers, we share with Juliette (Rebecca Ferguson) the second most surprising thing she’s discovered (the first, of course, is learning someone is alive in a “dead” silo) and it’s Solo’s statement that there are 50 silos. Juliette doesn’t know her own silo number but Solo says it had to be 15,16 or 18, which tells us that he probably knows how all the silos are laid out and other important factors.

But he’s also slightly crazy, or pretending to be, telling Juliette that he’s been seeing imaginary people and, as the episode unfolds, believably asking in a meek, frail, vulnerably believable way if she’s really real. We are meant to think he’s not all there — perhaps the spray painted warnings from inside the walls are his. We are being pushed toward believing him when our senses say do not.

This episode was structured as expected, bouncing between Juliette’s original silo and this one, and while most of the storytelling in the original silo (now to be known as Silo 18), where inhabitants are starting an uprising and Bernard (Tim Robbins) is trying to quell it, not much is new or fishy, but some of it is (and more on that below).