Silo Season 3 Just Revealed A Crisis That Could Doom The Entire Silo

This post contains spoilers for "Silo" Season 3, Episode 5, "Memory."

Things are ramping up on "Silo," with Season 3 representing the best this Apple TV show has to offer. In the past, congressman Daniel Keene (Ashley Zukerman) and journalist Helen Drew (Jessica Henwick) are uncovering a bizarre and vast conspiracy. In the present, it's looking quite dire for the citizens of Silo 18. In addition to the ever-present danger of the Safeguard Protocol (which would unleash poison and kill everyone in the silo), there's also the threat of Vitamin D+ being released into the water supply to erase everyone's memory. Now, it appears there's yet another existential hazard that could destroy the silo as we know it.

In case you haven't been paying close attention, "Silo" Season 3 has been slowly teasing a big problem down in Supply. Early in the season, Orla Kent (Quelin Sepulveda), the shadow to the Head of Supply, tried to raise awareness of some thievery happening in Supply and set about investigating it herself. By Episode 2, though, Orla had vanished, and when the mines were fumigated in Episode 3, her body was discovered by rescuers.

This week's Episode 5, "Memory," picks up with Sheriff Billings (Chinaza Uche) as he learns from the Head of Supply, Marta McLain (Clare Perkins), that the sector has been suffering from theft for years in "Critical Supply." Among the missing items are light bulbs, which Supply doesn't have the tech to make more of. As it stands, the silo will likely run out of them in about two years. And when that happens? The silo's entire food supply will slowly diminish, leaving its inhabitants to starve to death.

Suffice it to say, this puts the people of Silo 18 in a bit of a pickle.

We know the silo is a massive place full of different groups with their own interests, conspiracies, and secrets. Theft and contraband are nothing new, of course. For example, "Silo" previously established that the relics of the past — which are forbidden by the pact to prevent residents from remembering the past and revolting — get passed around and traded secretly all the time.

But who would even think of stealing light bulbs? And not just regular light bulbs you'd find in your house, but industrial ones that can light up and heat a greenery. Regular smugglers and black market traders probably wouldn't even know what to do with these, so why steal them? It's possible they're being taken by an individual with knowledge of how the silos work. Yes, silos. Odds are, the thief is someone who knows about The Algorithm in charge of all the silos and wants to change its system of oppression and memory suppression.

Could it be Solo (Steve Zahn) and the people of Silo 17? We haven't seen them since the cliffhanger ending to Season 2, but they have to re-enter the story at some point, right? Most importantly, we know "Silo" is set to conclude with Season 4, so the show has already begun building to some sort of conclusion to its larger narrative. That will surely include a confrontation with The Algorithm and, hopefully, people being forced to travel to the surface (somehow). We know from the end of Season 2 that it's possible to survive outside the silo even without protective gear, though we don't know how just yet. So, with Silo 18 in danger of becoming uninhabitable in two years, there's no better time for the show's characters to start trying to find the answer.