What a pleasure it is, watching Apple TV’s Silo’s investment in Camille Sims — and in Alexandria Riley, the actor who plays her — pay off.
Making someone who’s not part of the cast’s core the chief antagonist for the show’s third season is a risky move. Camille’s been around since early on, but she’s hasn’t had the importance of a Knox or a Shirley or a Sheriff Paul. Nor does Alexandria Riley have the star cachet of series leads Rebecca Ferguson, Tim Robbins, Common, Harriet Walter, Steve Zahn when he’s around, or Rashida Jones and David Oyelowo for a hot minute way back when.
Yet here Camille is, generating the story’s main conflict, acting like a true conflicted but hubristic arch-villain. She’s having arguments with the AI that runs the Silo, with its messianic hero Juliette Nichols, with her increasingly estranged husband Robert Sims, even with her troubled son Anthony. She’s helping the Voice in the Vault deceive Juliete, while also staying a step ahead of the Voice by taking the initiative and dosing the whole damn Silo with the forgetting drug “Vitamin D+” hours before the Algorithm orders her to.
As a politician, she’s an all too familiar type. She’s always turning the ratchet to the right, to more extreme extralegal sanction, to duplicity as policy, to ceding decisions to an AI program that tells her what a great job she’s doing to calm her down. Her apparently sincere belief that she’s going to turn the minds of everyone in the SIlo to Swiss cheese For The Good Of The Silo somehow makes her conduct more infuriating than if she were merely a cynic or a sociopath. She’s a portrait of a person mistaking doing their worst for doing the best they can.
I reviewed this week’s Silo for Decider.
Tags: decider, silo, TV, TV reviews