A key recurring set piece in the Silo TV series is the act of cleaning the show's outdoor camera lens.
The hit Apple TV+ sci-fi series follows a community of humans who live in an underground bunker known as the Silo. This descending vertical community has been occupied by humans for hundreds of years in a dystopian future without anyone really knowing how or why they got there.
Season 1 of the TV series centered on Rebecca Ferguson's Juliette, an engineer living in the Silo who beings to unravel a reality-bending conspiracy at play within the underground community.
Why Do They Clean the Lens in Silo?
Cleaning the camera lens is a big job in the world of Silo, but it comes with deadly consequences.
One thing the Silo TV show (which is based on author Hugh Howey's series of sci-fi books) keeps coming back to is this act of residents of the series' central underground community going out to the apocalyptic world to clean the lens that broadcasts an outside view to those living within.
These lens cleaners are residents who volunteer to see the outside. They undergo what is known as a Cleaning Ceremony, putting on a special hazmat suit equipped with a visor and all.
The Cleaning Ceremony is a big deal in the world of the Silo, and each one prompts everyone living in the underground bunker below to gather around these massive window-like screens that broadcast an image of the world above.
What is curious though, is that every person who partakes in the cleaning ceremony does exactly the same thing. They walk out into the desolate wilderness, wipe off the camera lens, and then collapse dead in the view of everyone watching.
But the question becomes, why do these Cleaning Ceremony victims feel compelled to clean the lens? They are not told to, yet every time, they end up doing it.
As revealed later in Season 1 of the Silo TV series (or about halfway through Howey's first book in the series, Wool), it turns out, what the residents of the Silo are seeing is not what the Cleaning Ceremony victim is.
Throughout Season 1, fans got glimpses of this picturesque image of the above world, making it seem like the desolate, barren landscape shown to the underground community is a falsity.
That, however, is not the case. Instead, the reason these Cleaning Ceremony volunteers are seemingly willed to wipe the camera is because they are actually being fed this blue sky and green grass image in their helmet, and they want to clean the lens so that everyone below can see what they are seeing.
But the world above is not the lush, thriving landscape the lens cleaner is being fed. That is just a virtual reality, meant to ease them into their incoming inevitable death.
Only Rebecca Ferguson's Juliette breaks through this virtual reality and survives the Cleaning Ceremony, not wiping the lens, and sending the Silo bureaucracy into a tizzy as she breaks the system they had so cleverly devised.
Silo Season 2 is now streaming on Apple TV+.
