The Silt Verses Chapter 44 - Episode Commentary

0:00

I spent a long time in the early planning stages of this season tearing out my hair over finale logistics - in particular, the question of how to efficiently get Hayward and Carpenter back to the White Gull and within touching distance of the other main characters after the crab nuke went off.

It’s tough, because you’ve spent three seasons establishing a geographic reality and you don’t want to cheat it by having the characters suddenly able to cover huge distances quickly (I know my go-to criticism for fantasy storytelling is often the Game of Thrones TV show, but…genuinely, it’s a fine example of how blatant narrative shortcuts can collapse the audience’s ability to care about the stakes). 

So for a while my assumption was that we’d have to just take the problem on the chin, cut to a week or two later, show Carpenter and Hayward driving back upcountry…and then try our best to come up with some nonsense to explain away why Hayward was still alive, still in peril, and why the government hadn’t attacked Bellwethers yet in that timeframe.

And then, far too late for my liking, the very obvious solution occurred to me - while planes are clearly very rare in this setting, we’ve established that they do exist.

And who would have a private plane, a medical team on hand, and the desire to get out of Glottage? Boom, the High Adjudicator. 

Suddenly a ludicrous background joke about the rudderlessness of Peninsulan society becomes a relevant plot element.

The prospect of having Carpenter and Cross hijack a plane and briefly kidnap the nation’s comatose premier felt like delightful fun, as well as the kind of absurd escalation that could only occur this close to the climax.

On a technical level, it was something we hadn’t done before, and a chance to just revel in the adventure and give Carpenter a chance for some heroics before we get to the drama of the finale.

The penultimate episode of any serialised story can often feel sluggish and dissatisfying, like the writers are awkwardly and joylessly rearranging the pieces into position for the final scenes, so the chance to get Carp and co back across country in such a heightened and hopefully entertaining way was just terrific fun. (Meabh in particular was really looking forward to being able to hijack a plane when we recorded this.)

So if this episode feels (to some extent, I’ll grant you) like a bit of a breather and a bit of a romp, that was definitely deliberate. 

I even ended up having to trim the humour back in a few places, because it was starting to feel too much like narrative whiplash after Shrue’s death.

0:08

This little passage at the start was originally the ending of the previous episode, which I ended up moving across to here.

I’d intended for it to be a more realistic scene, rather than from Hayward’s delirious perspective - with us actively hearing the details of Cross and Carpenter carrying Hayward out of the radio station, through the flooded streets and past crab-angels, and then into the car. 

Which could have been great in a War of the Worlds-inspired way, but…for God’s sake, Jon, it’s a very brief establishing prelude before the actual episode kicks off. Why make things so hard on yourself?

2:25

We also had Carpenter describing a skittering coffee saint loose on the streets of Glottage in the narration originally, but it sounded too similar to an episode of Futurama.

Likewise, we trimmed back a detail from Hayward about the hungry parade balloons eventually soaring up into the sky, disciples still clinging to the guideropes.

I feel like I could have spent forever describing a scene of various saints and angels rampaging through the streets, but ultimately we needed to keep things moving forward!

5:28

As a child, I remember hearing a lot of Magic FM playing in the car, which is a UK radio station that only plays incredibly unobjectionable (and don’t get me wrong, perfectly pleasant. I’m not too cool for school) mellow pop music on repeat. 

There’s something weirdly reassuring about hearing it again as an adult, because after 30 years it’s still mostly playing the same damn songs, and it’s always songs that I only ever hear on Magic FM. Stand By Me. Heard It Through The Grapevine. Out of Reach. Unwritten. 

Anyway, Mellow Moods FM is an homage to that important piece of British culture.

8:10

Something very strange about creating an internet show is that people don’t always visibly react as much to jokes as they do to character drama or plot twists (if you look at the fan commentary around actual comedies, whether it’s Wooden Overcoats or Victoriocity, it’s really not noticeably different in tone or content from more ‘serious’ shows, which I find fascinating), and of course as the writer you’re not feeling the dramatic tension in the same way that the audience is.

So I assumed this bit in the car would basically come across as an outright comedy, perhaps even too much of a comedy - especially Hayward pointing out the ambulance - but then I’ve already seen listeners reacting to it as if it’s a deadly serious exercise in tension!

10:35

A lot of people attempt to receive or interpret instructions from a silent and unresponsive superior in this episode (the pilot, the bodyguard, Cross, Rane). It’s not a big theme or anything but it felt fitting for an ep where Carpenter angrily reflects on our inability to interpret the will of the gods.

11:32

Originally, this part where Carpenter knocks out the High Adjudicator’s bodyguard - very kindly played by Kevin Berrey, creator of Hell Gate City - took place out on the runway. It only changed because I realised we didn’t have a credits sequence, so I quickly came up with and recorded a sort of lottery clown and then invented the notion of a kiosk or waiting lounge to accommodate that.

I’m glad I took the extra time over it, because I think the business with the vending machine is quite nice.

12:28

That’s Jamie Petronis, creator of The Cellar Letters, as the Pox Monk - and Lou Sutcliffe, creator of Eelers’ Choice, as Captain Patrick Marshall!

13:04

Again, part of the joy of this episode for me is that the plane hijacking is narratively a lark, and the details of how it plays out are utterly irrelevant to the main plot - all that matters is that it gets our characters to where they need to be. 

Which means that we get to let loose and have some fun one final time; we get to give Carpenter one last chance to be unabashedly heroic and deliver a few mean-spirited one-liners, without it feeling like we’re interfering with the rest of her character arc.

I’ve seen some people joking online that I never pass up an opportunity to let Carpenter be a badass, but the truth is that I’d do it even more if I thought I could get away with it!

It can be very freeing to feel that you’ve written a character who has enough substance and complexity that we can also cheer on her heroics in a very uncomplicated way, without it feeling trite or forced. (It is very much the difference between Furiosa and pretty much any other action movie hero out there right now.)

I know Meabh has said that she really enjoys playing a character who gets to be hardboiled and tough and dickish in a way that still isn’t often granted to female characters in mainstream media without either some male-gaze element or eventual comeuppance. But I think we both agree that it’s important to ensure Carpenter is always more than that and that she isn’t reduced to that - this is a person bearing a lot of emotional weight, this is a person who cares even when she claims she doesn’t.

14:24

As we later see, Carpenter is quite right to argue that the Peninsulan infrastructure is built around making accommodations for the right person - but she wrongly believes it’s the High Adjudicator, when in fact it’s Val.

16:13

If you listen very carefully, the safety briefing actually calls the jet a ‘biplane’. Which was a momentary lapse of worldbuilding judgment on my part and I almost edited it out. But then I decided, to hell with it, it’s quite fun to imagine what a biplane private jet might look like.

16:41

I had a whole defiant monologue about the hypocrisies of fantasy worldbuilding language prepped in my head for anyone who complained that champagne shouldn’t exist in a fictional setting because there’s no Champagne region, etc. 

But nobody’s said that yet, which is both a pleasant surprise and weirdly deflating. Fight me, someone. I'm ready!

17:19

A lot of the rain this episode is - in true Eskew fashion - there to help create a clear transition between all the different interior and exterior locations, and to cover our backs when the SFX is too complex.

For instance, in this scene with Carson, I think we’d really have struggled to maintain the sounds of a field camp / hospital for a solid ten minutes as he carries out his various conversations, so instead we just get a few footsteps and a whole lotta rain.

19:39

We’ve tried really hard to underline the notion of an ideological hollowness and essential pettiness at the heart of the corridors of power this season, the absence of any wider strategy and the dominance of personal interests.

And so for me it was both very funny and very important that the Woundtree are scapegoated (a big plot point!) not as part of some grand and well-organised conspiracy, but specifically because of one asshole who’s frantically lying on the spot in his efforts to ensure that his future career prospects in the private sector don’t get screwed up.

And the scarier thing is that with Val at his side, Carson could actually make it all work out to his advantage…

23:45

I often get relevant Simpsons moments stuck in my head when I’m listening back to a scene, and this bit with Carson sadly declaring Shrue an enemy on-air makes me think of,

“Homer Simpson, defying all medical advice, has switched to Powersauce's arch rival - the Vita-Peach Health Log. Doctors say he may not have the meganutrients needed to stave off death.”

27:10

The reveal that Faulkner’s disciples have been listening in to the radio all through the night makes sense to me, but it does create one lingering question. They’d have already begun celebrating immediately after hearing of Glottage’s destruction, so has Faulkner really sat there amongst them as they crow and cheer all of this time? Would he not have left by now?

28:50

Britomart is a stupid joke - it's a reference to The Faerie Queene, which was one of our big influences on the show. In that poem, Britomart is an embodiment of Elizabeth I destined to found the English monarchy and thus an avatar of manifest destiny and imperial might (so an appropriate name for a premier's plane). But she's also an avatar of chastity in the poem and the original Greek mythology, and therefore a very ironic choice given the reasons that the High Adjudicator ended up in that coma.

We actually screwed up the pronunciation of the word ‘Britomart’ here - Muna was directing the sessions with Felix and Lou, and I was directing the session with Meabh, and I accidentally gave Meabh an inconsistent pronunciation prompt, ‘bright’ rather than ‘brit’.

So instead we played it off as if Carpenter was the one getting it wrong and obstinately refusing to correct her error. It’s always nice when you can pass your mistakes on to your characters.

28:55

Originally there was a little more expository dialogue here, with Carpenter very sensibly attempting to use the plane radio to hail the Grace and warn them of the plane’s arrival, and the pilot explaining that the storm will make that difficult until they get closer. (You know, vague radio reasons.)

But there’s a scene from - all of things - CW’s Supernatural which I often remind myself of at times like this.

In-show, a film crew are making an Evil Dead ripoff movie - a horror flick in which a group of hapless teens read aloud from a cursed book and release a bunch of demons from hell.

The writers and actors, however, get hung up on one logical question - if the demons are in hell, how can they hear someone reading from a book in another dimension?

So they end up rewriting the movie and having the characters address the problem onscreen with hilaiously clunky dialogue:

“If the demons are in hell, how can they hear us?”

“They must have super hearing!”

It’s a very silly, but I think a very accurate, illustration of a common writer’s pitfall - that you can force yourself into awkward expositional dialogue and create more blatantly unanswered questions in your narrative by trying to explain away a minor headscratcher that the audience probably won’t even be thinking about in the moment.

So, yeah, I cut it. Of course Carpenter would have made the attempt to contact Paige, but we don’t need to see it.

30:19

In these flying scenes, we have a constant background wind effect moving from the left ear to the right ear, to try and trick the ear into thinking that we’re in mid-flight - a lot like a Parallax effect in an old game, I guess.

My sense was that the engine noise by itself (accurate though it may be) inevitably feels static. Hopefully it works!

31:26

Hayward is of course right to suggest that Carpenter needs to stop seeing the Cairn Maiden as a herald of doom and start trying to live outside the shadow of her god(s), but her reaction is also my reaction. Is it profound, or is it just messing around with words in order to feign meaning?

32:25

I’d always wanted to bring back Brother Wharfing’s suggestion of the temple where Carpenter can get a perfect haircut, but never had an opportunity. So showing that she remembers it, and has been holding on to the possibility of it felt like a nod to the narrative road not travelled.

It’s also a lot of fun to me that Carpenter rejects and mocks Hayward’s pitch that’s meant to encourage her to carry on living…and then he mocks and rejects her pitch that’s meant to encourage him to carry on living. 

They're opposites; they will never truly understand one another. But their newfound affection and care for each other helps, even when the words don’t.

39:26

The full consequence of Paige gathering the Woundtree’s people together was originally going to appear right here, as a fresh scene after she sounds the bells. But it’s an important scene, and it felt like we weren’t giving it enough time to breathe by having it crammed right into the middle of so much action and intrigue and so many competing storylines - instead I moved it to the start of the finale.

The collateral result of this is, I’ll concede, that Paige has spent a couple of episodes in a row dramatically saying she has a plan, without us getting to hear what it is or progress her storyline (although I think the plan is obvious enough at this point?). It’s not great storytelling but I think there’s hopefully enough else going on that it doesn’t feel too frustrating.

40:35

If you want to get really parallel-y in the themes, there’s a big one in this episode about characters swallowing their own tails and getting caught in absurd contradictions thanks to their dishonest attempts to control the narrative.. 

Carson is so devoted to his lie about the dead and heroic High Adjudicator that he ends up giving the order to kill the High Adjudicator. Sibling Rane is so entrapped by their lie about their unshakeable faith in Faulkner that they basically knowingly give themselves up to be drowned.

42:26

It can sometimes feel (particularly now at the end of the show) like I have a repetitive habit of the heroes only triumphing whenever they make a big emotional speech about resistance, so it was an in-joke for me personally to have Cross also attempt to make one, and utterly fail.

44:42

There’s something very funny to me about poor Carpenter and Hayward having originally set off to find an adjudicator who can spill all of the government’s secrets, and they’ve wound up with one who’s so culpable that he can only confess his own.

But it also felt like, weirdly, a rousing and joyous moment to have our protagonists confess their own sins and find a kind of camaraderie in what might well be their dying moments. We’re not going to have time for that in the finale, so it was wonderful to have a chance to just show us that Carpenter and Hayward are still carrying the weight of the things they’ve done, without being too overwrought about it.

Which, of course, comes right back to what we’ll see with Faulkner in the next scene, where he’s so weighed down with the guilt and horror of the people he’s hurt that he’s actively losing the ability to distinguish between them.

45:08

If you listen very closely (and it’s hard because you’ve got the seatbelt sign alarm competing with it) the High Adjudicator’s heart monitor begins to rapidly speed up in panic as the plane descends.

46:22

The plane crash itself was tons of fun to design. I actually layered several crashes on top of one another to try and convey a really cinematic sense of scale and perspective - the plane hits the ground/water in the background before skidding forward to the foreground.

I also really just adore a sudden cut from loud to quiet for comedic effect.

47:30

In my head, the Faulknerian disciples are split into vying factions at this point, with several groups attempting to leave in the night for differing reasons. Those who have lost hope now that the Parish has been legalised, those who think Faulkner has been lying all along about the Wither Mark, those who think he’s lost his mind and courage and can no longer be a fit leader for their cause, and those who are remaining loyal in spite of everything.

That’s way too much factional detail to try and spell out for the mostly unheard background chorus of an audiodrama, though, so we kept to the basics of ‘people are abandoning ship’.

49:00

This scene was a really fun narrative challenge, because frankly our audience is wise to our bullshit at this point. As soon as Rane overrules Faulkner and ‘kills’ Carpenter, we can be certain that they’re not long for this world. As soon as Rane enters the dreaming chamber, we can feel certain that this is the moment of their death.

You want to ensure that the scene doesn’t feel predictable emotionally, even if the outcome is exactly what we expect it to be. 

Likewise, it was important for Faulkner to continue his downwards spiral - very literally killing off the embodiment of people’s faith in him - but we didn’t want it to feel like a tired rehash of him murdering Sister Thurrocks in Season 2. (Our boy’s done a lot of murdering at this point.)

So the heart of this scene became about Rane desperately attempting to interpret Faulkner, just as our characters attempt to interpret their gods.

Rationally, they know that they’re in grave danger from an erratic and furious Faulkner, but they're unable to break free from the shared pretence of the wise and generous High Prophet - the false idol that they’ve worked so hard to cultivate.

Even the storyteller gets dragged under.

56:30

This line where Faulkner bitterly acknowledges that Rane has only acted according to the High Prophet’s own lessons (and therefore that he has unwittingly passed down the instruction that will shatter his rule) is, to me, the heart of so much of the show.

It’s the god raging at how they’re interpreted, and accordingly raging at how they’re unable to break free of that interpretation.

58:10

The script originally suggested that Rane is genuinely tempted by the offer of being made a Katabasian, but I think what comes across much more strongly in Hero’s performance (and which is thankfully a much more interesting idea) is the sense of someone trying to walk an impossible tightrope of diplomacy and courtesy in how they respond to a gift which is really a poison chalice.

58:30

Faulkner actually disrobing to some extent before he goes into the water, and Cross taking off his necktie, were additions that only occurred to me while editing - they weren’t in the script at all. 

Faulkner disrobing - well, it made sense that he wouldn’t just dive in with all of his heavy robes on. Cross taking off his tie came about because Felix Trench had included a fascinating little pause and change of tone in one of his takes, and it felt like something was shifting in the character.

In both cases it’s an important moment of the characters shedding their camouflage and pretence in order to speak honestly at last, but I think with Faulkner it’s also a case of deliberately making himself as vulnerable as possible to try and allay Rane’s concerns.

1:01:03

Originally B. (very accurately understanding it as a callback) said the line ‘I’m going to make you a Katabasian’ with exactly the same menace as when they said ‘I’m going to make you a saint’ three years ago in Season 1, and we had to ask them to dial it back a bit so it didn’t sound quite so blatantly like ‘I am 100% going to kill you.’

B. actually gave an even more terrifying performance all around on the first take for this scene, and it was unfortunately not quite right, because even with all of the social performance and entanglement at play, it made no sense that Rane wouldn’t have been running for their life at this point.

1:02:20

There’s a real cruelty to how this scene plays out which I think is thematically important. We’re drawing a line all the way back from the similar but very ethically ambiguous death of Charlie, a death which Faulkner has obsessed and equivocated over, either minimising or playing up his role in it depending on how he wants to understand himself…

…to this killing, which is entirely inescapable in its awfulness. Faulkner delights in finally doing something monstrous that cannot be denied; he gets to play the role of the villain.

He delights in - and rages at - Rane’s failure to transform, and his own failure to transform into something better. He breaks the driftwood staff, meaningless symbol of his authority and power.

Notably, the murder it’s most tonally similar to is not one committed by Faulkner or a member of the Parish at all, but the drowning carried out by Mercer in Season 2.

1:05:38

Just a huge shout-out to H.R. Owen, creator of Monstrous Agonies and Travelling Light, who’s played Rane. I think Hero has mentioned that this was their first time acting alongside others in an audiodrama production (as opposed to a narrator performance) and they’ve just done an incredible job all around.

Rane also seems to have built up a bit of a fanbase despite being - honestly - in large part a functional role to act as B.’s scene partner and to represent how Faulkner’s disciples go from a genuine faith in him to a desperate dependency upon the false image of him, and I think that has to come down to how wonderfully Hero has brought humanity and nuance to the character.

Hero did firmly state in our last recording session that in their opinion, Rane actually played dead for a little while in the water before powerfully swimming down into the depths of the White Gull and from there to freedom, and that as a result they are alive and well. 

So there we have it; that’s canon for anyone who’s upset about the character’s death. Rane will someday make a ludicrous return, a la Darth Maul.

1:06:45

I had my head down too much to really appreciate the coincidence, but happy UK Election Day / Fourth of July for an episode where our heroes kidnap (and let’s be honest, likely inadvertently kill) their nation’s premier! 

The Greens have won here in Bristol, which is nice. Hope everyone had a good day.