The Silt Verses Episode Commentary - Chapter 43

0:00

There’s a really interesting debate that’s been playing out in the past few years about how TV writers and showrunners respond to visible audience speculation online, and how that can send them running in all of the wrong directions by trying to subvert or pre-empt it (everyone thinks the island is purgatory! Quick, come up with something else!) and create a weird shaggy-dog ending that won’t make sense to future viewers.

I was really happy and excited that we didn’t have that here. It felt obvious to me that Chekhov’s crab nuke in the Wither Mark was going to come up again before the end, I felt like we’d heavily foreshadowed the fact that Faulkner was going to realise at a crucial moment that his followers were too hardline and extremist for him and that they’d see him falter, and of course ever since early on in Season 1 we’d been teasing the river’s rise as the drowning of Glottage.

But I hadn’t seen anyone really predicting that turn of events or treating it as the inevitable outcome, so it just felt nice and cheering to be able to spring that on everyone without worrying that it was too out-of-left-field OR too obvious for the audience to enjoy.

1:50 

It’s divinely-induced, but Tainsley is of course psychologically at a very ‘Faulkner in early S1’ place - desperate to prove himself special, desperate to fulfill a heroic destiny that makes sense of him.

That’s the wonderful GM Hakim again as Tainsley, and Oli Morris, creator of the excellent weird-fiction show Kane and Feels, as the sergeant.

4:13

We’re not going to articulate objectively how it feels to be a god in TSV, of course, but I did want there to be plausible aspects of godlike experience in Faulkner’s condition - the distress he feels at his children screaming his name and demanding he placate them, the helplessness of his watching as they misinterpret him to their own liking…

4:50

Originally, Faulkner had a little more meat to this monologue - a section where he considers the possibility of faking sickness in order to get out of the feast (and thus out of ordering Adjudicator Shrue’s execution). It would have been ultimately useful to show our working and to demonstrate that Faulkner is trying and failing to wriggle off the hook at every turn.

But in the moment it felt like the scene was dragging on too long, and the next few lines where he describes the accoutrements that have been heaped onto him were more thematically important.

We do instead try and cue the audience implicitly into just how trapped Faulkner is by demonstrating that he literally cannot exit his room without having two armed guards do it for him.

8:33

The crowd members are not, of course, chanting ‘Faulkner’ but I think you can sink into the delusion that they are in this early sequence as he walks down the corridor.

10:04

Greve, Shrue, and Faulkner have a funny little three-way parallel journey throughout this episode. 

All three of them have a pre-record of their insincere words set to stirring music, all three of them take to the microphone to try and urgently share their real feelings, and all three of them are cut off before they can finish (Greve and Faulkner both get knocked down onstage, even).

Shrue and Greve also both demonstrate their capability for courage and self-sacrifice in the moment when it really counts, whereas Faulkner…very much does not until it’s too late.

12:26

There are deliberate wedding vibes and references across this episode - there’s the march that plays as Faulkner enters, the formal signing of the licence that takes place between Shrue and Greve. All of which is meant to remind us of the tale of the Promised Bride and to give us the sense that both leaders of the faith are committing to a ceremonial commitment that they really, really shouldn’t be, and both are compromising their own personal integrity in order to become what’s expected of them.

14:24

I’m never doing crowd scenes again (he said semi-seriously). This episode is packed with them, and while I’m proud of how much we achieved, as I’ve said before, they’re an incredibly laborious and in some ways impossible challenge to get right with stock SFX.

Crowd sounds are either recorded onsite at concerts, sports games, or theatres (and these tend to respectively either be huge crowds, contain tell-tale signifiers in how the crowd reacts, or they have a real air of middle-class politeness about them) or they’re done in-studio as walla that’s often extremely hammy and cartoonish. ‘Crowd quietly listening’ washes are even worse, because that’s often just a couple of actors muttering gibberish or coughing randomly in the background.

We had a combination of all of the above in these scenes, and a lot of the work was in layering and levelling them to try and give the plausible impression of an actual reactive crowd. 

You can follow several of the fake-it-till-you-make-it techniques that we repeatedly use to conceal the non-bespoke nature of the sound: 1) individual actors yelling out a line which is then overtaken by a rush of raw noise, 2) the gongs being used to cover the noise fading out, 3) using binaural sound to have the noise left in one earbud and then move to the other.

However, there are some dead giveaways, too, for the careful or picky listener: 1) the amount of layering we’ve had to do makes it sound like Faulkner’s congregation is thousands rather than hundreds of people, 2) there’s more generic booing and applauding than this crowd would plausibly display (when Carpenter’s name is mentioned, I did try and pull out a chant of ‘I curse her’, but it sadly didn’t work, 3) there is one very specific walla actor who can be very faintly heard yelling ‘GET OUT OF TOWN!’ in an old prospector voice at various points.

The applause and cheering at the Glottage parade was far easier to accomplish because it’s a lot less of a bespoke situation, by contrast.

21:24

In some ways I think the most significant challenge with this scene was just how much we were depending upon those limited crowd effects and reactions to sell Faulkner’s dilemma and how much pressure he’s under in the moment.

I didn’t want us to halt the unrelenting horror of Faulkner’s experience by pausing to spell out his mindset (one option that we didn’t go for in the end was having Faulkner actually consider and articulate via narration the dead-end possibilities before him - if he tries to lie about the Wither Mark again, he’ll be instantly found out in the next 30 minutes flat and he’ll find himself surrounded by an angry mob with his entire edifice of lies collapsing, etc. Instead, we added another passage to that introductory scene where he describes those feelings of intense helplessness and how paralysed with fear and shame he feels before his followers.) 

But trusting the audience to follow the emotional flow of the scene is a lot more of a leap of faith when one of the crucial roles is effectively inflexible and undirectable, ‘a bunch of stock SFX taped together.’

I haven’t seen any hot takes along the lines of ‘Why didn’t Faulkner just excuse himself to go to the bathroom and then run for his life?? Is he stupid??’ so I think B.’s performance sold it for us in the end, which I’m very grateful for.

22:53

Back in Episode 6 of this season, Greve told Faulkner, “What happens when that graven image begins to fracture, I wonder? 

 When reality rears its ugly head from the black water, and something happens that you cannot possibly spin in your own favour?

 Or what happens when your fanatics prove too rabid even for you - and they get a glimpse of the hesitation, the terror, in your eyes?”

Which was directly foreshadowing this scene, of course, but in-universe I do also like the fact that basically every other character has proven themselves a more accurate prophet than Faulkner at this point.

23:00

When we recorded this scene with B. and Hero, I said (which I stand by!) that I don’t see this as a power-grab or betrayal from Rane, so much as an inevitable and (I think) understandable hardening of their purpose in the face of a colleague who simply can’t keep themselves together.

When your lead actor (as Faulkner put it) keeps getting drunk and can’t remember his lines, you begin by covering for him. Then you start prompting and prodding him. And in the end you have no choice but to start saying his lines for him.

28:32

We really stretched out the pauses between Faulkner’s final articulation of the Wither Mark, which I think helps to give us the sense that he’s really hesitating over whether to lie, even now.

30:56

Having the announcer follow up news of a mass sacrifice with a chirpy “And fireworks!” was a sort of in-joke to this I Think You Should Leave sketch, where Patti Harrison plays a business mogul who made her money after her own traumatic experience at a parade. Her delivery of “And popcorn!” (and her going goblin mode at the end of the sketch) is for me, indelibly funny.

31:30

We got the help of a lot of lovely audiodrama creators to pop up in the parade - that’s Kale Brown from Sinkhole as the Petropater parade float, Jess Syratt from Amongst the Stacks as a Cloak spokesperson, and Jamie Petronis from The Cellar Letters as the Saint Electric’s parade float. An especial shout-out to Kale (who’s also Moss from the previous episodes) who couldn’t stop laughing at the line about lumps of coal in the mascot’s belly.

Originally the Petropater’s float was spraying something (presumably oil) over the delighted crowd, which was a fun detail but there was no way of making that SFX clear over all the background noise.

The other joke here, of course, is that all the multinationals that were declaring themselves politically neutral across the course of the season are now sharing in the Peninsula’s victory.

37:30

Carson’s speech references a couple of key moments from recent political history. His talk of a patchwork nation with disagreements that ultimately make us stronger hearkens back to Barack Obama’s inauguration speech, a sentiment which I think is sadly feeling more debatable in retrospect.

His random tough-guy insistence that “if you come for one of us, you come for all of us!” was actually a reference to 2002’s Spider-Man, and the memorable additional scene that was inserted post 9-11 where a bunch of New Yorkers somehow defeat the Green Goblin and his technologically-advanced hoverboard by flinging random street garbage at him and declaring, “You mess with one of us, you mess with all of us!”

41:38

I don’t know if it’d really get noticed if I didn’t point it out, but listening back to the episode I just picked up on an error - a clock is already sounding twelve o’clock as Hayward, Shrue and Carpenter head into GGR, but by the time they reach the recording booth, it’s 11.45. Magical corridor. I might go back and fix it if I ever have time.

43:24

It doesn’t make any logical sense that the exterior of the recording booth would have muzak playing (how is the sound engineer meant to pay attention to the broadcast?), but we needed silence on the booth interior and we needed to be able to cleanly demonstrate our movement from one side to the other.

52:21

In my beloved Don’t Look Now, there’s a character who cries out in horrified distress right at the climax, “Let him not go!”

Which is a strange and ungainly turn of phrase, but also an incredibly memorable one to me - because it doesn’t seem to be addressed to the other characters at all, it seems to be addressed to some watching deity or Fate. So we were homaging that with “Let her live”, Faulkner crying out to the gods themselves more than his followers.

52:24

Originally Faulkner just fell down in his distress, but it felt a lot more dynamic to leave in the potential that Rane has actually pushed him down onto the throne in order to get the mic from him.

53:51

Cutting back and forth effectively between Shrue in the booth and the various audiences - Cross in the car, Val in the woods, the parade crowd - was surprisingly difficult to get right. A smash cut is infinitely easier when there’s background noise in both scenes at once, whereas here there has to be quiet in the booth!

54:06

We anticipated making a fair few trims to Shrue’s speech but it was largely left intact in the end - it was a big risk to have everything come to a halt for 10 minutes of monologue, 50 minutes into a fast-moving and action-filled episode, but it’s an important speech both thematically and to demonstrate where Shrue’s got to as a character, we’re very much in “trust the audience to stay with you” mode at this point, and I think Gryph holds our attention just brilliantly!

1:02:18

The Woundtree’s marks were written for audio utility rather than with the visual depiction at the forefront of my mind - they had to come across as a plausibly ornate series of at least three hieroglyphs, but we also needed Sarah to be able to belt them out in ten seconds flat to ensure the action didn’t grind to a halt, and we couldn’t rely on an assumed shared language as with the Wither Mark (it’s easier when you can just say ‘The Dolorous Rose’). Which is why we ended up picking a lot of relatively uncommon shapes to try and communicate at speed.

Now, of course, people have started drawing them and I’m already filled with regret because I’m not a fan of how the balbis looks in practice; it looks like a friendly cartoon character to me. It’s fine, I do not see it.

1:03:03

For a long time we debated twisting the knife by having the reveal that Carson had been deliberately pushing Shrue towards the edge as a useful scapegoat (and so the broadcast had been anticipated and deliberately cut off before Shrue could even get the description of the marks out) but it was too much mean-spirited complexity, I think. You gotta have a little hope.

So instead the point I wanted to get across - the impossibility of making yourself heard in a world of noise and propaganda - is conveyed by the parade-goers not paying attention to what Shrue is saying.

1:03:58

I felt bad about the fact that we have so many gunshot deaths (generic! Unimaginative! Val would not approve!) in this crucial episode of the Body Horror podcast, so for my own satisfaction there’s a barely audible explosion of flesh with every fatality here.

1:04:24

A lot of audiodrama sustained-tension sequences suffer from a stagey staticism, I personally believe - it’s that temptation to try and establish the stakes by having your characters argue their case to each other, which then prevents any possibility of action. “Don’t shoot! Listen to me, don’t shoot!” “I’m gonna shoot you!” Back and forth, and so on.

(I didn’t really enjoy the latest season of True Detective despite its incredibly promising premise, and late on it actually has a particularly baffling example of what I’m talking about - a heavily-armed standoff where everyone is standing in place pointing guns at each other and at great length trying to persuade everyone else to not to shoot them).

We were in danger of coming up against that kind of stalling here, so I trimmed it back a fair bit. Originally we had more from Carpenter threatening Brother Philly before the fight breaks out, which was great dialogue in itself, but stagnant as a piece of drama.

We also didn’t have Shrue locking themselves in the booth, either (which, if you think about it, is a bit of a surprising contrivance given GGR’s previous problems with radio hosts going rogue), but including that detail allowed the tension to escalate naturally with Brother Philly trying to force his way in.

1:05:52

Just a word or two for Sarah Griffin’s absolutely fantastic performance as Shrue across this series. I’ve always felt that our characters who began as antagonistic and slightly absurd and then gradually became humanised (Shrue, Hayward) have had an inevitably unfair disadvantage in how they’re perceived and how much their actors’ performances are appreciated - like they’re carrying the ridicule of their early appearances on with them.

Gryph’s done an absolutely wonderful job with showing us Shrue’s complexity, nuances, and capability for change and I’m just really so thrilled to have had them in the cast and to have got to know them. They’re a serious talent.

1:07:25

Having two halves of a fight scene occur at once is, of course, a ludicrous thing to try and do in an audiodrama where it’s often hard enough to track one piece of action. 

I did try and solve the dilemma (we need to hear Carpenter overpower Philly, we need to hear Hayward overpower Sibling Dawn) by switching the ambient noise from one earbud to the other as we cut between the two fights, but in practice I don’t think the human ear picks up on it on the first listen.

It’s all over in a heartbeat anyway and it quickly becomes clear where everyone’s ended up (we can pick out the moment when Hayward gets shot), so I’m not overly fussed.

1:07:31

A big shout-out to Brother Philly’s VA Hawley Thorne, who we cast way back last year and hoped to record with in the early autumn - and then had to find ourselves constantly delaying. You were really patient with us, Hawley, thank you.

1:10:04

My idea originally was that Faulkner’s disciples would either be wearing costumes at the parade or sneak under a float when they set the Wither Mark off, but that was frankly a bonkers thing to attempt during an already ambitious episode, and having them in some kind of basement made more practical sense anyway.

1:13:36

I think it probably gets lost in the rising tension of the scene, but Carson feigning unconcern as he receives the bad news, then immediately weaselling out of harm’s way and deliberately refusing to warn anyone else about the approaching Wither Tide in order to keep the road clear is a wonderful bit of acting from Rhys and it really makes me laugh.

1:14:44

You can’t really hear it without an extremely careful listen, but I wanted to keep it in to add to the chaos - the same police officer of the Cloak who’s been making public service announcements throughout the parade sequence begins yelling at people to get out of her way (and then starts shooting them) right before the Tide hits.

You can also maybe just make out the Trawler-man’s own roar rising right before the wave hits, and the crash of towers collapsing.

1:15:07

Having the POV descend suddenly underwater and luxuriate in the ambient noise for a moment before rising up to the surface again - I will never get sick of this trick, but I acknowledge that we’ve done it enough at this point.

1:16:17

A huge and grateful shout-out to Sophie Lynch, who played Greve - it’s a relatively utilitarian role, but even in this episode, she showcased such a fantastic range of emotion, and I loved how much she gets across right at the end here about Greve’s resignation and dignity in the face of death.

Originally we were going to end this episode with one final short snippet showing Hayward, Cross, and Carpenter stumbling back into the car and beginning their flight out of a drowning Glottage, but we’ve got time for that next ep, and Sophie’s performance felt too powerful a moment not to end on.

End

Fun fact! While this episode was releasing yesterday, we carried out our final ever recording session for the series. Méabh and B. were there with me. Between Méabh, B., Jimmie, Lucy, Muna and me, nearly all of us have cried during the final recordings. B. gave the very final line. It’s been an absolute honour and a privilege.