The Silt Verses episode commentary - Chapters 41 & 42

Of course I knew that there's a big difference between monologue and dialogue when it comes to recording time - but it still absolutely caught me by surprise that these two episodes (intended to be one episode!) had a script that’s only 49 pages, compared to the previous episodes that were running close to 60…and yet it came out twice as long.

So we split ‘em, which I think works out OK and gives the story a bit of breathing room without leaping about too much between the different locations. (I think it also feels more respectful to Paige, who's been out of the loop for so long, to have her own narrative space.)

Chapter 41

0:00

We provide tentative answers to a lot of our own big questions in this episode, and some of the answers we draw strong attention to (as with the Maiden’s sequence later on), and some are very quiet.

This first scene, for instance, I see as a really important counter to the running theme throughout the show about whether human beings can ever truly understand one another and the obsessive need to have certainty in an uncertain world. Paige and Hayward have no idea what the hell the other person is saying, and at various times they’re completely at odds with each other, but it’s nevertheless an important act of communion and confession for them both, and they ultimately both arrive at a state of consolation and resolve from it.

16:40

Paige’s earlier question about whether anything meaningful can grow in poisoned soil is implicitly answered here, I’d argue, in this scene with Dan dancing the polka. The fleeting nature of the Woundtree community's joy is exactly what prevents it from being poisoned.

It’s very minor, this scene, but it’s a really important little sequence to me, because as previously mentioned I think the task of showing the daily life of a functional and growing community of hundreds of people is beyond an audiodrama like ours (particularly because we’re representing it via three voice actors) - but the fact that the Grace has become a real community, filled with humanity and care, in spite of everything, is vital.

The outcome of Paige’s storyline - that none of these everyday negotiations and existential challenges are going away and will always be a threat, that she herself is inevitably a woman apart from the people who follow her, that she will never be free from the thing that’s devouring her, but that all of her hard work may nevertheless be worthwhile - is such a hard thing to get across, and it’s a relief to have a chance to show it rather than tell it.

21:55

Having the usual dark and ominous dreams of the Many Below / Woundtree being comically interrupted by the far more pressing matter of a human being who needs the hero’s help was very much deliberate. Yeah, yeah, you’re big and scary and you’re forever in the process of being born, we get it.

In general, there are a ridiculous number of parallels we’re trying to draw between Faulkner, Val, and Paige across these two episodes (when it was one episode I very much had it in mind as a chapter about three prophets).

One of the parallels that people might not spot - all three characters have a dreamlike narration sequence with a rising drone sound suddenly interrupted by another human being (which also breaks the ambient SFX in each case).

In Faulkner and Val’s scenes, they’re raging respectively at their god/themselves and the audience/their mother, before they’re returned to a grim reality of their own making and the difficult question of how to deal with the people around them.

In Paige’s case, she’s actively rescued from her nightmare about the Many Below by accidental human intervention, and it spurs her on into heroic action.

The obvious intent between these three storylines is that Val and Faulkner are both rebelling against their own hard-fought-for positions of power and control - no matter how absolute or godlike - as they come to understand the confinements, limitations and burdens of the role. 

Whereas as I see it, Paige is finding satisfaction in becoming a servant of her people and community, and accepting the burden as a necessary sacrifice.

22:15

I’ve written it in these commentaries before, but I think interrogating our relationship with hope (and how hope is used against us by institutions to hold us in place) is an essential part of both of our shows, and for that reason I always try and be very careful about how and where we introduce unabashedly positive narrative outcomes.

Moss from the power grid a few episodes back showing up again at the Grace is, for me, the ideal expression of what hope fulfilled should look like in our stories. We don’t draw attention to it, there’s no heavy narrative underlining going on there and lots of listeners won’t notice that it’s even him - but he made it out intact against the odds.

Funnily enough, we also hear Madeleine Turley, who was Silverwood in the same episode, appearing as the voice that whispers to Paige as she’s driving.

24:00

I don’t think you could make a Mad Max audiodrama, sadly - driving SFX are too limited in number and inflexible, and I think you can tell that even in these scenes, where the background effects do not by any means accurately represent a truck driving through dirty, rocky terrain.

But I definitely had my beloved Fury Road (and newly-beloved Furiosa) in mind with this little sequence, the use of doors slamming and engines roaring to create a sense of propulsion, the howling winds, the relative lack of dialogue.

If nothing else, I think it gives us the indication that the polluted lands are literally falling into apocalypse, propelling themselves forward into ruin.

25:00

We absolutely cheat the winch sequence by skipping some practical steps, but I think intriguingly we get away with it as a shorthand so long as we introduce the two key audio elements (the chain, the mechanical rattle,  the revving)?

27:50

It’s a cliche, and yet Dennis’ unexpected voice on the wind still makes me jolt. I think it helps that the initial whispering is largely in one earbud, and then Dennis’ voice is right behind us when he comes in.

29:36

Sarah Golding sang all of this herself - and she has a truly beautiful voice! 

The tune is taken from an arrangement of the 1583 Willow Song which most famously appears in Othello, as sung by Desdemona. The relevant verses:

The poor soul sat sighing by a sycamore tree

Sing all a green willow

Her hand on her bosom, her head on her knee

The fresh streams ran by her, and murmer'd her moans

Sing willow, willow, willow

Her salt tears fell from her and soft'ned the stones.

Let nobody blame him, his scorn I approve

Sing willow, willow, willow

He was born to be fair, I to die for his love,

I call'd my love false love but what said he then?

Sing willow, willow, willow

If I court more women, you'll couch with more men.

Sing willow, willow, willow, willow!

Sing willow, willow, willow, willow!

My garland shall be;

Sing all a green willow, willow, willow, willow

Sing all a green willow

My garland shall be.

What I adore about this song lies not just in the lyrics themselves and how they speak to relevant themes of death, natural transformation into a state of ruin, and lovingly offering yourself up to a thankless, monstrous power, but in its subjectivity and mutability.

Other gender-swapped versions of the Willow Song exist which alter its meaning entirely (one scorned male lover complains that his bride was “born to be false”,rather than fair. One missing verse speaks to our worries about what can grow in poisoned soil: “It buds, but it blasteth ere it be a flower”).

Most importantly, Desdemona sings the Willow Song because she sees her sorrow as an echo of an earlier tragedy, which was itself part of an older tragic tradition; the only way she can express herself is through the songs that came before her.

My mother had a maid call'd Barbara:

She was in love, and he she loved proved mad

And did forsake her: she had a song of 'willow;'

An old thing 'twas, but it express'd her fortune,

And she died singing it: that song to-night

Will not go from my mind; I have much to do,

But to go hang my head all at one side,

And sing it like poor Barbara.

Crucially, Desdemona then can’t even express herself through the song! She keeps forgetting and interrupting the lyrics as she breaks down. The words are inadequate, they don't truly belong to her, and they collapse as she collapses.

So, yeah. As the kids say, it’s a deep cut, but there’s a lot of thematic subtext packed into a bunch of humming.

31:30

We mash together a whole bunch of different spiritual storytelling traditions here in this one scene; the lowly figure who may be a deity in disguise, the wary negotiation and game-playing with Death, the Devil who appears to offer us a bargain, the prophet’s vision of God in the wilderness.

33:02

I wanted to be very careful with how we framed the Maiden’s appearance here.

We had to recognise that for the show to end without any direct (or apparently direct) confrontation with the divine would be unsatisfying, but that its two most likely gods for that purpose - the Trawler-man and the Many Below - simply cannot fulfill that role. 

The whole point is that they have no genuine answers to offer, that they will keep us dangling on the hook forever trying to make sense of their mysteries. You can’t just have either of them stepping out of the shadows and revealing their master plan to us at the end, because that implies an orderly universe and it justifies the characters’ faith in them. Likewise, you can’t just have them transforming into a big monster or antagonistic force to be confronted physically, because what does that prove?

So it had to be the Cairn Maiden, who of course has shown herself to be helpfully communicative and conscientious, who at least appears to be more human than her fellows, and who does theoretically have a direct stake in the collapse of Peninsulan society into ruin.

Originally I’d intended for Carpenter to have that encounter with the Maiden, but again that felt too pat and neat. Carpenter is the gods’ fool; she will always be questioning and raging and frustrated, and that’s what makes her who she is. (And she’s also already had her own cathartic encounter with the Maiden at the end of Season 2, when she communes with the Homesick Corpse, and another cathartic encounter with a maternal figure in Nana Glass.)

Paige, who is straying further and further onto the page of her own verses and out of her own skin, is a much better candidate - as Elgin suggests at the end, like Moses on the mountain, her encounter with the divine is a sign that she’s no longer quite human.

We also wanted to play fair, as an agnostic show, by leaving things up to interpretation on every count. 

The Maiden is played by Acantha’s voice actor, the amazing Sarah Golding, but she doesn’t reveal herself to any character who could confirm that she is Acantha or that she’s intended to be Acantha - and she never confirms her identity to any extent.

You could of course try and argue that she's literally intended to be Acantha, and that therefore everything that’s happened to Carpenter since the end of Season 1 has been the deliberate result of divine intervention and manipulation, but it also works as a purely thematic bit of theatrical actor-doubling for the audience’s benefit.

Equally, is the Maiden real, and to what extent? She never actually provides Paige with any tangible new information, and every answer she gives is to a question that was already playing on Paige’s mind in the earlier scenes, or which she read in her book before she fell asleep. (Even the question of ‘does the government know where we are?’ is one that Paige on some unconscious level would have known the answer to.)

Because this is audio, we only ever see the back of the Maiden, and as a ruling principle for this sequence I was thinking very much of the portrayal of Sunday in GK Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday, which in many ways I much prefer to CS Lewis’ depiction of the divine in Til We Have Faces

In Thursday, the gods aren’t hidden from us because we’re not yet godly enough to understand them; they’re deliberately hiding from us because there’s either a bestial malice or a parental mischief in their bones, and we cannot ever know which is true.

“When I first saw Sunday,” said Syme slowly, “I only saw his back; and when I saw his back, I knew he was the worst man in the world. His neck and shoulders were brutal, like those of some apish god. His head had a stoop that was hardly human, like the stoop of an ox. In fact, I had at once the revolting fancy that this was not a man at all, but a beast dressed up in men’s clothes.”

“Get on,” said Dr. Bull.

“And then the queer thing happened. I had seen his back from the street, as he sat in the balcony. Then I entered the hotel, and coming round the other side of him, saw his face in the sunlight. His face frightened me, as it did everyone; but not because it was brutal, not because it was evil. On the contrary, it frightened me because it was so beautiful, because it was so good.”

“Syme,” exclaimed the Secretary, “are you ill?”

“It was like the face of some ancient archangel, judging justly after heroic wars. There was laughter in the eyes, and in the mouth honour and sorrow. There was the same white hair, the same great, grey-clad shoulders that I had seen from behind. But when I saw him from behind I was certain he was an animal, and when I saw him in front I knew he was a god.”

“Pan,” said the Professor dreamily, “was a god and an animal.”

“Then, and again and always,” went on Syme like a man talking to himself, “that has been for me the mystery of Sunday, and it is also the mystery of the world. When I see the horrible back, I am sure the noble face is but a mask. When I see the face but for an instant, I know the back is only a jest. Bad is so bad, that we cannot but think good an accident; good is so good, that we feel certain that evil could be explained. But the whole came to a kind of crest yesterday when I raced Sunday for the cab, and was just behind him all the way.”

“Had you time for thinking then?” asked Ratcliffe.

“Time,” replied Syme, “for one outrageous thought. I was suddenly possessed with the idea that the blind, blank back of his head really was his face—an awful, eyeless face staring at me! And I fancied that the figure running in front of me was really a figure running backwards, and dancing as he ran.”

“Horrible!” said Dr. Bull, and shuddered.

“Horrible is not the word,” said Syme. “It was exactly the worst instant of my life. And yet ten minutes afterwards, when he put his head out of the cab and made a grimace like a gargoyle, I knew that he was only like a father playing hide-and-seek with his children.”

“It is a long game,” said the Secretary, and frowned at his broken boots.

“Listen to me,” cried Syme with extraordinary emphasis. “Shall I tell you the secret of the whole world? It is that we have only known the back of the world. We see everything from behind, and it looks brutal. That is not a tree, but the back of a tree. That is not a cloud, but the back of a cloud. Cannot you see that everything is stooping and hiding a face? If we could only get round in front—”

38:20

This is a long and talky scene, and I imagine it’s going to test the patience of some listeners who are eager for action or less invested in Paige’s storyline. But it’s a climactic encounter with death and about as close to the threshold of the divine as we’re ever going to get (and it also needs to do some plot-directing on the side), so I wanted it to have plenty of its own space and time to breathe, particularly how frantic the rest of the narrative is right now.

And Sarah’s performance is just absolute gold to me, filled with sorrow and menace and softness, so it holds me rapt throughout. 

The one part I could probably have cut down more is right at the start when we first meet the Maiden (if nothing else, Paige probably takes too long to cotton on!).

43:47

We originally had a line explicitly pointing it out, but this scene was very much intended to mirror Paige’s encounter with Hembry back in Season 2, another controlling and menacing avatar of the divine, and another act of negotiation.

Paige is now...much less patient and much less fearful.

44:08

Ursula K LeGuin already wrote, “We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.”

Really we’re not saying anything more coherent than that in the Maiden’s long speech here, just at far more length - but she’s summing up the entire series’ manifesto, really.

The thing that eats us is a beast, not a god. We know that because it hungers. Because it hungers, it will die. We will not save ourselves, but our efforts may contribute to its demise.

That’s about it, I think? That’s about as hopeful as a starting point ought to be.

56:46

Paige’s repeated reliance on coffee throughout this episode as a replacement for alcohol  - which Elgin fetches for her again at the end - was, I guess, meant to be a very quiet nod to the fact that at this point (whether we’re talking about alcoholism or the Woundtree), victory means living on with her burden, not overcoming it for good.

Chapter 42

0:00

B. Narr absolutely smashes this entire monologue - there’s a moment here when you can hear them frothing, which I think is just superb.

In these last episodes, continuing to empathise with Faulkner’s condition (which is near-entirely of his own making) is such a tricky balance and B. helps us understand him so well.

For me, the tragedy of Faulkner at this point is that he’s arrived at exactly the same place as Carpenter in Season 1 - longing to break away from the expectations of other people, desperate to divest from his god and his faith, certain that the Trawler-man has no answers to offer him - but there’s no catharsis to be found in that revelation given how thoroughly he’s trapped.

9:57

I don’t know how well it comes across, but the joke of the Grand Aquifer is very much that it’s just another hole in the ground, like the Gulch, only smellier, older, and more remote.

It’s a regression and a repetition of the place Faulkner was already standing in, it’s three steps backwards; it represents fanaticism rather than faith.

We toyed with the idea of having more significant visual identifiers mentioned during Faulkner's monologue - two massive statues representing the Trawler-man’s two faces in Faulkner’s throne room, for example - but I think there’s more horror to be found if there’s nothing impressive here at all.

10:50

A huge thank you to all of the very talented voice actors who were essentially just asked ‘please yell Faulkner’s name’. There’s a completely inaudible embarrassment of riches in this one scene.

15:50

We played with a couple of takes when recording this scene with B. and H.R. Owen. In one, Sibling Rane was still sympathetically managing Faulkner, and in the other, the cracks are really starting to show.

We opted mostly for the former, but you can hear Rane’s patience audibly fraying when they snap ‘We’ll pad your shoulders.’

20:24

This scene with Faulkner, Rane and Cull is a deliberate mirror of the upcoming market scene with Shrue, Hayward and Carpenter - two different ‘an angel on either shoulder’ sequences.

In the first scene, Faulkner is standing in the centre while Rane and Cull are off to either side (binaurally speaking) bickering with each other.

In the market scene, Shrue is mostly in the centre, but everyone keeps shifting position to indicate more of an equal relationship and fair negotiation between the three.

21:30

Carson’s three interview snippets here all act as examples of the Legislatures using a message of hope and utopianism to put their thumb on the scales of reality with regards to the military, economy and environment respectively (indicating that the CLS will inevitably have no choice but to surrender, prodding the stock markets towards optimism by suggesting that sacrifices will be bussed in from abroad, throwing off a question about the polluted lands by insisting that the victory proves that we can accomplish anything).

Val tries to do the same at the very end, but cannot.

22:05

The Floating Market is a location from the Silt Verses RPG, and you can hear co-creator Gabriel Robinson (who I think lurks this Patreon!) reading out the credits and representing Guttle and Croak Incorporated in the background. 

I did try and see if, with permission, we could find a way to set an entire episode at the Market, which is a wonderful bit of worldbuilding from Gabriel and which is supposed to be out in the wilds of the Peninsula, but it would have added to our already considerable ‘Carpenter and Hayward are on the road not quite getting to Glottage’ lag during the midseason. So transplanting the location to the city and having it appear here seemed like a really nice way to pay tribute to all of those folks’ amazing work while keeping the plot moving forward.

You can also hear the fantastic Erika Sanderson, Daisy McNamara and David Ault as three of our other market traders!

30:12

There’s a real breath of relief that came as we wrapped this scene that I also remember from Season 2 (when Carpenter and Faulkner flee the holiday village but leave the Homesick Corpse behind) and Season 1 (when Carpenter gets arrested).

It’s that conductor's moment where you realise that everything is in its place, everything has got to where it needs to be, for the big conclusion.

31:25

There was potential to end this scene with Carpenter reflecting more seriously on what’s happening with the Parish of Tide and Flesh a lot more keenly, but having her stay mission-focused with a side order of very human spite towards Faulkner felt a lot more accurate to her as a character here. Whatever she’s feeling, she’ll feel it when the job is done.

I also liked the idea of keeping both Carpenter and Shrue blissfully unaware of how their paths have previously collided via Mercer and Gage and Mason - again, I think it speaks to the show’s themes of limited knowledge.

33:55

Marta da Silva very kindly recorded this entire monologue from her travels in Japan and warned us that it wouldn’t be up to her usual sound quality standards…but it sounds beautiful. Absolutely stunning work.

Most of the background thrum and dronework here is from transformed SFX - screams, sirens - based directly on what’s actually happening to Nesh just out of view.

39:54

We talked a lot about Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, The Wrath of God in concluding Faulkner’s storyline, but there’s also a great deal of influence from that movie in how Val’s plot has progressed, and we reference it directly with one of these lines.

Val says, ‘and if there is no throne, we will make one’. Aguirre magnificently boasts, ‘If I say that the birds will fall down dead from the trees, then the birds will fall down dead from the trees.’

It also serves as another little parallel to Faulkner, who also has a throne which is not really a throne.

43:04

Val and Chuck wandering the corridors as the various CLS politicians are trapped in their individual offices feels very reminiscent of the January 6th Capitol attack in the US (although obviously a great deal less blunderous). That was conscious if not politically pointed - there’s something very awful in the isolation and visibility of having to barricade yourself in an office with your own nameplate on the door.

45:25

Val finding herself utterly spent and unable to come up with any more creative ways of killing people = hello, it’s me, the author, talking to you through your earbuds.

46:35

The various references to murderous or monstrous babies across Chapter 41 and 42 were just an in-joke to myself, as we’d only recently learnt we were having a kid when this was written and I thought it’d be funny to seed some hints of subtextual terror into the scripts.

Muna has still not seen Eraserhead, one of my favourite films, which is obviously a slightly bleak take on parenthood. So my tendency to enjoy very dark horror has been a running joke throughout the pregnancy between us. “Oh, he’s kicking. This is so nice! Shall we watch Eraserhead to celebrate? Or maybe an Alien rewatch?”

47:59

We note it in the transcript, but the setup of Val exploding the Conclave (with her footsteps moving through the centre as the screams ring out from all around her) mimics Faulkner, walking through the Grand Aquifer while his own name rings out on all sides.

What I think is notable is that this is the first time Val is requiring her own life to be actively rewritten by one of her lies (as far as I can recall?) which accounts to some extent for how she then undergoes it.

55:27

Something I sat with for a while was whether it would throw listeners off too much to have Val and Chuck go from a series of utterly horrible political assassinations to this final act of grace and kindness between them at the end, but listening back, I really like the turn and I think it’s precisely the point.

Chuck Harm absolutely does not deserve the gift and mercy he receives - the ludicrous gift of a big friendly pack of dogs, of course, but also the gift of freedom from the new god he was already abasing himself in front of - nor does it make up for the far worse harm Val’s already committed.

“Deserve’s got nothing to do with it,” is the famous line that appears in both The Wire and revisionist western Unforgiven, and that’s something that I pretty much had in my head throughout the writing of these last episodes.

This is not a story where we should establish the doling out of just desserts to hero and villain alike, because this is not a world where the gods are just.

Although amusingly, back in Season 2, William A. Wellman did jokingly say that they were excited to read the script where Chuck horribly dies, so I enjoyed surprising them with the scripts showing that Chuck makes it out not simply intact, but with perhaps the series’ only genuine happy ending.

57:11

I too would like to be away in the hills with an excessive number of dogs and nobody else around, just to be clear.

59:03

Breaking Chuck free of herself is what breaks Val free from her mother and thus Carson, which I thought was a nice touch.

But we still wanted to leave her alone with the uneasy silence (and the exploded corpses of the Conclave) - it’s not a triumphant moment of redemption by any means.

Across the last three episodes, we do actually see three characters - Val, Shrue and Hayward - meaningfully stepping away from the unresolved baggage of their family members.

We did a lot of thematic pairings in Season 2 and we’re doing a lot of meaningful threes this time around! And some of it is even deliberate, too.