The Silt Verses Chapter 40 - episode commentary

0:00

This felt like an important scene to have for Hayward as a character, looking up at his old childhood home. 

Our other three protagonists have all got to have at least one episode focused on their childhood and their family and their past, and we obviously would be getting into really repetitive and time-consuming territory if we tried that yet again…

But nevertheless I wanted to quickly affirm that he’s every bit as much of a whole and complex person as Faulkner, Carpenter and Paige are, and that in fact he’s probably come to terms with his past and everything he’s left behind in a far healthier way than any of them have. (Which Carpenter explicitly acknowledges.)

Having him specifically speak about experiencing rapture, as a kid in a high-rise, looking out over the world, was a nod to that. 

Hayward didn’t have faith growing up, and we haven’t given him meaty flashback scenes where he grappled with existentialism of the nature of the gods as a child - but he could still experience spiritual moments on his own terms.

3:50

Fanservice was something we’d been discussing a lot in the creation of this season, and in particular where the line is around character returns and callbacks - when does a nice payoff turn into pandering?

What happens when you bring a beloved character back when you don’t have an organic way for them to interact with the events of your most recent storyline; when they’ve effectively gone through their own entire arc already. What do you DO with Sid Wright or Gage if there’s no place for them in the story other than to obediently line up alongside the protagonists, offer their own clearly-defined take on things, and pander to the audience (or backtrack on their development and join the villains)?

I didn’t want us to end up with that kind of Marvel-movie stacked cast, where you’ve got Don Cheadle or Sebastian Stan hanging around with, fundamentally, nothing left to do and nowhere left to go, other than occasionally pop up in shot and contribute an opinion or a punch so we can all feel satisfied that they remain part of the team.

Having Charity appear again in the bar before hurriedly fleeing the scene at the sight of Carpenter felt like a nice compromise as a callback. We get that satisfaction in seeing a much-liked character again - but also it hopefully comes as an unexpected surprise to the audience, and we’re finding the humour in it, showing that she’s still around and still hunting boyfriends to their deaths out in the woods, and making it very clear that she’s not about to come back into the plot in a major way. (Although having said that, I’ve seen a couple of folks online speculating that we’re setting something up here - we’re not! She instantly legged it back out of the narrative! Let her go!)

I was a little concerned that we’d made a mistake by calling her ‘Verity’ instead of spelling out very explicitly who she was  - how long a memory do listeners really have, two years on? And I’ve seen some people who instantly got the joke and others have commented that they only realised afterwards who she was meant to be, so yeah. Maybe a bit less subtle next time.

5:24

There is a potential plot hole here, I think - Hayward indicates that he already has people in the city working for him (and clearly Hayward and Carpenter have somewhere to safely hole up in Glottage), but of course if there were trustworthy agents of the Woundtree active in town, they could presumably have solved the entire storyline by approaching Shrue themselves…which would ultimately negate the need for Hayward and Carpenter to come to Glottage at all.

In my mind, Hayward’s certainly established a network of sporadic and informal allies in Glottage - but that doesn’t mean he can trust them, or that they know what’s really going on. 

I haven’t seen anyone point that out so far. But it is there as a question mark in the text, and I do acknowledge it.

6:20

This is one of the episodes where it felt like we could ease back on the detailed audio realism - we spend a solid 25 minutes in the bar, Carpenter and Hayward (and then Shrue and Cross) are presumably drinking, but other than a few key moments with Cross, we don’t attempt to convey that in the SFX. 

My rationale there was that we already have a rhythm underlying the scene and a natural ebb and flow of noise and quiet to support the dialogue - a song, followed by applause - so there’s no real need to keep layering on top of it.

10:51

Do Shrue and Cross get too chummy in this scene too quickly, given how awful Cross has been to Shrue? Nobody’s mentioned it, but it weighed on me a bit during the final few passes.

I didn’t want us to have the impression that Cross has miraculously become a better person here. He’s clearly desperate for someone he can stop performing in front of (which is what got him into this mess in the first place), and Shrue, whose life is on the verge of being completely forfeit at this point, is that person.

14:11

The fundamental irrationality and hunger underlying power, and the desperate logical contortions used to make power appear beneficial, stable and rational, are pretty much at the entire heart of what the show is about, and what I was getting at here with Cross’ little speech about reason, wonderfully delivered by Felix Trench.

16:03

We do, I think, skip about a little here with Carson’s story arc and circumstances - in the previous episode, he was plotting an escape to civilian life and a career in business, and here he seems almost resigned to his responsibilities and the failing war, and his relationship with the Church Electric seems to have got substantially worse. So there is a missing page, although probably not a very significant one or one the audience is crying out to see.

Originally this scene would have come earlier in the story (indicating that he was trying to win favour back with the Church Electric with his Tranquili-Tea scheme), which is perhaps why it feels out of place in that regard - however, we didn’t have a place for it and it felt more effective here, coming right before Val’s big climactic moment.

21:40

I am, actually, really proud of how we cheat with the Battle of Mal-Retour across the next 20 minutes to give the impression of an entire army and then its ensuing destruction with really not much more than some vehicle noises and marching footsteps. I think we do all right there.

The trick is following Chuck from the outside to the inside, then back out again - so we throttle the audible scope of the sequence only to expand again once everything’s gone to hell - to give a before-and-after effect without having to do too much.

22:00

Harlan Guthrie, who of course does about a thousand voices very impressively in Malevolent and who previously voiced the Reverend Toes, had kindly mentioned that he’d be keen to do another role with us, and at the time I’d thought - there’s no way we can make that happen. He’s such a recognisable actor within the audiodrama community now; it’d be too distracting to have him show up again!

But the fun with these semi-diagetic credits roles is that it doesn’t matter as much if the audience is startled by the voice, since in the end it’s only a bit of fun. And having him play a barking, angry Drill Sergeant felt like a nice opposite to the bigger part he’d already played with us and what he gets to do in his day job.

22:50

The Drill Sergeant’s rather rude line here is a more vulgar take on Mark Twain’s infamous quip about Jane Austen (that he’d dig up her corpse just to beat her to death with her own shinbone). The rest of his insults are stolen from real-life drill sergeant sayings I grabbed from across the web.

23:37

William A. Wellman’s name is called in the credits (and not answered) just as Chuck Harm, who William plays, steps onto the scene. Oh ho ho. Oh ho ho. Ohhh, we have a good time here in sound design.

24:30

Chuck’s little angry sigh when a helicopter lands too close to his broadcast was entirely accidental - I just think William was taking a breath, but it worked perfectly.

Chuck also, notably, states that he will be discreet and then walks straight into a radio operating room and starts asking people what they’re listening to.

28:00

We use an actual balloon as part of the SFX for the radio operator’s head bursting. We have so many generic gory splats, I wanted a bit more of an absurd sense of momentary inflation. It’s in for about half a second, but it’s there.

28:01

I pictured Derek (who we never hear from - I contemplated giving him a little weird breath or some fleshy movements, but ultimately it’s quite fun to have him entirely imagined as the listener’s POV) as quite similar to the bizarre and deeply unscary technologically-grafted Cenobites who appear in Hellraiser 3: there’s a Cenobite with a camera lodged in his face, as well as infamously a very purse-lipped fellow who fires CDs out of his face.

Someone mentioned that Derek made them imagine something out of Cronenberg’s Videodrome, which is a much more respectable and less goofy horror reference, so I’ll take it.

31:10

The helicopter crash was difficult to achieve - you should really hear the rotor blades cut out before it falls, strictly speaking, but in audio that doesn’t necessarily come across with the impact and terror that it does on film.

31:31

We originally had Derek surviving for a whole lot longer (into a future episode, even) but it was better to take him out of the equation early on, we decided, to have Chuck on camera duties and entirely on his own with Val.

34:10

We had more from Chuck running about in a panic here originally after Val sets the rockets off, but I actually really liked the Looney Tunes gulp and then him quietly walking across to hide under a sheet of metal; it’s a great contrast to the shock of the rockets going off and gives the best possible sense of his helplessness.

You end up with these repeated highs and lows of noise and confusion followed by near-silence  that I think works wonders for the tension.

34:50

We cut a couple of short scenes out here wholesale - we were going to have Val confronted by a CLS general while the rockets are going off (the same general who briefly appears in an announcement back in Episode 5) and then have more with the escaped saints eating people, but I think we got our point across more than well enough with what we had.

41:10

Chuck instantly abandoning all of his patriotic pretensions and becoming a helpful and obedient sidekick for Val felt like the most interesting and entertaining choice we could make with the character, but I did worry a little that he (already a very Kent Brockman-esque figure) would come across as if we were homaging Homer in Space, the classic Simpsons episode in which Kent instantly declares his allegiance to giant ants which he wrongly believes are invading from outer space.

Nobody’s brought up that comparison, so maybe I’m just ageing myself there.

43:55

I really like it when we stumble into empathy somewhere unexpected, like Chuck finding himself pitying Val. It’s the most optimistic part of the show, honestly.

44:28

I liked this song as a piece of hummable and plausibly ‘live’ music (there’s not much of it on royalty-free sites, especially when you want to have the same singer across multiple songs!) and wanted to use it, but it specifically mentions ‘Tennehesee hills’ at the start, which we try and conceal from the audience with a bit of fade-in sleight of hand here.

45:25

Something I didn’t really anticipate this season is that, very understandably, whenever characters have a meaningful or a vulnerable moment, or they confess something that’s important to them, that’s going to be interpreted by listeners as a ‘death flag’, as a sign that we’re teeing them up to get killed off for good.

And that’s not an issue, necessarily (because this is the end of the show! Even if our heroes do technically survive to the end, we’re nevertheless as sure as hell concluding their character arcs.) but I think you do want to try and apply counter-measures for that in the writing, to ensure you’re not laying on these vulnerable moments too thick or coming across as overwrought.

So a bit of this interaction between Carpenter and Hayward we trimmed down - not because it was bad, just because I felt like some listeners would come away convinced they’re both going to die next ep and that would distract from the moment itself.

49:05

Cross’ line here, ‘And yet here we are, you and I, stood at a crossroads in the beating heart of the world, with nowhere left to go,’ is a nod to my beloved Crime and Punishment, in which the drunk and destitute Marmeladov, like Cross someone who deliberately plays the fool in social situations as a survival tactic, also giving into despair in a pub with Raskolnikov, turns and asks the armour-piercing question, ‘Do you know what it means, my dear sir? To have absolutely nowhere left to go?’

49:59

Also pared back was how Carpenter introduces herself to Shrue at the very end here - originally she was really hamming it up by doing a very deliberate ‘we saw you across the room and really liked your vibe’ wind-up shtick, but it felt like comedy coming from us rather than the character, so we trimmed it.

51:13

One of the moments I’d always wanted to try and get to with this season was this final scene - where peace breaking out, rather than war, is a moment of horror and uncertainty for our protagonists, and the sound of joyous church bells is a presentiment of horror. It seems to have gone down well, so in general thrilled with its reception!