Silt Verses Chapter 39: episode commentary

0:00

This was an odd, broad, ambitious episode, and it didn’t come together quite as cohesively I would have liked it to (I feel like I say that a lot, but so it goes); we ended up actually recording during COP28, which certainly ended up feeling eerily thematically relevant.

A few weeks back I was coincidentally reading Doppelganger by Naomi Klein, which is very good and which is in large part about modern-day conspiracy theories in a way that speaks to the thematic heart of this episode.

Klein explores the argument that the rich melodrama of conspiracy narratives should be understood in part as a desperate survival response to the unacceptable and very open realities of modern-day power; the fantasy that events around us are being masterfully engineered and stage-managed by all-powerful tyrants remains ultimately more palatable to many people than the more prosaic collective reality of national and global superstructures made up of leaders who are habitually reactive and venal - people who will continue callously serving their own interests and defending their own corners even in the face of global ruin.

There can be a real kind of orderly-universe reassurance in believing - like one former Premiership footballer bizarrely insisted on social media this week - that the UK government deliberately engineered the global COVID-19 outbreak during a local spell of warm weather (or perhaps the argument was even that they have access to a weather machine and so rigged a sunny spell?) to keep the populace from rebelling against lockdown.

There's no reassurance at all, on the other hand, to be found in the more pitiable reality that several of our nation's most prominent politicians really did respond to a deadly national health crisis by negligently passing vast sums of taxpayer money to companies like Randox and PPE Medpro in order to serve personal interests and enrich their loved ones, family, and even casual acquaintances. (Klein’s book doesn’t really touch on the UK response to COVID-19 in depth, but she does appropriately cite Mark Fisher, who argues that the truest basis of most modern conspiracy theories is open class solidarity amongst the wealthy. She also reminds us of her own ‘shock doctrine’ thesis, which is of course very much about the predatory response of power to crisis.)

The idea of a government-controlled weather machine may be ludicrous and fantastical, but if we believe in that, at least we can reassure ourselves that its creators must be serious people with a serious plan.

So all of that, in short, was the ultimate effect I wanted to get across with this episode - Shrue’s horrible acceptance (which mirrors our protagonists’ own struggle with the nature of the gods) of the hollowness and smallness at the heart of things. There is no brilliant master-plan underlying either the Peninsulan government’s summit or the Peninsulan government’s war, only personal interests, reactive moves, and hunger.

Nobody is in charge. There’s no steadying hand at the tiller; just small, selfish people, taking what they can.

The problem, I think, is that for both structural and technical reasons there were a fair number of cuts we had to make to the episode, so it’s a bit hacked-about and doesn’t land quite as hard as it should. And ultimately, while it’s a worthy goal to demonstrate to your audience that the antagonists aren’t doing much more than flailing in the face of change, it does err on the side of broadness as political satire!

0:05

This monologue from Carpenter was a late addition - from social media I got the sense that there was a bit of growing ‘when will we get to the fireworks factory??’ with Hayward and Carpenter’s journey, so I just wanted to address that and set up where they’re headed so the stakes are clear for future episodes.

We also hadn’t really set up Carpenter’s return to Glottage as well as I’d liked given how important it ought to be to the character given her history with the place, so I wanted to spend a bit of time dwelling on that while showing the impact of the war.

And, of course, it’s just wonderful to hear from Meabh.

5:40

Something else that caught me a little off-guard about this episode, I think, was the fact that we’d established this great VA library of adverts, propaganda, and announcements when we started producing this season (and I’d been convinced that we’d never get through it all) - and then we rapidly burned through almost all of it in the first half of the season.

So I wanted to have more advertising here at the start, that constant relentlessness of narrative that Shrue is living under, but ultimately we’d used all the good stuff and didn’t have enough time to go back out for it (and that’s why I pop up as a radio voice and the musical montage sequence sort of ebbs away earlier than it should).

6:01

Sarah Griffin is just brilliant at the unspoken and the half-said in Shrue’s voice during this scene - I actually find this sequence much more emotive than the callback at the very end of the episode where they speak to their partner again.

8:07

This episode actually doesn’t have a spoken credits sequence currently - which was just an oversight / tiredness on my part. If I get a chance, I likely will slip one in during this scene when Shrue’s in the car.

10:50

The sheer wastefulness of the campus having fancy scooters scattered about even as it struggles with open student rebellion only really works as a joke if they’re electric scooters, specifically - but then you can’t really convey that as effectively in audio, unfortunately, and it’s much funnier to picture Shrue awkwardly pushing themselves along.

11:08

I think a bigger challenge and frustration I have with this episode is that we struggle to make Greater Glottage University feel like a clear location that’s distinct from everywhere we’ve visited in the show already (we try our best with the automatic doors, the customisable soundtrack, etc - but ultimately that sense of sterility and pointless corporate frippery which I wanted to convey is difficult to get across consistently in ambient sound).

To address that, the script called for an automated voice to bark out inspiring buzzwords as characters entered a room (including the bathroom) but that was too distracting so we had to let it go.

We do try something a bit experimental here, with a prismatic-sounding drone in the background as Shrue approaches the Bowery. I was thinking back to Devs, Alex Garland’s mostly-good show about Silicon Valley types gone rogue, which features an experimental facility out in the woods with a lane of mirrors leading up to the entrance.

I liked the idea of trying to convey that shimmery, ethereal, entrance-to-a-fairy-tale quality through sound, which also ends up hinting at what’s going to happen to the summit attendees at the end.

11:50

Originally we had another scene here where Shrue enters the Bowery and goes straight onto the industrial shop floor, being forced to walk past (and ignore) some minor characters who we heard earlier in the season who are being imprisoned in cells and held in order to be hallowed, before proceeding upstairs to the creative floors.

A very nice moment, but it made literally no sense to have all of that at the facility entrance and created unnecessary confusion about what this space actually looks like, so we took it out.

12:47

I did wonder whether this sequence with Carson testing out the audio controls was too openly comedic - it was also partly a setup in case we wanted to use soothing ambient noise throughout the rest of the episode to help give a sense of place, which we didn’t fully commit to. 

I kept it in, partly because the awkward and brief dance party was an homage to the moderately Eskovian TV show Severance, which I very much enjoyed.

13:40

Felix Trench really makes me laugh hard with these lines as Cross - a very different character to his most famous role, of course, but he’s just an extremely talented comedian.

16:08

I think we do a decent job of seeding some of the clues as to what’s really going on here (like Melissa being the corporate scapegoat for the nationwide blackouts, or the two business executives being entirely unfussed about the outcome of the war) but from a glance at social media, everyone instantly clocked that something was going down as soon as it was clear Carson wasn’t in the room with them, so I guess that’s the pitfalls of being three seasons in at this point!

We also try and nod to the eventual outcome of the episode with Melissa’s little speech about the Saint Electric brand strategy - even an all-powerful and stable transnational monopoly is at risk of collapse thanks to the very human panic, mercuriality and uncertainty of its leaders. All empires die in terrible self-denial.

18:15

This scene was the big structural challenge that I think ended up causing problems for us somewhat - initially it was a lot longer, and I had the sense that it could be 30 solid minutes of 12 Angry Men-esque courtroom ideological debate with rising tension, alongside Shrue’s fellow attendees slowly falling under the spell of the tea (which turns out of course to be entirely meaningless, since the ideas are never being sincerely considered). But it created an episode that was on balance much too meandering and dense, and we had to pare it back to try and get the ep into any kind of shape.

You can see the faultlines and orphaned references of those changes here and there - for instance, Carson mentions ‘a couple of videos’ early on (we cut the second one, a sort of punky ‘how do you do, fellow kids’ advert targeted towards younger people which tried to position sacrifice as an act of rebellious defiance and affirmation).

24:40

There’s a specific kind of daytime TV advert aimed at nostalgic older people with a love of commemorative militaristic or monarchistic gewgaws here in the UK and that’s effectively what I was going for here - the kind of soft-focus ad that has a carousel line of text running along it underneath.

Trunce complaining about how divided and angry society is and how nobody is willing to have a conversation was a deliberate nod to one of the wider themes of the episode about civility, and to a worrying belief that I see expressed by many of the last generation's artists and thinkers (including some people I admire very much, like Klein herself): the idea that the biggest problem facing our society right now is division and incivility, a refusal to listen to one another, and that we just need to all come together and learn to have friendly town-square disagreements again and everything will be better.

For me, that's a bit of a glib perspective that misses the actual, far more dangerous undercurrents we're facing beneath that division - the problem of how a civil society can learn to navigate sincerely and equitably through a constant stream of distrust-inducing disingenuousness and misinformation, an internet-led world which requires us to sense-check and filter vast amounts of interconnected data and language, much of which is laced with wider implication, ulterior motives, and unspoken meaning.

(A great minor example this week: the director of the London Symphony Orchestra made headlines by complaining about 'misguided wokeism' being responsible for a lack of interest and funding in opera.

In theory, I could absolutely have a civil disagreement in the town square with this man about the reasons for opera's decline.

But first I have to try and get a read on him: is he sincerely confused about what 'woke' means and open to engaging with a counter-argument? Is he just cynically using the term and ensuing debate to draw attention towards himself, because he hopes that right-wing politicians will treat him as a cause celebre and give him some funding? Is he deliberately using it as a dogwhistle in order to avoid saying what he really means and believes? Did he pick up the term 'wokeism' casually and innocently from its constant appearances in mainstream papers, or because he actively watches 3-hour-long YouTube videos from frothing Great Replacement racists in his spare time? Regardless of his individual intent, who is backing his corner and disseminating his words, what's their angle, and how will I benefit them by engaging with their vessel?

What's the point of me expending all this energy to try and figure this out when tomorrow there will be someone else wheeled in to decry 'wokeism' in a slightly different field?

Incivility, prickliness, snap judgements and division in public discourse are, I'd passionately argue, not the symptoms of a society that's become too unwilling to converse so much as a society where there's far too much unspoken strain on all of us to vet and analyse the intent, wellspring, and implications of what's being said, and then map out the consequences of how we engage with it. This is the era of I am not what I am.)

26:35

The fact that none of the ideas being presented are actually addressing the problem at its source is obvious, and it’s also very much deliberately the case that nothing actually new is being suggested (Carson even paradoxically argues that the participants, as representatives of the old establishment, are the perfect people to come up with new ideas) but I also wanted the summit to very clearly be flouting the only rules it’s established at every turn; Shrue is expected to show decorum and civility and not to interrupt or criticise, but these rules are only forcefully applied to enforce the majority view.

29:20

Cross’s ‘lightning rod’ concept is something that I see playing out frequently in UK politics, but at the time I was thinking of something specific back in April 2023; TV pundit Gary Lineker (hardly a hugely radical figure by any means but a sort of popular bugbear for the right-wing press) had spoken out on social media against the cruelty and worrying historical parallels of the government’s rhetoric against asylum seekers, and large swathes of the media and political apparatus immediately turned the public debate into a question of whether Lineker should apologise for breaching impartiality guidelines.

31:11

Several people online seem to think they’ve heard a Johnny Sims cameo in this episode and I have literally no idea what they mean. He’s definitely not in this!

34:52

Cross’s argument that any regulation would scare away the wealthy and powerful and therefore be an unacceptable exercise in self-sabotage is one that we see a lot in the UK with regards to non-dom tax breaks, specifically.

42:17

Again, the facts of the High Adjudicator mismanaging vital resources for his own petty benefit in a time of crisis, and the idea of a major political figure being dogged by rumours of a sex scandal which nobody is willing to formally acknowledge, are very much UK political in-jokes, although I’m sure they’re fairly universally applicable as well!

46:18

Originally this entire sequence was a great deal longer and action-driven, and I had to take a hatchet to it, unfortunately - Shrue was supposed to attack and drive away the mirror-saint version of Brand, then Carson would trick Melissa into looking at her own reflection and becoming hallowed as well, then Shrue and Cross would find themselves surrounded by mirror-versions on all sides - but Shrue would use one of Timothy’s prompts to learn that there was a hidden exit in the storage closet, where they head in the next scene.

Shortening it led to some narrative issues, orphaned references and odd disappearances (Timothy and the mirror-saints quickly disappear from the narrative, it becomes very convenient that there’s an exit in Shrue and Carson’s hiding place) and I don’t think it’s structurally the best solution, but it was necessary just from a ‘getting the thing out the door’ perspective.

I’d bitten off far more than I could chew with the mirror-saints, and in particular conveying their movement and reforming / collapsing was too difficult through audio - we’d ended up with a long and complicated sequence with lots of dialogue and characters where the stakes and urgency couldn’t be clearly followed.

So, yeah, the episode takes a dip in structure and logic here, unfortunately, just to get us to the finish line.

51:30

I’m not sure how fully satisfied I am with the big reveal of Tranquili-T Seven; I think there’s an inherent challenge when the entire point of the episode is that there are no serious solutions being offered up by the political establishment (only cynical and selfish angles, exactly as vulgar and obvious as you’d think - exactly like Brand says) but you also don’t want the show to take a wholesale leap into cartoonishness in a way that undermines the seriousness of the wider stakes.

57:24

One of the endless joys for me is trying to figure out punches in audio, to give that sense of impact and weight without the sound being too hammy and over-the-top. I’d argue the solution is usually to try and create sound and motion around the punch - papers going flying are a wonderful tool in that regard!

59:58

People can say we’re a bleak or pessimistic show, but I think we express some real optimism here and there - Shrue’s fear that people might genuinely have no breaking point when it comes to the societal noose tightening, for example (which is a fear I absolutely share when it comes to something like climate change) is definitively answered in this final scene in a pretty hopeful manner.