The Silt Verses episode commentary - Chapter 38

0:00

We always knew this was going to be a really difficult episode to pull together, and while there’s a lot I love about it, most obviously the two lead performances, I think probably overall it’s not quite where I wanted to get it to in the second half.

It made sense that Faulkner would at some point need to return to the moment he made his first sacrifice to the Trawler-man, his estrangement from his family, and ultimately how far he’s now strayed from that first glimpse of his backstory and ambitions in Season 1 - which would mean going home.

It felt like we had unfinished business with Faulkner’s dad, who we’d established as having this universe’s equivalent of dementia, and putting the spotlight on him played nicely into how we’d essentially introduced the protagonists’ childhood authority figures as three different kinds of deity (Nana Glass as a forceful Old Testament god demanding obedience and sacrifice, Dennis as a manipulative god feeding on our desire for meaning and purpose, Faulkner’s father as an absent and vanishing god, a mystery that sometimes appears to know us and sometimes doesn’t).

Given that Faulkner is now in a position where he’s questioning whether the Trawler-man is a conscious force or the random movements of something animal and hungry, that felt like a good subject to touch upon.

And we’d also said that we’d address Faulkner as a canonically trans man this season, and we wanted to take that responsibility seriously and meaningfully - finding space for it in a way that could hopefully be an act of recognition and appreciation for the character rather than just a throwaway comment, even within the wreckage and endless deceit of his life as it currently stands.

So there was a lot of narrative ground to cover, with a couple of big challenges. The first was that we’d already done something very similar with Paige and Dennis (and in a similar place in the season!) - returning to a dilapidated home, reconnecting with your absent parent while wrestling with their limitations, having the conversations you should have had a long time ago…

The second challenge was that Faulkner needed to end the episode alone again, and so there was the question of how to introduce his father and then, basically, shuffle him back offstage as gracefully as possible.

I don’t know if we overcame either challenge quite as much as I would have liked, and I do have some nagging dissatisfaction about the final product, much as I am glad that we swung for it - in particular I think the second half of the ep rushes towards its conclusion and quite abruptly literalises the problem in the form of Uncle Just.

There’s a lot of richness and narrative potential there, and some aspects that I’d have liked to explore in much greater depth than we are able to - Faulkner’s feelings about Charlie, the nature of the water-butt out in the woods, just how much Eddie really suspects about Faulkner. 

And while I don’t know how it would have worked structurally, perhaps this needed to be a pair of episodes, effectively a movie-length story, to really fit everything in that it deserved.

0:23

Originally we had the explicit note that Faulkner and Rane (and presumably their followers) had hallowed the staff of the radio station into crustacean-saints, and we’d hear a bit more of that background violence and chaos during this scene.

But that throws off our sympathies for Faulkner a bit too harshly, and honestly, Jon, why are you making more work for yourself here?

1:38

The insistence that Faulkner ‘recap’ the increasingly tangled civil war of the Parish would have been a funnier joke if this episode had been the first post-break release, as we’d originally planned, but I still liked the implication that most of the Trawler-man’s disciples in isolated places along the river are struggling to keep up with what’s happening and who they should support.

In general, there’s quite a few places throughout the first half of the season where characters moan about how everything has got too complicated in the political plotting, which I guess was both covering my back as a writer (ho, ho, look how self-aware I am) but also acknowledging that this longing for simplicity and certainty is exactly how we end up embracing the temptation of easy, reassuring, false solutions.

5:48

Nobody will ever care as much as me about the transition to the interior of the car to the exterior here, which is an effort to artfully conceal the obvious seams between the ‘car starting up’ and ‘car driving away’ foley.

7:55

There is absolutely no reason for there to be as much fire in the Gulch as we show here, other than the need to quickly establish that some devastation has occurred offscreen (it is, after all, made of stone) - I guess the attackers were dead set on burning as much wooden furniture as possible?

13:07

I will just say here - the most hateful SFX of all time is the sound of footsteps in the forest. You can spend countless hours working with a footstep machine, you can use foley effects of someone actually walking in the forest - and still come out with something that sounds like an over-loud leaf-stamping machine being played over and over.

The problem is the crunch (and snow footsteps are equally hard for the same reason) which tends to feel very harsh when isolated as audio. It’s incredibly hard to make it sound non-artificial and audible-but-not-overloud.

And we have so much of it here!

20:58

One of the biggest real-life horrors, to me, is the reality of how people with dementia who have PTSD or past trauma can find themselves repeatedly reliving their past experiences as intrusive flashbacks, which feels almost cosmic in its injustice and cruelty (and within the world of the show, very much like calling down a god upon yourself by accident).

It’s a little like the horrifying existential theory (which I think weirdly I read in Terry Pratchett's Discworld books, of all places) that the afterlife is a subjective reality shaped by our beliefs about ourselves - that the person who feels they deserve bad things to happen to them will find themselves experiencing a kind of hell regardless, of whether they actually do deserve it. You were a victim once, and so you’ll be one over and over again.

I worked for a dementia organisation for maybe 5 years and there’s probably nothing that’s made me feel more inclined towards a belief in a random and pitiless universe - the very specific cruelty of letting people live out a long, complex life, and then reducing their daily preoccupation back to a single moment of abuse or suffering, a moment they’ve likely spent a great many years working to grow beyond.

20:59

I was always hoping we could get Steve Shell for the role of Faulkner’s dad - while I think there’s a solid 800 miles of USA between B. and Steve’s accents, it felt like an acceptable gloss, and of course we just thought it’d be an absolute honour to have him on the show, as a voice actor and horror writer we admire very much.

I also thought it’d really be interesting to hear that incredibly impressive, comforting paternal voice in a more vulnerable, childlike state than we’ve tended to hear it - and then just snapping back into place to offer Faulkner some advice and affirmation when we needed it.

We were very lucky that Old Gods was between tours, so Steve was available. He is of course an extremely gregarious and entertaining person to spend time with, as a former English teacher and a slam poet, and I think the sheer extent of that probably doesn’t even come through on OGOA itself. He’s also very generous - he asked for his recording fee to be donated to an Appalachian LGBTQ+ charity of our choice. Just a mensch.

23:10

The UK has an already terrifying, growing challenge with social care that no government wants to address (and with reduced / unaffordable care come other problems, from elder abuse to massive strain on family members’ mental health) which we’re not so subtly alluding to here with Eddie's discussion of care homes.

Of course, it's also worth saying - B. and Steve are doing a ton of emotional lifting in this episode but huge credit should go to Aud as well, who does a brilliant job with making us feel the weight on Eddie’s shoulders, the unspoken resentment.

23:15

We went back and forth on Eddie worrying out loud that Faulkner’s dad could accidentally deadname Faulkner.

It’s a legitimate issue that I know trans folks whose loved one has dementia have to grapple with, the heightened stakes and emotions around not being recognised or being mis-identified by that family member - and so it felt relevant to at least acknowledge that possibility and its impact.

But I also didn’t want to make anyone even momentarily afraid that we intended to go down that road with the story, which is why the content warnings are quite forceful on that point.

28:00

How to handle the political tos and fros of the Parish’s civil war without it becoming a Game of Thrones war-room situation was a big puzzle for us, and I do like that the best solution we found was ‘Faulkner gets crucial plot updates on the phone while he’s focusing instead on domestic tasks.’ I like the irony of that, and I like how Faulkner's divided attention prevents these phone calls with Rane from being just a big exposition dump.

30:08

These bits from the Marvel-esque radio serial are, as I’ve mentioned, a direct parody of Hayward and Paige’s own storyline, an imagining of how that story would be retold as a cautionary tale to reimpose the status quo (so the heroine is anti-sacrifice but begins abruptly yelling about destroying the world because she’s just too dang emotional; the hero fixes things with a big speech to the Legislatures; one bad apple is effectively responsible for all the trouble.)

Huge shout-out to Rissa Montanez and Marlon Dance-Hooi, who just got the tone we were going for so, so well.

32:20

The whole episode is basically the segment of The Godfather where Michael goes back to Sicily and begins to daydream about living a normal life, except poor Faulkner ends up with the stress of caring responsibilities for a vulnerable relative rather than Michael’s tradwife fantasy with Apollonia.

A really difficult balance with that was how far we took it. It’s possible to be both truthful and gratuitous, and there were some realities that do very much exist for many family carers (helping with bathroom duties, for instance) that we considered but ultimately shied away from tackling directly.

32:58

Originally Uncle Just was Uncle Jack, because I think Jack is a wonderfully creepy name, especially when it's repeated, as the Shining demonstrated - we’re taught via nursery rhymes that it’s a perfectly normal, even heroic name, and yet it jumps out at us with an ‘ACK! I

However, then I remembered that Arrested Development had an Uncle Jack, played by Martin Short, who was also dreaded by his relatives for the habit of flinging himself into their arms for hugs. I don’t know how much cultural cache that show still has, but to me it was offputting, so we went with something that spoke to the unfairness of the situation.

36:48

I probably could have included another line here to make the connection more strongly between how Faulkner describes his dad - sometimes being recognisable and making sense, more often not, incapable of offering any answers or providing genuine catharsis - and the nature of gods in the show.

40:18

I think you can probably make a perfectly valid argument that we should have just sat with the reality of Faulkner’s experiences with his father and that would have been a truer conclusion than bringing in Uncle Just as an external entity (and I do have some sympathy for that) - but then the reality of caring for a vulnerable relative is that it goes on and on, and we simply didn’t have the time for that in the fiction or in the show, besides which it would have been gruellingly inconclusive.

We had to provide some kind of resolution to the situation in order to cover it in a single episode, but as Faulkner notes right around the mid-section, that's the most unlikely thing for any of us - getting certainty, getting answers, getting respite.

As Eddie points out, nobody’s coming to rescue him from the relentless, inconclusive grind of his own life. He doesn't get the satisfaction of gods and angels swooping in to resolve things for him.

So for me the entire second half of the episode is a kind of magical-realist escape, a retreat back into fantastical horror rather than the grimmer realistic situation, a la Pan’s Labyrinth. 

I don’t think an angel necessarily eats Faulkner’s dad, or that they genuinely have that cathartic conversation at the end. I think Faulkner is forced to temporarily join his dad in the nightmare, just as Rane recommends, and it forces a moment of connection, real or perceived between the two of them. I think Faulkner expresses a wish to have an honest confrontation with his dad, and the prayer is answered, although not as he might have wanted it. I do think Faulkner’s dad has very possibly just gone wandering again at the end.

I do think we could have done with more time to work that more clearly into the narrative via some additional clues or hints, though I’m damned if I can decide how they’d have worked.

That said, we did want to provide a couple of small suggestions as to what Uncle Just might really be, if the listener chooses to interpret it as an external reality and not just a manifestation of fear - Faulkner’s dad keeps on humming throughout the episode which appears to call down the angel, we know that he used to work in the wind-farms, and there’s that old sailor’s tradition about how whistling can bring down the wrath of the wind upon you…(in which case, Faulkner perhaps worsens the problem, because he draws a wind-god’s marks on the cabin floor.)

51:10

Three of our main protagonists have at this point delivered an ultimatum to a god out of desperation, which again was one of those ‘where does narrative connection become monotonous repetition’ moments, because I did want it to feel like an inevitable threshold during any journey that involves loss of faith, where a character runs out of pleading or bargaining and only has empty threats left, but not like a ‘oh, I guess it’s this guy’s turn for a big dramatic monologue’ moment.

54:36

Originally we had Uncle Just break through the first line of defence at this point, and Faulkner sheltering with his father in the bath-tub, but it was, honestly, too much of a pain to sound-design. The interior of the cabin doesn’t really have distinguishing background noise (which is part of the reason we so often use the radio or Faulkner’s kitchen activities to help establish location), so there was no clear way of getting that transition across.

57:50

Some of the first messages we got about the show that really annoyed me were a few people during Season 1, always in the USA, for some reason, who emailed us or left a review with this sort of innocent, obtuse, ooh-don’t-mean-to-cause-offence-but-you-know-what-I-mean-don't-you air that I’ve also spotted being used against other podcasts that have cast gender-non-conforming voices:

“Oh, really want to get into this, but Faulkner’s voice is just so confusing to me, it stops me from getting immersed! I just can’t get past it!” (OK? What do you expect us to say to that?)

So I wanted to include that line about “it’s got a richness to it” as an active tribute to the richness of B.’s voice and how absolutely wonderful they are to listen to as an actor. I think they’ve only continued to gain in confidence, nuance and power as a performer in the 3 years since we started working with them, and it’s just such a privilege to get to collaborate with someone who’s so unremittingly kind, supportive, and up for anything.

Basically just a friendly little fuck-you to any of those people if they’re somehow still listening.

58:10

In the shooting script we noted that the Parish of Tide and Flesh has likely been raiding clinics or robbing lorries to get their hands on HRT, so Faulkner is perhaps not telling the whole story with ‘helped me get on the treatment’ - but in my head, it would absolutely have been a very Mason move to ensure that the Parish can support its younger disciples in a way that their rural communities simply don’t allow for.

As with Carpenter and her speech back in E4, I wanted to try and - as gracefully as possible - navigate in this sequence around who these characters are in all their flaws without accidentally pathologising their identities. (Carpenter can be cold and cautious without it feeling like an explanation for her aromanticism; likewise Faulkner can be dealing with themes of constant social performance and self-deception without those themes undermining the honesty of who he is as a trans man.)

1:04:00

It was too clunky to force in word-for-word across three different storylines, but there’s a repeating phrase that I wrote down as a kind of key to the season: every god is a god of lies, every god is a god of hope, every god is a god of death.