The Silt Verses Chapter 37 - episode commentary

In which Jon talks us through the making of Chapter 37 of TSV:

0:00

This was the episode that caused a lot of stress before Christmas, because I just couldn’t get it right.

I’d had this idea that I wanted to end the first half of the season with, essentially, a reminder that the flow of inevitable change is much bigger than our heroes; that we’re not doing some kind of Hegelian great man theory here; that much as we may be focusing on Paige or Hayward and Carpenter’s travails, the fate of their attempted revolution is very much out of their hands at this point, and there are thousands of people whose frustrations are bubbling over for the right reasons and the wrong reasons.

We wanted to show that any societal tipping point towards meaningful change isn’t going to be dependent on our protagonists’ personal journeys; it’s going to be vast, misstep-laden, long, and messy and not something that can be really portrayed in an indie audiodrama with a central cast of four - but it is happening nonetheless.

So the idea was that we’d check in with our protagonists and mark their progress before the final half, but that we’d also shine a spotlight a small group of unrelated strangers who are midway down the chain reaction that Paige has set off - this team of engineers working on the national power grid who rebel - and who then set off a further chain reaction in turn which will roll on and on, largely offscreen, over the course of the rest of the show.

And then because we were using electricity as a central theme, I thought we could emphasise the complexity of collective action by having all these little vignettes with callers on the phone, extra radio broadcasts, all taking different sides but ultimately leading in the same direction - we’ve been pretty negative in the show about modern telecommunications as something that’s used for propagandising, spinning stories, selling lies, but it also seemed apt to show that it’s also creating connections everywhere.

So it felt very important to include this episode, but definitely in the lead-up to December I found myself overwhelmed by a million disparate VA clips and the troubling sense that maybe, just maybe, in trying to write an episode about how individual solidarity and individual selfishness and individual anger can end up cohering into something collective and meaningful, I’d ended up, well…not doing that.

In particular, I’d gone in without a strong enough grasp of what those connective-tissue scenes should look like - how do you convey a flow of electrical current in audio? - and so the result felt unfocused and messy.

I think I was also thrown by the reaction to the previous episode, which was definitely the most immediate and noisy praise we’ve ever had - but intermingled were a few reactions from people who were visibly itching to get back to the main plotline and our core characters.

And that makes you question yourself, of course: “Hey, we know you’re ready to hear more from our protagonists, but actually we’re going to be spending more time with an even wider assortment of possibly-doomed side-characters who you don’t have a standing emotional connection with!!”

Anyway, I feel like we got it into some kind of shape, and the reaction’s been positive, so I’m very grateful for the patience with us to spend the extra time on it over the break.

I still have some structural gripes - I think even listening now, the ep is unfocused and uncentred out of the necessity of trying to show so many perspectives all at once. I think the length also sits a little uneasily within this season, where every episode is a full hour - in this ep, the main storyline is 30 minutes long, but we don't get to it until 30 minutes in!

But I’m glad we made the attempt to tell that story, and as always I’m a huge fan of the performances we get to showcase here.

1:00

We wrote and recorded this opening segment much later with Marta (a couple of weeks ago in fact) as a revision to our original plans.

Partly that was because there was a lot of ‘oh, I can’t wait to see what’s happening with Val’ excitement online that we hadn’t originally accounted for in the script, and it did in retrospect feel like we needed to check in with her in properly at this point, but also because it felt like her perspective could usefully mirror and emphasise the events of the rest of the episode.

Val, Paige, and Webb/the grid team all end up being confronted with the same basic realisation with regards to authority (whether that’s the Peninsulan government, a god, the bosses of the Church Electric) - not simply that it is cruel and hungering and will eat us up, but that it is clumsy and petty, and will feed regardless of whether it’s going to make a meaningful difference, regardless of the fallout which it never has to be confronted with.

I guess ultimately there’s a very modern sensation that I was trying to get across here which is crucial to the overall show - the anger and helpless horror of the knowledge that there’s no pragmatic master-plan overseeing the suffering we witness and the suffering we can’t see, and that pragmatism under capital is frequently a narrative veneer that’s enforced upon the majority to cover for the clumsy selfishness and limitless hunger of authority.

Yes, clearly-foreseen environmental devastation across our planet will continue to be ignored or downplayed for the sake of short-term commercial interests and largely individual benefits, no matter how obviously foolish that is. Yes, massively harmful cost-of-living increases will occur in order to keep individual profit margins on the rise. Yes, we will be told that we all need to be pragmatic and accept these realities, and play our part sensibly to reduce the harm in turn.

For Val, I think the interesting wrinkle is that she’s a thing divine that sows and imposes narrative wherever she goes, and so it’s quite fun to me that this scene is humanising her even though she’s very clearly expressing her ambitions to forcefully bestow meaning upon a meaningless world. She has a lot of small moments of humanity, but she's simultaneously trying to assert herself as a better-than-human force of divine authority.

She’s talking about creating an existential dictatorship, and she’s very much lying to herself by declaring that she would be any better than the things she seeks to supplant…and we like her more for it!

19:46

It is dramatically necessary - because how else do you get across what they’re dealing with as leaders and administrators? - but I will be glad and grateful when we no longer have to put Lucille and Ishani through any more council-meeting scenes.

29:13

We had more footage from each of these ‘phone caller’ VAs which I was sorry to lose, but we’d essentially ended up with a solid ten minutes of phone calls, which brought the episode to a grinding halt (and I think as we experimented with that rat-a-tat drumming, which brought to mind computer keys and telegrams, the flow of information, it became clear that we couldn’t possibly sustain it for any longer than we already had).

So basically from Lou, Michelle, Seb and Rae, we have four very different reasons for individual people to become enemies of the establishment; one caller who has a petty frustration about government waste and corruption, one caller who’s lost a loved one, one conspiracy-theory caller who actually believes there is a master-plan underlying everything, and one caller who feels that we’re facing a hopeless future so might as well act meaningfully for change before it’s too late.

32:18

Connor the Conduit was a relatively late addition - we’d had a few comments from people who’d found our increased jumping around from location to location hard to follow in this season.

I think it’s generally really helpful to dismantle your own initial defensiveness when you get any kind of critical feedback, and use that as the creative prompt and jumping-off point to fix the problem: so in this case, my initial reaction of “well, we can’t just have characters explicitly announce where they are at the top of every scene, can we? That’s lousy writing” evolved into “OK, but how could we have a character explicitly announce the location in a way that actually adds to the story?”

So I liked the idea of having a background character which is there to establish location but which also speaks very literally to the themes of the episode - you’ve got a pre-recorded voice propagandising over the real-time pained cries of the actual person, you’ve got a veneer of order and purpose over the meaningless suffering.

33:30

There’s a lot of throwaway dialogue in this scene that’s quite crucial to following the flow of the engineering team’s story - the truth about what actually happened at Fenton, the fact that there are multiple pragmatic solutions to the power shortage that are ignored because they involve institutions making meaningful sacrifices.

As mentioned at the top of this commentary, I did really want to have that quasi-realistic complexity of motive and the sense of wider events playing out offscreen, but it was absolutely a fear of mine that we’d end up with something either overly convoluted and explained or completely abrupt.

That difficult balance extended to the action as well - it wasn’t really in our gift to ever portray a realistic act of mass industrial sabotage upon a national power grid or how the authorities would realistically respond to that, but originally I had a lot of “look, we did our research” exposition about contingencies and counter-measures in there which ultimately needed to be trimmed back because we were getting bogged down in exposition. Webb’s speeches in particular originally had a lot of “Oh, and another thing, you also need to remember to do X…” to them.

So as a very obvious example, we ended up not acknowledging the more complicated realities of back-up power (phone lines or radio stations should have their own back-up power sources, but we simply show these both going dark).

It's a big and glaring gloss, but my thinking was that we’d clearly established that the Church Electric has an overarching monopoly over all these entities, so it felt reasonable enough (hopefully) to assume that the various regional operatives are acting to also shut those down, without the need for detailed explanation about how the infrastructure functions.

But now of course, looking back, I feel like we could have found ways to cover our backs and remove that potential plot hole without heaping on too much explanation - hindsight is everything.

To that end, we also quietly underplay the fact that Carson is presumably on the phone when he rants at an underling during the end montage sequence - it makes perfect sense that the government would have emergency lines still open during a blackout, but I didn’t want to have to clunkily explain away that caveat.

Speaking of inaccuracies, we also play a powerful-sounding electrical current effect over the phone line sequences, when of course phone lines are low-voltage compared to power lines.

I guess that’s comparable to medieval movies wrongly including a noisy SHIIIING metal-upon-metal sound effect when swords are drawn from sheaths: clarity is not the same as accuracy.

36:31

Having Webb say “Give me the maths” rather than “give me the math” was directly inspired by US listeners poking fun at us for having US-accented characters say the word ‘lorry’.

I think it’s a lot of fun to keep finding these little ways to remind us that the world depicted is not our own.

38:37

Originally we were going to have the phone-call sequences appearing as segues between the grid, Shrue, and Carson - almost as if we were travelling down the phone lines from location to location - but I think it’s much neater to have them as bookends, even if this part of the episode feels a little disconnected as a result.

These two scenes are playing set-up for the future events related to Faulkner and Shrue’s storylines, basically, but I did want them to also speak to what’s going on elsewhere in this episode (the haggling over ‘bodies’ in particular).

47:22

It’s not a big or meaningful point, but it is deliberate that Paige pours away her alcohol store and comes in from the cold to speak with Elgin in person at the start of the episode, while Carson, Shrue, Greve and Webb are all glumly drinking (or talking about drinking) in states of self-created isolation, entrapped by phone conversations.

We also made a point of having adverts, music, or announcements quietly playing in the background of almost every scene throughout the episode, just to hopefully place more emphasis on the electronic silence when it does finally descend.

56:30

Both Webb and later, Carpenter, make reference to the blackout resulting in a beautiful night for stars.

There’s a short poem by Russian gnostic Apollon Maykov, which I remember first reading in David McDuff’s introduction to his translation of Crime and Punishment, my all-time fave novel (and weirdly, now Googling, it often appears in inspirational quotes as misattributed to Dostoevsky himself - I need to re-read it and figure out whether Dostoevsky knew the poem, or if McDuff’s use of it caused that misinterpretation).

Don’t say there is no escape,

And that your troubles wear you out.

The darker the night, the brighter the stars

The deeper the grief, the closer is God.

That poem is lingering in the background of the episode overall, both for idealistic reasons (the need to continue the struggle regardless of death or failure) and more cynical ones (the people of the Peninsula begin to riot when their comfort is taken away from them - we tend to only hit our limit and decide that change is needed only when things become truly hopeless).

57:02

I wish we’d added more colour to Silverwood and Moss in these early scenes, but Moss’ phone call here does work for me - just the briefest glimpse into his life, a reminder that there’s more humanity here than we’ll ever be allowed to see.

59:07

I have mixed feelings about this end sequence, where we show the shutting down of the Peninsula via the phone calls cutting off, and then we start up again in order to show the wider impact (car crashes, anger, etc). In a visual medium you’d be able to do it all in a single unbroken sequence without stopping and starting, but that wasn’t really an option for us.

59:46

We have a lot more of the superhero serial and I’ll drop it out here later this week, as it’s good fun - it would have killed the pacing of the episode if we’d included more, but I did want the small snippet we hear to reflect the wider propaganda of the state (the hero is arguing to the ‘extremist’ anti-heroine that one bad apple just has to be dealt with in order to return society to its natural equilibrium; she’s positioned as emotive and vengeful for disagreeing with him.)

Realistically, it’s a bit ludicrous to have a Game of Thrones-esque ‘listening party’ in a crowded bar, during wartime, but it was the most efficient and meaningful way to show citizens in an uproar as their power is cut off.

1:01:30

We had a section in this montage originally where the protesting crowds actually begin to chant the creed of the Woundtree, but couldn’t quite get the sound right - it was too audibly 6-10 extras rather than a crowd of hundreds.

1:02:40

The little vignette towards the end with a rioter yelling about darkness and Mother Night was a late addition - we just wanted to make it clear that we’re not portraying some kind of easy wholesale societal shift away from gods and sacrifice overnight, and that anti-establishment faiths will naturally benefit from the Church Electric’s humiliation.

1:03:15

We had a lot more planned for this final glimpse of the national grid workers, about five minutes of extra footage - we were going to show Moss and Silverwood helping an injured Webb to safety, and the three of them struggling through the woods, then watching in wonder and horror as the pylon-angels of the Saint uproot themselves and start wreaking havoc upon the countryside.

A lovely idea and I was so sorry to scrap it, but during editing it felt like we were introducing too many false endings to the episode - going from the riot to the attack to the woods to Carpenter and Hayward. We were starting things up again right after the montage, and it wasn’t working.

We also had the sense that the more we saw of the engineers’ fate, the more we were undermining the wham of Hayward’s final line (and seeing how people have responded to that line, I do feel that we made the right call there).

On a purely practical level, it was also proving impossible and massively time-consuming to capture both of those scenes effectively and clearly (a pitched battle between gun-wielding agents of the Church Electric and the engineers presumably armed with makeshift melee weapons; the footsteps and presence of the pylon-angels). So on all counts it made sense to scrap it.

1:04:00

This is a funny final scene, and we’re trying to do a few different things at once.

The notion of an inevitable and future burnout, an engine shutting down, was meant to hearken back to everything we’ve already heard from Paige and the grid workers about the inevitability and necessity of mass societal change; the inevitability of people, at some point, finding their hard limit.

There’s rightly been a lot of sharing recently of the words of Rachel Corrie in her final emails to her parents (I might even have put them in a previous commentary? Anyway, they deserve to be repeated over and over), in particular the passage that reads,

I think it is a good idea for us all to drop everything and devote our lives to making this stop. I don’t think it’s an extremist thing to do anymore. I still really want to dance around to Pat Benatar and have boyfriends and make comics for my coworkers. But I also want this to stop.

That notion of what it means to drop everything, and what it means as a victory to even cause a moment’s pause, a moment’s hesitation before the engine starts back up, felt important to the episode as a whole.

But it’s also meant to herald the characters’ final upcoming farewell - I saw Carpenter here as basically staring out of the script at me and at the audience, pointing out that it’s time for their journey to end.