The Silt Verses Chapter 37: episode commentary

In which Jon takes you behind the scenes of individual episodes of The Silt Verses.

0:00

Why do this episode? A few reasons, really.

I was keenly aware that the second half of the season will be very hyper-focused on our core cast - so it felt like this could be one of our last opportunities to remind the listener that other sympathetic, human stories exist outside of what we’ve seen (and an opportunity to tell a side-story with a feeling of genuine risk and stakes, since at this point nobody’s going to believe that our protagonists could be taken out by a random sidequest).

I really wanted to fit in a tribute to Procrustes, my favourite ancient Greek weirdo, the motel-owner who’d welcome travellers in and then murder them by stretching them out on the rack or chopping bits off them to make them fit his bed (I never knew how to take his story as a kid - is his behaviour meant to be a very specific compulsive cruelty, or is there a twisted hospitality and courtesy in ensuring that his guests are the right comfortable proportions for the only lodgings he has to offer them? We assume the latter.)

As a child, I had the common fear that if I left any limb of mine outside the duvet, it would be exposed and unsafe to whatever vampires, monsters, etc, would come hunting for it in the night, and I quite liked the idea of a god who speaks to that fear.

I always felt in retrospect that we should have given David Ward an opportunity to find a bit of queer love at some point along his road (and I think huge, huge kudos to Nishi Ghosh, who is both appropriately David-like and very much his own character). So this episode does structurally mimic ‘Performance’ from I Am In Eskew, even ending with the same outcome where one partner feels unable to accept the reality and safety of what they’re experiencing - although in this case we switch protagonists halfway through.

And finally, there’s a line of thought that I see a fair amount online that frustrates me and that I spend a lot of time mulling over - its most influential and prominent appearance is probably its place in Alexandra Rowland’s ‘hopepunk’ manifestos - which goes something like this (to paraphrase):

‘When things are so rough in the world, we need fiction that’s tutelary, inspiring, hopeful and kind to remind us that better things are possible. Kindness is a political act in itself and art should remind us of that. Pessimistic or cynical fiction is disheartening and enervating, and the establishment wants us to feel disheartened so we give up on pushing for change.’

And to me, this philosophy is dangerously backwards as a response to art, but also inadvertently providing cover to the ways that optimism in art can be co-opted and harnessed against us.

Pessimistic fiction is clearly not politically disheartening by default - 1984 would not be nearly such an effective call-to-arms if the human spirit remained unbroken by the final line, to give one very obvious example - and the political and cultural establishment is evidently not mass-producing pessimistic art to keep us all in line. None of that is true; Disney is not producing yearly slates of Michael Haneke miniseries or Poppy Z. Brite adaptations. Pessimistic art remains largely unpalatable and therefore relatively un-cooptable.

Happy, heroic and hopeful stories, though, easy resolutions, upstanding moral lessons, and happy endings - this is the content that is churned out year after year, this is the stuff that can be weaponised against us with relative ease, and this is the stuff which can hold us in addicted, inactive thrall, as it reassures us that the work has already been done.

We exist in a world where some of the most powerful companies out there can produce heartfelt, diverse-rep, humane stories about being true to yourself or finding your courage or figuring out where your real home is.

Apple’s TV arm was trumpeting positivity, humanity and goodness to great acclaim in the form of Ted Lasso at the exact same time as the master company was being named in the 2019 lawsuit for the deaths of Congolese children working in inhumane conditions to procure cobalt. How many of us flocked to pay a 3-trillion dollar company a subscription fee so we could continue receiving the right kind of heartwarming lessons from Apple, of all people, about how decency is more important than ambition and success?

But then given the scale of the organisations involved, how culpable are the creators and how compromised is the work? Can a love story or a kind-hearted story with the right moral, no matter how well-crafted or sincere it is, ever be truly authentic if it’s produced within the walls of a colossal and irreparably inhuman conglomerate that is the ultimate benefactor of our emotional response? But then how do we respond to those stories’ genuine human emotion and care? Should we discard them entirely?

Do we begin by addressing the humanity, the joy, the love itself, or the house it stands in?

We’re caught at the end between two levels of understanding, like Seb is - in a state of traumatised distrust, unable to know if we can believe in what’s in front of us given what’s looming over us.

So I was interested in telling a story where the villain is driven by a love of hopeful resolutions and happy storytelling, but who uses these things ultimately as a form of enervating, paralysing control.

This is a big part of the underlying story of the TSV setting in general, of course - where characters and institutions use reassurances and the promise of fulfilment to cover for the endless destructive hungering of deities and human beings.

And to that end, we wanted to make a kind of nested-doll story, one that keeps shifting genres unexpectedly; it starts out as a ghost story, then becomes a romance, then reveals that the romance has playing out in the shadow of this manipulative force of false optimism and resolution that operates as a parasite while claiming to only want the best for us - but crucially without undermining or becoming unduly cynical about the significance and sincerity of the love story that’s come before.

That’s what we were trying to do, at least, but it is a lot all at once! Of all the big swings this show’s done, it felt like the biggest and the biggest potential for things to go wrong, particularly because we were largely working with an entirely fresh cast, but Nishi and Axandre were both absolutely fantastic (Muna recorded with them over one very long weekend) and a real pleasure to work with.

1:17

We were going to repeat this advert again at the end, but I don’t think it’s necessary to drive home the point, really.

In general, there are quite a few little hints playing out throughout the ep as to the true nature of the Amicus - in the radio and Chitterling announcements, of course, but they also occur in conversation. At one point Seb even actively states that along the road, the only people talking about hope and resolution and happy endings are priests of some god that wants to eat you.

2:23

We try and impose an ambient rule or two in every location to ensure that the audience always understands what space they’re in as quickly as possible - the car park has the whirring Chitterling mascot, the rooms have the cuckoo clock and the same door opening and closing, and the jukebox is always playing at the hotel bar.

The only standout is the hotel restaurant - we were going to have the buzz of a neon sign audible overhead, but it’s just too desperately annoying a sound to have for such sustainaed periods.

7:00

I was really interested in seeing if we could hold the audience’s interest with this extremely long narration sequence, which was heavily inspired / lifted from the famous Winkie’s Diner scene in Mulholland Drive. (The film even provides an inverted clue to the episode’s outcome - in Lynch’s film, the dreamer predicts that there’s a man behind the walls who’s controlling everything, some kind of explanation as to his inexplicable dread, but instead finds only a monster that destroys him without explaining itself. In our episode it’s exactly the opposite.)

10:55

We did a lot of extra expository dialogue work in this episode, with the intent that we’d always cut the length down as we pieced it all together and it became obvious which parts the audience didn’t need to hear to be invested in the mystery, as this was such a long episode in general (specifically, we cut: further descriptions about the motel layout and appearance, the physical appearance of The Man In The Walls, a paragraph from The Man explicitly spelling out that he was the original motel-owner 25 years back and elected to hide away in the attic to remove himself from suspicion. The last one is the only part I regret cutting, because I think it does help to connect the strands between past and present and explain just how the motel came to be ‘abandoned’. But we just had too much monologue right at the end of the episode, so we needed to be ruthless!)

11.43

It was more of a plot point originally that the pipes knocking behind the walls in Dev’s recollections were, essentially, the larval or egg-form of the motel (not pipes knocking at all, but a muffled ticking), but we’d already had a pipe-knocking god in the form of the Glooming Guest, so we de-emphasised that somewhat.

14:50

We only cheat a little with Dev’s recollections in the SFX - some of the noises are genuinely monstrous, others are just the distorted sounds of the plaster cracking as the Man in the Walls descends from the ceiling, and a slowed version of Alan Coveney’s voice.

26:16

Cuckoos are fascinating to me because, as a few people have noted in the comments - as symbols of spring, they’re symbols of hope, but they’re also associated so strongly with brood parasitism (and therefore the false and horribly subverted promise of hope), which plays heavily into what we eventually see with the Rapture-and-Bliss itself - replacing the messy, unhappy realities of our lives with a single false ‘happy ending’, and destroying the original in the process. Weirdly, I saw recently that Gretchen Falker-Martin, author of the brilliant Manhunt, has a book coming out soon that plays specifically upon this, so really looking forward to that.

We’re not subtle people, so of course you keep on hearing the genuine birdsong outside the motel, where Seb and Dev never venture, calling upon them to escape.

29:53

Romance TV shows and films often make particularly heavy use of music to tell us what we ought to be feeling, so we’re quite sparing with how we deploy it here and very deliberate about when we don’t deploy it - it can be heard in the background of the various propaganda ads and it helps to establish the atmosphere here, but the music also switches off halfway through this scene when Dev and Seb start to get really close. And the rising chord sound that we hear when the Rapture takes hold of someone is, of course, musical in its own way.

31:44

Seb’s backstory as a pig farmer’s son, and his compassion on the topic, plays into a couple of different ideas for me that aren’t explicitly spelled out; one, that he is still forced to live and work beneath a giant advertisement for the company that commissions that cruelty (which nods to the ultimate reveal of the Man In The Walls, the challenge of showing individual kindness while remaining in the shadow of a a monstrous and great unkindness), and two, that this is exactly why the Man sees him as a kindred spirit.

38:12

This episode posed a particular challenge because I know that kissing noises in audiodrama are a serious complaint for people with misophonia, but we didn’t want to come across as coy or withholding about the physicality of Dev and Seb’s relationship.

So we tried our best to work around the kisses themselves, with breaths and grabbing motions, to give a sense of passion without (hopefully) creating too many unpleasant sound effects for anyone.

44:28

The biggest headache for this ep was trying to balance character knowledge against audience knowledge - again, we’re 3 seasons in! Any listener is going to be screaming, ‘of course this is the monster-motel’ right from the start, and Seb acknowledging that he didn’t ever meet the previous owner reminds us of that right when we’ve got settled into the romance.

Nobody’s yet come out of the woodwork screaming, ‘GET OUT OF THERE, YOU IDIOTS’ so I’ll count that as a success.

48:02

These bits with Carpenter and Hayward were so much fun to record, but I saw them as a light-hearted mirror to the rest of the episode - they are, after all, arguing about half-forgotten childhood memories.

I also just really enjoy the fact that their time on the road has turned them from hardened revolutionaries into a pair of juvenile bickering siblings. Cabin fever will do that to us all.

And I think shout-out to Jimmie’s delivery of ‘Bebbie and the Cat Attack came first - do you have any rooms available?’ which is an absolute delight.

56:50

I spent too long trying to find a stock tune that roughly matches up to Carpenter’s guitar riff, and I absolutely failed at that task.

56:56

In retrospect I actually think we could have disposed of the whole ‘is it in the floor or the ceiling’ business - it creates a bit of narrative faff and doesn’t end up changing anything particularly important. I originally liked the reveal and the idea that the attic is a kind of malevolent heaven looming over the characters’ heads, rather than lurking beneath them, but it doesn’t do that much.

1.00.41

I personally imagine that at least 90% of what Seb experiences in the attic is the illusory false realities of the Rapture, which we hint at but don’t spell out (we experimented with having a ‘spore gas’ sound rise when the blooms start appearing, but preferred to abstractify that with the chordal music) - so if you like, you’re free to imagine the horribly comedic image of him stumbling about in the dark, going in circles in a relatively small space while imagining that he’s exploring a vast labyrinth.

1:01:00

Trying to convey the Rapture effectively and distinctly was a real challenge - originally I envisioned it as something fleshier, but that felt like it would be striking the wrong emphasis in how the episode treats bodies and sex; so then we had the idea of treating it more like a garden, a literal Eden, but of course then we wanted to ensure it felt distinct from the Woundtree! We had the echoing voices but didn’t want listeners to hearken back to the echo-angel from S2.

Oddly, I think, if the Rapture is close to anything, it’s the Cairn Maiden - it’s very much a twisted mirror of that final reassurance at the point of death.

1:02:00

Alan Coveney was our second choice for Roemont, and he just has an astonishing range - for the Man In The Walls, we asked him if he could deliver the lines with absolute, unshakeable kindness and compassion, and not a hint of sinister intent. He does so wonderfully at that, and I find it terrifying - more than a hint of John Hurt, too, in his voice?

We trimmed his lines down by a fair bit, but from a pacing point of view the character probably still goes on a bit long - however, I just couldn’t bring myself to lose any more of that marvellous voice.

1.03.52

A noticeable number of folks on tumblr have been talking about this episode specifically as tragedy and framing it explicitly as a tragedy, which absolutely is their right but which is really interesting to me because I don’t know if I’d see it that way at all - it’s a term that the Man In The Walls uses, but he’s the only person in the episode who does so, and I think the whole point is that his talk of happy endings and story structure should be denied, as it’s a controlling effort to impose firm narrative resolution and meaning on Seb and Dev, to their individual detriment and harm.

He’s turning them from real human beings into mannequins that can be put away once their single-issue lives are neatly resolved.

1:05:01

The sound of pigs here was a late inclusion - and basically only there because we needed to keep Seb busy while The Man In The Walls talks - but I do really like it as a way of repeating Seb’s earlier journey from despair to hope.

1.08.04

We wrote and recorded a version of the script in which Carpenter and Hayward come to the rescue (which we do set up with Hayward being also located on the first floor) - we didn’t intend to use it, we just wanted a backup in case we found it was too difficult to convey what was going on in the climax.

1:12:30

We note it in the transcript, but something audibly clatters to the floor here, and so what is quite essential is whether we hear it as the knife or as the flashlight.

1:16:30

Even if Seb and Dev are alive, I very much imagine that Francine is not (and in fact, that she’s still trapped in the Rapture and cannot be freed), which creates a sadness all of its own - Dev’s found her, but she’s not at all what he was looking for.

1:17:29

The reality of the ending is very much a coin flip to me - Sebastian’s flashback even mimics Dev’s earlier flashbacks, so we are offering up the genuine and strong possibility that he’s simply experiencing a traumatic episode rather than living out an Owl Creek loop of unreality - but almost every single person I’ve seen online has reacted with, ‘yup, they never got out, no question’, and I don’t know whether that’s a reflection on us, or on our audience (or perhaps the episode title’s unduly influencing them? But I liked the title too much to change it, and it is still technically accurate no matter if they live.)

I also think there's a note of hope even in the more pessimistic interpretation of the ending - if Seb still is trapped, then he is nevertheless dissatisifed and shaken, unable to happily accept his fate, which might still provide him with the opportunity to break free.

One point in favour of Owl Creek, I have to admit, is that Dev calls Seb ‘Sebastian’ at the end here, which he’d stopped doing earlier in the episode.