The Silt Verses episode commentary - Chapter 35

In which Jon discusses the behind-the-scenes work on Chapter 35 of The Silt Verses.

0:10

We have a lot of military propaganda this season so I did just want to include at least one minor advert - this is Steven Zivic here, who’s done a few roles for us this half - which was conjuring up the image of the lousiest, most unhelpful commercial god imaginable. Hence the Promo Supremo, an advertising / hawking deity of retargeting.

1:38

This scene with the I-Spy game is a bit of a palate-cleanser after the previous episode, but there’s also a little light-hearted character moment with a bit of heart hidden under the banter..

Hayward is glad to actually have a partner to talk to while he’s driving. Carpenter has mellowed enough that even if she takes the piss out of her travelling companion, she can do it with good humour and amusement, and he can take the piss out of her back.

This is the road trip neither of them got to have the first time around.

3:25

It’s already a long episode so the first cut of this scene was a lot snappier, but we ended up stretching it back out; I think it’s a good deal funnier if we luxuriate in the long awkward silences as Hayward tries to figure out the answers.

4:18

It’s been months, and I know in my heart that it was something very rude, but I can’t remember for the life of me what TCLAM was meant to actually stand for.

6:40

We’ve already killed this guy who’s being sacrificed to the river-angels, back in the season premiere (maybe even before that, as well?) but he has a nice range of being-murdered stock SFX which is very convenient for occasions like this, so hopefully nobody notices - or maybe they just pulled him back out of the water last time around?

10:31

People often think of us as the crab show despite the fact that the crab-angels really don’t appear all that often or have central relevance to the plot (it’s a meme, I get it!) so this episode felt like a little treat: crab-angels for everyone!

11:18

We knew that we had to both introduce and kill off Roemont relatively quickly this season, to essentially clear the way to give Faulkner a shot at the top spot of the faith, and set up a definite schism between the two factions.

We also knew that realistically, no listener was ever going to buy the possibility that Roemont would successfully assassinate Faulkner six episodes into the season.

So rather than try and spend a lot of time persuading our audience that Roemont is dangerous or a serious threat, we decided to go the other way and present the High Katabasian as, essentially, doomed, a bit of a Hillary Clinton in the 2016 US election, or here in the UK, David Cameron calling for a Brexit vote that he believed would never actually result in a ‘yes’ consensus: a longstanding and initially over-confident representative of the establishment slowly realising that he is perhaps not canny enough, not well-loved or fondly remembered enough, not good enough, to stand against a tide of emotive, regressive, deception-driven populist fervour that he cannot understand or sympathise with. 

And then the fun and the tension can come from watching Roemont gradually unravel one scene at a time.

13:07

We don’t say it out loud, but there are about a dozen little parallels that we worked into this episode suggesting that Roemont and Faulkner are essentially the same person forty years apart.

Roemont obsesses over his mementos and achievements that everyone has now long forgotten; Sibling Rane shows off large segments of the Gulch that have been transformed into mementos of Faulkner’s one great victory.

Each believes the other is being unsubtle and obvious. Each shows remarkable, nearly godlike hubris while explicitly claiming to be a servant of the people carrying out a burdensome duty.

And while Faulkner later talks about putting on a mask and a performance, Roemont has already been devoured by his own act - ‘who would I be if I did not go?’ he says. What identity does he have outside of his status?

And here, indeed, as a few people have picked up on, they deliver duelling narrations, and we group the VAs into two opposing factions (with Carpenter and Hayward appearing on Faulkner’s side) rather than in order of their appearance.

15:03

A few fun details in this little trio of scenes between Rane and Roemont, I think - like the cognitive dissonance of Carpenter being remembered as a nameless ‘close advisor’ who helped Faulkner during the battle at the climax of S2, but also the fact that Faulkner is actually diminishing his own positive qualities to make the story more mythic (like ascribing the man-o’-war escape to the Trawler-man when it was Faulkner who made it happen.)

And a huge shout-out to H.R. Owen, by the way, who plays Sibling Rane wonderfully throughout this episode - the very gentle, watchful condescension towards Roemont is a delight.

20:34

The feast scene isn’t technically necessary to the plot - all we really get from it is Faulkner and Roemont both offering ominous coded warnings in their speeches (and apparently ignoring one another’s coded warnings in the process) and the sense that Faulkner has a popularity far beyond Roemont’s - but because it’s really incredibly difficult to demonstrate the scale of Faulkner’s support beyond crowd applause SFX, having a couple of monologues in this centre section that the unseen hordes could respond to felt like a very useful tactic.

Faulkner’s story concludes in the background so I doubt many people are paying attention to it, but it’s an apt ending - he tells a story of Fleck turning a doubting disciple into an eel to ‘prove’ that the Trawler-man is still with them.

28:08

Because this episode was veering a little close to Game of Thrones, we also wanted to introduce some mostly comedic, stagey Shakespearean plotting as well for this scene. (Roemont is basically playing a prating Polonius as he runs back and forth to ring the bell, offers unwanted advice, and generally fusses - although of course in this case he isn’t the one hiding behind the garret.)

A lot of real-life historical assassination schemes, whether it’s Julius Caesar or Rasputin or the thing with Castro’s wetsuit to the 1960 CIA plot to poison Patrice Lumumba in the Congo which is where High Adjudicator Devlin takes his name from, seem to have that sense of awful semi-slapstick panic to them - clumsiness, improvisation, uncertainty, nothing quite going to plan, and so that was something I was looking to capture.

33:47

Skip Kent-Davy really kindly responded to a quick request for the use of ‘The Promised Bride’ here, because it occurred to me right towards the end of the production cycle that the song could fit diagetically into the world as something the Parish might actually sing!

I adore Skip’s music and think it fits the vibes of the show so, so perfectly, so it was wonderful and very humbling to be able to slot it in here. I think it has the feeling of an intermission between some very long dialogue scenes, which the listener can probably benefit from.

It also felt useful to cut back to the feast at this point to give the sense that the party is still ongoing - and that Faulkner might actually still be sitting there.

35:46

I haven’t seen any evidence of confusion in response to this episode, so I don’t think it was necessary for us to spell out exactly what happens after Roemont leaves the chamber, but in my mind:

• Faulkner and a mob of his disciples were waiting for Roemont to leave the room
• The disciples headed up first, overpowering Grenshaw and dragging him back out
• Faulkner then took his place in the chamber and waited for Roemont to arrive.

I considered including a little background indicator of a struggle as Roemont walks in a circle (a spent bullet bouncing beneath his feet, perhaps), but I don’t think we needed it and it would have been fiddly to achieve.

37:39

Steve’s accent slips a little here for the line, “How did you beat me back here?” but that actually happened on both of the final takes we had, so I interpreted that as fate.

39:37

The Drowned Man’s Hearing has an obvious bit of Catholic confession to it, but I was also thinking of the Negative Confession / weighing of the heart from the Egyptian Book of the Dead, which is a concept that I’m extremely fond of.

In this case, rather than professing a pure heart, the supplicant sheds and deposits his past sins in order to become pure as water once more.

Faulkner, of course, identifies the fact that he is not walking towards moral purity and honesty but rather into a new kind of performance.

45:58

I saw the end of Faulkner's confession here as directly signalling the transition from 'faith' to 'religion' - the loss of the personal relationship with the divine in favour of the oversight of a superstructure of divinity.

54:25

I really like this line from Faulkner, “I just did”, because we get to enjoy the implication that he’s murdered Roemont by murdering his reputation for about 3 minutes before we realise that, no, he is being perfectly literal.

57:55

Roemont’s murder by prayer-mark is a direct homage to / steal from the delightful 1957 horror Night of the Demon, which I go on about more than any one person should, and the original M.R. James story Casting the Runes, where in both cases a key plot detail hinges around slipping a written curse into someone’s coat.

58:26

I know we’ve got over-ambitious at times with the sound design this season - but this feels like the ur-example. The giant crabs? An entire crowd of giant crabs? Crabs walking through water? Making what need to recognisably be giant crab noises (whatever those are)? Having a tangible impact on a car?

I don’t think this scene is my best work, but I also think it was an impossible task, and it feels like a relief when we get to Roemont’s death scene and we only have one giant crab to worry about.

59:38

I will acknowledge here that ‘an antagonist crawls away from a scene of disaster, thinking they’ve escaped, but they end up coming face-to-face with something horrible and getting their grisly comeuppance alone in the woods’ is a cliche, but it’s one of my favourite cliches and it never fails to satisfy me. (The excellent 2001 werewolf/martial arts/detective potboiler Brotherhood of the Wolf does this twice in a row, hilariously.)

1:00:00

Roemont begins this episode wondering whether Faulkner’s disciples will recognise him, and he ends it realising that perhaps his own god doesn’t know who he is. Poor guy.