The Silt Verses Chapter 34: Episode Commentary

In which Jon discusses TSV Chapter 34 and talks through the behind-the-scenes production and creation of the episode. (As with the episode itself, this commentary contains discussion of real-life atrocities.)

0:00

We obviously begin with an extended audio content warning here, acknowledging the fact that this episode heavily features military airstrikes and civilian collateral; a topic which is, quite coincidentally and quite horribly, something that’s very much on a lot of people’s minds right now due to what’s been happening in Israel and Palestine over the last fortnight, and in particular the horrific strikes being carried out against Palestinian civilians and civilian infrastructure.

The question of how best to handle this was a tough one for us all around, honestly.

In our day-to-day, we’re both incredibly upset and angry both about the collective atrocities of the past two weeks and, here in the UK, the inadequacy and inhumanity of our political response. And so finishing off production on the episode felt hard enough in itself.

As a fiction writer, I do believe very passionately that horror can serve a useful purpose in offering parallels to and reflections upon real-world monstrousness. I believe dystopian fiction can be a powerful and precise expression of anger at that monstrousness, and I don’t believe entertainment has any responsibility to be escapism (quite the opposite, in fact).

However, I also believe that horror writers, like surgeons, should commit to doing no harm to their audience, and that artists shouldn't be so egotistical as to believe their work is always needed, warranted, or merited at difficult times.

So we ran up a number of potential scenarios for how we could make listeners aware about what they were going to hear, and we discussed at length whether we should simply push the episode back by another week, as of course we’d delayed already for production reasons. But ultimately that felt like a problem in its own right; denying reality in favour of our own short-term attention and empathy here in the West.

If this is an inappropriate week to put an episode out because it features these story elements, then isn't it a comfortable pretence to act like there’s going to be an appropriate week? How can we honestly pretend that next week is going to be any better for people suffering in Gaza, or that previous weeks were perfectly fine?

So - yeah. I don’t know, and I can't pretend that I feel confident we necessarily made the right decision - or indeed that there are any easy answers when it comes to the creator’s position and the responsibilities of dystopian fiction in situations like this.

0:30

An ongoing real-life atrocity which was in fact on our minds during the creation of this episode earlier in 2023, and which played into Paige's earlier comments about how history will portray her movement (and which has been going on since long before I Am In Eskew started) is the US history of airstrikes and drone strikes in Somalia, which have according to Airwars resulted in between 85 and 161 strongly evidenced civilian deaths across the past 16 years, including more than 20 children.

US Africom have to date acknowledged only 5 of those deaths. Until 2019 they insisted there had been none.

Amnesty International has carried out excellent work over the years investigating and reporting these strikes over the years, which have repeatedly resulted not merely in civilian death, but attempted erasure of the dead person’s civilian status - in February 2020, after killing an 18-year-old Somali woman during a family dinner as well as injuring her 7-year-old and 12-year-old sisters and 70-year-old grandmother, Africom initially put out a press release boasting that their strike had instead successfully killed an Al-Shabaab terrorist.

That's an ongoing horror of remote warfare and callous, dehumanising propaganda, relying on its victims' disconnect from any platforms or outlets that might grant them a voice to argue back to the wider world against how they were characterised. It’s a careless, empowered cruelty that’s worse than anything we’ve ever included on the show, and it’s a horror that will long outlast the show.

Of course, I don’t think any fictional depiction of airstrikes in a heightened and absurd fiction like ours can possibly be a serious or adequate commentary upon that reality, and I don’t think this episode should be taken as a serious or adequate attempt at commentary about it, either.

But it sure as hell makes me furious.

1:45

This introductory scene originally didn’t exist in the script, but Michelle Kelly (who rocks, who is a serious talent, and who played Mrs Kensey in S2) let us know that she’d be interested in working with us again, and we thought it could be a really fun and gripping opening to foreshadow the events of the episode from the start, and to see one of the war-saints we’ve been going on about for so long.

I’ve seen listeners talking a lot about how tough this scene was to listen to, and how bad they felt for the Sky-Saint, and I think that’s testament to the fact that a sympathetic character is very often just any character with a particularly brilliant actor playing them.

In this case, on paper I thought I’d written the Sky-Saint’s character as (very darkly) humorous and clearly unsympathetic - someone who’s been believing all this time that she can join the war in some position of power, safety, and authority rather than as just another victim, and who is just realising now at the last second that her degree qualifications don’t make her any less disposable than anyone else.

But the scene really seems to have hit folks hard, so way to go, Michelle.

3:20

The overall scene is probably too grim for anyone to really be paying close attention to the dialogue at this point, but as a lifelong Catch-22 fan who gets furious over justifications about ‘quick, efficient’ military campaigns being better for their victims in the long run, I really am proud of the line,

“even if you opposed this war, remember, your airstrike could be the one that ends it”.

The CLS General is Steven Zivic, incidentally, who was the Fisherman in Episode 1, and he has a wonderful, horrible, fatherly take here.

The farewell message is a little reminiscent of Vault 11 in Fallout: New Vegas for me; we considered whether it should have a patriotic, brass-heavy backing track, but I think it's more effective with that softer music that resembles an airline safety video: the victim still being treated in a civilian context even as they become a war asset.

4:24

The procedure for being hallowed, as we saw with Faulkner and the motel owner back in S1, usually involves being branded or scarred with prayer-marks, but that’s a hard thing to convey when you’ve already got hissing and the sounds of rising machinery occupying the audio space, so we cheat on ourselves here a little and include the whining of something like a table-saw to give the sense of approaching doom.

6:00

Huge shout-out and thanks to Daisy McNamara, who's reading our credits. (Daisy and Lou Sutcliffe have a new maritime horror audiodrama, Eelers' Choice, that's just started releasing!)

Cutting away to the control room itself here is of course a cheeky trick to ensure that we don’t have to figure out what ‘a rocket starting up’ sounds like.

We also cheat by having a very speedy three-second countdown so we’re not wasting the audience’s time, which I imagine would be frowned upon in any real launch control...?

7:53

I’ve seen a couple of listeners say over the seasons that Carpenter’s true faith lies not in either god she's been associated with, but in other people, and yeah, I think that tracks.

What we really wanted to get across with these short montage scenes was that sense of the satisfaction she gets from being part of a genuine community - very comparable to the peace that she finds alongside Acantha in Season 2 - but also the fault lines that begin to develop over time.

The longer she stays at the Grace, the more kinship she feels from being a useful member of their society - but the more she can’t help but notice Paige’s absence, the lack of long-term leadership, the lack of resources. We can imagine that her relationship with the Parish might have developed like this over the years.

8:30

I have no idea why Carpenter even comes into Hayward’s canteen during this scene. Originally we’d written her as passing him by on the street, but that felt too much like the start of a Disney song - side characters throwing open their windows to greet her, etc.  So she drops off a sack, drops off her gas mask, and…picks up the sack again? Ssssh.

9:40

A surprisingly big concern was finding some solo instrumentation to play in the background of this scene. Because you don’t want it to feel too Robin Hood in Sherwood Forest - oh, the charming rebels are listening to jolly fiddle music and stamping their feet! - but it can be difficult to find solo music SFX that isn’t too obviously polished.

For a long while during production this episode had a saxophonist playing (because why the hell shouldn’t the escaped convicts have found a saxophone somewhere?) but it sounded too much like our heroes had somehow teleported to a jazz bar.

So we reverted to guitar, like the cowards we are.

10:20

There’s been several stock SFX in this episode that sound curiously similar to our voice actors (for instance, that isn’t actually Michelle screaming at the start, it’s a stock effect - but I really don’t think you could notice).

More strangely, there’s a drunken conversationalist in the background of this scene who sounds to me exactly like Graham Rowat (maybe it is him!) who played Dennis in S2. You can hear him yell 'Hey, buddy!' and something like 'Good god, doctor' if you pay close attention.

I like it; it feels a bit like I’m at the climax of The Seventh Seal and all of our old actors are coming out like ghosts at the final dance.

10:30

There's an implication buried in this anecdote that Elgin tells - that either Dan has somehow failed to notice that Paige has a drinking problem, or that he has noticed, is in fact far more savvy and subtle than anyone has realised, and is trying to banish liquor from the entire camp in order to solve the problem without calling it out. I have no idea which is true and I love both possibilities just as much.

14:00

There’s almost a criticism being held against ourselves in how Carpenter talks about the Cairn Maiden in this scene in the bunkroom.

We spent all of last season setting up the idea of this peaceful, fatalistic, kindly god of death who’ll meet you in the inevitable place - but does that make any difference, when it comes to your final moments? How many of us are capable of facing it without struggle, without terror? How can we ever feel like we’ve done enough?

There’s also, I think, a clear parallel and comparison between the Sky-Saint at the start (who understands that her sacrifice at the hands of her community is a wasteful, shameful act, but who would be very happy to let this happen to other people and views herself as too ‘useful’ to be hallowed) and Carpenter, who no longer sees value in her life itself, but believes she can help propel her community onwards before she dies.

The latter is, perhaps, more selfless? But it’s also a desperate grasping for some final shred of meaning in a life where faith and family have proven themselves - to Carpenter - horribly meaningless.

16:10

What I find quite interesting about this episode is that it feels like an action-heavy storyline in the first half, but that action is driven largely around building tension in long silences (as with Carpenter here walking to the window as we wait for something dreadful to happen).

I love that; I love the illusion that there’s a great deal happening even when the ‘real’ action sequence is only about 5 minutes of the overall episode.

17:20

These segments are probably my least favourite of the episode - where we’re trying to work in some crowd background noise with limited resources as the protagonists dash about delivering exposition. I think and hope the end result isn’t too obviously artificial, but it’s really hard to make an impact when it’s just a lot of clattering footsteps in an uncertain space.

I also deeply regret the decision to include a bucket chain in the script (hey, Jon, want to include anything else that requires a lot of voices and doesn’t have a clearly identifiable sound attached to it?) but we do at least manage to fit in a short snippet where I think you can get a sense of what’s happening.

18:18

I spent a long time in the final stages of production worrying about whether the audience would get annoyed at or nitpick the fact that there’s a fire even though the rocket remains unexploded.

In my head, something that was in the hatchery ignited - perhaps fuel for the flamethrowers that we established two episodes ago - although of course we should have explained that outright. Nobody’s mentioned it so far, so I think I got away with it?

We also de-emphasise the breathing-masks and ear protectors for the purposes of audio clarity - several characters mention that they exist and are being factored into the emergency response, but we only explicitly bring Carpenter’s mask out for the final fire sequence, even though it would make sense for everyone to be wearing them at all times.

So if anyone wants to create a CinemaSins-esque video denouncing our plot holes, I reckon those are two really good starting points.

19:28

We don’t emphasise it, but I saw Hayward’s line here - about doing the best with the resources they have, no matter if it’s futile - as an expression of his philosophy at this point in the show, and the only possible answer to Paige’s wider concerns about their movement.

20:01

The script here said something like ‘We hear the flicker of flames. An unexploded rocket stands before CARPENTER and ALICE. Even if it doesn’t make sense for it do so, the rocket emits a steady beeping sound so we understand where it is.’

23:26

There’s actually a huge amount in the 23-30 minute segment of this episode that was essentially unplanned and which had to be reworked on the fly.

Originally we’d envisioned the Sky-Saint as basically an enemy propaganda broadcast; a kind of withered-corpse with wings that remains in the rocket and just repeats its mantra over and over again to make its enemies fly up into the sky (which is a callback to a god we’d wanted to use back in S2 but didn’t have space for), until it’s eventually consumed by the flames.

But of course that’s not very dynamic, and it felt extremely limited as a storytelling device and in the fiction. So instead this monster had to fly, we thought. Why wouldn’t the servant of a sky-god fly?

I really wish we’d come to that realisation earlier during recording, because I would have liked to include dialogue lines that reference the look and feel of this creature, whereas in the finished product we’re basically leaving the listener to imagine it all.

What I did want to at least ensure - again, doing the best with the resources we had - was that the listener couldn’t be left with the generic sense of ‘oh, this is just Carpenter fighting a dragon’.

So I tried to include as much explicitly bird-like audio as I could (I was picturing something like a great fleshless mutated vulture, something a little bit Skeksi) - some of the squawks and gobbles are literally just repitched turkey noises, which have that wonderful curiosity and confusion to them.

Someone asked recently what makes a good monster, and I do think part of it is allowing a little pity, a little absurdity, which we tried to ensure were present here.

And then of course once we’d made those changes to our monster, making it a more active participant in the episode, we then needed to kill it off, which resulted in it attacking Carpenter and Elgin in the middle of the hatchery fire before being unceremoniously buried in the rubble.

(While Carpenter has probably become more and more of an action hero as the show has progressed, this was a clear hard line we didn’t want to cross - she doesn’t get to defeat the saint and knows there’s no point in trying.)

24:58

I had no idea whether we’d be able to pull off Alice flying up into the sky when we wrote the script, but; to hell with it, it’s the last season, so let’s take some big swings.

Alison Campbell, who plays Alice just brilliantly in this episode, actually said during recording, ‘This is a very ambitious episode,’ with the quiet supportiveness of someone who’s privately thinking, ‘You’re nuts.’ And yes, we probably were, but I think it works OK in the end.

The coins and keys falling to the ground are a nice punchline, but also an homage to Jordan Peele’s Nope, which is a film I wasn’t sure I enjoyed at the time but have found myself thinking about more and more with every passing month since. (And which is definitely a horror sound design masterpiece, irregardless.)

25:44

I also had no idea until the very last moment what music we were going to have Dan play during this scene - obviously, it needed to be a comical choice of ‘anthem’, and as it needs to complement the ensuing action sequences I didn’t want to have it too slow or dreamy.

If I have a self-criticism, I think it’s the fact that with the driving beat, the song maybe doesn’t sound embarrassing and silly enough, and so there’s a risk of the audience believing that we’re taking it seriously?

Someone on tumblr already recut the scene with Never Gonna Give You Up by Rick Astley, and I think that sounds infinitely better - in my head that’s now canon.

26:15

The idea of viral divinity (and thus averting your gaze / closing off your ears as the only possible method of avoidance) goes all the way back to s1 e4, where Gareth finds himself obsessively reading a mantra over and over, which transforms him into the elk-saint. And of course we featured it again in S2, where Shrue plays an audio tape of soothing music as part of the standard emergency response.

However, as it appears in this episode, I can’t help but be reminded of the classic Carl Anka ‘Just Don’t Look!’ sequence from The Simpsons: Treehouse of Horror VI.

27:30

The script called for Paige to lead the crowd of disciples in a rousing recital of the Woundtree’s mantra as they work at this point (which is why we have Dan chanting it over the speakers later on and Carpenter and Elgin joining in).

The trouble was, I’d written that moment as a stirring reminder that the people of the Grace are working together as a collective, and individual heroics aren’t what’s important here - but as soon as I’d edited it, the only question in my mind was ‘Why is Paige standing around leading a chant instead of pitching in and helping?’

So it was making the opposite point to the one I intended, and it had to go!

30:10

Again, this is something that you imagine is too blunt when you’re writing it, but I don’t think I’ve seen anyone picking up on - Carpenter recites the mantra of the Cairn Maiden, a passive and unresisting embrace of imminent death, as she’s marching into the flames.

But as soon as she finds Elgin, she switches across to the Woundtree’s mantra, which is instead about resistance in the face of death, and she even jokes that the ‘I will die’ line is too fatalistic and insufficient.

Other people are what stop us from giving up.

31:20

I got halfway through adding even more action into this sequence - the Sky-Saint smashing through the floorboards as Carpenter and Elgin escape upstairs - before I realised I was getting utterly lost in the woods and just needed to wrap this thing.

31:40

I think I said in the episode 1 commentary that I was going to get obnoxiously obsessed with having characters fall from heights this season, because I’d just about figured out how to make that work in the sound design. And, just as predicted, here we are, doing it again.

(The transition from jump to splat between the two scenes is actually very satisfying for me as a piece of audio. I could listen to it over and over.)

32:54

There is something really delightful in terms of narrative structure, but really exhausting in terms of production, to work on an episode that’s all shifting scenes and cuts and complicated action right up to the halfway point (eyy, we managed to have a convenient break at the 30-minute mark again!) and then just people talking in a tent for the second half.

Because inevitably you end up devoting most of your time to the action and then find you don’t have enough time to really polish the quieter dialogue sequences, which of course deserve and require their own care and attention - and because they’re quieter, because there are more lines, and less background noise to conceal stray clicks and breaths, there’s a lot more cleanup work that needs to be done.

Less glamorous, just as necessary.

36:15

Muna got really angry at Elgin when she was listening to the final product and got to this part, where Elgin proposes that the people of the Grace take up arms against another illegal cult to claim their territory (you directed this scene, Muna!).

While I obviously don’t think Elgin is in the right here, I do empathise with her desperation and belief that someone needs to take charge for the group's long-term survival as well - there’s that line from Crime and Punishment, one of my favourites in all of literature.

“Do you know what it means to have absolutely nowhere else to go?”

50:06

For me, the second half of this episode almost feels like a clearing of the decks - we’ve got two characters, in Paige and Carpenter, who are both suffering from the fatalism, the dread, and the exhaustion of standing a little too close to the divine, and the longer they stay around each other, the more that’s going to feel like a crowded, cluttered, repetitive narrative space. We can’t keep cutting to Carpenter dreaming of the Cairn Maiden, then back to Paige dreaming of the Woundtree; that’s too dramatically similar.

And so I saw this confrontation almost as an articulation of that problem - two people who care about each other, who are both struggling with a similar weight, but who can’t quite get the words out to reach one another and truly help one another. And so, inevitably, they separate.

56:00

We’ve had a lot of Hayward ultra-competency and decisive leadership this episode, so it felt important to have a bit of a return to form here - anxiously and obsessively plotting out how to make a good first impression on his road-trip buddy by playing the right kind of music.

It’s funny, but it’s also a genuine character moment for me - in his old life as a cop, we’ve seen that he’d be driving alone for long hours with no company but his handler on the radio.

This is the very first time he actually gets to work alongside a partner, so of course he's excited about it.

56:48

Like I’ve said before, I don’t have strong inclinations or interest towards explicit romances in my fiction (all credit to the shows that do it well, but when I see folks online getting so animated and passionate about a pair of protagonists falling in love, pining for each other and eventually getting together I feel the absolute incomprehension of a beetle staring up at a shoe), so we were never going to have a big prominent love story between Hayward and Paige.

But I did at least want a meaningful moment between them here, with intimacy and care buried in the words shared between them, but not quite spoken aloud - whether we view that as platonic or otherwise.