The Silt Verses Chapter 33 - episode commentary

In which Jon takes you behind the scenes of production on Chapter 33 of The Silt Verses:

0:00

Something we spoke about publicly after Season 2, and which has definitely been on our minds a lot this season, is the danger of Game-Of-Thronesing when it comes to our narrative structure. 

By which we mean, having so much ground to cover with the various characters and their plots that you end up cutting back and forth between a bunch of council chambers, laying the groundwork via an endless series of planning or bickering scenes that don’t do much or really connect with each other - and then fitting in maybe one actual narrative event per episode.

And when I’d written this episode, I said to Muna, ‘I think I’ve Game-Of-Thronesed this one, but it’s OK - we don't do it again, and it’s needed for what comes next.’

But then I got to the end of sound production and I realised, to my surprise - oh, actually, there is a connecting theme here! This is an episode where everyone is struggling with acts of performance - and perhaps more than one conflicting form of performance at once - in the hope of finding their way to catharsis and truth.

(Faulkner performing the role of the heroic leader, but also the pure man of faith, while also contemplating the approval he’ll have to act out when he discovers Carpenter is dead. Roemont acting out the death of Faulkner but also jealously getting caught up in the idea of playing the part of Faulkner. Val creating a false performance of love which turns into a false ritual of revenge, which is also being put on as a warning and a threat for the benefit of Carson).

And that’s always nice - when you realise that there’s a small unexamined part of your brain that might be smarter than the rest of you.

01:15

With the return of the Drowning Song (or rather an adaptation of the Drowning Song) I wanted us to have a little in-text description of how I think we’ve used music as part of the setting so far in the show, and how that mirrors our approach to mythologising in general - as something that conceals, propagandises, fakes real emotion, but also something that reaches for the profound and gets about as close as it’s possible to go.

(And, of course, it calls back to Faulkner’s own origin story and reminds us just how much has changed since then.)

03.29

I’m genuinely quite proud of this short crowd scene where - I think? - it doesn’t blatantly come across like what it really is (5 VAs shouting actual lines and then a generic background sound effect layered on top). The stamping feet help to create a sense that there really is a big crowd here.

Less effectively, I probably spent up to an hour trying to figure out a way of layering enough SFX to create the coherent sense of several hundred people all falling to their knees at once, until I had to scrap it. (Reader, it was not possible.)

04:42

I think there’s something very specific and very fun about having got this far with someone like Faulkner as a protagonist - the transition from early-series Walter White to late-series Walter White, if you like - where we don’t have to worry any more about the tedious stuff of ‘oh, is he likeable, is he morally redeemable, are we going to lose people if we stick with him too long?’

We just have to live with the entirety of him, the contradictions, the decency and the selfishness alike, as he continues on his way.

There’s the famous and gorgeous Fernando Pessoa poem I always go back to, about the artist who both genuinely lives but also performs (and by performing them, betrays) their honest feelings - Faulkner may feel terrible about what he’s done to Carpenter, but he’s still ultimately accepting her inevitable death as necessary to his grander narrative destiny, and he’s wallowing in his bad feelings about it as a form of private performance for his own benefit.

The poet is a faker

Who’s so good at his act

He even fakes the pain

Of pain he feels in fact.

08:35

I think the hardest thing to convey gracefully in a show like this is the big-group factional stuff, the numbers and vibes of the Gulch that are occurring behind Faulkner. 

Because you’re forced into a hard fluster of exposition coming in from offstage - “so to keep you updated, we have four hundred followers here and they all feel X and Y about Roemont. Is the audience clear on that front because it’s going to help drive the action, even though we're never going to encounter any of these people?” - but that’s been true for pretty much all stories since the dawn of time so I probably shouldn’t worry. It's the sort of thing that Shakespeare would send a random Messenger in to convey.

09:56

It’s not pointing to anything big other than the subjective and vying realities of the show, but I like that we have a direct little metaphorical contradiction across scenes - Faulkner imagines water passing vainly over rock without affecting it, Greve imagines water breaking against rock and being destroyed. 

Faulkner pictures himself as the stone, Greve pictures herself as the water.

10:00

Originally we had the Drowning Song track playing throughout this entire monologue, but less  is better, I thought, so instead it fades and we descend into Faulkner’s personal underworld - until we’re just left with him in the silence and no ambient noise at all.

This also creates a nice callback right at the end when the Song returns - because while we’re getting a few moments of honest, private relief and happiness from Faulkner, the irony is that the news that Carpenter is alive means that he can continue performing without fear that his guilt and sorrow over her death will come through. There will be no confrontation between his private and public selves.

12:02

We knew we had a lot of work to set up Roemont and Greve as essentially representatives of this higher class within the faith that we haven’t seen much of yet, and to plot out their feelings on legalisation, AND their intentions towards Faulkner.

And again, I think it was that fear of Game-of-Thronesing that led to this scene spiralling outwards from the fairly basic outline of ‘Roemont outlines how they’ll assassinate Faulkner’ to ‘an old man who’s never been allowed to play the hero, but has always played the part of the faithful steward, gets caught up in imagining how he could have been somebody different.’

So it was a bit of a swing to devote 20 minutes of the episode to that piece of tragicomedy, but I really wanted to give it a go. Can we make people empathise with the frustration, foolishness and sorrow of Roemont, and with Greve’s pained acceptance that the Parish is ultimately powerless and will be caught and altered by the greater forces at work?

14:02

There are some obvious bits of self-referentiality throughout this scene but for me the most pointed one is Greve criticising the entire concept of ‘Roemont killing Faulkner and blaming it on an external party’ as an unoriginal, repetitive plot development after Mason’s death in Season 2. 

Just mocking myself as a writer as I go.

15:00

Steve does absolutely fantastic work with the Faulkner impersonation - I love the death gurgle - but listening back, it makes me quite sad to hear it.

Roemont comes alive when he’s pretending to be Faulkner; he keeps returning obsessively to his performance as Faulkner, even though (by his own intention) it’s a limited part with few lines.

15:50

We had even more material here originally with Roemont railing on about how it was ‘unrealistic’ or emotionally lacking not to have a love interest for Faulkner, but at a certain point you just go, ok, Jon, you’ve made your point, time to back off.

21:12

There are couple of occasions during this episode where I can’t quite unhear a line’s unfortunate aural resemblance to something else (the other one is right at the end when Faulkner whisper-chants, “She’s alive, she’s alive-” and I can't take it seriously because I keep expecting him to burst into a rendition of Stop The Planet of The Apes, I Want To Get Off.)

In this case, Greve’s “We blinked, we dreamt, we slept” takes me back unpleasantly to the horrors of Mike Flanagan’s endless ‘she slept, she woke, she walked’ monologue from his Turning of the Screw/”Haunting of Bly Manor” series.

I don’t hate the guy, but as someone who likes to overindulge in overwriting, I should be forced to watch his work every once in a while to get a forceful reminder that it just takes a few turns of the screw to tip you over from a big juicy theatrical monologue into foot-dragging, navel-gazing tedium.

25:41

We do a little retcon work here that doesn’t bear up to complete scrutiny - we’re sort of implying that Mason knew or suspected a wartime draft was coming which would negatively impact the Parish, and that he was moving against that in advance by making his proposal to Shrue, but of course we didn’t hear any of that from him while he was alive. Maybe he just forgot to mention it.

29:47

I didn’t intend it, but speaking of The Simpsons - William’s brilliant blustering performance as Chuck Harm has some serious Kent Brockman vibes to it.

I also continue to be chuffed that the scene breaks - again unintentionally - keep lining up almost perfectly with the midpoint of the episode. It feels like we’re doing network TV.

31:31

As a great example of the difference between acting in horror and being a witness to horror: Muna reports that after directing this long, traumatic scene between Marta (who plays Val) and Chrissie (who plays ‘Candice’), she felt pretty shaken, and went to check - was everyone OK, emotionally? Did anyone need a breather or a time-out?

Cue two performers staring back at her, perfectly composed, like, ‘Nah, we're ready to run it again. You want more pained howling in the murder sequence?’

32:30

We agreed that we wouldn’t worry about consistently applying the indicators of Val’s powers (the ‘Simon says’ element of calling upon The Last Word, the background thrum), because it’d start to grate on the listener or feel like a comical repetition after a while -  and I am incredibly grateful for that decision in this long sequence, where having exactly the same build-up every single time would definitely undermine the horror of what’s happening or create comedy where it wasn’t intended.

So instead we have the grandfather clock fading out every time she tells a lie, once she enters the house - always the sense that something changes in the environment, but never the same application of that change.

I tried having that same ‘absence as a form of presence’ approach in this scene as well, with outdoor sprinklers that cut out every time Val speaks, but it was too jarring each time.

32:40

We don’t spell it out, but there’s a running joke in the show that the Peninsula has a backwards culinary culture compared to the CLS and a generic ‘stew’ is one of its delicacies - so it’s the smell of an appropriate dish from her childhood that attracts Val to the door in the first place. Be careful what you cook!

We also had an additional exchange about how Val can’t taste coriander, which was funny but distracting, so it went.

34:05

The change to Candice’s accent after she changes wasn’t scripted  - that was Chrissie’s suggestion for the character, and by God she pulls it off.

On this topic, I saw someone on Tumblr pointing out that back in Val’s first appearance in S2 with Sergeant Lawton, we get the spectacle of an Irish-accented VA having his reality overturned by an actor with received pronunciation, and viewing this as a deliberate commentary on the English treatment of Ireland (which you could then apply to this scene in more of a class-based analysis, with Candice’s original West Country accent being destroyed and warping into something posh).

It’s a perfectly valid read, but I’d respectfully disagree with it from an authorial intent perspective- mostly because we loved Dave Wilson as Lawton (who I’d imagined specifically as a Tommy Lee Jones type and an American actor before we heard Dave) for his talent and ability to convey weariness, authority and decency in a single line read, and I’d hate for him to ever imagine he only got the role so we could have him be victimised and murdered by an English performer!

But also because to my ear, Val’s accent is specifically a European-derived, international-school kind of RP, rather than an English aristocrat’s RP - most obviously comparable to Eva Green’s, with a bit of extra musicality that I think Marta quite brilliantly utilises to add some humour and strangeness to her reads.

Anyway, death of the author applies as ever here.

35:00

Originally the script called for more focus on Val trying to repeatedly force expressions of love and pride out of Candice, but ultimately finding them lacking - it would have been great to have applied more pressure there, but my suspicion was that it’d end up too distinctively reminiscent of Nathan For You’s very funny and very horrible ‘I love you’ sequence. 

36:05

What we were hoping for with this entire sequence - and Marta does so, so brilliantly with her anger and sorrow to help us get there - was to get to a place where the performance takes over and the reality gets forgotten by the audience, so that our sympathies go astray; to find ourselves forgetting that ‘Candice’ is not Candice at all and that Val’s accusations are completely misplaced - to the extent that we might not even think to consider that Val's reasons for holding even the real Candice responsible for her situation are to some extent unfair. (Essentially, for us as audience members to fall under Val’s spell.)

43:33

I wanted to be really, really careful with how we unpicked Val’s situation and her anger here.

Because while on the face of it, “volunteering to become a governmental battle-avatar of deceit and an experimental subject to make your disapproving mother love you” feels uncontroversially like a bad decision to make, I’m aware that there’s a lot of knotty stuff in fiction with how the themes of body horror, transhumanism, physical transformation and identity collide and you don’t want to move through them clumsily and make a point that you didn’t intend (I’m thinking, for example, of the old cyberpunk fiction and RPGs that would essentially imply that any surgical change to your body innately means losing some of your humanity in the process).

So it felt important to circle back to the themes of the Promised Bride with these specific lines from Val where she talks about how she might have made a different choice for herself rather than for the benefit of others - just to underline, I guess, that the horror of her situation is very much not trying to lead us towards some blanket statement of ‘bodily change is dehumanising’.

45:14

We had a little more here, with Candice repeatedly trying to invent extra tasks to complete the ritual of dinner - trying to hold off her own doom - but it wasn’t quite clicking for me so I cut it at the very last second. There was too much that was implicit, and I wasn’t sure it would clearly come across.

In general, I think these quiet scenes - where it’s just dialogue, silences, and footsteps - can perhaps surprisingly be a bit of a horror to edit!

By the time you’ve listened to the scene 30 times and you’re no longer picturing it in your mind’s eye, you’re absolutely the worst person to decide whether you’re holding a silence too long.

48:41

Val’s descriptions are horrible, of course, but I really like the fact that we get to do the audio equivalent of a discretion shot in this episode - building up something truly gruesome and frightening without ever depicting it.

49:50

We actually recorded a bunch of eating sounds and eating-adjacent lines with Marta between this and her previous appearance in the CLS cafe, before it became very clear - of course she doesn’t need to eat any more. Why would she? So we scrapped all of that.

And resultantly,I quite like that she keeps appearing in the vicinity of food but never audibly eats or drinks anything - it’s a small touch but it gives her the sense of being a ghost still lingering on the threshold of her lost humanity.

50:40

It’s not a big line so I don’t know if it’ll be noticed, but I do just want to draw attention to Rhys’ take on “...no. No, she wasn’t”, which is just a brilliantly funny read, while also retaining that faint paranoia as he double-checks his own reality. Val is screwing with him.

54:40

Candidly, I feel like I’ve probably run out of interesting material for the Parish of Tide and Flesh at this point (in terms of creating extra rituals, ceremonies, and titles around the central theme, at least - I don’t think the ‘cursing’ ceremony feels particularly inspired!). But that feels like perfect timing, because Faulkner should also be beginning to notice how limited and constrained the faith is.

56:53

One of the funny little quirks of audio production is how you consider stage whispers - because you don’t have the additional visual cues and choreography that you might get in theatre or film to show that while a character is ‘whispering’ at an audible volume, they are some distance from anyone who might be able to hear them.

So in this case, I am pretty much relying on the audience to understand solely via context that Faulkner doesn’t have anyone sitting next to him on a pew who can hear him quietly chuckling to himself.

But you can just imagine them  leaning in after the episode ends - “Uh, Katabasian, what’s so funny?”