Chapter 32: Episode Commentary

Episode commentary by Jon on the latest episode of The Silt Verses! Hope you enjoy.

0:00

A big bugbear of mine is how progressive movements tend to be portrayed within popular fiction, because very often we end up with essentially a fallen-woman approach to them.

The plucky freedom fighters or guerrillas can be righteous and heroic for a couple of scenes while they’re hiding out in the forest - which of course isn’t very interesting to watch for any great period of time - right up until the moment they ‘go too far’ in service of their cause, do something morally reprehensible, and that’s our cue to understand them as extremists and fanatics and instantly dismiss them as a ruined ideology.

(The last Marvel show Muna and I watched was The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, which goes through the bizarre fantasy of having its disenfranchised antagonist become more and more extreme and unconscionable in a well-intentioned attempt to protect displaced refugees, then ends by having the protagonist fix things within the system by simply making a nice humanistic speech to the government. Inspiring music plays, fade out.)

Whether or not the rebels are justified or not largely comes down to the amount of time they’re onscreen. The longer they’re visible, the more likely that they’ll prove to be extremists or villains, but if they’re just sort of shouting slogans in the background or heroically gunning down baddies from the treeline, probably they’re going to ethically remain in the clear.

It’s like it’s impossible to look at the thing head-on.

So we wanted to introduce Paige and Hayward’s revolution by trying to look at it head on; by spending an episode acknowledging and exploring the maddening complexity and uncertainty involved in building anything communal - what actually sustains a movement like this? What is most likely, in the end, to ruin it?

Maybe you need the zeal of the true believer like Dan, no matter how offputting or divorced from the hard realities that is.

Maybe you need to focus on making the right practical choices to keep yourselves alive, regardless of ideological purity, as the Hatchery Keeper and Elgin advocate for.

Maybe you need to be focused on getting the optics right, as Hayward believes, and be patient with yourself as the mess and chaos plays out behind the scenes in the hope that you’ll get to the right place in the end.

Paige finds herself in opposition to all of these, but unable to articulate a better solution. 

The true believer is clearly in denial about his god’s true nature. Too many of the pragmatic ‘hard choices’ will result in a movement that’s as ethically compromised as the world they’re trying to oppose…but the utopian narrative-building also creates a dangerous gulf between reality and fiction. 

How do you navigate around all of that?

And ultimately, as Paige says near the end, all of these disagreements about the nature and identity of what they’re building here, as well as the increasing scale of the movement, render the entire thing less and less coherent and controllable - as its leader, she’s now bound to something that belongs to everyone else and not to her.

Even the name she came up with has been taken away and replaced with a name that’s an obvious compromise and which carries an altered meaning.

So maybe Paige is right to fear that they were always doomed. Or maybe she’s selfishly undermining her own movement by not being able to see past her own frustrations, by refusing to participate, by only looking at the negatives.

Maybe Hayward is right that they just need to keep pushing forward, and that the compromises and arguments are just all a necessary part of building anything. Or maybe he’s the one leading them to disaster with the choices he keeps on making.

Nobody is in the wrong here (well, maybe Dan). But the true danger to their collective cause isn’t that they might blow up an orphanage out of ideological zeal or commit some wild one-off act of extremism that will villainise them forever.

It’s the fact that each day involves a hundred impossible choices that slowly alter the long-term shape of the thing, and each one, in a small way, may prove to have contributed to its ruin.

So I inhaled a lot of Ursula LeGuin’s The Dispossessed before writing and then rewriting this episode, and then tried to get all of that down on paper - what I saw as the more interesting and difficult portrayal.

That’s…a lot to try and cram into an hour-long episode that also has to do a lot of heavy expositional lifting, reunite several characters, and set us up to move the plot onwards, and I do wonder if what we’ve ended up here is simply too much of everything all at once - plus a heavy heaping of helpless bleakness from Paige - to be digestible or enjoyable. (Cole from The Town Whispers once said something very wise to the effect of ‘you know when an episode hasn’t landed right because everyone is politely silent about it’, and it’s been a bit quieter out there since this ep released!)

Narratively, when you’re already a wildly over-ambitious show, it probably isn’t a good idea to introduce a new faction and then instantly say, ‘OK, here are all of the practical problems, rapid identity changes, and differing interpretations that are making it increasingly incoherent and compromised. Got that? Now to sprinkle in some depression and despair as well!’

But I thought it was really important to have a big ambitious swing at portraying that impossible situation, and the ep does the necessary setup work of getting us to where we need to be irregardless So even if this one's maybe landed as too gloomy or overstuffed for some folks, I can be sanguine.

0:10

I always wanted to bring Carpenter back at some point to the barbershop that Brother Wharfing mentions in Season 2 - the divine silence and peace of a quiet haircut - but it never felt possible in terms of her journey, so we’re just slipping it in here unnoticed.

0:35

In the UK, the environmental activist group Extinction Rebellion has been the target of an astonishing range of attacks that very neatly indicate our country’s knee-jerk resistance to any kind of disruption. 

When they blocked roads in protest, the media line was that they were (presumably/hypothetically) preventing ambulances from getting to hospitals and therefore acting in a recklessly unreasonable way.

When they instead interrupted a politician’s wedding by throwing some orange confetti, the line was that this was disrespectful and a cultural taboo. They really can’t win.

So here it is very much deliberate that the Many Below/Woundtree’s group is being accused of everything from wrecking the war effort to causing the rise of more punitive government policies, when in effect they’re a tiny and largely powerless commune living out on the edge of the world, with a limited national impact beyond the hysteria being spread by other people.

2:11

We originally had an actual section from the superhero serial to include here, which would have been a very obvious propagandistic take on the Woundtree - portraying an ersatz Hayward and Paige as fictional characters in one of those ‘sympathetic character goes too far in service of their goals and turns into a monster whose role is then to get beaten up by the actual heroes’ storylines that appears a lot in a lot of comic-book movies. We’ll definitely fit it in later on, but we had too much here already as it was.

3:32

Again, we were going for a UK-based parallel by having “must a god feed?” crop up as a gotcha question when Shrue is being interviewed - earlier in the year we had a wave of TV and radio interviewers who would suddenly ask a politician “can a woman have a penis?” or similar.

The underlying game here was that any guest who wanted to make even a token effort to stick up for the inclusion of trans women would be forced to stammer their way through a “well, I guess, uh, let’s get into gender theory” answer that would come off as long-winded and waffling, while a politician who was happy to score points off punching down could simply grin, say, “no, of course not” and be applauded by their base for being straight-talking.

And this soundbite game then became fodder for the greater game of our national politics, with the actual victims of the point-scoring essentially forgotten in the process - cries in Parliament of “my opponent is trying to tell me I have a bad economic record, but he can’t even tell me what a woman is!” Arf, arf, arf.

As it is with Shrue here, there’s something horrible and fascinating about that shadow conversation that’s occurring beneath the real conversation - the ‘straight-talking’ and ostensibly straightforward talking point being deployed to shut down basic decency or indeed any kind of basic thoughtfulness in public debate. Public debate itself being transformed into a bullies’ playground game where there’s only one right answer and everyone knows in advance who’s allowed to deliver it. (Judith Butler, meanwhile, continues to avoid this stuff and engages with measured and intelligent answers in writing, then gets edited out or editorialised around. You can’t win.)

4:00

As Paige mentions later on, it’s a plot point that the inhabitants of the Grace are essentially blasting music through the loudspeakers to keep the starving gods at bay beyond the border - but there was no way that we could actually portray that without it being distracting (especially as our scenes are often around 10 minutes long, so you’d end up having to switch song halfway through).

So the hope is that by having a couple of musical interludes playing diagetically through loudspeakers here and later in the episode, we’re giving the sense of that ambient sound without literally portraying it throughout.

4:20

It would have been better if Dan had corrected ‘the truths of the Many Below’ to ‘the truths of the Woundtree’ here to better signal the changing nature of the faith, but I just didn’t catch it.

5:33

I think perhaps one of my hang-ups with this episode is that I think we do quite well with implicitly signalling Paige’s condition in the first half (as with her return to drinking) and then we spell it out explicitly and at length in the second half.

In general with creating a show like this, you always spend the entire creation process worrying that you haven’t spelled things out clearly enough, then end up kicking yourself for not giving the audience more credit!

6:58

There’s a very good and funny bit in Boots Riley’s new show I’m A Virgo, where Elijah Wood pops up as a man who wants to abolish the death penalty in the USA - but having realised that abolition will be an incredibly difficult and long-term goal to achieve, he’s decided to become an executioner in the meantime to ensure he’s at least doing his bit to kill prisoners as humanely as possible.

I guess we were reaching for the same dark hypocrisy in reverse here - the anti-striker’s accusation of “you’re making things harder for society’s victims by standing up for them, which only ensures that society reacts more harshly to keep them in line.”

7:17

Originally the script had it that Paige instantly realises she’s running late and stumbles immediately out of bed, but I liked the implication that she knows she’s letting everyone down but really can’t face going out right away, so she procrastinates, keep drinking, and lies instead.

8:00

I was both worried about it feeling pat to have us circle back around to Bellwethers, and felt it was practically necessary (because of course they’d go back to the one ruined town and unpalatable place in the north of the Peninsula that we know about already) and thematically important (because the spark that was meant to have ignited this entire war has already been discarded and forgotten, because the Trawler-man’s impact itself as faded and fled, because this too is something that keeps changing its shape, because Paige and Hayward are tackling the difficult task of building on top of ruins with their own buried histories).

14:40

This entire episode script was actually rewritten pretty much from scratch (save some of the narration), because originally I thought there was no way we could possibly convey the arguing factions and perspectives within the movement through dialogue - so it was just going to be duelling narration, with Hayward representing pragmatism and optimism, and Paige shining a light on her doubt and despair as an opposing view. And then we’d finally get one dialogue sequence at the very end when Paige and Carpenter reunite.

But then you still need to bring in the ancillary characters at some point anyway - so to hell with it, we decided; we’d have the different members of the camp popping up as the angels and devils on Paige’s shoulder as she navigates through the town, and make a real stab at building the sense of a community.

15:00

It probably gets lost when we’re introducing this bombastic comic-relief character (wonderfully played by Laurence Owen, who’s one half of the excellent Mockery Manor) but there’s something very sad for me about Dan - who professes to believe that the Woundtree will overthrow the licenced gods of the government - fixating on a single victimiser, a single prison officer, who hurt him once and who he wants to see brought to justice.

He’s traumatised, and has no way of resolving his trauma other than a naive hope in divine retribution.

It’s a very different character, but we were thinking of Jesse Plemons in Game Night for this scene - the comic silences and reactions Paige displays, that funny and unnerving experience of someone very intense who’s intently holding your gaze while basically holding a conversation on a completely different planet to you.

17:05

The lyrics in this little sequence are about the ‘king of the mountain’ who’s loved by everyone and runs everything, with the singer expressing a desire for control over him - which felt pertinent to the themes of the episode as Paige feels the loss of her control over the thing she’s created.

My little ‘nobody actually notices this’ sound design moment for this episode is the wind chimes, which I thought were a great way of indicating when our characters are standing near or passing by buildings - creating the invisible shape of a town.

17:26

This scene was originally just meant to have the aftermath of the chicken-angels described, with Alice (the very excellent Alison Campbell, a Bristol-based actor where we are now!) having torched them earlier that morning (which from a health-and-safety perspective makes a lot more sense, since Paige is just able to wander into the containment zone) - but it’s such a heavy episode, y’know?

Consequently I felt obligated to throw in a fun little The Thing body-horror moment, and I do like that it indicates both the treacherousness of the environment and the humorous banality of surviving in it.

20:50

Actually, my one ‘nobody will notice this’ sound design moment this episode is having the sound of sweeping cutting to the rhythmically similar sound of a page turning. 

Man, did I spend too long patting myself on the back for that one.

21:15

A big welcome to the brilliant Ishani Kanetkar as Elgin, who’s actually worked alongside Lucy before on The Strange Case of Starship Iris!

22:10

I didn’t even realise it until I relistened to the episode just now, but Hayward displays a bit of hilarious hypocrisy here - overwriting the minutes in order to chide Paige for snapping at him, then later insisting that the minutes of the meeting need to be an honest record. (Paige is just as hypocritical for blaming him about her ‘sleeping in’, but I think she knows that.)

23:00

We had more detail about the ‘brain trust’ originally - both explicitly dwelling on the positives (Paige and Hayward’s people are beginning to think seriously about composing a manifesto and imagining a future society with neither gods nor sacrifice) and the negatives (sthe white-collar prison escapees have clearly formed their own exclusive forum of ‘intellectuals’ in order to maintain a measure of control over everyone else) which we only hint at here.

24:56

We might understandably come away from this episode viewing Hayward as an agent of compromise, but I really wanted us to feel that he’s genuinely come a long way as a leader and a manager in an impossibly difficult situation.

26:30

Paige says she ‘always’ takes her coffee black, when back in Season 1 she enjoyed frothed milk.

But as Hayward tells us outright later - in the Grace, milk cannot be relied upon not to go sour, so you either have to take your chances or forgo it entirely. 

So Paige has not only changed her habits out of necessity, but the way she takes her coffee (which used to be a sign of her status) has now become a signifier of her distrust and detachment from the entire situation.

28:10

Paige had more to say to Hayward here on pretty much every one of the points she raises, but we trimmed it back - which was a difficult choice, because I find her incredibly empathetic in this episode; I think she’s right to have the doubts and fears she does - to me, she’d be a lesser person if she didn’t have them - and I don’t believe Hayward, try as he might, has satisfactory enough answers.

But everyone has their threshold of patience on introspection or handwringing when there’s a plot to get on with, and I really didn’t want us to lose peoples’ sympathy or for it to feel like we were just doing ‘Paige complains for an hour’. It’s always a really, really hard thing to focus on a character who’s fed up, depressed and essentially stagnating without losing the audience’s patience somewhere along the line.

35:25

I have mixed feelings on giving Carpenter some ominous bad dreams relating to the Cairn Maiden here (there’s a risk of us crowding the episode out with two different characters suffering visions from a different god!) but it felt like we needed a clear ‘jolt’ to switch from Paige’s perspective to Carpenter’s.

36:51

There’s probably an argument that we could have just cut the episode off here with Paige meeting Carpenter and saved the rest for a future week, in fact, but we’ve got multiple storylines and limited episodes - I really didn’t want us to still be milling about in the Grace by Episode 5/6 without any sense of where that plotline was going.

37:16

This little scene felt really important - because after all the talking and disagreements that have led up to it, what Paige and Carpenter don’t say to each other is what’s really vital; the harmony is in the silence between them.

But that silence also creates a distance - they don’t hug, like Faulkner and Carpenter did. Instead, Paige has to explain herself; she tells another story, with everything that entails.

39:30

Just in general, huge credit and appreciation to Lucy, who plays Paige - she’s been having a really busy year of it and some challenging times that she’s talked about on her own socials - we weren’t sure earlier this year how much time she’d actually have to record with us (which is why a few of the teasers position Hayward as a bit more central to the faith), but she came in strong and she absolutely crushed it, as always.

43:44

The story of the ‘Widow of Wounds’ of course mirrors the adapted, homogenized Promised Bride story that Shrue told us last episode, but to me what’s more important is that Paige is living a reality far more in line with the original tale: she’s made herself a vessel, she’s sacrificed herself, to try and fight back, but is she any freer than she was before?

49:05

I feel like we’re having to walk a very fine line with the Tree itself, and I’m not sure how well we’ve done it with the writing here - it’s important to keep conveying that this is most likely an animal, like any other god, that it is uncontrollable and single-minded, that it is unworthy of the cause growing around it, and that Paige has to find a way of safely mediating between humanity and this hollow, hostile thing.

But I also don’t want listeners to come away feeling like we’re setting it up as any more dangerous or extreme than any deity in the setting (that this results in an anti-Woundtree battle royale or anything like that), because for me that’s really not the point.

50:43

I adore asking VAs to do their own humming, because it’s always something I’d never have thought of - in this case, Jimmie did a callback to the shanty from Season 2.

53:33

Back in Season 1, Hayward fantasised about opening up a gourmet restaurant, so it felt like a nice little grace note that he’s now working with poor-quality ingredients to cook for his comrades as a kind of community ritual (one that doesn’t necessary result in good food, but is important all the same).

It also speaks to Hayward’s philosophy throughout this episode - while Paige fears that nothing good can grow out here and their movement is already too spoiled to be a success, he’s doggedly doing his best to work with what he has. 

Is it better to go hungry, or to risk using tainted ingredients to try and make something edible?

1:01:06

We could easily have switched this episode around with Episode 2, and in fact we went back and forth on doing so (it just came down to recording timings).

On balance, I probably *just* about regret that necessity - Episode 2 does establish very clearly why Shrue might want to join our plucky band of heroes, but it also pre-empts and to some extent counters Hayward’s arguments by demonstrating just how powerless a single voice raised in opposition can be, no matter if it has all the facts at its disposal.