Chapter 31: Episode Commentary

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

0:00

I had a bit of nervousness around releasing this one, in full honesty. (Although how many times have I said that at this point?)

One of the big challenges about being two seasons in at this point is that, very understandably, a lot of people are invested in hearing from their favourite characters. Which means that since Episode 1 released, since the cliffhanger at the end of Episode 1, we’ve seen a lot of ‘ah, I can’t wait for Episode 2 when Paige is going to return!’

So you do end up with a bit of a pit in your stomach when instead you’re prepping an hour-long episode that heavily features a minor antagonist from last season and introduces a bunch of new characters!

You just have to hope and trust in the story you’re telling, your fantastic actors and their performances, and ultimately the receptivity of the audience themselves - that they’re going to come away from that hour satisfied and feeling like they’ve benefitted from not having their expectations met.

The fear is that listeners will be shifting in their seats muttering, ‘well, maybe next episode we can get back to the characters I really care about.’

I try and hold onto the example of Twin Peaks: The Return, which I had the benefit of living through as an internet-age serialised story, where every week any number of viewers were getting more and more frustrated or irate over their old favourite characters not returning or only returning in deeply peculiar, time-killing ways, but in retrospect having seen how the story comes together we seem to all have collectively accepted that playful and clearly deliberate trolling as basically part and parcel of a masterpiece. (No, we’re not going to be that bad. We will be hanging out with Paige and Hayward next episode.)

Anyway, the initial response has been good from what I’ve seen, so I’m very relieved and happy and get to have my five minutes of ‘oh, everything was OK, actually.’

0:30

That’s Alex Nursall, of the excellent Parkdale Haunt, as Sam Kincannon. Alex was absolutely brilliant and completely understood the brief - we wanted an immensely-serious news anchor whose every word is shot through with urgency and severity but who doesn’t really address any social issues at all; she actively uses a ‘grown-ups in the room’ tone to skate past what really matters.

(Here, for example, Sam aims to tackle the contentious issue of a nationwide draft by telling her audience how they can get their paperwork in order for it.)

Coincidentally, today in the UK we actually have a think-tank led by a Tory MP which has been briefing to the press that we need a new national conscription service in this country; it is, of course, the basest and most cynical red-meat-to-the-base imaginable that has nothing whatsoever to do with the actual problems facing our young people, but serious broadcasters will gladly pick it up and debate it today as if it’s worthy of our time and attention nonetheless.

We also hear GM Hakim here as Tainsley, who’s absolutely marvellous (and we’re going to see a little more of him in future).

2:44

We had quite literally hundreds of auditions for Val and some really, really excellent performances, which was fortunate because it actually turned out to be an incredibly difficult role to cast.

Because when we were looking for comparable characters - when you have a memorable monster who’s essentially a human-looking but inhuman predator moving amongst regular people, when you’re trying to create terror and tension in their power over others who don’t realise the danger they’re in - visual media often leans on stillness and silence to create that sense of isolated inhumanity.

Our uncanny predators tend to be creatures of few words, who rattle and confuse others through their self-contained quiet (I’m thinking of Anton Chigurh in No Country For Old Men, or maybe even the Woman in Under the Skin, at least as a starting premise).

But Val, by her nature, needs to be a talker, which creates an unhelpful sense of connection between us and the character; it’s far harder for someone to terrify us when they’re always explaining themselves.

And the more the character talks, being a master manipulator, the greater the risk of coming across as too broad and too performatively wicked - vamping it up, basically.

I think Marta does absolutely brilliantly at walking the line here, and I’m so thrilled that we get this chance to work with her on the role; we can hear that Val is amused and wry at times, but she’s amusing herself. She maintains that detachment from us no matter what.

There’s a moment later on where she’s rather horribly killed poor Sergeant Loughton, and you can almost hear her tilting her head to one side to observe him, a la Michael Myers from Halloween. It’s just fantastic.

7:16

The love-saints were actually originally in my mind as swimmers chained to land-mines desperately splashing after their victims, as explosive guard-dogs, so quite glad we got to return to that here.

I also really liked the notion of a corn-doll god who’s made out of barbed wire and I’d had that in mind for a while.

It’s just really lovely to have a long monologue so that we can slip in a few more weird angels and gods on the side before anyone notices, to be perfectly honest.

9:24

There were a few cuts we made around this monologue, basically to refine some rough limits around the scope of Val’s powers (for example, removing any indications that she can lie to the love-saints or to the empty sky, although I liked the quiet implication that she makes it safely across the channel by lying to us, the audience).

Sarah Griffin mentioned in one recording session that Val is both terrifying and childishly unfair - the equivalent of a kid who says they’ve won the imaginary fight because they have a laser gun and laser shields, etc, etc. Which is actually exactly what we were going for; we wanted that sense of a potential antagonist who is almost ludicrously untouchable, who could undo anything in a heartbeat, because that’s the problem at the core of this final season as a whole.

What happens when you lose control over the narrative you’ve spent so long building up? How do you prevent it from being brazenly overwritten by the ones who come after? If you’re so certain that what you’ve established is the truth, what defence is that against the lies of someone who’s infinitely more powerful?

11:15

It’s not spelled out, but another fun little implication that there’s something childish about Val and her power comes here - the border guard is bashing his own head in, like a psychic-domination form of ‘why do you keep hitting yourself? Why do you keep hitting yourself?’

11:45

I’m going to try not to spend too much of these commentaries just gushing over the performers, but Sarah Griffin is just an incredibly good performer and (like Jimmie before them) I think they probably get too few flowers just by dint of being on the ‘wrong’ side - but it’s a far harder job to get across the humanity of your character when that character is acting against the heroes, and Gryph just absolutely smashes it throughout this episode.

13:55

It’s very much intended here that the story of the Promised Bride has been - perhaps even inadvertently - reshaped into something socially conservative in the course of being reworked into a propaganda narrative, affirming her marriage rather than revolting against it.

14:22

We pruned back a little extra conversation here between the Radio Exec and Shrue that would have just been laying out the timeline for legalisation, the approvals that Shrue was waiting on, etc - it was all decent exposition but I think we came to realise that this was one of those ‘trust the audience that they’ll understand, move on with the plot instead’ moments.

14:53

The credits, wonderfully provided by Daisy McNamara, were a bit of a late addition and I’m not 100% happy with them conceptually - we wanted to quickly convey the bustle of Glottage and I didn’t want to resort to another ‘voices on the radio’ credit read, but I think it creates a contradiction with the monologue that Shrue goes on to give about how the city is quieter than it was before, and a bit of unaddressed hypocrisy when it comes to their thoughts around helping the unfortunate.

(Nothing wrong with there being hypocrisy, of course, but I can’t help but feel like that it should have been more smoothly integrated into the scene.)

18:40

Having Shrue very quickly explain the Moridame Palace is a ‘oh shit, we’ve never described the seat of government in the Peninsula before, what can we come up with that isn’t utterly generic?’ moment.

In the description of it, and the complicated feelings of the present-day citizens towards its appearance and historic meaning, I was thinking mostly about the ‘Typewriter’ Victor Emmanuel Monument in Rome.

20:50

Sarah Griffin is resident in the UK, so we got to have a nice mutual grumble when recording this episode about how Shrue’s ‘you can’t be too radical in trying to push for progress or people won’t stand for it, you’ve got to be sensible and slow to get anything done’ approach to politics basically makes them a Labour party rep right now.

The collective, casual, baffling agreement between various characters in this episode that the war is going terribly and things are only going to get worse, but, hey, what can you do? also feels very much borne of what I observe in UK society right now, too. Clearly I’ve been going through some stuff.

21:51

We’d considered having more pomp and circumstance around the machinations of government here - I really liked the idea of the Legislatures having a god of timekeeping on hand whose acolytes keep solemnly interrupting the ‘light and quick’ meeting to invoke the Sacred Minutes - but we were getting too crowded.

22:35

Our primary direction to Rhys, who plays Carson - who’s also headlining the new Ethics Town horror podcast if you haven’t checked it out yet! - was to find the evil in Ted Lasso or Hank Scorpio.

We were imagining someone with this very cheerful, fast, joke-filled patter that seems to be good-humoured and conscientious on the surface, but which is basically just hurrying the conversation on to wherever he wants it to go, with constant sidebars, ironic asides, and distractions to keep his opponent constantly off-guard and unable to engage. (Rhys was brilliantly game, of course, and does lots of little improv moments here to bring that to life.)

Felix Trench, by contrast, was provided with a ‘can you give us a Boris Johnson impression’ brief for Cross and I think he does so much more with it; I love the slight hesitancy in his unctuousness, as if he’s audibly trying to figure out his angle as he speaks.

29:13

A huge hand for Dave Wilson here as Sergeant Loughton, who auditioned for Roemont and was one of our top picks for that role as well - a lovely, lovely bit of acting and he does just fantastically with the, let’s be honest, bizarre direction of ‘please make noises like you’re becoming a chair.’

We very much pitched this scene as one of Chigurh’s encounters in No Country for Old Men - where we need to first feel Loughton’s decency and then his absolute vulnerability as he realises he’s come up against something overwhelmingly monstrous in just a few lines.

It’s really not easy to get the audience to care about a character who’s only around for 10 minutes, but he absolutely does it.

30:54

We’re absolutely and fully sticking our tongues out here, revelling in the disparity between what we hear and what the characters experience, by having Dave’s character remark that Marta’s character appears to have a ‘Peninsulan accent’, when of course both actors’ natural accents don’t align with the accents of the actors we’ve previously heard from both nations.

I still very occasionally see new listeners complaining that it spoils their immersion or ‘makes no sense’ in TSV to have an Irish-accented protagonist crop up alongside US and English-accented performers without some kind of firmly delineated identities in the setting to set them all apart, and with all due respect to those opinions, jeez.

I think it’s something I only get more militant and angry on over time - it’s probably the only disagreement around storytelling technique I see around the show where I can’t just shrug and accept it as subjective.

I think probably my stance hardened even more after seeing what happened with Amazon’s Rings of Power last year, where this kind of fussy, obstinate classification across your cast ends up feeling more and more outdated and blatantly harmful - because inevitably the accents end up being deployed as a limiting cultural shorthand, and so you have the truly embarrassing spectacle of ‘oh, well, the hobbits are all bucolic and carefree travellers in this one and we need to set them apart from our posh elves and noble heroes. Better ask Lenny Henry to put on a bad Irish accent!’

(Fantasy still gets away unchallenged with doing this all the time, of course, when it comes to Middle Eastern or African accents that are solely deployed to denote rugged but wise nomads or barbaric desert slavers, but maybe that’ll change in time as well.)

Or as a more positive slant, I remember reading about a Mexican-American film critic who took her dad to see Diego Luna in Rogue One a few years back, and the gentleman was stunned, confused, and ultimately delighted, to see a hero in a sci-fi flick who had a Mexican accent without any justification required (in a series that had - for its own thematic reasons, sure - begun by broadly sorting its cast into plucky American heroes and haughty British villains and then tossing every other accent into the ‘funny-speaking alien species’ pile), and I just think that’s the most compelling case for trying to be as equitably accent-agnostic as you can be across your cast. Nobody should be shocked to hear a hero speaking in their voice.

34:28

We were really torn for a while on whether to provide some audio or narrative cues to show that Val physically transforms in some way when she’s lying (photo-negatives peeling off her flesh to ‘prove’ what she’s said, her unhinging her jaw, snake-like, some form of Spooky Filtered Voice), but I think it was the right call to keep her grounded in these moments. She doesn’t change; the world changes around her.

We still have that sound of rising tension that we hear here, but we’re not going to worry about deploying it consistently or treating it as an in-universe ‘noise’ - we should always be guessing about whether or not Val is telling the truth in any given moment.

We do have a few more subtle cues that appear during this episode - background noises or voices tend to cut out while she’s speaking, as if she’s silencing them.

35:35

So, the chair thing. To return to Twin Peaks, one of the most maligned scenes in its second season was when a minor antagonist is transformed into a doorknob, but I always thought that moment was, like the kids say, kicking rad.

Utterly bizarre and unexpected, but weirdly appropriate in a ‘fairytale consequences’ kind of way - I’ve always wanted to turn someone into furniture in one of my stories.

38:20

Writing an entire town’s history out of existence hearkens back to a later episode of Eskew, and I think the idea of rhetoric as a particular kind of black magic is something that really interests me in general and which I’d like to keep coming back to.

When we talk about stories in 2023 across the popular discourse, I feel like there’s still a lot of warmed-over Alan Moore-lite proclamations about how storytelling is a kind of transportative and transformative magic.

Which is all well and good, but my view is that if we’re ever going to get out of this mess of the 21st century alive, storytellers need to be giving more serious consideration to how the same techniques they rely on are used to manipulate and entrap us, and ultimately to hold us in place.

We play on that throughout Val’s speeches - she explicitly uses a couple of argumentative fallacies at various points, and of course the ‘Last Word’ is a phrase that we’d use in relation to debates - but she is of course completely right here to say that the town should not exist in its current state.

41:18

I’d originally pictured the inhabitants of the coastal town essentially crumpling themselves out of existence, shrinking and shrinking, but that’s not a fit ending for an audio medium, so to hell with it - everyone explodes.

46:00

I think there’s a line between dramatic tension and absurdism that we’re just skating along here, perhaps a little dangerously - to me, it’s absolutely appropriate to the setting and to the real-world stuff we’re parodying within the setting to have these high-level politicians getting swept up in enthusiastically embracing a very clearly unreliable and harmful super-weapon, while threatening and bullying anyone who raises pretty basic health-and-safety protests, treating them as a tedious obstacle and a busybody.

And in general, portraying the inner workings of the Legislatures was, for me, an opportunity to show that the decisions that have had a huge impact on the lives of our protagonists - like the Parish being criminalised, and now potentially legalised - are being carried out glibly and casually.

But of course you don’t want the audience to dismiss these antagonists as a result - ‘oh, ok, they’re reckless idiots, I guess this problem will take care of itself’.

So I’m hoping we can keep walking that line.

47:36

Perhaps surprisingly, Carson covers for Shrue here by not identifying them to Val, which I really liked as a little grace note for the character.

54:32

Shrue’s journey of increasing disillusionment and unease with their complicity in this episode mirrors Paige’s story in Season 1, and of course Hayward’s to a certain extent and maybe even Gage’s, and I think oddly enough this is one theme where I really don’t mind if we’re repeating ourselves; if genuine hope can be found anywhere, it’s in the possibility that no matter what comes, any one of us may find themselves pushed to the breaking point - and that may incentivise us to change things.

The other possibility is that all of us just keep on falling.

55:26

My personal view is that Shrue’s family are real - although the little joke of course is that it’s the first time we’ve alluded to them, so they really have just been retroactively summoned into existence - but of course the doubt is now there. They'll never be able to stop wondering.

57:00

I think the next episode is also likely to be an entire hour as well. I’m going to try and stay calm if we end up with one episode this season that’s a total outlier and only 31 minutes long or something like that, but we do have one on the horizon that’s likely to be feature-length.