The Silt Verses, Chapter 30 - episode commentary

It's launch day! But as you've already received Episode 1 of Season 3, please instead enjoy our episode commentary, taking you behind the scenes and through the episode's creation step-by-step.

Hope you enjoy!

0:00

Originally, we just had a very basic and very short ‘establishing shot’ style mini-scene planned here before we leapt right into Faulkner’s tribunal; it was going to be the sound of the river for 10 seconds or so, and then the Parish’s bells ringing out.

There were a couple of problems with that. One, it felt a bit dull as a way to kick off the final season.

But two, it felt like any establishing audio cues would actually undermine our sense of place (if there are bells ringing and audible from the outside, how is this a hidden base? Are we back in the Paraclete’s Gulch or somewhere else?).

We’d also been giving a lot of thought to the problem of geographical and factional clarity; how could we remind the audience about the different factions and regions at work within the show, since the storytelling baggage is really piling up at this point and we don’t have a handy Game of Thrones-style map visual at the start of every episode?

So we thought it could be fun to try a kind of musically-accompanied intro sequence from upriver to downriver that just clues us in again to a few key elements: there’s a war in the north with the Linger Straits, the Parish of Tide and Flesh is still active midriver, and then there’s the Saint’s Dam and the licenced faiths.

I remember the intro sequence from the ultra-edgy 00s animated sketch show Monkey Dust very fondly - where you had these brassy, confident blasts of music accompanying sudden shifts from a paradisiacal veneer to a monstrous nightmare vision - and I was keen to try something like that.

So we have this fun shift from the war-torn north to the peaceful south, dropping in and out of the water via one bomb and one sacrificial victim upriver, and then one kid diving off a board, to indicate how the White Gull is being successfully tamed down south.

It might ultimately be too busy as a sequence for it to fulfill that clarifying purpose (I don’t know if a first-time listener is going to come away with, ‘ah, yes, I feel confident about the contrast between north and south across the Peninsula’) but it puts me in a good mood every time I listen to it, so I’m proud.

The music is just a royalty-free song licenced from Envanto Elements, ‘The River’ by SyncHits; it was pure happy accident that we found it.

The lyrics are ballad-y nonsense, but weirdly they actually feature a lot of appropriate thematic cues for the show (a valley of death, carrying burdens, loving someone or something but fearing to come any closer) so it actually works bizarrely well, I think.

That repeated lyric of ‘I couldn’t love you any more than I do right now’ also felt like something that could be expressed by me and Muna personally, since with this season we’re setting up a farewell to the show, to the incredible cast, to our listeners.

You could also argue that we’re not technically breaking our habit of using diegetic music only within the body of the show (well, sort of) - when the ‘camera’ surfaces, the song can be heard as if on the radio, but when it’s underwater, it becomes clear. So it’s almost as if we’re hearing the Drowning Song and the voice of the river itself.

2.26

Steve Hendrickson, who brilliantly plays Roemont, can also do a very convincing English accent and he auditioned with that, but the trouble there was that he’d have felt too much like Mason Mk II. Thankfully, he sounds fantastic in his natural accent as well.

In general, a big challenge for us this season was getting across a deliberate sense of in-setting, banal recurrence within the fiction (so you killed Katabasian Mason? Bad news, it’s manipulative assholes all the way up! Killed Sister Thurrocks? Don’t worry, there’s plenty more eager young disciples ready to be eaten up upon your orders!) without it feeling like an involuntary repetition or a failure of imagination on our part.

We wanted to have that very tangible feeling you get in, say, later seasons of The Wire; that nothing can be fixed with the death of one individual, that there are always more corrupt bureaucrats or naive victims within this world ready to step up, and our protagonists never quite escape the grip of their circumstances no matter what.

3.00

There’s an obvious impressionism going on in this scene, where the ‘council’ is only two people - it’s a deliberate choice not to spoil the tension and the spotlight upon Faulkner with background coughing or some extra Katabasians popping up for a line and then vanishing again. But if we want to imagine that the council is genuinely underpopulated, that also works within the fiction.

4.00

For me, these flashbacks aren’t just a ‘remind the audience what happened’ utility, they’re very much giving us a glimpse into the depths of Faulkner’s guilt even as he’s retelling the story in a way that suits him - so they’re an emotional tool to try and keep us with him without resorting to a ‘this is how I really feel’ monologue this early in the season.

They’re also really clueing us into what I think are two of the big themes of the final season - lies and legacy. The stories we shape around us, the ways we reframe what’s happened to us, and how those stories continue to grow and twist once we’re gone.

We also openly cheat here (or perhaps it's Faulkner's memories that are faulty) - the alarm is blaring during the first flashback when in the episode proper it actually hadn't been turned on yet - to help distinguish between past and present.

22.50

We spend 20 minutes just on the three characters talking at the start of this episode! Huge credit to B., Sophie and Steven, because I don’t think it feels like a slow opener (listeners may disagree) - it’s a really enjoyable scene for me, and I love the interplay between the actors.

The last season of anything serialised is a reckoning, I think - all of your narrative debts come due. Debts like “shouldn’t we have established the name and identity of the High Katabasian earlier so we don’t need to introduce the character fully now and there’s less narrative lifting to do?”

But it really helps when the actors are as compelling as this, so that we don’t feel bogged down in that exposition.

24:13

We made a small cut here - originally the script explicitly names the southern council’s headquarters as the Firth of Frith, which initially I thought was a fun joke (‘frith’ referring to refuge or safety), and then I heard B. say it aloud and realised it was goofy as hell, too weirdly reminiscent of the real-life Firth of Forth, and needed removing.

25:30

Faulkner appeals to the notion of honesty as a protected virtue on a couple of occasions during this episode - stating that anyone who’s honest shouldn’t fear repercussions for what they do and say - which is a bit of a nod to Iago who does exactly the same thing in my favourite monologues from Othello, and a sign that he’s starting to go off the deep end with some of his manipulations.

26:55

H.R. Owen, of the marvellous podcast Monstrous Agonies, does a wonderful job here as Sibling Rane; and during recording, they told us they were really excited about the ‘soup monologue’.

I assumed they were being tongue-in-cheek, apologised, and promised that the character will have some more exciting lines later on the season. But no, they meant it, and they do a fantastic job with it.

Again, if it isn’t too repetitive, it’s such a relief working with talented actors when you’re bringing in new characters late in the day - H.R. really gives us some humanity and understanding of Rane in just a few lines.

I’d also like to shout out how far B. Narr has brought Faulkner as a character; the maturity, the confidence in his voice…you can listen to Season 1 vs this episode and hear the journey that Faulkner’s been on.

30:45

For the first episode, we really wanted to dive right in with the first half setting up Faulkner and the Parish’s situation and the politics of the matter, but then having the second half as basically a continuous action sequence that gets Carpenter to meet up with Paige and Hayward - the place she’s always been walking towards.

It was by no means deliberate that it ended up being almost exactly a 50:50 split of time spent with the characters, but I’m gratified that it did turn out this way.

32:42

Carpenter should not be able to hear the sound of snoring (unless it’s truly impressive) through a window and the thunderstorm, but it’s one of those ‘if the character can see it, you can hear it’ conceits that you just need to go with when it comes to audiodrama.

33.34

We have maybe four different quiet-to-loud or loud-to-quiet transitions in this episode (the cut to Carpenter outside in the rain and thunder, the cut here to Carpenter opening the window, the cut to Carpenter waking up, and the back-and-forth with Fade in the car later on) which is a telltale symptom of ‘Jon just got comfortable with a particular sound design choice and is now going to overuse it’, but I love the utility of these fast cuts in indicating a change of location without taking us out of the moment.

33:50

Something that’s been really wonderful this season has been the chance to fill in the world subtly through more background noise - adverts, largely - that add more to our understanding of the setting, but aren’t essential to the story.

So we have Alyssa Petrie here with the Saint’s advert and then Rissa Montanez and Marlon Dance-Hooi doing incredible work with a deeply serious Marvel-esque action serial once the Fisherman wakes.

The latter was a lot of fun to write because if you keep your ears peeled throughout the coming episodes, there’s an ongoing story to the serial that acts as a parallel to Paige and Hayward’s story (and indeed some of the paths we opted not to take with it).

At some point during the season I'd like to compile all of these and share them on here so you can enjoy them in their full glory.

34:48

Our instruction to Méabh with the fridge-raiding here was ‘please go nuts’, and of course she obliges. We could probably have cut it down, but she just plays it too well. Apologies to anyone who hates eating sounds, although I don't think we get too gross with it? 

Also, they say you shouldn’t work with animals in entertainment, but the fisherman’s dog was an absolute professional. (We used Walker 2 for its footsteps - which handily gives you a little ‘collar’ noise - which was tons of fun, although I think later on you can hear that the barks audibly sound like a larger dog.)

35:50

Originally we didn’t have a monologue here at all from Carpenter, and the idea was that her ‘dialogue’ sequences with the Cairn Maiden would fill us in on her state of mind, her near-readiness for death, and her exhaustion.

But it just felt wrong, listening through to the episode, not to get a direct glimpse into either of our two leads’ heads when we've come so far with them - and frankly, when you’ve got Méabh in your cast and you’re not making use of her monologue skills, that’s a shameful waste.

I think it was also a concern for me that when you have a character who's as capable as Carpenter, who’s as admired by the audience as Carpenter, you can get into a bit of a bind where the listeners are basically expecting her to badass her way out of any problem - when we want it to be clear that her troubles are starting to catch up with her, her old wounds haven’t healed, and she’s more vulnerable than ever.

So this monologue is definitely doing some hard expository lifting in terms of spelling out and underlining the obstacles she’s faced and the condition she’s in, to prepare us for the chase sequence that comes later - basically a pre-emptive writer's strike against any “wait, why didn’t Carpenter just steal Fade's car, get a gun and kill everyone while doing wheelies and wearing sunglasses?” questions.

45:28

This is the episode of the Three Stevens - we have Steven Anzalone, of the Maeltopia horror podcast, returning as Brother Fade, and Steven Zivic as the Fisherman.

Both actors do a wonderful job - Fade was a bit more gangly and awkward in S2 and Steven A is excellent at giving him a bit more steel here - but I owe them both an apology, as they have some extra lines here that have been cut!

Originally we had Fade realise that the Fisherman is a worshipper of the Trawler-man who’s completely ignorant of all the events of the past two seasons - he’s just been quite happily worshipping his river without any clue who Faulkner is or that the Wither Mark’s returned.

It would have been a nice little grace moment to give us a glimpse of a person with faith living outside of his religion’s influence and to try and demonstrate that there's more to the Parish than we've seen, but it just killed the pacing to get too deep into this stuff when the audience is going to be more concerned about Carpenter getting away.

49:40

For this chase, we were specifically thinking of the sequence in The Wire’s final season where Omar gets away from his pursuers by leaping from a high window and ends up injuring himself  - it’s heroic, it demonstrates Carpenter’s capabilities, but it should also provide that uneasy reminder that she’s mortal and not invulnerable, and she’s been running up the mileage for a long time now.

I’m really proud of it overall, although a couple of folks mentioned they found it hard to follow in the comments when we released the episode to Patreon - I’ll be interested to see what the overall response is like and whether the environment makes any kind of difference.

Something that was mentioned as a point of confusion is that Carpenter seems to reach the hills and the border fence quite quickly; we’d actually experimented with having a longer sequence of her running, tripping and climbing, to more clearly indicate that she’s put some distance between her and the house, but it wasn’t working for me.

My sense is that there’s a maximum length for audio chase sequences like this, a limited amount of time that you can maintain the tension with running footsteps and hard breathing before it too obviously sounds like a repeating SFX and the listener feels amused rather than immersed - and we were right on the verge of hitting it.

Cutting back to Fade in his car was my way of trying to get around that limit, which I do enjoy as a technique. I also like the music he’s clearly been playing - it makes perfect sense to me in-world that there’s some utterly generic, this-could-apply-to-any-god religious albums available.

50:11

For the first time in making this series, I’m experimenting here with a plugin called Ambeo Orbit, which (amongst other things) adjusts the equalisation in order to give a sense of height as well as left-to-right binaural sound. So Carpenter should sound higher as she’s climbing the fence.

Does it actually make a difference and can anyone hear it? Not a clue. But I like this little sequence.

Flaws? I think despite best efforts, you probably have to work to visualise the fact that Fade has attempted to knock through the fence and mow down Carpenter (she has SFX as she dives out the way, but they’re pretty impossible to hear), so I do worry that audience members might be left with the curious impression that he’s totalled himself for no reason.

Regardless, I'm very happy that we swung for the - ho, ho, ho - fences with this bit.

56:37

Probably the biggest agony of the episode was resolving exactly how Fade should die.

Originally we had it in the script that there was a bunch of drunken posses roaming the countryside looking for Hayward and Paige and the ‘jailbreakers’, and Fade encounters them at the 30-minute mark before we meet Carpenter. 

He shows them Carpenter’s picture and successfully recruits them to try and hunt her down, but in the end they see him from afar and accidentally shoot him instead in a darkly comic ending.

Lots of fun, but a whole extra scene, another ancillary character for the audience to remember, and setup that eats up precious time before we can reintroduce Carpenter, so we scrapped that.

Then we thought maybe one of Hayward’s followers shoots Fade, Carpenter gets the wrong impression and runs - but that steps on Hayward’s cheeriness when he shows up, and it was almost impossible to choreograph in a way that wasn't confusing. 

It felt important that Carpenter doesn't kill him - although of course she could - but also that she's unable to save him.

We actually also recorded a few extra lines in case we could make it work out that a stray god descends upon Fade (so apologies to AJ, who also voices the border-fence warning and would have been said stray god - this must be how Marvel actors feel when the script changes out from under them).

But like David Lynch says, sometimes you create a plot element for a reason and that reason only becomes apparent further down the line. 

So we’d established that the Trawler-man is raging, we’d established that Fade corners Carpenter by a waterfall - of course it made sense and set us up nicely for the rest of the season that her god would demonstrate to his chosen disciple (in her mind, at least) rather dramatically that he isn’t done with her yet.

1.00.00

Muna has been making fun of me because I originally envisioned Season 3 as a shorter season - there’s not much to wrap up, surely! - and now there’s more episodes than any other season, and they’re longer. Whew.

Anyhow, amusingly, we end with some curious parallels to the start of Season 2; both episodes contain Faulkner justifying himself (in a cave, no less) to the higher-ups of the faith. Both episodes end with Carpenter treating a rescuer as a violent threat right up until the last second.

It’s like poetry. It rhymes.