The Silt Verses episode commentary - Chapter 29

The last episode commentary of the season!

0:00

It’s hard to know what to say as an intro for this one, really!

It feels like we’ve come an incredibly long way since the show launched in 2020, and I know Muna and I both feel like we’ve learnt a huge amount in producing this season alone (taking on more sound design duties, being more ambitious with action sequences), and long may that continue.

We'd really like to keep doing this for a while longer, and so long as we do, I'd hope that we can keep learning from every new...season, project, thing...that we make.

I feel incredibly grateful to our returning cast and collaborators who are so patient with us and just give it their all (especially when it’s been a year when a lot of them have been moving on to brilliant and exciting projects themselves!). I feel really excited to have worked with so many people for the first time who’ve just been an absolute pleasure and delight.

I’m just grateful all around.

0:35

Bells and sirens recur through the entire episode, and of course we’d established the Gulch’s alarm system and the air raid sirens in previous eps.

The idea is that we keep establishing that background noise as a warning sign of oncoming danger in different contexts - the Gulch’s bells are signaling the retreat, the sirens are sounding as war breaks out - and then when we finally hear the bells ringing out in celebration of Faulkner’s victory, that’s the last warning sign that things are about to go horribly wrong.

3:18

I think there’s a particular challenge with action in sound design that I - at least - haven’t figured a way around yet, and that’s the limitations around characters making sudden entrances (for the purposes of a nasty surprise or a deus ex machina rescue).

You can’t have characters silently lunging out of the darkness a la Michael Myers (happy Halloween! The new film sounds terrible. I can’t wait). You’re essentially restricted to Sergio Leone-esque gun-cocking sounds from offscreen to advertise a new presence, or the character needs to loudly announce themselves in some way as they enter the fray.

This is why, in the world of The Silt Verses, the most effective way to overpower someone in combat is to run up to them quickly while yelling.

Still, Mercer leaping at Faulkner and then Carpenter leaping at Mercer fits with the wider preoccupations of the episode, I think - we have a lot of nested symmetry going on in it.

We start and end the episode with a bloody fight where an underestimated character ends up killing their superior. We started this season with Mercer and Gage receiving their orders from Shrue, and Faulkner negotiating with Mason in the Paraclete’s Gulch, and that’s where we end things in this episode.

And in that first fight scene itself, we have quite a fun mirroring between Mercer and Carpenter as combatants and Faulkner and Gage as their seconds - which then signals the fact that both pairs are going to fall apart due to the actions of the latter.

I will also say for the record that there are many reasons to hire Méabh de Brún, but her berserker war-cry is up there amongst the highest of them.

3:48

If I’m ever foolish enough to try and sound-design a fistfight again, I will definitely also have it take place waist-deep in water.

It’s great; you can get a real sense of movement and frantic scrabbling in the splashes that you just wouldn’t when restricted to grunts and punching noises. Highly recommend it as a conceit. I’m quite proud of this little bit.

5:52

If I had a do-over I’d probably go back to Mercer and Gage’s final confrontation here and rewrite it - or better yet, I’d have written out all of their scenes separately in a single run. Their conflict doesn’t escalate quite as organically as I’d like it to, and I repeat myself in some of Mercer’s lines, which is unfair to Daphne who’s so brilliantly unhinged in these last couple of episodes.

In their final moments, I was thinking about the real-life story of the Gibbons sisters and their bond, which weighs on me heavily - and that calls back to something Hayward said back in Season 1, Episode 5.

It's the idea that you could be so close to someone, so perfectly entwined and co-dependent with them, that they need to die before you can truly be an individual.

Mercer speaks that sentiment, but Gage is the one who acts it out.

9:50

There’s a very early pitch out there for The Silt Verses from way back, when we briefly tried shopping it to the BBC - it concerns a character called Mallory who buries the dead in a garden by the sea, and the body of a soldier that washes up and begins to speak, and she listens to his life story as she buries him.

So this was quite a nice scene for me, because we basically return to the very earliest roots of the show.

9:58

The blunt, unhelpful replies from the Corpse are a direct nod to Disco Elysium: rest in peace, ZA/UM, you were great.

13:23

A lot of the sentiments that appear in the show around the Cairn Maiden’s faith are my own feelings about mortality and peace being beamed into the characters’ mouths directly.

And so is this bit.

I spend a lot of time agonising how I come across to the people around me and worrying that I don’t understand how they’re thinking and feeling - which is partly me, but partly also the classic English standard of polite decorousness that squirms away from actual emotional communication.

And in I Am In Eskew, that was very much played for horror and paranoia.

But as I get older, I’m also trying to treat that uncertainty as a sign that I need to give voice to my feelings more clearly.

I need to let go of my deeply-embedded reserve and communicate as clearly and often as possible to the people around me that I love them, because it’d be terrible if I missed a chance to put it into words.

When it comes to this show, I need our voice actors to know that I may awkwardly stumble through recording sessions with them, but when I’m in an empty room listening to their takes I invariably mumble a little “don’t worry, don’t worry, you’ve got this” under my breath when they fluff a line, and I do a little battle cry of “ahhhh, that was great! Well done!” when they absolutely nail it, like I’m cheering them on from the bleachers or something.

I need all the amazing people who make fanart and tag us in it to know that I have a little folder of it all and I go back to it and admire it every once in a while when I’m low.

Like the Corpse, I should tell everyone more often that I care.

13:53

A lot of characters talk about going home this episode, but the Corpse is the only one who does so peacefully or fulfillingly.

19:02

It’s always funny looking back - when we were planning this season, a question we asked ourselves was, ‘are people going to want to spend so much time with Paige and Hayward - our supporting characters - following their own separate narrative without Carpenter or Faulkner around?’

And now I listen back to this little scene snippet with Hayward and Paige, where we’re basically just checking in on them for a moment before the season’s ending, and I think, ‘this might just be my favourite scene in the whole episode.’

Having great VAs helps, of course.

20:30

We went back and forth on whether we wanted to have another newsreader round-up scene in this finale.

In the end, what settled it was the opportunity to have a final callback to Dennis: both in the sense that his final legacy is to be remembered as a lifelong criminal and a traitor, and to end his story on the note that he might have actually reflected and considered what Paige said about her workplace during their first encounter…

...and ended up posting her pamphlet to the employees there.

23:00

That’s Muna and me, just coming in as a little definitely-not-distracting Greek chorus here to show that Faulkner has become the hero of the Paraclete’s Gulch. (Look, we couldn't afford an entire crowd calling out his name.)

25:25

We asked B. to give us some generic contented humming here - they ended up giving us a rendition of River Chant, the outro music from Season 1. 

I don't think they knew we were going to use another of Skip's songs for Season 2, so that was just a fun coincidence!

Return to the River felt perfect for this season's outro, because it feels like an update of River Chant - elements of the older song are still recognisable in it, but it's more layered and complex, with vying lyrics like this season's vying factions.  

25:30

This scene was one of the first things we wrote for the entire season (and we recorded it early on, in parallel with Faulkner and Mason’s encounters in Episode 1).

We always knew that Faulkner would exhibit growth during this season, becoming more assertive and more responsive to the feelings of the people around him, genuinely thinking about the role he can gainfully play for the betterment of his community rather than just acting out a generic ‘chosen one’ part that grants him power and status…

…and that this growth would lead him to a moment of great victory and great recognition within the faith, which ironically puts the role of the messiah back into his grasp.

And then Faulkner discovers, tragically - both when Mason reveals that the planned legalisation of the Parish is going to take that role away from him, and when he fears he’s about to be discovered as Mason’s assassin and he has nobody to pin it on - just how far he’s willing to go to cling onto that mask.

32:58

Huge credit to both Cait and Jamie for their excellent (and visceral) dying sounds - as Jamie said to us when he delivered his final lines, ‘Mason is hard to kill!’

Thurrocks has no real excuse for not coming at Faulkner from behind with a folding-chair while he's busy throttling Mason, though.

35:02

I feel absolutely sorry for Faulkner here - I really do.

I think that this is a decision that will haunt him for the rest of his life - but the thing is, he has faith in Carpenter. He truly believes she has enough time to get away and she’s too capable to get caught. 

So he doesn’t believe he’s sentencing her to death, but rather just seizing control of a narrative that she’s no longer using. Since she no longer has a part to play within the Parish…why shouldn’t she be the traitor so that he can carry on being the prophet?

I also think that Carpenter, while well-intentioned, didn’t have a hope in hell of clearing away either of the bodies, the debris and blood away in time.

But that's her expression of love towards her brother (although not the one she intended to make). 

She sees him, she sees what she's done - and she instantly pitches in to help him work his way out of this hole. 

She gets her hands bloodied in solidarity with him, and that's the final tragic mistake of the season.

Thank you for listening, and thank you for reading!