Episode Commentary: Chapter 26 & 27

Hi, folks! Thank you for your patience - we’ve combined our usual episode commentaries into a single entity, as we found we didn’t have a lot that we could say about Chapter 26 without spoiling Chapter 27!

As they’re sort of a double-bill, it made sense to dive into them together and spoil to our heart’s content. Hope you enjoy, and of course spoilers follow below.

Chapter 26

00:00

There was a whole second segment at the start of this episode, where Paige and Hayward stop reading from their holy book and go on to talk about the process of their creativity as well.

It was stretching out the prologue too long, so we cut it, but here’s how it would have gone:

HAYWARD:

(Narrating)

That’s how we write it.

But there’s so much more to it than that, of course. So much excised, so many corrections, so much that’s too horrible, too marvellous - or simply too close to put into words.

I don’t think I could ever articulate the strange intimacy, the joyful chaos…the new terror that the girl from across the border and I discover as we give birth to our god, one day at a time.

Long drunken nights on the rusted tractor, yelling out half-formed chants into the starlit sky.

Vomiting into the sink or toilet or the soil of the fields, feeling something strange and writhing pass through your gullet and out of our nostrils and our eyes, dissipating into the air.

A hideous fever that comes upon me one day and takes hold of me for weeks, curled up in the spare bedroom, sweating and stinking babbling in the voice of hallowed men in a language neither of us fully understand.

PAIGE:

(Narrating)

Endless arguments about the phrase ‘I will bring them fear instead,’ which I’m not so keen on, but which Hayward insists - pacing back and forth across the living room floor, waving his arms like a marionette - is absolutely crucial.

I call him a diva and an egotist. He threatens to leave and form his own superior cult which will in time overwhelm mine.

We keep pushing on.

Our god comes to us in glimpses; vivid firework moments of impossible, spontaneous creation when we jump up and yell together, yes, we’ve got it, we got it just right. We can see him in the marks, we can hear him in the whispers.

Long days where the wind is still and the sky is empty of possibility, when nothing comes and nothing enters us and we wonder what the hell we were ever thinking.

Over time, the house begins to flower with crocus.

White flowers, pressing upwards through veins of stone in the soil, making my dad sneeze and retreat to the kitchen to open another beer, cursing us both beneath his breath.

Night after night, the sad detective and I wake from shared and splintered dreams of a place beneath our feet, a place that’s stifling and choked with a million desperate voices, concrete cracking upwards under our weight, driving upwards, ever upwards, straining for the surface…

…and then it’s done.

3:00

William A Wellman from Hello from The Hallowoods voices the TV presenter here - they came up with the name ‘Chuck Harm’ on the spot and we liked it far too much not to include it.

3:56

I like occasionally inserting my current breakfast fixations into the show and making the characters mildly obsess over them. In this particular case, Dennis is for some reason hung up on hash browns.

5:33

Paige’s plan is hearkening back to Hans Fallada’s Everybody Dies Alone / Alone in Berlin, and the heartbreaking true-life story of the Hampels, a couple who spent a year secretly distributing anti-Nazi postcards across Berlin - and as Dennis intimates, found that nearly all of their messages seeking solidarity were instantly handed into the authorities.

6:22

I think with this episode, we really wanted to nod towards something that we probably wouldn’t have time (or the narrative scope) to explore in greater depth, which is the question of ‘why should it be you?’

Paige is a character who’s come from a middle-class, apolitical status (at least in her adulthood) and a position of complicity and now she’s taken on this pretty extraordinary mission of challenging her world’s entire way of being. And whether she intends it or not, she’s taking on a messianic mantle by accepting that role.

And characters echo the question throughout - is she really the person who should be doing this? Is she best-suited to the task? What does it mean for someone from her background to approach somebody else in dire straits and offer them a chance to destroy themselves for the sake of putting an end to the cycle of sacrifice?

It was also a chance to underline the point that Paige’s plan can save lives through deterrence, but it still does require an act of harm; it still makes her complicit in an act of violence that will affect real people, and not just the system she’s hoping to disrupt.

And often when that complicity is depicted in fiction, it’s used as a way of staining an idealistic cause (look, the revolutionaries would be just as bad as the system they seek to overthrow!). We very much didn’t want to take that approach, which is why it felt important to have Paige, as she says in the next episode, “feel the weight of it,” to acknowledge the suffering that she’s asking someone to take on their own shoulders.

12:48

These two conversations in the car between Paige and Dennis were something that we had quite a few discussions over, because these two characters as daughter and father are really stripping back the subtext of their relationship and displaying a very clear self-awareness of the problems between them (which in Dennis’ case, is probably a self-awareness of his own flaws that he might not necessarily have access to).

Would it be more realistic to have these two people continue failing to communicate with each other, failing to understand each other, because there’s been too much hurt and too much manipulation between them?

Probably, but on the other hand we were very aware that Dennis would be dying next episode, and I think we had to let him show that he was capable of change, even if he’d never have a chance to really act on it.

He’s the only god on the show who ever accepts that he’s a source of harm.

20:00

This was actually a really challenging episode to do sound editing for (perhaps surprisingly, given that it’s mostly dialogue and very little action) because one thing we hadn’t really anticipated was that in the world of licenced SFX, there are a lot of ambient, and certainly very effective, background tracks which appear to be using audio and voices from real prisons and real prisoners.

And it’s probably best not to get too proudly up on your high horse around how you use sound effects that you source online - because any real-life crowd SFX you use is, I’m sure, going to contain the voices of people who haven’t given their permission and certainly haven’t been compensated. But the more we discussed it, the more we felt uncomfortable with using any of that, given the episode’s themes around exploitation under incarceration.

So we’d initially planned to really give a sense of Paige going deep into this place and the environment of the prison, and we ended up paring all of that back for lack of ability to convey it effectively.

20:30

We brought on Lucy Winter quite late and she was absolutely fantastic as Esther - just really captured this very tricky character, and a real pro! Hugely recommend her to any other audio folks who might end up reading this.

That’s also the Host from We Are Not Meant To Know (a fab horror anthology audio-series, similar to NoSleep or Knifepoint Horror) as both the Chaplain and the Police Captain across these two episodes, and Jasper Locke as Corvin!

Again, we brought Jasper on at short notice and he was just brilliant to work with - incredibly kind and enthusiastic and we really recommend him!

29:26

I’ve had to work quite a lot to get comfortable with including lots of plotting in the stuff I write (see Eskew) and my experience has really been that there tend to be plot moments you’re incredibly proud of, and plot stretches which are agonising, because you’re just hoping you can get through them without your audience spotting all the holes in it or judging your characters for not spotting them.

For me, this entire prison sequence is the latter. It felt important to have Paige connect with an actual victim of the system she’s seeking to overthrow (instead of simply going back to her old workplace and finding allies there), but it is an incredibly reckless plan, and it relies on several characters going along with an act of political terrorism.

In the end, of course, Dennis is right, and Esther is right - people who are in a position of safety will not allow you to drag them down with you, and the more people you involve in any enterprise, the more unreliable and unsafe it becomes.

Chapter 27

0:00

This first jukebox song sounds a little like the True Detective Season 1 theme, Far From Any Road, which was a deliberate little nod.

2:58

I know Carpenter and Faulkner get a look-in midway through this episode, but for me these are very much Lucy, Jimmie and Graham Rowat’s two episodes, and they just absolutely kill it throughout.

I love Lucy and Jimmie’s performances in the lake scene that comes later, and I adore Graham’s nervous monologue here in the bar, even as a smaller moment; he’s just absolutely captivating to listen to.

We also don’t draw attention to it, but we learn later that Dennis has in fact taken Paige’s money to pay Corvin with - which he welches on here.

7:55

Not a single person appears to have taken the narrative bait that Dennis might actually end up betraying Paige and Hayward here. Maybe you’re all too savvy? Anyway, kudos, folks.

10:27

With Carpenter and Faulkner returning to the Paraclete’s Gulch for the climax of their story, this season follows the geographic/narrative pattern of Season 1, according to what the movie Game Night describes as ‘cute full-circle bullshit.’

14:36

These two scenes have some lovely acting in them, but they probably are stretching plausibility just a little with Carpenter and Faulkner’s heart-to-hearts taking place while they’re meant to be rushing back to the Gulch.

We had that slightly awkward tension between the urgency of their situation as we’ve established it, and the need for these two characters to have a proper reunion moment and reiterate their states of mind before we get to the fireworks factory!

21:24

Méabh asked if she could add in a few extra ‘Joe Quaids’ here that weren’t in the original script, just to wring some extra mockery out of the situation. I adore this.

(I think we also just wanted to give Faulkner a little extra backstory and humanity from his time in the seminary, which was lacking previously.)

22:50

I cannot skim stones, as this scene presumably makes clear.

24:04

‘Well, I did go to college’ was Lucy’s addition here, as was her final line after Hayward hocks his wedding band - ‘Seemed plenty loud to me.’

Both brilliant choices for very different reasons, so huge credit to her for those!

30:40

This scene was a real challenge (and a bit of a headache) to do sound design for, because it’s that issue of audio-drama as impressionism. You can’t realistically portray an entire squad of armed police officers stomping through a house without creating a cacophony, so how do you create just enough of a sense of noise and movement and voices that we understand what’s meant to be happening here?

I think the great thing, again, is that we mostly have Graham’s performance and the tension of the situation to cover any cracks in the sound design. (And to cover the fact that…given how long it takes them to walk through it, the farmhouse seems to have magically become a lot bigger in this scene. The perils of writing a lot of dialogue.)

34:45

It wasn’t deliberate, but listening back to it, Dennis’ death has a lot in common with Michael Caine’s character in Children of Men - it’s poignant, but he goes down irritating and poking fun at his own killers, which adds a grace note.

It also just felt hugely cathartic to have a death scene that wasn’t completely awful and monstrous, but genuinely heroic.

And I think we also really wanted to show that - even if Paige never knows it - Dennis makes good on his promise to stop making it all about him.

He dies thinking of how clever his daughter is, and how proud he is of her.

36:11

There’s a very fine line we’re trying to walk with the two sequences at the end of these two episodes, because the intent is very much not for this to become a ‘oh, no, Paige is the villain now because she tried to change the system but she went too far and couldn’t control it!’ story.

But nevertheless, we needed to find ways to efficiently demonstrate a few crucial points: firstly, that this god’s birthing isn’t a purely intellectual exercise, and that the system of violence it’s trying to uproot is deeply embedded - there will be vast wounds created by the efforts to pull it up, and there will be collateral damage.

Secondly, that even if it continues being a net good, this new faith will quickly fall out of Paige’s control and become something bigger and more amorphous than her original intent for it, just as with any ideology.

And thirdly, that becoming the face and voice of this movement potentially means becoming something else, and losing a part of yourself in the process…