The Silt Verses Chapter 25: episode commentary

In which Jon tries to provide a bit of extra running commentary on each episode as it comes out. (Spoilers follow for the episode in question.)

0:00

One thing that we really wanted to try and stretch ourselves on was a kind of madcap, ambitious Coen brothers episode - where there’s lots of action, several duelling motives, and we hopefully pull the rug out from under the listener’s feet by having several of our storylines collide against each other, violently and chaotically, to darkly humorous effect (and the holiday village setting with a dilemma involving adjoining motel rooms is a bit of an obvious nod to No Country For Old Men, which we’re both really fond of).

And this is it! I’m genuinely very proud of it and it’s probably the episode I’ll relisten to most from this season, although maybe that’s just my personal sensibility. 

I do get the sense that we were cramming a lot into this one, so not sure if I have a good idea yet of how it’s gone down overall. It might have been too much, which is OK! 

2:28

Originally we had a whole separate monologue that Mercer was going to deliver in her own scene, about the time she’s been spending sifting through Shrue’s dossiers glaring at the known members of the Trawler-man while the hunt is on hiatus.

And that was going to go in front of one of the earlier episodes in this half of the season - and I think that would have made the ‘gotcha’ moment more excitingly and effectively foreshadowed for that scene later in this episode when Mercer does encounter Carpenter and faintly recognises her.

It would also have made explicit something that is only assumed here - that there are photographs / mugshots of Carpenter in the authorities’ possession from when she was arrested.

The problem was that the two previous episodes had such tight focuses on a single location and on Hayward/Paige/Carpenter as characters that it felt seriously odd to be tacking on a minute-long monologue from Mercer right at the start - it didn’t flow well.

So we ended up merging that into this scene, and I think (I hope?) it’s reasonable enough that we fill in the assumption ourselves about Carpenter’s photo.

3:35

I’ll go into more detail about this by season’s end so as to avoid spoilers now, but one of the big inspirations for Mercer and Gage was (in a non-sexual way) the movie The Duke of Burgundy.

It seemed like an interesting idea to take that common archetype - the pair of eccentric killers / villains who are perfectly in tune with one another and have a shared patter all of their own - and to start to give it a twist. What happens when one person is beginning to find the shared performance confining and monotonous, and one person feels very strongly and passionately that this isn’t a performance at all?

6:00

We knew that Carpenter and Faulkner needed to get captured by the followers of a truly horrifying faith - one that’s so awful as to also merit Mercer and Gage’s attention.

It made sense to have that as a god of pain (which would mean, logically speaking, conducting excessively painful sacrifices). And we’d sketched out the followers of the Snuff Gods already in the lorebook, albeit as a fairly generic Hellraiser/Martyrs-esque ‘pain is sacred’ cult.

When we revised them for the show, it seemed like an opportunity to be a bit more playful, so instead we rewrote the Carving Chapter as conscientious objectors, of a kind; as this warm-hearted, familial illicit faith based around a genuine ethical (if thoroughly deranged) protest to the rules of the setting.

If ours is a ruthlessly competitive society where our success and even our survival is contingent on committing unthinking or indirect harm to those around us, the Chapter reasons, then perhaps the counter-action to that spiritual damage is to commit our harm as consciously and thoughtfully as possible - understanding and accepting our own wrongdoing as thoroughly as we can.

It’s a cult of mindful sacrifice, essentially, which is a phrase I wish I’d remembered to include in the episode.

And in narrative terms, all of that means you can have this cult of horrible sadists as a sincerely happy and mutually supportive bunch led by a cheerful youth-pastor type. 

Which allows for some moments of humour, and hopefully ensures that they don’t feel too one-dimensionally edgy as antagonists - I think I even feel a bit sympathetic for them at the end when we start to realise that they're not cowards, and they don't have a one-sided approach to their belief. 

If they die in pain, they genuinely hope that their suffering will help their murderers to learn and grow!

6:40

The direction we gave Harlan for the Reverend Toes was, ‘ethically speaking, this is the worst person in the world, but he’s also just a very sincere, very nice stand-up guy. It isn’t a false veneer of villainous affability, he isn’t saying nice things with a sinister edge to them - he just is legitimately the nicest dude you could ever hope to meet.’

Which he does incredibly well!

7:20

This does all feel a bit like the serial killer convention from The Sandman, in retrospect, but I actually hadn’t seen it or read it until a couple of weeks ago so I’m not going to beat myself up over that.

11:40

I’m playing Brother Tapper here whimpering in the background, which is probably too much of my voice for one episode, but I find it genuinely difficult to ask actors to play roles that are just essentially ‘panicked and pained moaning for ten minutes.’ It feels somehow both mean-spirited and a waste of their talents.

But it does allow for a bit of a voice parallel between Tapper and the Corpse, who of course I’m also playing - and that fits quite neatly thematically.

(Carpenter has, of course, actively numbed herself to the sound of the Corpse’s voice and his pain, hearing it only as irritating noise.)

12:50

I was thinking specifically of Center Parcs, the UK holiday village franchise, for this episode’s setting - the villages tend to be set within high pine woodland, which makes them extra surreal and bizarre spaces. You’ve got all this cheery Disneyland-on-the-cheap branding going on but you’re completely surrounded by the looming, menacing forest.

The animatronics are another nod to the fact that this is a society that’s had to learn to live with dramatic population decline, but they also handily allow us to provide the audio equivalent of establishing shots as the action moves from scene to scene.

17:30

I spent too long worrying about whether a metal shower-head could really be used to smash in a stud wall (Muna’s verdict: yes, there are several ways, and maybe don’t think too hard about it).

But we needed Carpenter and Faulkner to interact face-to-face for their reunion rather than just having muffled yells between a wall for a long scene, and these two characters would obviously just not sit around waiting to be sacrificed, so it felt like the right choice to give them something to do, however utterly pointless.

18:11

It wasn’t deliberately written that way, but one little joke that came out in the sound design is that Faulkner says he’s ‘through’ when it audibly is Carpenter who’s been doing most of the work.

21:00

Mercer was originally going to encounter one of the Leaning Larch animatronics at the start of this short scene and vent her fury on it.

We got some incredible ‘smashing up’ yells from Daphne, but it made no sense! They’re sneaking up on the village! So it had to go, sadly.

23:15

I’ve really come to love sound design since I started picking it up for this show, even if it does basically swallow up all of my life outside my day job now, yikes. I love the possibilities it opens up for the actual writing.

For instance, we were thinking about how to ensure that the audio sells in the fact that the Carving Chapter are genuinely community-driven and mutually supportive (so that it clearly feels like the exact thematic opposite of the party at the Kensey house back in the first half of the season) without needing endless cheering and applause SFX going on in the background, and while only having a single VA to represent the group.

So we thought maybe we could have someone over-enthusiastically ‘Woo!’-ing in the background at a given point, and then some indulgent chuckles from the crowd.

And then once we had the sound effect for ‘Woo!’, which had a sort of slightly drunken beer-party vibe to it, we thought, ‘well, maybe this person has come to the weekend with her own torture implement, and she’s revving some kind of saw in the background, and everyone else is rolling their eyes at her a little because she’s a bit over-the-top.’

You can hear her woo-ing again in the background in this scene, this very enthusiastically violent character charging towards the enemy, and then of course she gets her own little death scene as well later on.

And you can listen to the episode without ever picking up on the fact that she has her own little nearly wordless storyline, but it’s there.

It’s just so much damn fun; it’s a whole extra stage of creation.

26:16

With a limited budget and production time, I think we’ve really begun to think hard on this season about how we can include action without having to actually show it in too much detail.

This ‘one-shot’ sequence with Carpenter creeping through the village is a fun example of what we’re trying to achieve, I think - sticking to a restricted perspective of the fighting but making it clear that stuff is going on in the background, and trying to use silence and actor reactions rather than a lot of SFX to build up our overall picture with both comedy and tension.

27:05

I spent a lot of time wondering if we should cut this hug between the two of them, because I didn’t want the reunion to be too cornball, which in retrospect would have been a bad idea.

You get very unsentimental when you’re working on your own stuff, which can cloud your judgment.

“Oh, when this episode launches, people are going to be RAVING about the smoothness of the scene transition from Gage’s pipe to Toes’ guitar solo - oh, no, wait, it’s the reunion. Everyone’s talking about the reunion.”

27:40

The script originally called for Carpenter to kick in the door. And then I remembered that, actually, she has keys. D’oh.

27:50

Another unscripted little background joke that came out in the production phase was that Faulkner tries to show Thurrocks the same big-sibling affection that Carpenter showed to him and instantly just hurts her by patting her where she’s wounded.

30:48

Harlan has been popping up on a lot of horror podcasts lately, and rightly so - he’s a delight to work with and if you like Lovecraftian shenanigans you should absolutely check out his show Malevolent.

He is also, as he proves here, an excellent die-er, which hopefully Arthur won’t be doing on Malevolent for some time to come.

32:54

Again, I love this little sequence and I suspect the blocking in it is one of those things you obsess over when you’re making it to a ludicrous extent that absolutely nobody notices when it goes out.

I do regret that I couldn’t find proper SFX for slashed tyres flapping / rattling as the coach moves forward (you just have to imagine it), but I am proud with the rest of it.

The music faintly growing and receding in volume as the coach does a three-point turn is fun, I think!

34:37

There are a lot of little echoes, contrasts and comparisons throughout this episode, some more obvious than others.

You have the use of music in very different contexts between Gage and The Reverend Toes, you have the unthinking harm and cruelty of Mercer compared to the deliberate cruelty of the Carving Chapter, you have the recklessness and frustration of both Mercer and Carpenter, you have Faulkner and Carpenter’s return to an instinctive and easy camaraderie and cooperation set against the crumbling team of Mercer and Gage who are failing to communicate, you have both Mercer and Faulkner thanking their gods for what they (perhaps wrongly) see as a favourable piece of good luck, and of course you now have a pair of protagonists with a burden set against a pair of antagonists with a burden.