The Silt Verses Chapter 24: 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

Honestly, I still don’t know if I love this episode wholeheartedly (this is a safe space, right?).

That has nothing whatsoever to do with the performances, which are simply incredible and some of the very best we've had, a little to do with the writing format (this is the second of our two experiments with combining dialogue and diagetic monologue in the season, and in retrospect I think Hembry’s episode worked a little better: the narration here is hectoring and insistent by design, but it’s nevertheless hectoring and insistent; we could probably do with Carpenter just sitting with her own guilt for a couple of scenes rather than having it pursuing her quite so relentlessly!) and a lot to do with its sheer, all-consuming bleakness.

I worked for a number of years at a dementia support charity, and I’ve had experiences of dementia in my own family, and I think one of the things which terrifies me most in the world is time-shifting and the possibility of reawakened trauma.

That you could spend years working at yourself, dealing with your trauma or your guilt about something that happened when you were young, and ultimately resolve your feelings about your past - only to then find yourself reliving it over and over again with no possibility of escape.

That absolute helplessness and hopelessness, that inability to confront the source of your trauma in a way that actually overcomes it or offers catharsis, was something I was very much trying to convey in the concept of this episode.

We wanted it to be a bit of a riposte to the most popular metaphor in horror right now, where it’s all a slightly cheap and easy vehicle for catharsis: the protagonist faces down the monster / stand-in for their own psychological hang-ups, overcomes it and earns the right to resolve their trauma.

It’s meant to be about the baggage that simply won’t go away no matter how often you confront it, no matter how thoroughly you analyse it, and no matter how self-aware you are about it.

And the only solution - other than giving up completely - is to take a breath and carry on, bearing all that weight onwards with you.

Which I think we did communicate in the episode well enough, and for me it’s an honest expression of that fear, but my God - having had to listen to it repeatedly, I just feel drained and saddened by it.

Hopefully it’s a lot less enervating and more enjoyable for folks who are just listening to it once!

1:28

We underline it later, but every voice in the cabin is somebody who Carpenter has left behind (except the Corpse).

What we don’t underline is that the episode is effectively a Hansel and Gretel retelling in a lot of ways: the cabin in the wilderness, the witch in her kitchen, the menial tasks, the lost brother, the victim eventually finding a way to escape without being devoured. 

There’s no deep meaning to that, but the fairy-tale atmosphere is meant to help underline Carpenter’s vulnerability here and make her feel more effectively reduced to a childlike condition.

2:50

‘The episode where the hero is trapped in a dream-world / recurring loop and forced to relive their unhappiest memories over and over’ is pretty well-worn in serial genre storytelling at this point (which is quite odd, really, but true).

But it seemed obvious that for Carpenter to really move on, she needed to have some kind of interrogation of her history of violence on behalf of the Trawler-man, and some kind of overdue confrontation with her grandmother, who of course is at the very root of many of her feelings about faith and life more broadly. 

And ultimately, doing a dream-world episode is much more fun and no more hackneyed than doing a flashback episode, so we went with this instead.

7:50

This was by far the most cut-down episode of the season when it came to editing - the amount of monologue always drives up the episode length, and by the time we'd assembled everything we were looking at a solid (and talky!) 70 minutes if we’d left everything intact, so we had to start hacking away.

We took out an extra speech from Nana here about the necessity of sacrifice, a good amount of additional narration from Carpenter and Helen, more detail about Carpenter’s murders committed as a lure on the Trawler-man’s behalf, and a couple of fairly substantial extra scenes after Nana’s ‘murder’ where Carpenter attempts to bury the old woman but finds her coming repeatedly back to life.

It was always the right decision, I think, although we lost a few lines that I quite liked. Maybe we’ll do an Extended Edition!

17:25

We weren’t originally going to have Helen as a voice in this episode, but we love working with Carmella, and given how much narration there is in the ep it made perfect sense to have some of that divided up between a few different characters - and to draw a hard line from Carpenter’s first acts of violence to her most recent victim.

26:08

The script originally just called for Carpenter to run away here - repeating the actions of her younger self by fleeing back into the cabin and leaving the sacrifice alone in the darkness to be devoured.

That was surprisingly hard to convey, though, and ultimately it felt more exciting and appropriate to have her caught in place as the angels return. (It does make it a little harder to understand exactly what’s happening with the doors if she’s standing in place, admittedly.)

27:39

Méabh de Brún does an absolutely stunning job throughout this episode, and she really gives it her all when Carpenter is just utterly broken by the experience - but I think this is actually my favourite monologue here, even though it’s not climactic here and it gets quickly passed by.

She just beautifully gets across the hurt Carpenter feels - not just the harm that her grandmother did to her, but the harm of her grandmother being taken from her.

(And a huge shout-out to Méabh, as well, for introducing us to the wonderful Liz Ryan, who plays Nana Glass!)

30:13

We probably should have had Carpenter continue to smash the kitchen up during this scene - I think it’s a little bit oddly static given how furious she is! 

But it was a bit ludicrous and distracting to have the SFX continue on during Nana’s speeches.

31:30

Like I say, I do find this episode a difficult listen, but I could replay Carpenter roaring and pummelling her grandmother’s face in over and over again. 

Just great voice acting.

36:11

Not to admit to shoddy planning, but I had absolutely no idea in S1 why Carpenter had changed her name - I just knew that she had.

And then when we started writing this season, it began to make an increasing amount of sense that she’d have chosen to undergo a kind of baptism when she returned to the faith - that she’d have wanted to set herself apart from what came before. It is a relief when a storytelling decision comes together in retrospect despite your best efforts!

40:43

Originally the script didn’t contain this entire storytelling sequence - Carpenter would just wake up amongst the bodies and be left to guess at what kind of god, or saint, she’d encountered during the night.

I am still absolutely torn on whether it was the right call to include it: I think without it, the ending would have been too open-ended and vague, and I like that it underlines the cycle of violence and shame which predates Carpenter and goes all the way back to the very dawn of our setting’s society…

…but it is a hefty chunk of ‘well, I guess it’s time to explain ourselves and wrap things up peaceably’ narration in an already long episode, which I think makes the whole thing feel a bit like a Star Trek episode of the week. (And while we do cover ourselves with the implication that Carpenter is only speaking to herself, we are probably skating on thin worldbuilding ice by making this divine force quite so apparently self-aware.)

On a side-note, it felt like something was missing from this sequence, and I wondered whether the jazz music playing on Nana’s radio would sound melancholy and eerie when stretched…and luckily enough, it did!

It also reminds me a little of British Sea Power’s soundtrack to Disco Elysium, which I like!

48:20

The ancient corpse of the priest being found atop a rock, gazing out over the landscape, is a nod to the Survivalist from Fallout: New Vegas, which I found a very memorable little moment.

50:47

If we achieved nothing else in this episode, I’m utterly thrilled that we were able to use the end credits as a jump-scare twist. 

We’ll never be able to top that.