The Silt Verses Chapter 23 - 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

This episode is sort of a parallel partner to Carpenter’s first appearance in Season 2, if you think of it primarily as Hayward’s story – the protagonist wakes from a grievous wound, in a place of beauty and safety, and sets out on a new path while weighing up the emotional baggage of their past with the help of a surprising ally.

But then from Paige’s perspective, the story is more comparable to Faulkner’s first appearance in Season 2 – where the protagonist's religious mission and personal ambition in a historic refuge is complicated by the presence of an untrustworthy and manipulative father figure.

In other words, it’s a beginning (of the second half) that mirrors both of the beginnings from the first half.

It’s perhaps the episode I worried about least across the entire season, largely because the VAs recorded their parts quite early on and they were all just brilliant, so I knew they could carry the story perfectly well! (I also didn’t spend too much time panicking over the question of ‘is this too much of a quiet episode’. It's fine! The first half of the season was quite action-packed.)

1:26

‘I made you eggs’ is just a lovely line reading from Lucy – both genuinely kind and absolutely taking the mickey.

3:11

We gave quite a lot of thought to Dennis’ characterisation, because it felt quite important to the wider themes of the show.

This is, after all, a show where shitty parents and shitty gods have often gone hand-in-hand – and Paige’s dad has been one of the primary banner-bearers for that comparison, since in Season 1 he very explicitly appeared as a god-like figure: unseen but insisting upon his daughter engaging with a cycle of endless obligation to support him and to pay attention to him. He’s even addressed directly in the second person by Paige in the same way that Carpenter and Faulkner have soliloquised to the Trawler-man…

And so for an episode where we’re beginning to worry about whether the master’s house can really be torn down by the master’s tools, whether a god can ever be created that acts as an effective agent of change against the status quo, it felt very apposite to show Dennis as an abusive parent who is not openly abusive, someone who doesn’t deploy violence or outright threat and who remains convivial, supportive and charming (most of the time).

The problem isn’t that he’s a heartless monster; that would be too easy.

The problem is the power dynamic itself, and how he uses it to enforce a bond between them and get what he needs from her, by sweetly reminding his daughter at every turn how much he’s done for her, undermining her opinions and recollections, and making himself the centre of attention whenever she tries to speak up. He wants her to feel indebted and as if she ought to be consulting him for help.

He does love his daughter, and he is genuinely proud of her – but her achievements make him all the more terrified that she’ll abandon him and that makes him manipulative, transactional and unkind.

In much the same way, the ‘lucky’ citizens who inhabit this world of gods, like Paige – the people who don’t get sacrificed, who get treated well, who prosper – are of course victims in their own right: they’re living in a state of constant threat, and the benevolence of their benefactors is used explicitly and implicitly to enforce their compliance.

7:33

Jimmie actually got a tray, a jugful of water, and did all of his own vomiting sounds, which was pretty above and beyond, and which we absolutely adored.

9:06

Hayward and Paige in the tractor actually parallels Carpenter and Faulkner’s similar heart-to-heart in the dodgem cars at the end of Season 1. I don’t know why characters in this show need to reveal their innermost doubts and melancholy while sitting in comedic vehicles, but they do.

9:30

I almost cut this bit about the noise of worry parents make, because it reminds me of a good and filthy joke about Marge Simpson in Issa Rae’s Insecure and now I can’t stop thinking about it.

10:00

Jimmie delivers this speech brilliantly but I was a bit concerned that it’d come across as too artificial an attempt to very rapidly redeem him and turn him to Paige’s cause (because let’s be honest, we only have 14 episodes! We don’t have time to have long drawn-out rejections of the Hero’s Call to Adventure, we need to get on with the story).

We definitely had seeded the fact in Season 1 that he feels like he’s putting on a performance by participating in his daily life and he tries to hold the realities of his work at a distance, but it tends to be other elements of his character – the clumsiness, the talkiness – that people pick up on. Anyway, it seems to have gone down well, which I’m glad for.

13:25

This might be my favourite credits sequence. Thank God we only had three VAs in this one – it just wouldn’t have worked with a big cast.

14:05

The notion of religious copyright is something we hadn’t really got into prior to this episode, bar the general idea that there are ‘licensed’ and ‘unlicensed’ faiths.

In my mind, control of distribution is a key part of how the international community in this world keeps illegal faiths down or forces them to merge with licensed gods.

You may not be able to stop a family from worshipping their harvest-god in the privacy of their own home (especially if you can’t prove that they’ve sacrificed anyone), but you damn well can prosecute them for sharing their pamphlets with anybody else.

15:02

I am obsessed with the story of Stakhanov – the idea that you could effectively create a public-relations god of labour whose false miracles make sustainable and honest labour impossible – which is generally seen as this patently absurd, fairy-tale Soviet trope.

But a huge number of 21st century jobs continue to rely on targets that wreck workers’ wellbeing while having limited to zero impact on actual output - one of Muna’s first jobs was a telesales job where employees were humiliated by being made to work without a chair for the rest of the day if they hadn’t hit their targets by lunchtime.

15:25

I think this brainstorming bit is maybe on the verge of ‘Paige applies goofy marketing tactics to deeply serious situations’ getting too silly as a concept, but it felt incredibly helpful to have her effectively show her working on the topic so the audience feels filled in.

20:00

We recorded this entire scene without a Dennis to play against Lucille and Jimmie, as we couldn’t find a time to make everyone’s schedules work. I think Lucy is brilliant here, but also a ton of praise needs to go to Graham Rowat, who does just a stunning job with Dennis when recording asynchronously – he really finds the sincerity in Dennis’ arguments, he doesn’t play the character as a heel or a villain.

20:24

The direction we agreed on here for Hayward is “it’s like when you’re at your friend’s house as a kid and they get into a screaming match with their parent and you just have to sit there in awkward silence still trying to be polite.”

25:47

Along the coast of England, you can occasionally stumble onto old World War II pillboxes and concrete defensive positions, abandoned in the long grass, half-buried. There’s something incredibly arcane and haunting about them, these cramped holes where soldiers would have waited for an attack that never came - particularly when you take into account our country’s clarion approach to heritage more generally (well-funded, well-kept stately homes and castles, signposted from our main roads) and to WWII as an hour of glory that must never be forgotten.

These inglorious, horribly claustrophobic, unusably ugly sunken fortifications have of course been utterly forgotten, except by kids who use them for graffiti practice or as a drinking-hole out of the rain.

27:14

Hayward’s lousy portmanteaus are pretty much just how much I struggle with brainstorming god names at this point. “A god of fire? Uhh, the Flame Divine. Old Smoky. I don’t know.”

31:15

The godbirthing rituals were a tricky balance to get right. The process had to feel ambivalent enough that it doesn’t kill off all of the mystery (i.e. we know it involves prayer-marks of similar gods, blood, psychological manipulation, but not too much else), it had to feel weighty and difficult enough that we understand this is dangerous and challenging work…but we also didn’t want to spend hours in narrative limbo with the characters slogging away at their task.

I hope we made that work, though it’s still a bit shocking to me that the sequence is literally just 5 minutes of a 45-minute episode, particularly as it took up most of the editing time.

34:57

It turned out everyone was a talented singer, and we hadn't planned for that at all! It was ridiculous. This bit should not have worked as well as it did. I kept pausing the relistens and going back to it so I can listen to them singing the shanty over and over.

It was, however, hell to find a way to get everyone's rhythm to sync up so that they sound as if they're actually singing off each other.

35:41

The three monologues felt really rewarding to write here, because most of this season the narration has been purely pragmatic in explaining what’s happening with a character in the here-and-now. 

We haven't got a chance to use it to leap outside the confinements of the characters' environments as much as we did back in Season 1.

Getting to shine a light on the characters’ histories in a very different time and place each time was a ton of fun, and hopefully sells the idea that Paige’s idea could actually be kind of brilliant, because it truly is universal - every single person in this setting has lost someone to some form of sacrifice.