The Silt Verses Chapter 22 - 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

So! Originally Faulkner was going to have two on-the-road episodes this half of the season.

In the first episode, it’d be mostly light peril and character development. He’d have some success in meeting with the followers of the rain-cult, and we’d get to see that actually, he is warming to the responsibilities of being a leader.

We see that he cares about the young disciples he’s with, he’s becoming more considered in his actions to try and keep them safe, and their more fanatical expressions of the faith actually make him stop and reflect upon his own behaviours.

(But on the other hand, he is very much embracing his perceived messianic role and the required deceptions involved in that, in order to keep impressing them.)

And then in the second episode, we have this experience in the caves where despite his best efforts, it all goes horribly wrong; our chance to do a squad-in-trouble story, a kind of mini-Aliens. “40 miles of bad road,” like James Cameron put it.

The problem was, that first episode felt too much like treading water in a season where we already have a lot of storylines and forward momentum.

When all of the main characters are split up, you don’t ever want to have a Game of Thrones, rotate-the-cast-while-we-wait-for-something-to-happen ‘oh, let’s check in with Paige, who is still working towards that goal we established earlier. Now a scene with Hayward, to remind us what’s going on with him’ thing going on.

So we ended up merging them, which presented some challenges of its own!

Because then of course we had to create a single episode where everything goes horribly wrong for Faulkner’s expedition, but our first reaction shouldn’t necessarily be ‘oh, God, Faulkner, you screwed it all up at the first instant, didn’t you?’.

So we need to have heard him repeatedly trying to think ahead and avoid disaster on behalf of his new followers, and we need to feel like we’ve been on enough of a journey in 30 minutes that it doesn’t all seem to have collapsed hilariously abruptly.

The episode is trying to accomplish a whole lot at once, in other words, but hopefully it still works.

2.15

We actually have a panoply of audio-drama creators in this ep - which wasn’t deliberate, just the way it shook out!

• Cait Gallagher, who plays Thurrocks, is part of Calliopic Productions, an indie company that specialises in female and queer voices, and which has put out two shows, Voidless and We Know None
• William A. Wellman is the creator and star of Hello from the Hallowoods (we have them back for another role later in the season!)
• Harlan Guthrie, who plays the Reverend Toes, is creator and the entire cast of Malevolent, the Lovecraftian audio-drama.
• And Cole Weavers of The Town Whispers fame is the echoing voice of Hyades Plimpton.

So we were lucky to have a ton of honestly incredible VA talent (Mintaka Angell also very kindly comes back to play Jasp), but I also want to really shout out to B. Narr, who I think just does an unbelievable job of anchoring the whole thing.

We really feel Faulkner’s increased confidence, his sorrow when it comes to Carpenter, his thoughtfulness in trying to figure out the central mystery, his terror when the Angel appears…and the fact that he audibly is beginning to understand that his messianic mythology is all performance but he goes along with it anyway. It’s just a brilliant range from B.!

3:35

We didn’t want to over-egg it, but this section is obviously doing a bit of The Wire-esque generational cycling, with Faulkner taking on Carpenter’s exact role in the opening of S1 - he’s examining a sacrificial victim that’s been located by a younger sidekick, and taking the opportunity to lecture them.

7:51

This was another of the episodes that I wanted to try and run sound design on myself, and there’s a bit here where the rattling of the sacrificial mast becomes the rattling of the kettle that I think nobody will care about but I really enjoyed. We were recently watching Park Chan-Wook’s Stoker, which uses a ton of inventive and transitional devices from shot to shot, and that was a bit of the inspiration here.

8:13

Willliam Wellman, the Hello From The Hallowoods creator, happened to tweet recently saying that they’d love to guest on The Silt Verses.

We had this relatively small role - Wallace - which desperately needed to be filled, and another one that comes in the second half of the season that’s a good bit meatier, and we knew they could do a lot of great voices, so we asked if they’d mind doing both.

It was quite last-minute, but in retrospect it left me devastated that we hadn’t given the background disciples more to say, because I love William’s voice for Wallace in just a few short lines.

It wasn’t what I was expecting at all - we were thinking younger, 20-something voices for these young acolytes - but it was perfect and it helps make the character distinct as this middle-aged, hearty fellow who might have converted later in life and is just as zealous as the kids are.

In fact, I think my favourite line reading of the episode is William’s ‘Understood’ later on, which they just do to perfection.

It sounds like Wallace is a unit in an old real-time strategy game and you’ve just clicked on the location you want him to go to. I would play that game.

10:18

None of the scripts in the second half of the season call for a scene to open with the sound of the wind and then suddenly we hear footsteps on the ground, which is good. I feel like we’ve completely run that into the ground (three scenes in this episode alone!).

I think I was also taking the piss out of myself when Faulkner mutters, ‘What’s she keep yelling for…?’ because we’ve had two scenes in quick succession starting with Thurrocks shouting from a distance.

19:17

We’d invested in an ‘ambient spaces’ plugin for this season - which wasn’t the only reason we had an episode set in a cave network, but it was definitely up there. The echoes just sound lovely! Every episode should be set in a cave from now on.

20:50

Faulkner, of course, does spend a lot of time this episode considering the safeguarding responsibilities of leadership, drawing a line between himself and Mason, and reflecting on how he intends to be a better caretaker than Mason ever was…

…but the only time during the episode when he actually goes first into the darkness is when he feels like he has mocking eyes on him, and needs to prove a point.

He also lies a lot throughout the episode, despite making it clear he has no respect for Mason’s patterns of deception, and he clearly understands that his ‘true disciple’ wouldn’t appreciate it if she learnt the actual depths of his delusions of grandeur.

23:13

I only included this bit about Thurrocks and Tapper being an item because I didn’t want listeners to get confused and think we were going for a romantic thing between Faulkner and Thurrocks, as so many of their lines are her hero-worshipping him and him accepting the flattery. Literally nobody has mentioned that so far, so I probably just need to stop worrying so much.

25:00

This little monologue section was a late addition (and a huge thank-you to B. for putting up with my ‘wait! I’ve come up with an extra bit!’ emails).

It occurred to us that we didn’t have much of a sense of wonder in the episode, and that we could probably do with a little grace note where we get to see concrete evidence of the Endless Drear’s chapel underground - so that the final fifteen minutes aren’t just about running around in featureless caves screaming.

It was also a nice opportunity to remind ourselves of the central contradiction here - that Faulkner is doing a lot of reflecting on the importance of good leadership but he’s doing so because he sees himself as distinct from his followers.

28:01

I personally have no idea if the ‘clear…clear…clear…CLEAR!’ bit is scary or funny, because it makes me think of The Simpsons where Bart attaches fifty megaphones together and then says ‘TESTING’ and causes a sonic boom.

But it plays with something that really interests me in audio-drama, which is using repeated sounds to build tension while setting expectations - and then subverting or toying with those expectations.

Audio can feel like a very inflexible and limited medium for action when we don’t know what’s happening, but once we've established a recognisable signifier for an object, an entity or a place (once we know what sound the monster makes, what sound that door makes when it creaks open…) we can do a whole lot more.

28:41

We’ve had a lot of human villainy this season, and it felt like we needed to make time for something that’s natural, and awful, and can’t be negotiated with.

A god / angel of echoes seemed like a really fun idea; one of my favourite horror concepts in recent years was the rightly-celebrated bear-creature that shows up in Alex Garland’s Annihilation adaptation, speaking through the voices of its victims, and this felt like a good chance to do something similar.

I think what we wanted to have quietly emerging during this season - without commenting on it explicitly or laboriously in the same way that we’re delving into the politics of the setting - is that notion of divine pollution.

Every god, no matter how well-intentioned, lingers on in a place. Every act of deliberate or accidental worship is leaving its mark and will continue to cause trouble for future generations.

What I also like (and it was a bit of a thrill to realise this!) is that the nature of the god and the established rules of the setting mean that we don’t need to spend any time explaining why the damn thing is there or how it works.

Because we already know that “you might be feeding a god and not even know it,” we can intuit that the followers of the Endless Drear maybe inadvertently began granting power to an echo-god, over the long years when they were hiding out down in the caves.

And then when Hyades Plimpton and his folk retreated down there later on, they were facing something very hungry, and as they began to shout to each other in a panic, it began to pick them off one by one…

We can figure out the entire timeline of what must have happened if we stop and think about it, but we don’t need the characters to take a time-out and explain it themselves, which I think would kill the episode’s momentum.

I really like the fact that it’s a breathless 15-minute sprint to the finish line at the end to end this half of the season!

32:03

This section where Thurrocks trips and they have to dive into the water was a late addition - originally we had another burst of narration from Faulkner that essentially fast-forwarded the action as he and Thurrocks find their way out of the caves.

But then we established that we had them wading through the water as they went further in, so why not use that to have a bit of extra echo-monster action on the way back?

We had another line reading where Faulkner says ‘down’ which worked out of context (we got lucky) and plenty of gasps so we just cobbled it together from that.

33:01

One thing I love about working on these commentaries is that I get to write things like, ‘We can assume that the cave is deliberately trying to give Thurrocks a nervous breakdown by mimicking her voice more frequently, as it’s figured out that she’s a weak link’ and it’ll be completely accurate.

33:30

This episode is in its own way a nightmare for sound design, of course, because we’ve established those concrete rules: if you’re too loud, the Angel In The Echoes will be able to use your own voice to kill you. Easy.

But then with every sound, you’re second-guessing yourself, because in actual fact the volume of the noise is less important than whether it sounds like it’s been pitched loudly. (Do these footsteps sound too vivid? Is this line delivered as if it’s being spoken at a higher volume than that earlier line that did cause the Angel’s attack?)

And that becomes worse when the noises that do lead to the Angel attacking are only heard at a distance - so in other words, they’re much quieter than the ‘quiet’ noises.

In order for everything to stay audible and comprehensible, I suppose there just needs to be a trust component with our listeners: “the characters are being too noisy when we say they are.”

For dramatic purposes, we also have to accept the conceit that the Angel in the Echoes attacks Wallace far more quickly than it does anybody else, but I think we can rationalise the notion that it attacks faster deeper underground, because that’s where it emanates from. It does make sense!

34:30

Not that it would have helped under the circumstances, but Sibling Jasp completely forgets to use the first line of the Alluvial Lament as a passphrase here, as Faulkner instructed them to.

35:10

We originally had a little monologue from Faulkner here in the script, describing exactly what happens to Jasp when the Angel attacks.

But it felt bizarre and jarring after this big burst of SFX to have the narration pick up again, so instead we thought - fuck it, maybe their head rolls down the rocks towards Thurrocks and we leave it with the implication of what’s happened!

We haven’t had a rolling head yet in the show, and it’s one of my favourite horror bits.

36:15

Personally, I feel a bit sorry for the cave here. Maybe it’s just me.

37:13

It was a last-second choice, but I really like the sound of the Reverend Toes just charging rapidly at Faulkner mid-speech with a blunt instrument when we’re not expecting it.

I find that sort of thing - like Hickey running at the guy in silence before repeatedly stabbing him in Season 1 of the Terror - can be a hell of a lot scarier than any amount of jolts or spooky sound effects.

37:50

This was the last episode of the season’s first half! I’m very intrigued to know how people are finding it but also very excited to share the second half with everyone - it feels as if we’ve set up a lot of pieces for everything to come together (and a few inevitable reunions) in the second half.

I don’t think - or I hope! - that it’s been a directionless ride so far, but there’s definitely going to be a lot of upcoming payoff and confrontation for all of the characters who’ve been on noticeably separate journeys so far in these first seven episodes.