The Silt Verses Chapter 21: episode commentary

0:00

In one of the previous commentaries, I mentioned that Atlanta was a show that we’d really been looking up to, and one of the things I really admire about Atlanta is the incredible confidence it has to cut away to a set of side characters (or entirely fresh characters) for a standalone episode that still ties back to the wider narrative and themes.

I think that really demonstrates that you’ve got your story under control, that you’ve got your audience’s full attention.

So we wanted to take a big over-ambitious swing at doing something similar, with Shrue and their aides as a one-off focus. We thought it’d be really fun to watch the setting descend into war through the eyes of these unheroic characters who are embedded in the system - who are foolish, spoilt and self-centred and certainly contributing to the wider problem, but who aren’t absolute monsters and who would try and stop things from getting worse if they weren’t so fundamentally helpless and immersed in all the wrong priorities.

And I’m sure there’ll be folks who listen to this who are just itching to get back to the main characters, and that’s OK - but screw it, I wanted to give this a go, and I’m really glad that we did.

(It was also a fantastic opportunity to work more with Sarah Griffin and to work with Sena Bryer and Oliver Smith, who I think are both utterly brilliant and bring life to roles that aren’t that much on the page!)

On another note, for a few days I thought this was going to be the first episode that didn’t give me a gut-punch of fear to release, and then the night before launch, I had a terrifying dream that I was being chased and eventually eaten by a relentless Spinosaurus, which I couldn’t escape from no matter how hard I tried.

So if anyone doesn't enjoy this episode, please just know that I predicted that. In my dreams. In Spinosaurus form.

3:50

Willard Trunce, the actor endorsing Shrue, is played by James, an old friend who I wrote some of the vignettes that inspired I Am In Eskew with. The only instruction we gave him was, ‘You’re a washed-up fantasy Ray Winstone,’ which I think he understood admirably.

I wrote this whole part on the fly when I realised we were missing the credits for this episode, and while it is maybe a bit too dark, I really like the implication of Harold’s Law - that at some point the wrong kid got killed, and Shrue’s solution was not to try and ban child sacrifice, but rather to impose a new law to enforce proof of identity.

5:27

One of my first jobs was with a former spin-doctor who used to be pretty famous; he’d been kicked out of his party after a series of scandals, and he was trying to start up his own business.

He was a pretty spectacularly awful human being; he spent a good amount of the working day getting his PA to bully Apple into sending him a free iPhone by threatening to call the tabloids on them, he was deeply slippery when it came to paying his staff, and at least once he was watching porn in his office while leading conversations with his team.

And every so often these MPs and advisors that I knew from the papers would pop around to see him and scheme with him, because he was formally out of politics but that meant absolutely nothing in practice.

And this guy was a left-wing politician, at least nominally - he was someone who was meant to be aligned with the party of principle and community.

So I think for the same reason that The Thick Of It was funniest when it wasn’t focusing on the Conservative Party (because it’s funnier, and more ultimately heartbreaking, when you’re focusing on the people who are meant to be helping, but who are spineless weathercocks) it made sense for Shrue to be someone who’s trying to stop the war with the Linger Straits from going ahead.

5:45

The Jolly King Kipper scandal is just a reference to the ‘Troy McClure sleeps with the fishes’ episode in The Simpsons, there’s nothing deeper than that in it.

6:39

We were ready to cut this section because we thought taking the piss out of a centrist god that blithely calls for compromise regardless of any context would come across as too smug and glib.

But then we decided that the god could have its saints as some kind of grossly horrible toad-like voice that spits up mud as it speaks and is clearly, audibly utterly vile, verminous and awful, and somehow I think turning it up to 900 like that essentially fixed the problem.

It also turns into a bit of an homage to the Cheddar Goblin out of Mandy, which is always a good thing.

6:51

Lucille Valentine voices the saint of the Smiling Child here! This was in fact the second occasion during production where Lucy emailed us out of the blue asking “Hey, do you have any extra weird little freaks that I can play?”

Not coincidentally, Lucy is an absolute delight to work with and she should get way more roles.

16:35

This whole scene in the diner, to me, hearkens back to getting that first round of feedback from a client when you’ve been working on their marketing brief.

“You said you wanted us to do this, but now you’re saying you want us to do that, but we still need to be encompassing both of your contradictory requests…”

25:04

There comes a point on a show like this where you’re just desperately trying to think about what real-life divine concepts you can horribly corrupt, and it seemed obvious that in the Silt Verses, a god of love would be this awful, all-consuming thing.

Originally we were envisioning a sort of literal child/landmine saint: a kid who trails after you seeing you as their beloved parent and crying out for you to give them a hug, and then exploding you horribly as soon as you touch them.

But that might have been too far, even for us, so we ended up with this more aggressive version of Mr How / Mrs Why from Eskew, as a compromise.

Until quite late on, the Love Saint just sort of spluttered romantic overtures to the characters.

But then we thought maybe they could speak in rhyming couplets, like a Valentine’s card. The implication is that this thing may be terrifying, but it’s also effectively a kissagram service that’s gone horribly wrong and has been repurposed as a weapon.

26:45

I adore a good motorcade ambush. Children of Men was the biggest inspiration for this scene, but I’ll watch Clear and Present Danger, I’ll watch anything that has a motorcade ambush. It’s that tight perspective of the protagonists in their cars, adjusting to the constant chaos, that I think is totally thrilling.

But we were also hugely enjoying Barry on HBO, which amongst many other things has a great sense of wit when it comes to its action composition.

And that’s great for a show with a smaller budget, because when you’re not trying to make your fight scenes seem ‘cool’, you can get away with a lot more on the cheap - by having the action take place in the background, or cutting away at a crucial moment, finding ways to offset or play with the action by introducing a concealing element.

So until quite late on we hadn’t planned on the second portion of this sequence, where the car crashes - Jeff and Shrue were just going to run, and Jeff would be left behind.

But then it occurred to us that we could use these anti-prayer headphones as that concealing element - where you don’t need to do the impossible and try to clearly convey a detailed car crash via SFX, because the music and Shrue’s breathing is foregrounded instead.

(That was the idea, anyway - although then I played the first take to Muna and she said, “Oh, I was surprised by the bit when Jeff went off and started shooting people.” So let’s see how listeners react, and whether it’s clear enough.)

28:00

This whole sequence is meant to be comedic, really, with the headphones, the music, the saint and the shouting. It’s very funny to me and I’m a bit surprised that so far, people seem to be more horrified by it…?

28:36

Originally Jeff was going to die first, but when we read over the script I felt like Ana was the more sensible one in their first scene, since she proposes the idea that Shrue goes for and she’s generally keeping control over the meeting more effectively.

I was picturing a bit of a Rosenkrantz and Guildernstern (or Glen and Ollie from The Thick Of It) equilibrium between the two aides, where neither one is noticeably smarter or more prominent than the other. So I swapped them around to give Jeff a moment in the sun.

But listening back…I’m not sure that Jeff does come across as much sillier than Ana, which I think is thanks to Oliver’s great and very sincere delivery to some absolutely daft lines?

So I feel like Ana was a bit hard done by the script, and I sort of wish we’d had a chance to hear Sena Bryer deliver that final furious monologue to Shrue, which I think she’d have been brilliant at. But honestly, both actors bring so much to roles that aren’t much at all on the page! We’d love to work with either or both of them again.

31:45

When we were listening back to Episode 1, I was a bit worried that Shrue didn’t have enough going on for Sarah Griffin to get their teeth into, because they’re a fantastic VA!

We’ve seen plenty of selfish and glib politicians who get their comeuppance, and it’s a bit of a shallow archetype - we didn’t have much more to Shrue other than their role in their plot and a bit of a ‘This is Tommy Carcetti from The Wire, in a fantasy world’ biography sketched out to them.

But a talented actor really can elevate your writing and obscure the flaws, and Sarah does such a brilliant job across this episode.

There are a ton of line readings from them that I loved, but the one where Shrue sceptically and nervously chuckles, “We should call someone…probably my office, right?” is maybe my favourite. It’s such a small moment on the page, but it’s very funny and it shades in so much about the character and their disconnect with their own responsibilities.

And then we end up with this impassioned and fairly decent monologue at the end, which is so far removed but which doesn’t feel alien to the character as portrayed.

33:50

This bit here at the end with “I’ll take that hurt on” is quite important to the wider themes of the season, I think - Shrue attempting to essentially position themselves as a sacrifice. To reclaim the harm that they’ve suffered, to define it as a personal attack upon themselves, with the hope of preventing it from being used in a nationalistic narrative and continue the cycle of violence.

And ultimately, they fail, because the harm itself is far less important than the story and the narrative lesson that grows around it.

36:12

I think a lot of the jingoism in this episode is universal, but this specific note at the end here - a politician pretending that some ancient, rusted tanks from the last century could be used in an upcoming war, in a cheap and naked bid to old imperial nostalgia - was meant to be a very British sort of stupidity.

It’s obviously being implied that Barbeau set up the entire attack to try and take Shrue out while justifying the case for war, but that’s not something we’re going to treat as a big conspiracy or villain to be unmasked, a la State of Play and all of those noughties thrillers where the military-industrial complex gets dragged out into the open by plucky truth-tellers at the end.

There’s a right-wing hawk in the background of this story doing monstrous things, but there’s nothing exceptional about her and proving that she did it would change absolutely nothing, so we’re not going to even bother focusing on her.

36:28

Originally this episode was going to be number 5, with the Paige/Hayward/Hembry ep coming afterwards, followed by an episode where we see what’s been happening with Faulkner.

But then this end section felt too much like a confusing and slightly unfair tease - we see that Faulkner’s on the road, but then psych! Next episode is actually about Hayward! So we swapped them around, which I think was the right call.