The Silt Verses Chapter 20: 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

When I wrote this one I was convinced that it was going to be the best episode of the first half of the season.

Then I listened back to it and I instantly thought, ‘I’ve fucked this one up,’ and felt sick to my stomach for about a week. ‘When this comes out, we’re done. Done.’

(This is hilarious given the themes of the ep.)

And after a few more listens, I’m probably personally floating somewhere in the middle, but since writing up this commentary as a draft I’ve already seen a few people online saying it’s their favourite episode, so what do I know? Absolutely nothing, that’s what.

The performances are, I think, absolutely fantastic - a huge shout-out to the incredible David Ault in particular who carries so much of it on his shoulders! - but there are a couple of rough writing patches in the dialogue and plotting which I’m not so happy with, and I think the constant repetition (and occasional contrast) of the narration and dialogue/SFX actually works more a lot more smartly in script form than it does to my ear.

Anyway.

2:36

We originally had Hayward being interrupted by an angry (and anti-Peninsulan) cafe owner but we ran out of time and voice actors and it was just my voice as a placeholder, and at a certain point it starts to feel noticeable that Muna and I are constantly running around in the background filling out the extras.

2:40

The episode is a chamber piece or a bottle episode, other than the two bookends which just check in with Hayward and Carpenter - which I was really interested in doing anyway.

We’ve had all these action-heavy and SFX-heavy episodes with way too many voice-actors that have preceded it this season, and while I think audio-dramas can occasionally default too readily to ‘a few characters bickering / bantering in a room for 20 minutes and that’s the episode’, I also really admire the craft of having a single location and tension and trying to hold the audience’s attention from there.

But equally, as we’ve progressed away from relatively narration-heavy writing to a far more dialogue-focused way of writing in Season 2, I was particularly keen to bash the two elements together and bounce them off each other, feeling out the differences between the controlling narration and the looser dialogue / SFX (and just having a chance to describe a good super-weird monster again? Feels good).

4:20

David Ault moderated a panel that Muna and I were on back in October last year at London Podcast Festival and he said he’d be keen to work with us! We adored his work in NoSleep and Shadows At The Door, of course, so when we had the script for this episode written up with this bizarre and juicy part, it felt very obvious that we’d want to ask him if he could take it on.

5:14

There’s a mistake here, I realised retrospectively - originally Paige’s company was given as ‘Old Black Crow’, but I think we ended up tweaking that to ‘Black Crow Incorporated’ back in Season 1, Episode 7. But we revert to ‘OBC’ here as an acronym. D’oh.

11:59

I think there’s a real problem you get into when you’re far enough into a show like this, when it comes to not making your characters seem like idiots because the audience’s instincts are so well-honed and heightened.

As listeners, we know full well that something horrible is afoot from the beginning and we do expect the characters to keep up with that. So maybe Paige takes a bit too long in this episode to grasp that Hembry is not simply having delusions alone in his apartment, on that basis…?

12:59

On a couple of levels, I guess this is an episode specifically about episodical entertainment, in the form of the nightly plays/sacrifices that Hembry puts on within his apartment.

With Hembry I was trying to get across a hysterical version of my own personal state of anxiety whenever we put an episode of the show out (no matter how often we put an episode out!), the desperate desire to get a good reaction and some applause, the increasingly unhinged belief that every episode needs to be better and bigger than the last one to keep generating the same reaction, more dramatic, with more deaths and more horror…

…it’s very deliberate that Hembry’s in supreme, authorial control of the action but he is also utterly helpless and living in fear of the collective observer that’s endowed him with this power (which he thinks of as one singular entity and one consensus, but which is clearly many different creatures).

So he’s a writer or a director, really, rather than an actor.

He’s quite comparable to David Ward from I Am In Eskew in that sense, in that both characters are living out anxieties about performing in the correct way to get the correct reaction from the world around them.

But then to follow on from that, it’s also very much an episode about side characters and their disposability, and the habits that I’d noticed myself getting into while writing the series.

Because after all, how can you sincerely write ‘humanistic’ horror, about flawed individuals who we’re meant to care about and who we’re meant to root for as they struggle against this murderous system that treats people as disposable sacrifices…

…when at the same time, every episode, we’re offering up these side characters as disposable sacrifices to the narrative as a kind of punctuation, as a punchline to get eaten by the monster of the week?

So Hembry plays on that, because he *is* the side character who has no future in the wider narrative, who only exists to get devoured, or to become a monster who gets defeated, at the end of the episode - although he also misinterprets the staging of the story, believing that he’s the star and Hayward and Paige are ultimately the disposable victims.

And so I suppose Paige’s insistence on not treating Hembry as a threat, a lost cause, or something to be fought - appealing again and again to him with empathy, patience and humanity until she finally gets through - is supposed to be a political act in itself according to those terms.

It’s an act of revolt against the setting’s way of life, as well as an act of revolt against the episode’s story structure. 

…or we could argue that she’s simply trying to talk him down because she needs to figure out how to get the books off him, of course, and she uses that to basically puppeteer him at the end while insisting that he’s the one in control. There’s a bit of wiggle room there for a less straightforwardly heroic interpretation.

13:30

Originally when Hembry insists that Paige can’t leave, he had a line about ‘needing to maintain the unity of place’, but we thought that was maybe a nudge and a wink too far.

17:22

This isn’t in any way a spoiler, but there comes a point in mapping out the character arcs where you’re very aware of how the characters are perceived now as you’re wondering about who lives and who dies, and when (if Hayward dies now, will people actually care? Will they cheer?).

So there’s a bit of a tease in having Hembry deliver his own audience commentary on both Hayward - who he sees as a bit of an unlikeable joke who can safely die at any point - and Paige - who he sees as sympathetic but doomed, a good vessel for a tragic ending.

And of course, Paige rejects this again by insisting that Hayward, too, should not be treated as disposable.

27:00

I was vaguely thinking here of a production of Titus Andronicus we went to see years ago at the Globe where they did the trick of using a ton of red ribbons for grand guignol scenes.

It was the height of summer, and people in the standing audience kept on fainting and being carried out on stretchers (just toppling like dominoes every ten minutes or so) because it was so hot out in the sun, and the Globe then used that as PR in all the press to show how gory and effective the production was.

If you ever put on Titus Andronicus, my advice is to keep people standing and turn the thermostat up.

30:00

I think we could have emphasised it more, but there’s obviously a point to be made that the positive, affirmative lesson Paige seems to demonstrate at the end of the episode (that she can assert her will on reality, and make things better for those around her, by seizing control of the narrative) may not be the only rational conclusion to the story (we might instead note that Hembry, someone who’s always had the literal power to reshape reality around him at will, is still trapped in a one-dimensional and confining existence by that power).

31:10

I wrote Hembry’s ending as cathartic, but listening back, I think it might actually be interpretable as a misguided act of self-destruction - the Watcher in the Wings hasn’t taken any action against him and he still doesn’t seem to know what it’s capable of doing (if anything).

He’s raging against the expectations he believes that his audience has, and he’s raging against the fact that he’s observed.