The Silt Verses Chapter 19: 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

I’m a pacifist, but I’m also very angry. And the older I get, the more I have to reckon with the limitations of my beliefs to enact change in an unjust and power-led world…particularly on a day when you wake up to news as wretched as today’s.

I also think that one of the key messages of Crime and Punishment, one that I deeply and passionately believe in - that even the killing of the most horrible human being can never be a purely moral action because of its harmful impact on the killer - is widely and dangerously misapplied when it appears in in popular fiction.

In a great many narratives, pacifism is prominent but it's highly selective. It’s a crutch to prove that the protagonist has retained their humanity, usually right at the end of the film, by having them wrestle with their anger before sparing the life of one specific, named and significant antagonist who absolutely does deserve to die. (However, less important antagonists who are unidentified, in massive groups, or who die quickly off-camera can be slaughtered in bulk without ever diminishing the character’s heroism).

You have Gandalf wisely declaring that Frodo does not have the moral authority to choose who should live and who should die before twirling about in circles to murder dozens of orcs with a cool sword-staff combo.

You have countless action-movie goodies massacring their way through hordes of henchmen before they get to the snivelling plutocrat villain and then some voice of reason pops up to declare, “No! He has to stand trial.” “If you kill him, you’ll be just like him!”

And you have the hideous Rose in Get Out, whose lack-of-fate was tackled in Professor Kinitra Brooks’ mini-essay, What Becky Gotta Do To Get Merked?

Now, as a trope, this stuff is as old as time, and I understand that it goes all the way back to the Aeneid and beyond: codes of heroic honour, the importance of respecting surrendering foes and non-combatants, etc.

But in a global society where the worst consequences of our actions often do impact people who are unseen, unnamed and at a remove from our lives, and where any radical social progress would have a harmful impact on celebrity-aligned political and corporate figures who are very much seen, named, and ever-present in our lives…I think this sort of stuff does its own quiet kind of harm.

Over and over, we’re repeating the lesson to ourselves that indirect, mass or out-of-focus harm to faceless alien hordes doesn’t come with any personal cost to the hero’s soul, but if the hero stabs the individual billionaire, conqueror or tyrant at the big action climax, that’s an act of ruinous moral decay to themselves and a step too far. 

What does that lesson do to our moral instincts?

So. We were interested in an episode that throws out a bunch of different forms of harm - direct and indirect, deliberate and accidental - and then plays around with how we should measure them against one another, and what responses are available to us - without trying to offer any concrete answers.

Is Eliza's fate better or worse than the saints who are more grotesquely transformed and retain less of themselves? Is Carpenter right to believe that this in particular is an act too far? Is Wharfing better off abandoning Eliza - or killing her, even - rather than hanging around and accidentally tormenting her further? 

Do we feel Alf’s fate less sympathetically than Helen’s because he’s a bit of a dick, even though they’re both complicit? Was it cruel of Helen to let Eliza live in the first place? How much more culpable is Helen than, say, Paige? Did Carpenter’s actions make a positive difference to anybody, including herself? 

How does Carpenter’s treatment of Alf compare to Mercer and Gage’s treatment of the schoolteacher two episodes ago? On the other hand, when does peacefulness become passivity that plays into the hands of the people doing harm?

I don’t have a confident answer to any of this stuff, and while we wanted it to be clear that Carpenter’s actions do come with a cost and a weight to them, we also wanted it to be perfectly valid if someone’s ultimate takeaway from this ep is just, “You know what? Good. They deserved what they got."

3:00

We could probably have given ourselves a bit of extra buzz by announcing Jonny Sims’ appearance in advance, but that also probably wouldn’t have been very fair in terms of setting expections, given that his character doesn't show up until 15 minutes from the end and then gets murdered.

After Cole from The Town Whispers, Jonny is the second audiodrama horror creator to play a character who goes down like this, of course, and it was a ton of fun working with him on it. (Fourth if you count Muna and me playing background characters who keep on dying…?)

5:14

Huge shout-out to the amazing Daphne Nitsuga, who really shows her range here. (She also plays Mercer, of course, who’s basically as far from Eliza character-wise as you can get.)

6:08

Originally, we’d planned for a disciple of the god of time to join Carpenter on her journey from Acantha's house, and that character would have filled Wharfing’s role as the voice of non-violence and hope that Eliza can be cured.

Once we scrapped that character, Brother Wharfing felt like an obvious fit for the part: he’s a healer, of course, and by nature likely to be itinerant, but he also feels thematically similar to Acantha as someone who tries to undo the harmful consequences of society from a position on society’s margins.

It’s another opportunity for Carpenter to consider that a faith that's built on compassion and decency, but it’s also an implicit challenge to the life that Acantha proposed for her in Episode 2 - burying the corpses as they wash up from the government’s experiments further up the coast. Is that really what she wants to do? Will that truly give her peace when the world outside the garden walls is so awful?

And while we're on the topic, a huge congrats to Caleb Del Rio, who won an Audioverse Award for ‘Best Guest Performer in A New Production’ for his performance of Brother Wharfing in Season 1!

6:14

In retrospect, I can’t picture Carpenter’s line ‘Brother…Brother Wharfing?!’ without thinking of the ‘Beyonce?!’ meme, and I don’t know what to do with that feeling.

6:55

The implication here is very much meant to be that Wharfing has taken so much harm into himself by this point that he’s now struggling to carry out physical activities by himself. His selflessness and his kindness does come with its own cost.

7:57

I personally do have that tortured relationship with the hairdresser - where there’s the peaceful bliss of the silence and the soft, repetitive sounds, but also the absolute terror of having to make small talk for half an hour with a stranger without embarrassing yourself and no possibility of escape - where I’d long for a god of silence to make its home there. So this little bit of dialogue is 100% just for me.

9:00

It wasn’t intentional, but I think Eliza’s situation has a lot in common with the child from Bolvangar who the heroes encounter in Northern Lights/The Golden Compass, who cannot be comforted or reached by any of them and who somehow feels separate from humanity - I remember that scene horrified me when I read it as a kid.

There are also a couple of similarities with the psychic driving experiments/torture committed by Ewan Cameron and the MKUltra programme, which I remembered only recently from Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine - as Helen notes later in the episode, the scientists here are breaking their victims down chemically and psychologically to make them susceptible, empty vessels for new gods.

17:10

We don’t go into it, but Carpenter of course has her own reasons why harm committed towards a child in the name of a god, the abandonment of a child, and the loss of that child’s family, all hit her particularly hard.

18:44

In the original script, Brother Wharfing hears the thunder overhead and mutters, “Looks like there’s a storm coming.” 

CLUNK, CLUNK, CLUNK. We took it out, and I quite like him just grumbling quietly to himself as the rain falls instead.

18:49

We’re very much into the second-act familiarity of the wider show at this point - I’ve written about that before and what it means for horror and dramatic tension in an episodic show (i.e. nothing good).

We understand that Carpenter is competent, that her story has a direction to it, and that she won’t suddenly die to a side-quest four episodes into Season 2. This creates safety and therefore predictability.

And as a writer, you have to try and come up with ways to tell exciting and tense episodic stories with genuine stakes, without getting into the formula of introducing a new disposable supporting character who can be killed off by the monster 30 minutes later, over and over again, while allowing the protagonist to keep on triumphing and surviving.

So another of the main reasons for writing this episode was to try and mix things up structurally by making Carpenter the monster and the source of fear. The script directions spelled that out very firmly, in fact - the first half sets up the stakes, and then the second half is literally a slasher movie with Carpenter as the killer.

Also, we didn’t intend it that way, but I do like that the perspective shift does happen almost precisely at the halfway mark of the episode.

19:13

A ton of praise needs to go to both Jonny Sims and Carmella Brown - if we’re just gleefully waiting for these scientists to be killed off, the episode doesn’t work, but I think they do a fantastic job of giving their characters a lot of humanity and sympathy in just a short time.

Carmella’s also appearing as one of the lead roles in our upcoming So Long, Good Luck, and we can’t wait for you to hear their performance in that as well!

19:36

Alf is introduced knocking at the door, and he dies knocking on the glass. Ho ho ho.

There are actually a couple of recurring elements throughout S2, which keep occurring in different contexts and with different significances depending on how the characters respond to them, and which both appear in this episode: someone pleading for mercy or help and knocking noises to signify the arrival of an ally or a threat. 

It doesn’t necessarily have a grand unified meaning behind it, but it’s worth keeping an eye out for.

25:46

The second half of this episode has quite a lot - axe included - in common with Shane Meadows’ revenge-thriller Dead Man's Shoes, starring Paddy Considine.

There’s a moment in that movie that’s always baffled me, where Considine’s character threatens the small-time criminals he’s stalking by menacingly painting the words ‘Cheyne Stoking’ on the wall.

Cheyne Stoking is the breathing pattern that can be experienced in terminally sick patients as they approach death.

I had no idea what that meant when I watched the movie, and presumably neither do the villains in the film, so it’s just a very funny and unhelpfully erudite threat for the character to be making.

Carpenter is much more straightforward.

(If we’re going to quibble - how long has this storm been going on for that she’s been able to accurately count every one of the scientists working at the station? Ssssh.)

28:04

I think I wrote this while forgetting what a ‘tannoy’ actually is, but apparently the Tannoy company does also produce two-way communications systems, so maybe it still accidentally holds up.

32:30

Carpenter’s footsteps actually appear in this scene as she sneaks up behind Helen. They’re inaudible, but they’re there (you can also hear the squeak of the gate).

38:40

‘Nothing should be borne forever’ in Wharfing’s prayer nods to the fact that he may be praying for Carpenter to find relief from her accumulated anger, trauma and guilt as much as for Eliza.