The Silt Verses 2.3: 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.)

So this episode is a bit more of a romp, obviously! It’s broader, it’s more comedic and action-driven, sort of a splattery farce.

And that was very deliberate, I suppose with the exact opposite reasoning for having Carpenter’s reintroduction as a moment of respite.

Hayward and Paige were the characters who we set out to give clearer arcs to in Season 2, with the sense that something crucial was missing for them in S1.

We’d introduced Hayward as this Pentheus / Sergeant Howie character, the avatar of the self-satisfied establishment, and since then he’s acted as a largely ineffectual antagonist to Carpenter and Faulkner while getting a bit of a lesson in humility, and without ever doing anything particularly awful or immoral himself (compared to the relative standard of the show, at least.)

And that’d be a dangerous place to keep treading water in, because you have a character who’s been established without much power or impact who almost serves as a repeating speed-bump to the action - a minor Saturday morning cartoon villain, or a Skyler from Breaking Bad, say - and that’s when the character starts to feel tiresome and not worthy of our time.

“Oh, here we go again, Hayward is shaking his fist at the sky as Carpenter escapes…”

So Hayward needed a reset to give him some renewed agency and a change of conditions, and a fun setpiece where we can fully enjoy our time spent with him.

We also just wanted to flex a bit, I think, with a standalone adventure that sits in its own environment.

At a certain point some of these characters’ paths are going to intersect and we’re going to have to focus on their longer-term storylines and emotional journeys above all, so before we get to that moment we wanted to just take a breath and go berserk.

0:00

Originally the script here called for a sort of Edgar Wright montage - a whoosh of cell doors closing, car sirens, etc, as Paige narrates them - but I think that ends up feeling a bit redundant in audio and certainly a lot less elegant than it does on film. (I don’t really even like the clunk of the spade when Carpenter mentions the clunk of the spade last episode!)

I think it’s nice to get the sense of her travelling home and reflecting instead, and I absolutely love Lucy’s line-read on ‘Home’, with all of the implied tenderness and pain and emptiness that coming home again can give us.

1:12

Something notable is that characters start referring to the Linger Straits occasionally as the ‘Consolidated Linger Straits’ or 'CLS' in this season.

This is a minor tweak to cover our backs so we have an alternative way of quickly communicating the country’s name in dialogue.

Because this is an audio medium, after all, and if characters in the Peninsula spend the next thirteen episodes saying lines like ‘We have no choice but to declare war on the Straits!’ it might start to get a little distracting and, dare I say it, funny.

5:15

In Muna’s tannoy announcement here, there’s a very quick jokey suggestion of some kind of god of neat and speedy shelf replenishment that essentially sets its horrific servants loose in the supermarkets after closing time to rearrange the store.

I imagine you’d see a lot of this in the world of The Silt Verses. Labour shortage? Create a god to fix the problem. God eats staff who don’t obey the rules or get locked in the store. Labour shortage worsens. Increase the worship of said god.

6:00

We met Pip Gladwin, who plays Gren, when he very kindly stepped in to get horribly murdered as our live-performance Gareth at the London Podcast Festival last year, so it only seemed right to try and one-up his previous fate. (We also met the amazing Sarah Griffin there, who live-performed Charity - you’ve heard them as Shrue and you’ll hear them in So Long, Good Luck in the near future!)

Pip also appears in - amongst other things - the incredible Wooden Overcoats, where I understand he didn’t die in awful conditions quite so often.

6:25

This is the first episode I did all the sound design for myself from scratch, which was incredibly foolhardy in terms of time management, but I really wanted to give it a go and I hugely enjoyed and valued the experience.

Your amazing Patreon support has really helped with that (thank you!!) as we’ve been able to afford some extra audio tools to make the whole thing quicker and hopefully sound better.

But it also means you can re-evaluate the scene composition with a lot more depth - when you’re actively working up the audio yourself, you have a lot more space and flexibility to consider what might have been missing in the script directions (large or small) and revisit it.

A very minor example: originally we just had Hayward standing in stupefied silence, which is a hard thing to convey over audio. So instead we have him dropping the cans he’s meant to be stacking, which is very much in-character.

8:35

Something I adore which I’m seeing more and more in modern TV shows in recent years is knowing how and when to flex the tone unexpectedly and dramatically into comedy or surrealism or horror for a single episode or scene without undermining the overall piece.

I’m thinking of Barry and its brilliant, off-kilter extended fight-scene episode in Season 2, and Bojack Horseman’s many tonal swerves, or Twin Peaks: The Return, or even the elegant balancing act right now of Our Flag Means Death, which convinces us to care about its characters’ emotions and relationships even while it’s constantly reminding us via anachronistic humour and modern speech that none of this is real.

So I think there are some other very blatant points of reference for this episode - Parasite, Ready or Not, Knives Out, Get Out, that entire broadly-defined but consistently brilliant sub-genre of ‘outsider enters into an enclave of the wealthy: social commentary, chaos and collapse then ensue’.

But I was probably cribbing more from Teddy Perkins in Season 2 of Atlanta, where you have this wonderful shaggy-dog narrative that begins with a menial, everyday arrangement, and then gets more and more absurd and horrible as soon as the protagonist sets foot in the mansion. 

It’s the notion of the wealthy host's house as a space with its own twisted logic where the usual rules of reality don’t apply and the host's eccentricities dictate the terms of every interaction.

10:14

A huge shout-out to Mintaka Angell, who’s absolutely brilliant and we love working with! I don’t feel like we’ve given Felix enough juicy lines, but in particular Mintaka’s line reading on ‘Don’t call my fucking house. Ever again’ is just wonderful and way above the quality of what was written on the page.

12:59

Hayward wants Gren to turn vigilante with him - he’s still looking for a partner! A partner who understands him! I find that a bit sad.

13:30

We heard Shogo and Michelle, who wonderfully play the monstrous Mr and Mrs Kensey, in The Secret of St Kilda (which also has cults and which also stars Méabh de Brún!), which you should definitely listen to if you haven’t already.

14:18

There’s a minor running joke in bad 90s-00s Owen Wilson comedies - which I can only assume is because it’s a bit that he personally loves - where a character will try and discuss a niche topic with him and he’ll pretend to understand he's familiar with what they're talking about by enthusiastically turning the last set of nouns he’s heard into an acronym. (e.g. “I'm going to the Rhode Island School of Design.” “Ah, RISDEE! Fantastic.”)

I don’t know why that's stuck with me, but I meant Gren’s cheerful response here, where he clearly isn't keeping track of all the instructions, as a tribute to that gag.

15:22

I’m a sucker for eerie knocking pipes in haunted-house stories - whether it’s Shirley Jackson or Ghostwatch.

When I was younger, we once stayed for a long weekend at an old house where the pipes would knock all through the night, and it was terrifying, because there comes a point where rationality no longer feels sufficient. 

At 9pm, you know that it only sounds like someone walking up and down the corridor outside your bedroom, but by 2am, you no longer know anything for certain.

16:15

A couple of years back, we were watching a pretty terrible YouTube reality show, whose name I've long since forgotten.

It was the sort of show where they sit couples down in front of a fake therapist and a camera to discuss their problems and all of the drama comes bubbling out, etc.

And there was one absolutely fascinating guy on the couch. He dressed incredibly well, he was in great shape and well put-together, and he explained himself with a huge amount of confidence as someone who was a life coach and nutritionist ‘to high net-worth individuals.’

His girlfriend was getting more and more fed up with him. Because these ‘high net-worth individuals’ were such a suspiciously all-consuming presence in his life, and the exact nature of the services he provided to them was so unclear.

It was starting to wreck their relationship. He couldn’t spend any money with her, because he needed to keep himself in good clothes and in good shape to impress his high net-worth clients. He couldn’t spend any time with her, because he needed to take his high net-worth clients to nightclubs and fancy restaurants to remain in their favour.

She couldn’t figure it out: was he having an affair? Was he scamming the clients? What, exactly, was his deal?

My impression of him was much sadder than that. 

Beyond the bravado, I thought he genuinely had a few rich clients/'friends' who he thought he was building something mutually-beneficial with - when it was clear that in fact he was dangerously dependent upon them. 

He was continually losing most of the money he was making and spending all of his free time just on maintaining these relationships where he was acting as a paid friend and entourage member, when he could be dropped by any of them in a heartbeat.

(Inevitably I think the show came out, he saw a lot of criticism online, and he declared that he’d been just ‘playing a character’, then encouraged everyone to follow him on Instagram.)

And this isn’t to judge, because none of us are immune to that mindset - especially when we’re all doing extra gigs and side hustles on the internet, and it’s wonderful and great and fulfilling and we feel like we’re doing well for ourselves by making some extra cash and building a profile, but we are becoming hopelessly dependent on huge platforms and companies that lack even the basic regulation of regular employment, and all of it could vanish in a heartbeat for reasons beyond our control.

Anyway, you watch something like that, a real-life human being being pushed into a smaller and smaller box by his circumstances while insisting that he’s coming out on top.

And then you watch the fictional bit in Parasite where the housekeeper’s husband bashes his head in against a light switch in obeisance to the house’s owner in the belief that he's offering value, and you just think: yeah, sometimes you do need a sledge-hammer to get across how horrible and self-destructive this all is. (Or some kind of blunt-force trauma, at any rate.)

So Gren is meant to be an expression of that, and I see him very much as the sad and absurd heart to this episode, rather than the obviously murderous aristos - the character who is so convinced that he’s being savvy and hustling and climbing up the social ladder that he fails to spot the very clear signs that everyone else can notice, and he serves himself up on a silver platter to be hurt, humiliated and ultimately destroyed.

He’s a kind of distinct opposite to Vaughan in Chapter 7 (and in many ways I think the eps are very comparable), who knew that they were doomed but had no way out.

15:20

Nobody’s ever going to mistake the Kenseys for subtle, grounded villains, but we tried to make them at least banal and human in their monstrosity. (One little detail I liked in this scene - Mr Kensey looks for empathy and shared understanding in terms of home renovation costs from someone he wouldn’t share a bathroom with.)

17:37
I really thought we made the reality of Hayward’s marital status crystal clear in this episode, but so far it doesn’t seem like that’s the case from the reactions I've seen online, so screw it: we’re throwing in all kinds of red herrings and wild contradictions from this point on.

18:40

Grouping the three best-known fossil fuels together as a holy trinity in a way that makes sense for a multi-national energy company expanding its reach, but which makes total nonsense out of the actual nature of the god, is just me making myself laugh and nobody else.

21:40

Muna likes Hayward as a person more than I do - although Jimmie’s performance is just fucking godly, episode after episode, and I think he deserves way more credit! He’s so human! So funny! And just a brilliant, warm, wonderful person to work with! - which is mainly because I think I intended him partly as a parodic self-portrait in terms of being a walking disaster zone.

But also, credit to the character where it's due this episode. He has a reliable nose for when someone can’t be trusted! If he’s in a bad situation, his first instinct is to try and get other people out with him! He tries to help Mrs Kensey and Gren even when they probably don’t deserve it!

23:30

The Glooming Guest is the element of this episode that I’m least happy with - it does feel too pat in terms of how quickly and conveniently it’s introduced and then shows up at the end as a deus ex machina to wrap things up, although I think Siobhan does a lovely job here with the monologue.

I also think Gramma Kensey’s swift and triumphant victory over the Petropater creates the unchallenged implication that we should consider it a ‘better’ or fairer god than her son’s, when the background details actually make it clear that this can’t really be the case. (Regardless of whether her husband did allow himself to be sacrificed in order to keep his mine running, his family ended up with the legacy as a result.)

We could probably have done with another scene between her and her son ahead of time to set up her decision to abandon that legacy, too.

But I’m not going to be too hard on myself here - it’s a busy episode, a massively long script with too many characters, and the Kenseys’ doom needed to ultimately come at their own hands rather than Hayward's, that sense of a debt come due.

28:00

I’m not sure how much listeners enjoy it, but sometimes I personally have a great time aiming for the sweet spot between ‘horrified gasp’ and ‘shocked laughter.’ To me, this is a funny scene above all, because it just keeps getting worse and worse.

I love the splat of Gren’s stomach skin just being tossed to one side, I love the fireworks going off at the end. It’s completely gross and so over-the-top.

A few months after writing this scene, I coincidentally saw mention of (I think) a South Korean gangster movie which also features someone getting hot coals fed into their body, but I’ve tried to avoid looking into it any further. I’d like to keep pretending this was an original concept.

The strings are also probably worth noting - they weren’t in the original script, and I think the music adds a lot by following (or undermining) the action as it plays out, but it’s also very helpful in concealing the seams in the crowd reactions. You can only do so much with standard SFX for something like this.

31:33

So it’s worth noting - we were very deliberate (and will go on to be very deliberate) about not putting too many cultural signifiers in place to distinguish the Linger Straits and the Peninsula.

The Straits are obviously portrayed as more highly-developed and technologically advanced, they have a working public transport system…but there’s no accent, language difference, or recurring phrases used to mark either one out as the ‘foreign country’.

Clearly there is some difference that allows Kensey to recognise Hayward as a Peninsulan, but we as listeners don’t have access to that.

The show’s characters are going to spend a lot of time this season discussing the fact that they believe there are unresolvable differences between the two nations. But we wanted the show’s background language itself to disagree with that and focus on the fact that…these countries are actually very much the same, and exist under the same multi-national system of governance. (We also wanted to avoid getting into Fantasy France territory where one country feels like the ‘foreign’ one with all the baggage that comes with that.)

But I’ll be really interested to see whether that comes across, or whether people do start to get confused about who’s on which side of the border.

32:29

This is a silly little cameo for me, but after our first listen, we really liked the idea of Mr Kensey’s ultimate indignity being the fact that his guests weren’t actually all that impressed by his hard work. (We then added in the extra scene where a few of them leave early and he has a little scream into the night.)

It’s also an in-joke about putting out anything creative, and the anxious terror that what you’ll end up with is a bit of a shrug. (‘I mean, it was fine’ is what I fear reading, week after week.)

34:10

This is definitely my favourite scene - I think it feels like the logical culmination of the absurdity and awfulness and slapstick of the entire episode, with Hayward as almost a Looney Tunes / Max in Fury Road anti-action hero, scampering to keep alive.

And a ton of credit needs to go to Michelle Kelly here, who pulls off ‘ridiculous human being has their throat impaled on a prawn skewer while still being more outraged than terrified’ far better than we could have dreamed of. Hopefully it was fun to perform!

35:18

If we’d had more time and resource, one big regret is that we didn’t go back and add in another short scene here where we hear the musicians zipping up their cases and getting the hell out of the mansion (presumably giving up on their tips) before Hayward enters.

It’s a loose end and I wish we could have found out what they were thinking once they’d wrapped up their performance.

35:54

We had a narration sequence in place for this scene originally, where Hayward describes what’s happened to Gren and the ensuing struggle, and we ended up cutting it.

We lose a bit of physical description of Gren’s condition that way, but it means we more neatly bookend Hayward’s adventure with narration on either side, and it genuinely is a lovely, cheering feeling when you have enough confidence to realise for the first time, “Oh! We can actually get this across through sound effects alone!”

I’m also certain I’ve seen or read another horror story where a tormented prisoner counter-intuitively prevents their own rescue by calling for their captor, because it doesn’t feel original to me - but off the top of my head, I don’t know what it was.

40:00

I think we’re going to have more consistent episode lengths this season (35-45 minutes across the board as opposed to 30-60), but it really is a fool’s game trying to standardise the runtimes when you have a mix of action, dialogue and narration - narration being the big lengthener and one that has wildly varying speeds depending on the VA.

I was convinced that this episode was going to be a solid hour and yet we ended up with a pretty lean 40 minutes? I’m sorry, how did that happen?!