Silt Verses 2.2: 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

This was a bit of a nerve-wracking episode for me, in all honesty. (Muna points out that I find a reason to get nervous about every single episode, which is fair).

I feel like the internet has really killed off ‘purity of the work’ sentiments along the lines of “oh, I simply don’t engage with critical feedback, it’s only a distraction” that I remember seeing amongst filmmakers and authors a lot when I was a kid, and I think that’s a grand net good. (Stuck-up bastards.)

But I also have to acknowledge that I think there are at least two big disadvantages to having an audience that’s very close and immediate and visible when you’re working on something.

One: when you’re looking over collective opinions, you’ll see a pattern emerging; a few particular character aspects or moments being discussed repeatedly because folks enjoy those aspects the most.

And because you’re a greedy clown dancing for pennies, that incentivises you to emphasise those aspects more, because of course you want to get more of that same reaction in future.

But, of course, that’s going to wreck the character, flattening them out and turning them into a caricature of themselves.

And, relatedly, you’re going to see the biggest response and buzz around the dramatic water-cooler moments, twists, and action scenes - so of course you want to generate more of those moments.

But again, if you work too hard to replicate that response, you’re going to end up with a shouty, flashy show of dramatic moments with nothing in between.

So this episode was nerve-wracking because it is - for the most part - a quiet episode.

Nothing hugely dramatic happens: we focus on establishing the faith of the Cairn Maiden, eventually creating an inciting incident to get Carpenter back on the road, and before we do that, giving her a space to breathe and recover.

And that terrifies you, because you don’t want to bore anyone in the second episode of a new season.

But it also felt essential to give Carpenter that space as a starting point for her journey in this season, because she (rightly) was everyone’s favourite character from S1, but I definitely felt she was in the most danger of turning into a meme in my head, and that was something I needed to course-correct on: resisting the urge to immediately surrender to the internal cry of give the show more angry, violent, terse heroics!

Taking some time to re-establish her humanity and her emotional state - effectively after a very dramatic loss-of-faith - felt crucial to give her room to grow from here.

It also probably feels a lot less important all these months on, but I wrote this episode shortly after the climax of Season 1 aired. At the time, it really felt like she deserved a fucking break, an episode where nothing particularly horrible happens to her and she gets to sleep a bit.

This has turned into a big rant. Let’s get on with the commentary!

0:19

It’s not exactly an uncommon political tactic these days, but I was thinking specifically of David Cameron as UK Prime Minister when Shrue speaks here.

His advisors had very obviously told him to sternly respond to any challenging interview questions with words along the lines of “Look. Let me be extremely clear,” which became a useful tell whenever he was about to lie or equivocate. Shrue does the same here.

3:06

One of the ways we tried to get around the risk that this would feel like a ‘waiting for them to get to the fireworks factory’ episode was to really try and emphasise the peace and quiet of Acantha’s lych-house; to hopefully make it feel like a paradise to the listener as much as it does for Carpenter. So we take a bit of time here with the waves and the seagulls.

3:34

I’m not sure the casual ear will be able to tell, but Sarah Golding actually showed up to the recording session with her nostrils plugged, to more effectively play Acantha here with an injured nose.

It was easily one of my favourite recording-session moments from the show so far, up there with the amazing Daisy Bilenkin, who arrived for Episode 4’s recording with real animal jawbone earrings as talismans to play Charity.

We also agreed on a West Country accent for Acantha, which I liked because it’s where both sets of my grandparents are originally from. I find it quite touching and lovely listening to that voice!

9:10

If any past or future references to the Peninsula’s geography make nonsense out of Acantha’s assessment that she’s a hundred miles south-west from Glottage and maybe a hundred miles east from the White Gull river, then clearly the answer is that divine pollution has screwed with geographical reality, and also I’m sorry.

10:00

The Cairn Maiden is pretty unchanged from her mention in the Season 1 Lorebook, and Acantha even borrows a few phrases from that write-up.

I wrote up the idea of an itinerant god of death and ruin about halfway through the first season - I wasn’t thinking specifically of Appointment in Samarra, but I guess it’s quite similar in the sense that a perfectly sincere death-entity heading towards a destined place and time can be seen as a trickster or a hunter by the individual who’s trying to escape from that destiny - and I really loved it.

So the idea of having her as a prominent deity in S2 grew from there.

13:50

That’s Muna whispering as the Cairn Maiden!

Something small that irked me: I think in the foundational rules for the show, I originally wrote something like “Gods don’t speak, they only express themselves through visions and signs.”

“Speak” was definitely a poor choice of wording for an audio show (how else are you going to convey a vision, dingus?) - I don’t see this scene as breaking that rule necessarily, since it is very much a vision and not a conversation. But I accept that it’s a more direct divine communication for the listener than we’ve seen from the Trawler-man, who’s only been described as speaking.

I saw that as intended to convey the sense of a persistent god who lurks just over your shoulder - a figure who’s haunting you, rather than one you’re chasing - rather than to suggest that the Cairn Maiden is a deity who’s any more rational, human, or capable of explaining themselves.

15:20

There are times when a character just blithely speaks my own thoughts aloud and this line - “the vast majority of people perplex and terrify me” - is most definitely one of them.

18:12

It perhaps isn’t the tenderest thing in the world for Acantha to give the corpse (or her thigh?) a little wet slap here, but it really made me laugh and it feels in keeping with her no-nonsense pragmatism.

I also adore lychgates, incidentally. I understand that they’ve traditionally played a pragmatic role in allowing funeral processions to shelter during bad weather, etc, but I’m in love with the ritual aspect, the idea that there has to be an established threshold, a border crossing point, between the realms of the living and the dead.

19:12

For the Cairn Maiden’s prayer, I was really thinking about what I’d like to hear when I die, so the words here probably mean more to me than they will to most people.

But I think I probably also cribbed a little from The Handsome Family’s Far From Any Road, which shows up in the credits of True Detective Season 1, and which also finds wonder in the idea of being dismantled and dispersed by scavengers:

When the last light warms the rocks

And the rattlesnakes unfold

Mountain cats will come to drag away your bones

And rise with me forever

Across the silent sand

And the stars will be your eyes

And the wind will be my hands

21:50

So the idea of the corpse-saints singing, mindlessly relaying information from their past lives, and even infectiously ‘waking’ in distress from under the ground is influenced by a couple of older stories which I love - the traditional Japanese story of Hoichi, the musician who’s summoned to play for an audience of the dead in their graves, and an early Dostoevsky story called ‘Bobok’.

‘Bobok’ is a very uncharacteristic story for Dostoevsky, grotesque, comic and absurd - it’s usually taken to be a bit of a Gogol rip-off - and with a deeply unchristian representation of the afterlife. From within their graves, the corpses bicker, monologue, and obsess over their past lives - but the longer they rot and decay, the more they lose their compos mentis, becoming only able to whisper ‘bobok, bobok, bobok’ over and over, growing quieter and quieter until they can no longer be heard. I love it. It feels weirdly Beckettian in that representation of endless atrophy without resolution.

Oh, and I’m playing the Homesick Corpse here as well. Muna and I are filling in a few background voices between us throughout this season - the perils of trying to upscale your narrative - so hopefully it doesn’t become too obvious or distracting.

22:50

I was thinking about the famous bit from The Tempest for Carpenter’s description of the Corpse here, the transformation of the body into body-shaped natural elements. 

(Considering it, I wonder if that passage was also inspiration for the wonderful swimming-pool coral-corpse visual in the adaptation of Jeff Vandermeer’s Annihilation, which I don’t think appears in the original text.)

Full fathom five thy father lies;

Of his bones are coral made;

Those are pearls that were his eyes:

Nothing of him that doth fade,

But doth suffer a sea-change

Into something rich and strange.

25:43

In this scene, we reuse the ticking clock SFX from Faulkner’s encounter with Mason last episode, which isn’t (just) judicious use of sound effects - we wanted to draw a bit of an implicit parallel between the two parallel quests that are established here.

25:55

Originally we had a more violently dramatic inciting incident here: the lych-house is attacked, Carpenter fights them off, Acantha dies, Carpenter leaves her little paradise behind.

The thing is, there’s something uniquely grim about that trope - whether it’s in The Punisher, Game of Thrones, Rambo, or Acantha’s fellow Somersetian Solomon Kane  - where we watch a tough (usually male) character find peace and normality for a couple of scenes, and then they’re pushed too far or their mentor is killed, and we get a big cathartic explosion of violence. 

The fiction vaguely pretends to care about the hero ‘losing their soul’, but it’s absolutely a celebratory moment, a return to normality and murdering.

We wanted Carpenter’s story to be exactly the opposite; we didn’t want to wipe out that sense of character progress just to get her on the road again.

27:00

I sometimes see social media posts circulating in mythology circles online about the tragedy of the hero who outlives their own story.

I saw that as something interesting to be explored in Carpenter’s story this season, both as a character within the narrative who’s undergone a climactic ‘death’ at the end of the previous season and as a human being. When we have to start afresh, whether it’s after a break-up or a loss of faith or an addiction, we may all understandably feel that our story has already ended and we’re just lingering on beyond its natural conclusion.

27:10

There are so many reasons why we absolutely love working with Méabh, but in particular I want to pick out her extraordinary versatility when it comes to both monologue and dialogue (perks of being a talented actor and writer as well!).

She can hold your attention and interest for long sections of narration, but she can just as easily deliver a page’s worth of emotion with just a few lines. It really, really opens up the possibilities in the writing when you know you have that.

29:16

Another change from the original intention: we were going to have another guest at the lych-house, the disciple of a god of Time (whose adherents smoke hallucinogens to slow down or speed up its effects, and who hope to eventually conquer time entirely) who’d set out alongside Carpenter.

It was a fun concept, but in practice you just ended up with another sidekick to smoke Not-Weed and irritate Carpenter, and it didn’t feel needed or merited.

30:12

Acantha only mentions one of her cats eating her after she’s dead, which may strike us as slightly odd.

This is another tweak - at one point, Acantha was going to propose that Carpenter takes Ends on the road with her, to “watch something grow, and remember that you have it in you to do the same.”

I liked the sentiment, but agonised about whether it was just too impractical and twee to have a kitten with Carpenter on the road (and another example of essentially playing to the gallery). In the end, we cut it, and I sleep better at night thinking about it.

32:00

Méabh told us that there’s a comparable story in the Ulster Cycle - the hero Nera, who allows a corpse to climb upon his back and then sets out on an increasingly dark and bizarre journey to find it a drink of water and bring it peace - which I’d never read, but I absolutely loved the parallel!

As Carpenter’s final line suggests, I was thinking more of the journey of self-actualisation depicted in the Egyptian Book of the Dead, or the Book of Going Forth By Day, which remains my GOAT religious text. 

32:30

A huge shout-out to the very talented Cole Weavers of The Town Whispers, who plays both the Schoolteacher in this scene and one of the reporters in the episode’s prologue. You should definitely go and give his show a listen right here. 

This scene was originally written as a good bit longer, with schoolchildren present and an extended interrogation. But practical considerations aside, it felt unnecessary to drag out the cruelty - we know Mercer and Gage are bad people already!

34:00

I have always hated, hated, hated, scenes in film where a character is drowned and our perspective remains above the water’s surface, rather than following them under the water. (It doesn’t matter if it’s Funny Games, Get Carter, or Hook. Yes, even Hook makes me shudder.) 

I don’t mean this as a moral judgement - it’s a very effective directorial technique - but there’s something so incredibly sadistic and unkind about having the camera refuse to sympathise with the victim in their final moments, instead continuing on with the scene and treating them as something vanished and invisible and forgotten in the same seconds when they'll be dying offscreen.

So this death is a nod to the thing that horrifies me and it gives me the jitters, probably a lot more than other listeners, I’m sure.