Silt Verses Season 2.1: 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 think this opening scene is probably the weakest across the episode in terms of the reliance on narration to cover the choreography (I don’t know how you’d go about audio-engineering a squad of security guards and a politician stepping out of a distant van) which I think we smooth out a lot more as the episode goes on.

We also had to cut a fair bit out in order to balance the mix of narration and dialogue, and even now I think it still gets confusing here and there.

Part of me wishes that we’d just excised the scene completely and gone straight to the soldiers’ attack, for a real banger of an opener - but on the other hand, I like the imagery of these feral god-hunters just lazily hanging out in their compound full of bones, and it is useful to get sight of Shrue, who we’ll be returning to later in the season.

4:11

I think it’s also fun to set up the implied expertise of god-hunting as an art, and then ultimately, as we see, it isn’t like that at all. What Shrue is looking for is people ruthless and brutal enough to wipe the memory of a religion from the landscape.

5:24

Originally we couldn’t decide if Mercer and Gage should be a co-dependent couple or co-dependent siblings. There’s some interesting stuff you could do with them as a couple, and it seemed fun to introduce a pair of lovers to our existing mix of lonely and tormented individuals, but ultimately it felt too confining for the characters.

There’s a long history of co-dependent killer couples in fiction, and it comes with its own cliches and complications (if it’s a straight couple, you have to reckon with the tradition of Bonnie and Clyde, Natural Born Killers, Pumpkin and Honey Bunny. If it’s a queer couple, you have to consider the legacy of some pretty foul homophobic shit, like Mr Wint and Mr Kidd from Diamonds Are Forever, where their attunement is meant to signify something decadent and abnormal), as well as pitfalls in terms of where their story is going.

Having them as siblings gave us a bit more freedom to skip past all that, and it also gives a more interesting implicit backstory of how they got to this point.

I’m fascinated by cryptophasia - where twins develop a shared and secret language between themselves during childhood - and I do see Gage and Mercer as essentially a theological extrapolation of that: bonding together as children under unhappy circumstances, they’ve come up with their own god which belongs only to them, and which has come to define them.

It’s also a nod to my favourite co-dependent killers, Croup and Vandemar from Neverwhere, who have a similarly-confusing naming convention. (“If you’re brothers, shouldn’t you have the same last name?”)

6:31

We’re going to jump back and forth between different characters in these first few episodes, in order to catch up to the present day and get everyone onto the same timeline.

You might spot that there are a few recurring signifiers throughout the episodes (like the snow falling) to hopefully help convey when every scene is meant to be taking place.

8:20

One of my favourite character designs as a kid was the Soothsayer from Asterix, this wandering trickster who uneasily aligns himself with the Romans and wears a wolf’s head as a hood.

I think that connection was what I was unconsciously going for by having Mercer and Gage also wearing animal skulls, but I think I’ve also come to enjoy giving audio-drama characters a single quickfire visual signifier rather than getting into the weeds of description.

If people want to imagine the character or do something with them, it gives them a hook without being too dictatorial about it.

8:41

I used to go to school close to Broadmoor, the UK’s most infamous institution for the criminally insane, and they set up old World War 2-style air sirens throughout the surrounding area, which were supposed to go off in the event of an escape.

Once a week at 10am, they’d test the sirens to make sure they were still working, that slow shrieking roar that you’d only know otherwise from old movies.

It was an incredibly odd feeling, how you’d begin to get used to that sound. It became part of your weekly routine - almost comforting in its own way - but you’d always be checking yourself. “Wait, is it 10 o’clock? Am I meant to be hearing this, or am I not meant to be hearing this?”

So this mention is a nod to the strangeness of that experience. The villagers are using the old wartime siren to summon people from the fields for what they think is an exciting community moment, but of course they are in terrible danger - from their own government.

9:52

Mercer mentions that the Mire Hag’s followers are being wiped out in order to allow for the burning of the moorlands, to accommodate grouse-shooting.

Again, this is a personal memory. I used to walk on Exmoor as a kid and watch the moorlands being burnt, or swaled - it’s a very surreal, frightening experience, to see fire being spread in a controlled way, this line of black smoke rising over the hills.

As with the air-raid sirens, you end up having to marry your understanding that nothing is wrong with your instinctive fear that everything is wrong.

10:55

This season is going to focus a fair bit more on human cruelty, and it’s interesting how much that’s made me check myself as a writer (is the children’s laughter here too much, right before the shooting starts? Does it feel mean-spirited?). I’m much more comfortable having someone get horribly killed by a monster than by another person, for some reason.

It’s a weird failing, and one I probably need to get over - I also struggle to write characters suffering if I’ve heard the actor voicing them before. It was much easier to write horrible shit happening to a character when it was David in Eskew and I was writing it happening to myself.

11:01

Pregenerated SFX screams are fascinating. We have a better sound library subscription this season, but even then there’s a lot of very comical-sounding or unnatural stuff out there. I hope that having Mercer and Gage’s voices and gunshots in the foreground helps to cover that, at least.

There’s also, for some reason, a lot of SFX which features people screaming that they’re being specifically attacked by a dragon. (“Arrgh, a dragon!” “Look out, it’s a dragon!” “Oh, no, the dragon is breathing fire!”) I really feel like they’re limiting the usefulness of the clip unnecessarily by repeatedly spelling out that it’s a dragon, but so it goes.

Maybe on S3 we’ll try and hire someone just to scream.

12:06

I really like the Peat Saint’s drone-sound. We’d done a lot of bellows and shrieks at this point, so it feels different, almost a little like something out of the dance sequence at the end of Annihilation - and weirdly empathetic, too, I think. I’m rooting for the big guy.

13:42

I honestly enjoy deliberately including words or phrases in fantasy that have a known real-world etymology - like Carpenter and Faulkner playing Marco Polo in the reeds in Episode 1.

I think it can add a bit of welcome playfulness to the world’s language, and give the audience a bit of a jolt. A lot of fantasy subgenres are well-established enough that they have an expected lexicon, whether it’s medieval or Victoriana or whatever, and I think it’s nice to disrupt that familiarity whenever you can.

I’ve mentioned it on Tumblr before, but I love this passage from Ursula K LeGuin’s ‘City of Illusions’ for how it throws the reader off-course continually, and forces them to adjust their expectations of the setting by using a mix of Biblical and modern-day language:

"Oh fool, oh desolation!” said the Prince of Kansas. “I'll give you ten women to accompany you to the Place of the Lie, with lutes and flutes and tambourines and contraceptive pills. I’ll give you five good friends armed with firecrackers. I’ll give you a dog—in truth I will, a living extinct dog, to be your true companion."

One of the things that annoys me most, by comparison, is when authors tie themselves in knots doing the opposite. They become so desperate to avoid anachronism and pastiche by referencing the real world that they end up with something that actually feels more convoluted and artificial in the process: 

‘So then the villain played King’s Gambit, which is a strategic game with pieces on a checkered board, and the fact that the villain is playing it is character shorthand which should tell you that they possess intelligence and a calculating mind. The pieces are, uh, a prince, a sovereign, a cavalier-’

That’s just chess! Call it chess if you want to have chess in your story! You think jousting or lute-playing don’t have their own specific real-world histories which you’re stealing from to populate your fantasy world?

All that being said, I didn’t call the ‘bottle grenade’ a Molotov cocktail here because I figured it’d be too distracting in a crucial moment, so I clearly can’t be relied upon.

17:55

All the congregation voices are me. It’s just a roomful of Jons.

18:36

The cough here is actually to hide a background noise that we couldn’t remove, but somehow it actually works perfectly because Jamie does a little pause. You can imagine Mason glowering over his spectacles at the slight interruption.

18:40

Love Mason here. “For today’s sermon, I’m going to convey the nature of our surroundings to the audience.”

20:03

There would presumably be guards and attendants outside this chapel, and I’d like to think Faulkner had to lie his way past them in order to make his big Aragorn-esque entrance.

(I also very much imagine that when he ‘collapses’, he has one eye open from the floor.)

21:05

There’s a line of Mason’s that we cut here, where he essentially welcomes Faulkner in: “Of course, you’re among friends now.”

That line becomes ludicrous when you consider that Faulkner is lying apparently unconscious on the floor, of course. Who are you talking to, Mason?

21:26

This is my favourite scene in the episode. It can be a real guessing game to figure out what’s *too* comedic in a show where we want the stakes to be taken seriously but there’s a fair amount of absurdism and weirdness.

So I’m really chuffed that we got in a scene where there’s a lot of laughs that come organically out of these two characters trying to out-maneuver each other with blatant lies.

22:55

So a fair point that can come out of this scene is - what is Faulkner’s plan here? Does he really think that Mason is going to let him get away with withholding the Wither Mark indefinitely?

I do think he’s being hopelessly naive, but in my head his aim is to use his grand entrance to quickly establish a position where he’s no longer reliant on Mason: as a Katabasian, with his own followers (which he insists upon) he can act as ‘prophet of the river’ and begin building his own power base.

I also think there’s an element of youngest-sibling vulnerability for a character who’s never really owned anything and who’s always had to fend for himself: to Faulkner, having your own permanent suite, a hot shower, and food service on demand are signifiers of a higher tier of existence, so I can see him wallowing in that a little to his own detriment.

My heart also breaks for him a bit when he’s laughing in that shower. The shower is my place for manic laughter or despairing breakdowns, so I can relate.

29:48

I think in general throughout this show, you can set your watch by the fact that when I’m starting to worry that it’s becoming too grounded, I will throw in an entirely extraneous background monster.

31:30

I saw someone point out that there’s no way Faulkner would be able to identify the Jellyfish Saint as a Man O’War specifically (which isn’t also actually a jellyfish).

This is absolutely right, and the explanation is simple; we didn’t want to ask any actor, no matter how talented, to sell the line, “It’s a…jellyfish saint?” in a tone of horror. We’ll own that decision.

32:42

I genuinely think everyone gives a wonderful performance in this episode, but I want to give a particular shout-out to Jamie’s sceptical reading of Faulkner’s melodramatic false interpretation of the events of the Season 1 finale.

It’s just a really lovely, layered take: Mason is pretending to take the text seriously, but not pretending too hard.

38:10

Originally the episode was going to just end with the punch and the cry of pain, but we had a spare ‘oh’ lying around from Méabh (in a very different, far more serious context) and I think it helps to convey a bit of the natural anticlimax there.

It is a very comedic note to end on in an episode that starts with a civilian massacre, I’ll admit.