Eskew By Episode: 5 & 6

In which Jon and Muna offer commentary, anecdotes & random thoughts on every episode of I Am In Eskew.

Episode 5: Illumination

It's the one where David Ward gets haunted by a railway bridge.

Jon:

Call of the void

I’ve always really struggled with heights. It’s not a vertigo thing, exactly, more an overwhelming awareness that it would be so easy to just impulsively hop over the balcony and fall into nothingness. A complete lack of trust in your own body and mind not to drag you down over the edge.

How are you meant to feel comfortable up there when it would be easy to take the leap? One step, two steps. Your own self-control is the only thing keeping you alive.

It was only some time after writing this episode - in fact, it was only when I started listening to an excellent horror podcast of the same name - that I learnt just how common the sensation known as ‘the call of the void’ is.

Anyway, I’m generally pleased with how this episode turned out, and I know it's one that clicks for a lot of people who maybe weren't enjoying the first few eps as strongly. I feel like it does get across the actual experience of intrusive thoughts - the gnawing relentlessness of them, the way they repeat but also extend, finding new ways around your mental defences - in a way that makes sense as surreal horror.

The stuff where David breaks the fourth wall and begins addressing the 'listeners' is fun, but this is about as far as we take the idea that he's actually producing any kind of podcast.

The railway bridge

Strangely, this episode is probably the most grounded in reality. Close to our house, there is an old crumbling railway bridge that I walk across each day to get to work. All around it are the ruins of older bridges - great stacks of brick perched between the train lines, surrounded by dark masses of creeping foliage.

It's absolutely beautiful, the only truly beautiful place in our neighbourhood. A place that's born in ruin.

And every so often, I stumble across discarded, eerily meaningful items that have been left there. A child’s ribbon hanging over the edge of the bridge. Once, a pair of crutches propped up neatly by the precipice.

No actual deaths have ever been reported there as far as I know, but somehow that makes it creepier to me - as if this is a place where people leave pieces of themselves behind, before stepping out of our world entirely.

Changing up the tone

In some ways, this episode marks the biggest tonal shift in the series overall - we go from a strange but largely stable city where nightmarish things break out largely in isolation, to a nightmare reality that keeps changing before the protagonist’s eyes, where nobody can be trusted. It really opens things up, but we also lose a bit of structure in the process.

And obviously elements of the story, like a fake partner and children being conjured up to entice David, pre-empt what’s going to happen later on…

If he doesn’t want to go…

I’ve read a couple of listeners speculating on why certain phrases recur - like the editor in this episode repeating, “If he doesn’t want to go, I suppose we can’t force him,” from the previous episode.

There’s no deeper meaning to the words themselves. It’s just meant to be indicative of how Eskew’s realities are bleeding cancerously into each other, creating echoes and repetitions where they shouldn’t exist.

In his own small way, David is impacting the city - his experiences and sensations are rippling out into whatever's created for him next.

Content warnings

Before this episode, I hadn’t even considered the idea that the show might need content warnings. It didn’t cross my mind, because the audience size at that point was so small, the whole thing didn’t feel quite real yet - but then a few people started tweeting about how hard this one hit, and that felt like a bit of a wake-up call to be more responsible.

BWUUUM

Since this is a short commentary, one random tidbit - the ‘scene break’ noise. I know it annoys the hell out of some people, and others just aren’t sure what it’s meant to be.

I wanted a sound that gave the sense of an industrial landscape shifting and transforming - almost the sound of scenery being move in a theatre - but also giving that sense of movement. (I think it was literally ‘industrial noise 5’ in an SFX library, with some adjustments.)

I was mainly thinking of the pendulum noise in Hannibal which is used for scene breaks at certain points. I watched a lot of Hannibal when I was writing this - it’s a great show for making you question your sense of self and reality.

And David is a very Will Graham character - in the sense of his traumatic but all-consuming love story with a far more powerful and malevolent force, in the sense that he’s a character who has a succession of increasingly awful things happen to him - way past the point of absurdity - but who always somehow survives them, and in the sense that he’s a deeply vulnerable man who coats himself in pride and prickliness.

Episode 6: Intrusion

Riyo makes her appearance. 

Jon:

When I started writing the first few episodes, I don’t think I’d really wrestled with the reality that at a certain point, you probably need a plot.

Bringing in a second character to get a view of Eskew from the outside, and to begin articulating how you get into it in the first place, made perfect sense. And that character needed in many ways to be the opposite of David - an active, disruptive agent who’s unwilling to adapt in order to fit into the nightmare.

Riyo is Muna, in so many ways - her tenacity, her courage, her ability to get things done, her scepticism towards established systems. Basically, this whole plotline is me telling my wife I think she’s capable of tearing down society, and should definitely have a go if she wants to.

Recording together was a new experience, and at first I think I annoyed the hell out of her. I’d spent five episodes at this point building up a dead-eyed monotone, but Muna comes from a performance poetry background, and she prefers more musicality in her readings.

So it almost came as a culture shock at first - “Emphasis? In my podcast?” - and I had to get used to the fact that, yes, these voices are going to sound very different.

Muna:

I think it’s very kind to say that, but Riyo is brave in a way I’m not, in a way lots of us aren’t. There’s so much of David in me, in us all, I think. I’m sure everyone has felt that dichotomy, of wanting to both tear it all down around you but also not wanting to lose what little you have. There’s a real sense of insecurity and distrust in those of our generation and younger - you are aspiring to something you feel you will never achieve.

If any part of me is like Riyo, I’d say is the part of us all that feels capitalism has destroyed the soul of our society. We’ve gone from “eat the rich” to...just wanting to burn it all down, especially since this past year and a half has forced us all to slow down. Grappling with the meaninglessness of it all does make you long for the nihilistic sense of hopelessness, doesn’t it?

Jon:

I spend a good amount of the Riyo episode scripts editorialising about horror, so this opening section about ghosts probably lets us know what we’re in for.

I do think a lot about the tensions and contradictions in how we portray ghosts, though. We often characterise them up close as essentially sincere entities, lingering on due to a supernatural longing or frustration with a single goal in mind - but then we also associate them with poltergeists, carrying out chaotic acts of mischief or deliberate terrorising within the household.

And that’s how we can end up with ghost stories that have a lot of jump-scares but then take a hard, weird swerve into treacliness, like the Haunting of Hill House shows. “Oh, you guys! Our dead sister was only appearing to us in nightmarish flashes with sudden shrieking noises at the scariest possible opportunity because she wanted to warn us.”

I don’t love this episode as a horror concept (I don’t think there’s anything particularly interesting or original in the ‘hauntings’), but I think I was trying to play with a ghost story that fitted into what we already knew about Eskew.

It isn't that David is trying to contact his mother but inadvertently doing it in the creepiest way possible. Aspects of him, and his connection to his mother, are bleeding out from his bedroom, like recordings.

I love Nigel Kneale’s The Stone Tape, which has that same idea of hauntings as automated echoes rather than controlled events.

Muna:

I am completely obsessed with the relationship between mothers and their children. So much of my own work touches on this. Do parents - mothers in particular - impact their children or does the act of having children impact parents, which is what causes them to impact their children?

Is it David’s fault he is in Eskew, or is it his mother? Was there something about her parenting that caused this, or was he always destined to end up there?

I’ve been thinking about, writing about and talking about nature versus nurture, and that’s the most powerful part of the whole podcast for me.

Jon:

For once I was very deliberately trying to create a discrepancy in the timeline during this episode - David thinks he’s been in Eskew for three years, but he was seventeen when he left and it’s clearly been far longer than that - but plenty of people seem to get to this point and express shock that I cast myself as the world’s most jaded twenty-year-old.

Jon:

There was an episode that I never ended up writing - the concept is that David goes down to the Lower Town in Eskew, where the river is flooding up through the shacks.

And he meets an old woman like his mother, who is sitting out at the front of her hovel just staring at the water.

She explains that something has been rising out of the water and snatching children - including her own only son. It’s been a year to the day since he was taken, and she’s calculated that tonight is the night the monster returns.

She plans to sit out and at least catch a glimpse of it - but David suspects that she’s really hoping for an opportunity to confront it and let it swallow her up as well.

David, perhaps uncharacteristically, agrees to sit out with her all night, and wait.

Nothing emerges from the water. Morning comes, and they’re still waiting, and the old woman continues to mutter, ‘Just a little longer. It’s coming. I know it.’

Eventually David just has to leave her there.

It wouldn’t have been a very thrilling or eventful episode and I’d have struggled to extend it to 30 minutes, so it was probably better off staying in the drafts folder.

But some of the same ideas are in here, that an encounter with the supernatural can offer relief and satisfaction rather than terror. And that there’s a real frustration and melancholy at not glimpsing anything, at being denied that explanation.

I hadn’t read it at the time, but there’s a story in Nathan Ballingrud’s North American Lake Monsters, ‘Wild Acre’, which gets across that complicated feeling of abandonment really brilliantly.

Jon:

I’ve written about it elsewhere, but ‘James James Morrison Morrison’ is of course from a real poem by AA Milne, ‘Disobedience’.

I have a real fondness for inadvertently creepy nursery rhymes (Ring-a-ring-a-rosie, Mary, Mary Quite Contrary) but all the obvious candidates have been used already! I’ve always loved this poem, though.

It’s about a bossy child, I suppose, and it delivers a teasing lesson to parents that they should be as obedient as kids are always told to be. 

But it’s also a deeply weird little puzzle - James James Morrison Morrison’s mother goes down to ‘the end of the town’ (the place where the town ceases to exist? What’s beyond the end of the town?) and is never seen again.

Muna:

Something else that could have worked really well here is “For Want of A Nail”, which is which is all about searching for something that in turn results in the loss of everything. 

David is so busy searching for the answer to why and who he is, that he loses not only the idea of what he is searching for but his very self.

Jon:

I read Bruce Chatwin’s The Songlines when I was young, and while the honesty of his writing has since come into some disrepute, I was really taken at the time by his theories on nomadism - that human beings began to develop mentally once they began to walk on two legs, that stagnancy is not a natural part of our condition, and that wandering from place to place doesn’t just broaden the mind, but actively furthers our evolution as a species.

Riyo’s partner really exists as a nod to that idea - if all cities are Eskew, if the comfort and safety that these places offer is a trap, can we detach ourselves from their influence by keeping constantly on the move? Is that how we stay alive while keeping our distance?

Jon:

There’s a sad little in-joke for me at the end here, where I refer to American preachers - I realised only around the time of writing this episode that ‘Eskew’ is actually an active surname that occasionally crops up in the USA, because we received a cheerful direct message from a woman in the USA with that surname, asking us if we were long-lost relatives.

I wondered if it was derived from Eskov, but ancestry.com claims it’s a bastardisation of Aske as an English surname.

If that’s true, the official family motto of Eskew is ‘fac et spera’ - ‘do and hope’. Seems weirdly appropriate.