The Silt Verses
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The Silt Verses Episode Commentary: Chapter 45 (both parts)
🕑 Added 2024-08-13 13:51:32 +0000 UTC
Hey, wonderful people - I’m writing this in the early morning as our baby chills out in his crib! All three of us are doing good; life is good. Hope you’re all great as well. Let’s do one last TSV episode commentary.
Spoilers below for both parts of the finale.
Part One
0:00
This episode could theoretically have just been released as a complete standalone rather than as a Part One. But the narrative momentum carries through into Part Two, and from my perspective the themes across both parts are pretty fully unified.
For me the key factor - and it took a while for me to actually be able to articulate this even to myself - is that these two episodes evolve gradually into a series of final negotiations between the characters and the narrative about how their stories ought to end. (Which is one big reason why I really don’t see this ending as universally tragic in the way that I think some listeners have. Everyone ends up with some level of agency and self-expression in how their ending plays out, even when the circumstances are against them - except for Faulkner, but Carpenter does then reaffirm that agency on his behalf in their very final scene upon the river.)
We see some of that negotiation beginning to build in Hayward and Carpenter’s argument, in Carpenter bluffing Sister Cull, in Paige making her proposal to her people, but it really comes out in the very final scene of this first episode, where Val effectively course-corrects the entirety of who Carson is and how his life has played out in order to give him a different ending.
0:12
Originally Tainsley and the Sergeant were travelling in the back of an army jeep, but we had too many cars in these last episodes as it was, and you get so, so sick of working on engine noises. So having them in a speedboat was just a bit of novelty for me.
2:10
About midway through engineering this scene I realised it was the last ‘big’, complicated, action-heavy sequence we were going to have in the entire show, since the rest of the two episodes are mostly two-handers and dialogue-driven.
As a result I end up getting a bit unnecessary here with the long ‘tracking shot’ into the belly of the plane.
2:45
In this scene we actually have Erika Sanderson in a US accent as the in-flight safety announcement that’s going off in the background, and Erika Sanderson as Sister Cull in an English accent. Erika’s a very talented actor!
3:01
Carpenter waking up here jump-scared me at least a dozen times while I was sound-designing it.
3:59
We do a bit of patented Choreographic Cheating in this scene. Carpenter and Hayward rushed to the back of the plane together (with Hayward presumably being carried?) in the previous episode. So even assuming that she’s somehow several rows away, there’s no way they could be far enough apart for her to have to crawl to him for as long as she does.
But we lose out on a lot of useful information about the scene and the characters’ condition if she just opens her eyes and can see him and reach him immediately, so…you know, we cheat.
6:52
It was quite important to me that the characters don’t even comment on the High Adjudicator’s presumable death; he’s perhaps the most important person in-setting but he goes out like an extra.
8:22
In what is entirely a stupid joke for me and me alone, if you listen to Sister Cull’s prayer in the background, it cuts off in exactly the same place as when Faulkner said it back in Episode 2 of Season 1. We never learn what actually happens when the flood comes.
9:15
There’s a bit in one of the final Avengers films that I think is quite good because it’s not afraid of embracing the absurdity of sincere heroism - Black Widow and Hawkeye, two of the least beloved characters in the franchise, start competing with each other in order to be the one who sacrifices themselves. And that race to die starts escalating bombastically, with trick arrows and acrobatic stunts-
-and I thought it would be quite fun if we did something similar, but our version essentially amounts to a feeble slapfight between two gravely wounded and exhausted people, with Hayward grabbing Carpenter as she tries to crawl away.
11:00
The mechanics of exactly how Carpenter manages to crawl out of the fuselage without being spotted by the disciples who are wading into the river to try and search the wreckage is one of those things that we just couldn’t map out without a bunch of extra voice actors accomplishing not very much at all.
So instead we operate on Sergio Leone rules, and she…just vanishes as soon as she hits the water.
Of course, if you’re a Carpenter Lives truther, the fact that even injured she appears to swim underwater unseen is probably a good bit of foreshadowing.
14:00
Carpenter’s long boast to Sister Cull here was originally meant to appear during the encounter with Brother Philly at GGR a couple of episodes previous - we had to cut it because the momentum of the scene was stalling, but I loved Meabh’s performance far too much to throw it away, so she delivers it to Sister Cull instead.
To some extent, then, having the Cairn Maiden’s whispers rise up to bolster Carpenter’s intimidation attempt is a bit of a hack - we’re covering the sudden shift in the character’s speech pattern by providing a supernatural explanation for it. But it was a good choice, I think, as it gives the Maiden a bit of tangible presence in the finale that she otherwise lacked.
16:09
We originally recorded this scene so that Faulkner actually picks up on the other end of the radio, complains that everyone in the Grand Aquifer seems to have vanished, and mistakes Sister Cull for Sister Thurrocks in the process (while offering to make her a Katabasian).
It was a fun bit, and a nice way to clue Carpenter into the fact that Faulkner is not doing well at this point, but probably too comedic. It also undermines the image of him alone at the very bottom of the Aquifer if he’s been scuttling about the place freely just a few scenes earlier.
20:00
Figuring out how to give the Woundtree disciples an audible presence within Paige’s big announcement scene was a bit of a headache. How do you give the sense of a real community without a great many more VAs than we have? How do you convey hushed fear followed by stunned silence followed by quiet resolve? (There are also clear limits to crowd SFX, as I’ve mentioned before, and I didn’t want there to be a weird class contrast between Paige’s people and Faulkner’s - i.e. I didn’t want the Woundtree disciples to be clapping politely like they were an opera crowd or something, but I also couldn’t have them cheering and roaring on a scale like the Children of the Parish).
You can see the seams of how we tried to resolve that problem via sound design - a few extras including Muna and myself gossiping at the start of the scene, and then having the cheering get abruptly cut off by Paige later on when it starts.
So I’m not entirely satisfied with the results, and it’s an issue we could probably have solved with better planning to some extent (having a few extra Woundtree background VAs who could pop up consistently throughout the season).
We do also have to do a bit of ‘as you know’/’just in case you aren’t aware’ bullshitting on several occasions during this episode so that the audience is clued into which characters have what information about the attack on Glottage. The sergeant and Paige both share the news of the Wither Mark’s devastation with people who…probably already know all about it? Carson also tells Greg information that he should already be aware of.
26:30
Elgin’s words about death in the polluted lands being better than death at the hands of the Legislatures directly echo what the electrical grid team said a few episodes back.
29:11
Much to my frustration, we did have to cut a whole sequence of minor scenes from this point on. Originally Dan made his whole speech giving his support to Paige, sat back down, and then he unexpectedly stood back up again and made another secondary point - how can we walk away without making one final effort to distribute the Woundtree’s marks amongst the population?
And then ultimately he’d go on to suggest that the Woundtree gang float their missives downriver along the White Gull, where they can be found or unearthed in the centuries to come.
It was an attempt to tackle the obvious question that comes up when your characters are Omelas-ing - well, what about the people you’re leaving behind? Who is your final responsibility to?
Which isn’t an unreasonable question, but that answer ultimately felt pat to me (ooh, what if the REAL Silt Verses are the ones left by Paige and her people? No. Silly.) and as if we were going down a narrative rabbit hole for ideological reasons, while testing the audience’s patience by piling extra plans on top of a sequence of activity that was already pretty dense.
30:42
I don’t think I have a genuine logistical grip on how the Woundtree disciples’ vote is actually meant to work (if 51% vote to stay and 49% vote to leave, is Paige really going to stay?) but I needed some way of quickly conveying - again, with a very limited cast - that this is a communal decision and not an authoritarian one.
33:00
We wrote this scene with the intention that Carson is actually at a makeshift ‘field office’, but we didn’t really have any interesting way of conveying what that space would look like.
So what I thought could be quite fun instead was the implicit notion that he’s converted his own house into a field office and has been corralling his workers to pull overnight shifts there.
36:50
Carson’s scene with Val here - and the sheer number of contradictory angles he finds to justify his actions, downplay his actions, deflect his actions, etc - very much mirrors the scene in the next episode between Carpenter and Faulkner.
39:00
We needed to give Carson something to do in this scene to prevent it from being totally static. It seemed appropriate to have him go and grab himself another Tranquili-tea, but then if he actually drinks it he’s successfully playing Val for a fool and her act of mercy is undermined.
So instead he keeps coming back to it, but is too jittery and distracted to actually drink it.
45:50
I don’t think Carson’s eventual fate would work if we didn’t get this monologue from him beforehand, raging at Val (and by proxy the gods) for her self-righteousness. Awful though he is, this is the most honest thing he’s ever said.
48:20
I wanted to pick childhood career dreams for both of these characters that were essentially childish and absurd - hence ‘ballerina’ rather than ‘ballet dancer’ - but both vocations do play into the characters’ fatal flaws.
Val dreamt of achieving a final perfected condition beyond struggle and insecurity, of being apart from other people (and one which would rid her of the need to impress her parent). Carson dreamt of being needed and loved by his community and being able to turn people’s lives around with a positive word. Both of those dreams got horribly twisted along the way.
49:00
Originally I had the sound of dancing footsteps beginning to softly fade into the room here, as if Val is watching her childhood self practicing ballet around her.
I was very pleased with myself, and then Muna did her listen-throughs and pointed out that while I might be imagining this as a beautiful vignette, and some listeners might indeed understand what was going on, the reality was that it would be a distracting CLACK CLACK CLACK CLACK throughout Val’s monologue for anyone who couldn’t visualise what we were trying to get across.
So instead I went with Satie’s Gnossiennes No. 5 to try and convey the same effect - which isn’t a ballet piece specifically, but which I do think has a wonderful child-like lightness and unpredictability that simulates dance.
It also felt like an appropriate in-joke given the name of the overall piece, which speaks to gnosis. It’s the music of awakening, after all.
Using a well-known piece of music isn’t something we’ve done before and I did want to be careful with that choice and its potential to break the fantasy (apparently it also recently appeared in Our Flag Means Death, which I wasn’t aware of) - but ultimately you’re not going to be able to track down such a genuinely powerful and moving piece of original classical music by rifling through stock royalty-free catalogues, and I think the familiarity of it works for our purposes here. It should feel a little like coming home to the audience.
51:03
I saw someone post saying how fascinating it was that Carson and Val’s visions of their imagined lives were entirely free of gods. But from my perspective, Carson’s memory of the white-moustached milkman absolutely is intended as divine - my platonic ideal of what a god should be, in fact.
The milkman offers consolation and reassurance to help us keep on living. He leaves us kindly offerings. He’s a mostly unseen but crucial part of a loving community, and he possesses great emotional authority but no tangible power. His kindness inspires kindness in turn.
52:20
There’s a habit we start to establish across these two episodes where characters are speaking both to each other and to a ghost in the room.
When Val accepts Carson as someone who could have been a better human being along the road, and effectively forgives him by embracing that version of him - she is, really, talking to her mother. When Carpenter and Faulkner speak to each other in the second part, they are also talking to Em and Charlie, their own biological siblings, at various points.
53:50
I still don’t know if I have the words to express this properly, but there’s a theme that becomes really important over these two episodes which you could perhaps call a grace of purpose, or freedom of purpose, or reassurance of purpose, or freedom from purpose?
Val expresses it first when she talks about becoming a ballerina, because ultimately as she says the ballet part is not what matters to her (although the art I’ve seen which features her as a ballet dancer is gorgeous!). What she wants is to be freed from the hunger to achieve and impress others, to get the hard part of existence out of the way early on so she can live in peace and contentment. What she’s asking for is the Cairn Maiden’s peace, really - nowhere left to go and nothing left to do.
And then from there we have Val reassuring Carson that whether he had a family or not, he will be remembered and loved all the same. We have Hayward reassuring Paige that he arrived at exactly the right time rather than too ‘late’. We have Carpenter reassuring Faulkner posthumously that wherever he chooses to wash up will be the right burial ground for his body.
It’s almost an echo of the Maiden’s prayer that ends up being heard throughout the entire story - the idea that wherever you end up, or however you get there, this will be the place that’s right for you.
55:45
This episode was a great reminder to trust your audience. I’d seen lots of people online excitedly speculating that Val was going to show up and very violently and gruesomely rid the world of Carson, to satisfying effect (which is a huge tribute to how memorably loathsome Rhys has made our season’s antagonist).
Which wouldn’t have made any sense for Val and her journey, but of course you get in your head about it - is everyone going to be disappointed that she shows him mercy here? Are they going to see it as an anticlimactic cop-out that he gets off so lightly and with a kind of blessing compared to everyone else?
But people really got the purpose of the scene, which rocked.
In an earlier episode Val - lying - describes herself as a god of possibility, but that’s exactly what she becomes at this point. She finds the good even in someone like Carson, and he demonstrates that one last time before he dies by offering grace to her in return.
Part Two
0:00
I love the fact that both of these episodes are effectively just showcases for our actors to really go all in - and every single one of them does an astonishing job, I think.
0:14
There was a certain perverse joy in ensuring that both Carpenter’s opening line of the final episode, and Carpenter’s opening line when she comes face-to-face with Faulkner, are just deeply silly and weightless (the plumbing reference and the cow reference specifically).
3:03
I actually had to rework this entire massive scene a couple of times nearly from scratch, for the silliest of reasons. In the previous sequence with Faulkner and Rane, Faulkner slipped his shoes off before stepping into the dreaming pool. There was no reason why he would have put them back on, so I engineered the scene with wet barefoot sounds - but it sounded odd and unnatural in such an echoing space, so I redid the scene with wet shoes. That sounded too squelchy and comedic, so I redid it again with the usual dry shoes and we’ll just have to assume that Faulkner for whatever reason toweled his feet down mid-breakdown.
3:50
I quite liked the idea of Faulkner referencing a dualist schism in the Parish that we’ve never heard about before (I had Catharism on the brain when writing the schism between Faulkner’s people and Greve’s), because it’s a reminder that even right at the end, humanity really doesn’t know anything about the nature of the Trawler-man, and that nature remains entirely open to interpretation and manipulation - there’s not much difference between the dualist philosophy that Faulkner references and Carson’s suggestion that the Trawler-man should be split into two brand mascots.
4:16
Something we could probably have done a better job with is conveying exactly what’s happening when Faulkner appears to be addressing his family members / victims. We’ve established a couple of episodes ago that he keeps imagining he can glimpse their faces in the water’s reflection (which calls all of the way back to Episode 2 of Season 1) but that doesn’t come across necessarily in the choreography, so the natural assumption is that he has some kind of generic Force Ghost thing going on.
What we also talked about a lot for this scene’s recording is the layers that come with delusion, the performance of irrationality that sinks into true irrationality. I don’t even know if Faulkner is tangibly seeing his family members or victims in the chamber in a Hollywood sense. (Crucially, nobody ever seems to answer him).
It’s more like - as with pretty much everything he goes on to do during this episode - he’s trying different realities on for size. Like a coat. Seeing if the delusion has any satisfaction to it.
4:54
I think huge credit needs to go to our two leads for the fact that this scene is absolutely bloody huge (40 minutes!) but we’ve had nobody that I know of kvetching about it dragging or feeling overlong. I cut a few of Faulkner’s monologues down but less than I thought I’d have to - B. just does a really disarming and heartbreaking job throughout.
The length was very much intentional - I did want to take this last opportunity to do a really big, theatrical two-hander between Carpenter and Faulkner, to really give them a substantial final encounter after an entire season apart and give some closure and airtime to what is, by this point, a very complicated relationship…but of course that comes with the risk of it slowing the episode to a halt.
Partly that length is also important to - I suppose - show our working with regards to Faulkner’s character arc. Could he abandon the ruin of his life and rejoin Carpenter and Paige, find a way to atone for the things he’s done? Absolutely. Is that the best option at his disposal? Definitely. But is he, even at the end of it all, able to abandon the story he’s spent his life building? And so we needed to have him wrestling with that.
So while the scene is very Shakespearean in some ways (not least the mention of Carpenter’s ghost), for me it’s also a big homage to Raskolnikov from Crime and Punishment, my favourite character in all of fiction.
Like Faulkner, Raskolnikov spends a lot of time trying on different justifications for his acts of murder (including the idea that if he can only become enough of a net force for good in the world, they will retroactively have been worthwhile); like Faulkner, he almost ends up temporarily performing madness rather than inhabiting it fully. Like Faulkner, he is capable of great impulsive kindness and humanity when he doesn’t stop to think - but as soon as he does stop, he tries to make it part of his own narrative.
Raskolnikov, when he realises that he’s going to get caught, also ends up performing his own atonement rather than really and genuinely experiencing it - which we do strongly hint to in Faulkner’s final scene when he imagines himself rejoining Carpenter.
32:33
Would Faulkner have gone with Carpenter, if she hadn’t mentioned that Paige was a prophet and therefore got his back up? I think he would have.
44:00
This little bit with the Doctor Phil type playing over the radio, played by the wonderful David Easley, was a late and minor addition - we just wanted to remind the audience of the radio tower’s geography, and I guess I also wanted to give one final sense of the potential death knell for the Woundtree movement in mainstream Peninsulan society, as it’s now being actively pop-pathologised. It’s silly, but perhaps a much-needed laugh at this point.
45:51
We recorded all of Hayward and Paige’s final scenes (from their failed radio conversation in Glottage onwards) in a single session, and I think Lucy said this short monologue was the one that audibly broke her.
From here on out until the end, everyone was crying or hyperventilating throughout the recording session - and huge, huge credit to Jimmie and Lucy for taking a breath each time and then diving right back into their takes like absolute professionals while we were all absolute emotional messes.
48:25
We didn’t do as much with Elgin’s character as I’d hoped to, but for me this line gets to the essence of the character and almost the purpose of the entire Woundtree movement in the narrative all at once - Elgin fulfills her purpose by selflessly serving her community, in a way that isn’t big or flashy or exciting.
She doesn’t wring her hands about what her life means if she isn’t at the centre of things, like Faulkner does; it’s a gift and a privilege just to help. It’s all been for her.
That selflessness I think is later mirrored in Hayward’s reaction when he arrives at the Grace and he isn’t at all bothered that he’s been left behind - he’s just happy that Paige has got away.
49:00
Everyone says ‘I love you’ in this episode, even when they don’t (except Val, I guess, but she’s alone and busy affirming herself). Paige and Hayward say it to each other. Paige and Elgin say it to each other here. Arguably Hayward and Carpenter say it to each other.
The only time it goes unnoticed is in the moments between the two characters who actually say the words.
52:37
We originally had a longer monologue from Hayward here where he arrives at the Grace and discovers his own grave, which was very touching but I think unnecessary dramatically speaking.
53:05
Is it actually a little selfish of Hayward to call Paige on the increasingly convenient radio (we get just to the edge of it being ludicrously easy to contact whoever you like over it, I think) and traumatise her by saying goodbye, rather than just letting her go on and believe that he’s dead?
Yes, but we wouldn’t have the scene otherwise.
53:30
This scene also had to be redone painstakingly - because usually when our characters are out in the god-winds, we apply some ‘gas mask’ filters to dampen their voices. Unfortunately, when the scene is so emotional - and when Hayward’s voice is also coming through the radio - that really gets in the way of the performances. So it’s quietly discarded, and perhaps we can imagine that Paige whips off her mask as she runs to the sled.
55:10
Hayward, I think, is directly expressing during this scene some ideas which speak to why I don’t see the events of the finale as tragic, but rather anti-tragic (if that’s a thing?). In a world where the search for existential fulfillment and revelation has driven us to be manipulated and misused by cynical powers, irresolution itself can come with its own kind of satisfaction. He hasn’t missed her, she hasn’t failed him - again, there’s the echo of the Cairn Maiden’s words in the idea that he’s shown up at exactly the right time, that he can find satisfaction in something that will forever be beyond him.
59:43
The problem with Val at the story’s climax was both the traditional storytelling headache that arises when one character is powerful enough to reshape reality (well, why can’t she just do X or Y?) but also the ideological challenge that accompanies her story arc - whatever she does to help our heroes needs to feel appropriately miraculous, but it also can’t be godlike. It can’t make her back into an authority or figure of power and it can’t prove that actually her abilities can be used for good!
It needs to effectively go unnoticed.
So having her literally call up the weather forecasters (prophets!) and tell her final lie not from a position of power, but posing almost casually as a concerned citizen - that felt silly, and appropriate, and unexpected.
60:00
The problem we always faced with Paige and Hayward’s revolt is the same one that that China Mieville struggles with in Iron Council, the last and least of his Bas-Lag trilogy (and it’s a topic which Disco Elysium also explores) - we cannot honestly end the story by having the plucky progressives topple the authoritarian government or win over all public opinion with One Big Speech. We cannot make it that easy, because it isn’t that easy in reality, and suggesting that it could be is a complacent narrative, and we need to directly reckon with how such narratives are used to keep us in check.
So we had to end it on some kind of hopeful note, but a hope that feels honest to us - and one that also acknowledges that we may not live to see it come to fruition, and there will be all manner of impossible challenges left to overcome, and it may never come about at all.
I knew it was an impossible task, but I just wanted to find something that satisfied me better than Iron Council (which, spoiler, ends with the revolutionaries being frozen in time by the establishment overlords, but ever-so-slowly inching forwards the city they intend to conquer).
What we ended up with isn’t original - it’s the Omelas ending, it’s the concept of turning your back on Eden and walking out into what is most probably death and ruin with the understanding that to remain is its own kind of death. It’s the most honestly hopeful ending, for me.
One alternative idea we had in mind for a long time was that Paige and Hayward actually should let the Woundtree disciples go on without them and let themselves be killed, forming a massive protective wall of sainthood to cover their people’s escape.
I don’t think that’s a bad ending, necessarily. But it’s…more satisfying in one sense, that the characters get to physically reunite, while also being less satisfying and thematically just in the sense that they both end up getting swallowed up by the limited thing they created. It lends legitimacy to the Many Below and therefore godhood/sacrifice that isn’t really intended within the narrative, it papers over Hayward’s own feelings about the gods, and it brings Paige’s own ongoing struggles with leadership and sainthood to an abrupt conclusion. (Because after all, are the Woundtree’s people then going to remember her for herself, or remember her for her sacrifice? Will they be able to let their god go, if their god’s the one that ‘saved’ them?)
And so over time what I became much more interested in was the idea of a kind of relay race of human connection, where nobody quite reaches anybody else in the physical sense, but the characters’ care and courage for each other propels everyone else further along their path (while at times tempting them to linger back) and that’s the most important blessing that’s offered up to anyone. The Woundtree disciples will ultimately get further than Paige; Paige gets further than Hayward; Hayward gets further than Carpenter. Everyone helps to make that happen. Does it matter if they don’t directly come face-to-face, with that in mind?
1:01:35
As late as the early Patreon release, we had a couple of the helicopters actually crashing in the god-winds, but having them - as far as we know - retreat without further loss of life felt more appropriate to the scene and Hayward and Val’s endings.
1:01:45
Originally Val was going to die of her wounds, but we had too much of that going on already. Taking agency into her own hands with one final Woundtree-like act of defiance (and one which suggests a final rebirth) felt like a more fitting tribute to our favourite god of lies.
It also gives us a cute little elemental angle on the protagonists’ endings. Paige predicts her death in soil, Hayward dies surrounded by the winds, Faulkner drowns, and Val goes up in flames.
1:03:10
We’ve already had a couple of QnA questions that ask us about ‘killing off’ characters in the end as if we’re bloodthirsty souls and that was the motivating factor, but honestly? At this point in the show we’ve spent so long dwelling upon death as an inevitable change that we need to learn to accept, and death as the natural ending to a story, that I really don’t see any negativity or a failure in the way most of our cast go out.
Hayward’s death here is a parallel to the death Val gives to Carson. He doesn’t die alone in any existential sense, only his physical circumstances. He dies full of joy and the confidence that his decency and his efforts will live on through the people he loved. He dies firmly rejecting the idea that he needs anything else from the universe beyond what he already has. He’s willing to become a saint in eternal torment for the sake of Paige, and instead he’s given a final peace as himself.
It’s the same perfect death and fulfilment he could have looked forward to fifty years down the line. Like he says, it’s a gift; it’s not a loss for him, not even a sacrifice.
As mentioned, I really don’t see the ending as entirely unhappy (I fully accept that it has tragic elements), and I’m interested to see whether people will end up agreeing with me on that front once the immediacy of the response fades away. Like Paige says in her final monologue, there’s a rough and tarnished hope to it, but a genuine hope nonetheless.
Hayward dies entirely fulfilled. Val takes ownership of herself back. Paige lives on for now, while coming to terms with her future death and predicting that the work will go on beyond her (I guess the question of how hopeful her ending is depends on whether you’re accepting their journey as allegorical at this point or viewing it as a literal ‘let’s walk a hundred miles inland and find a place to pitch camp’? I see it as the former but I get that it’s also the latter). The Woundtree’s disciples are against all odds venturing into a place where the voices of gods have fallen silent. If Carpenter has died, she can rest at last; if she’s going to get up yet again and struggle on, we can feel confident that she knows what to do with herself next.
There are miracles in here, and there are consolations, and there are victories. I dunno, it’s enough to make me want to keep getting up in the morning.
1:16:26
The script originally had a little more delusion on Faulkner’s part here right before he runs out to follow Carpenter - he starts to imagine the future that awaited him with Paige and Carpenter if he went to join up with them, and then it occurs to him that if he goes with them, he might ultimately atone enough to become the next prophet of Paige’s people (in other words, that the Trawler-man was the problem, not him) and suddenly he begins to excitedly make that his new purpose.
We do still hint at the notion that Faulkner’s final commitment to atonement in this scene is worthless because he’s only going to use it as the next twist in his self-made narrative, but it’s more subtle in the finished version than we’d originally planned for, and we let him hold on to a bit of clarity.
1:20:20
It only occurred to me a few days before recording that Faulkner should yell out ‘Marco’ and go unanswered, and thank God it did.
1:28:20
I do actually feel quite guilty and conflicted now over what at the time felt like a minor detail, where Carpenter describes Faulkner’s hair as blonde.
For me there was something very lovely about having her unexpectedly give us another detail of Faulkner’s appearance while she’s tending so closely to his body - because it brings him into a focus that he’s previously lacked. And so I saw it as an act of intimacy and care on the part of the narrative, to add that extra detail about how he looks where previously there’s been none. And the idea of his hair looking a bit golden and angelic worked as a contrast to the rest of his appearance in this scene.
But what I think I didn’t consider (and I do need to be honest that visual appearances are the least important part of any character for me, and people seem to get really animated over it in a way that I just don’t) is that for the artists who’ve previously portrayed Faulkner with hair that’s a different colour, we’re actively taking a freedom away from them, and we’re stepping on their toes in a space that we’d previously left to them.
I guess I’d got so used to the idea that fan-artists and writers can just happily create their own “take the ball and run with it” works which alter or adapt the original that I didn’t really weigh up how important following the canon can also be.
So yeah - genuine apologies to anyone who was frustrated or thrown off by that decision. There’s a fascinating and complicated interplay between original text and responsive text online which I think I’m still getting to grips with, even after years of doing this.
(I will also say that I was completely baffled at first that some people seemed to be reacting as if blonde hair was a freakish rarity, rather than a common hair colour - it was as if we’d suddenly declared that he’d had a monocle or a massive bushy moustache the entire time. And that’s how I discovered that while a solid 12-15% of the population here in the UK are naturally blonde, we’re actually one of the highest percentages in the world, and in the USA it’s only around 5%. You live and you learn.)
1:30:42
This part was very important to me - where Carpenter says that if Faulkner wants to be buried in silt, he’ll be buried in silt, and if he wants to wash out to sea, that’s exactly what he’ll do.
Like I mentioned before, every character ends up with some level of agency or at least a final acceptance over how their ending plays out - other than Faulkner, who is denied his hope by the Trawler-man. So having Carpenter reaffirm Faulkner’s agency over his resting place, at the end, is her final act of grace towards him.
1:36:37
We deliberately don’t get into the changing nature of the landscape in the face of Val’s miracle - are the god-winds sweeping out over the Peninsula now, or is it just a localised phenomenon?
1:38:09
We had four versions of this ending scene written - one where Carpenter gets up and walks on and that’s our final beat, a message about enduring in the face of it all.
One where she dies of her injuries straightforwardly in the appointed place (which we were never really going to go with), one where she’s explicitly killed by Tainsley, which is more of a traditional tragic irony situation, and which allows us to underline one last time the reality that no character is immune from being misused and misinterpreted for the purpose of someone else’s story.
And then there was the idea of an ambiguous ending, where we toy with our audience’s emotions a little (sorry) before she ultimately collapses into the river and we’re left to interpret what we hear in that moment - did she get away one last time? Or is that an unrealistic hope? Which of the two outcomes she predicted does she get to claim for herself?
And honestly, right up until the final days of production I wasn’t sure which one I wanted to use, but one of our biggest themes in the show is learning to embrace the limits of our knowledge and how the futile search for certainty drives us mad, and either one of the two possible endings (Carpenter keeps staggering on to a new life of peace and burials / Carpenter floats downstream to be with her brother in actual death) were equally satisfying possibilities for me.
And for me the uncertainty mirrors the hope for a final agency that Carpenter speaks of for Faulkner, because now she gets that choice - and she gets to make it unseen, away from us.
If she wants to be lost and forgotten, she’ll be lost and forgotten. And if she wants to wash up somewhere new and keep trudging on, that’s exactly what’ll happen. It’s not in my hands, it’s in hers.
The interesting consequence of all this was that - from my perspective, the scene is objectively designed so that Carpenter probably escapes (it has to be like that, really, to reach an appropriate state of ambiguity via SFX). If you pick apart the audio, you can track the evidence that points towards this conclusion. She turns, runs, and hits the water right before the second gunshot, and the second bullet audibly whizzes into the water. (Tainsley and the sergeant don’t seem to think he missed, but the evidence is against them.) You then get a sound at the very end of the scene which absolutely is an SFX of someone or something swimming away, slowly and irregularly.
But because podcasts are such a varied medium in terms of listening environment and everyone processes audio differently, there are people who’ll come away dead certain that she survived (even probably that we laid things on much too thick), and there’ll be people who listened in the car or in an office who won’t be able to hear those audio cues at all, and who’ll have absolutely no idea that we were even hinting at that possibility. To them, Carpenter is 100% dead as a doornail.
In other words, the outcome of Carpenter’s story isn’t just a coin flip or a ‘you decide’ shrug to the audience. If we accept that the listening medium, device and environment are part and parcel of the text itself, then the text itself is subjective and ambiguous in a way that’s outside of my control.
Which does feel thematically very appropriate and cool, and I know that online there are already people who are basically talking past each other with opposing interpretations and a lot of confidence (“I can’t believe Carpenter died like that!”)
But I also have no idea how to convey that absolute subjectivity in the transcript, so the transcript really is quite a firm wink-wink nudge-nudge indicating that she might have made it out.
1:41:30
The mechanics of Chekhov’s Tainsley were inspired by the original Get Carter, a very impressive and very unpleasant UK gangster film from the 70s which may not have much cultural cachet any more (bizarrely remade and misappropriated in 2000 with Sylvester Stallone)
Get Carter is fascinating to me in the interplay between banal human cruelty (abuse, beatings, killings) and a greater cosmic cruelty that presides over proceedings (as epitomised in one awful scene where two goons push the protagonist’s car into water - with no idea that coincidentally, a relatively sympathetic character is locked in the trunk. We never cut back to the poor accidental victim, and the anti-hero Carter barely reacts to the fact that they will be drowning offscreen as the rest of the scene plays out, so it almost goes unnoticed by the story).
At the very end, having got his revenge, Carter turns, chuckling, to toss his shotgun out to sea and put a symbolic end to his rampage - and right as his arm is on the upswing, he’s shot by the assassin who’s been tailing him throughout the film. The shotgun lands right next to him.
It’s a lovely scene because with the bare minimum of plot and character elements I think it demonstrates tragic irony and tragic anticlimax can in their own way feel very cathartic; sometimes the worst thing does happen at the worst possible time, sometimes we are cut off before we can finish. It does strike us as wrong in Lear if the messenger gets to Cordelia in time. It's too neat. There's truth in the chaos and the mess.
1:43:37
Someone asked us on Tumblr whether the final conversation between Tainsley and the Sergeant here is breaking the fourth wall and talking to fans (i.e. telling people not to expect certainty or full closure).
Perhaps, to a very minor extent? But I think it’s meant more as a final expression of the show’s overall philosophy of agnosticism, and Tainsley serves as one last example of how our lifelong hunt for purpose and certainty can end up entrapping us and limiting us. (While also reminding us that the world of TSV will go on, and people will go on spinning stories within it to serve themselves - it is very funny and horrible and appropriate to me that these troops’ entire long-awaited war ended up being a case of shooting one random civilian and then immediately retreating to base to crow about their heroism.)
1:45:30
I wanted to also include a final snapshot of a drowned Glottage and crab-angels roaming the flooded streets in this montage, but ran out of time.
1:46:30
I think by the time we get to Paige’s final speech here, the allegory of the Woundtree’s journey has fully detached itself from the tangible realities of the setting.
If the polluted lands are a few thousand miles across, and they’re heading into the dead centre, then realistically Paige has got only got a few days or at most weeks to live before her people leave her behind. But I’d interpret it as a longer-term timeframe - at the end of Paige’s lifespan, like Moses, she will watch her people walk on beyond her - in a way that isn’t intended to be strictly realistic.
1:49:14
We originally recited the rest of the episode cast at the end of the credits here, but it was dragging - and I didn’t think anyone would resent us just putting the time aside to give our four leads their own space right at the end. They’ve all done such an amazing job, and I’m so very grateful to have got to work with them all.
Just one final word again, as well, for the amazing Skip Kent-Davy, whose music we featured at the end of Season 1 and 2 and also around the mid-mark of Season 3 (their fantastic The Promised Bride plays in the episode where Faulkner usurps Roemont). It felt most appropriate to end with silence, particularly given the role of music throughout the show as emotional propaganda - but I also do feel the absence of their work, which has been such a powerful recurring element throughout our three seasons.
And that’s it! Next I will be putting together some dates to record our QnA, so one final call-out to anyone who has questions for us or the cast.
Comments
Claire Clam
I had to pause it the moment when Carpenter says she'll leave a cairn behind so he can follow - this series has meant so much to me and I'm so blown away by it. Thank you so much John and Muna
Eilis Fanning
Don't know if here is a place for q and a questions but I really want to know: why make the trawler man a river god specifically? Is it because a river has an inevitable course? Did you just have some cool river imagery on the brain? Thanks!
