episode four: director's commentary

SPOILER ALERT: read Episode 4 before reading this!

It is the sound of loneliness. The whistle on the AM radio as he slowly turns the dial left to right to left again, trying to find a human voice. I wonder how many people actually hear this these days? I don't think there are many analog radio dials anymore, and not many people listening to AM. There really is a creepy, lonely, electronic whistle when you're not quite tuned into a station. At night you really can pull in radio stations from distant cities. I used to spend hours turning the dial, looking for those distant human voices. Riding in the back seat of the car on a cold winter night with my dad trying to find the radio station that belonged to that tower in the distance is one of my earliest memories. We were just driving north to my granparents back then. Just a three hour trip but that's an eternity when you're just a few years old.

“This is for Bobbie!” the man screamed, pulling a knife from his jacket and driving it into the professor’s belly. This actually happened in my Psych 100 class! Well, sort of. They guy just made a lot of noise and said weird things and staggered out of the room. The point was the same. 120 witnesses all saw a completely different event. I guess in the past they actually shot the professor with blanks, but the event was just too traumatic for students and they didn't want to risk lawsuits and they had to tone it down.

“Well, he wasn’t wearing them but he usually does. You could tell by the dents on the sides of his nose.” Milo's ability to remember details about a person is inspired by a story I read about A. Conan Doyle. What few people realize is that Sherlock Holmes was actually inspired by a real person, a professor of Doyle's, who could just glance at a person and tell what they did for work, what their habits were and so on, all from their calluses and the wear of their clothes and such.

I put a song in my head, Gonna dress you up in Mylar/All over your body. Madonna’s inane lyrics stick like molasses and are almost impossible to get rid of. Yes, I know these are not the lyrics to the song. Milo hates Madonna so much that he can't bring himself to sing the lyrics right, even in his own head.

“What do you know about the history of the world?” There are a whole lot of lines throughout Castles that are actually taken from the lyrics of 80's alt rock songs. One of the best of these songs is The History of the World, Part I by The Damned which is actually a big inspiration for this whole thing:

No one alive and no one left
Nobody cares or ain't you heard
Looks like I'll take my dying breath
In the history of the world

There's some foreshadowing there, but I'm not going to say any more.

It is as if all history was caused by a few hundred kings and generals and presidents, and the occasional scientist of two. It really flabbergasts me that to this day most people don't even give a second thought to what history is. The sum total of human experience has been reduced to what can be tested on multiple-choice fill in the oval with a number two pencil exam, with propaganda and lies mixed in.

Grampa pulled something from his pocket and handed it to me. It was a ring. On it was an emblem I’d never seen before. It had a circle at the center, and from it radiated eight arrows, almost like a compass rose. “This is our sigil. The sign of the 27th letter, and the invisible helping hand." My friend Dustin Ruoff has this same ring. He bought it because he thought it was cool, even though he had no idea what it meant. I'm not sure who was the first to use this symbol. It figures prominently in many of Michael Moorcock's works as the symbol for Chaos, and is used by Peter J. Carroll in his text Liber Kaos as a representation of the five dimensions of Chaos Magic Theory. I don't know if Carroll was inspired by Moorcock, or if Moorcock was inspired by Chaos Magicians, or if the similarities are just coincidental (I know, I know... there are no coincidences...). I'm using it in both the Carroll and Moorcockian sense, and its appearance here is a special treat to the followers of either. Understanding that this is a symbol of Chaos is not critical to the narrative. However, if you are a fan of Moorcock, then you might be wondering if Grampa's motives are perhaps a little more sinister than Milo realizes, and if you're a Chaos Magician you'd either be getting jazzed or pissed off at the idea of a Chaos Magic action hero...

The 27th letter idea comes from The Invisibles by Grant Morrison, though he borrows heavily from everywhere so I doubt that he was the first to come up with it. I love the idea of there being letters in our alphabet that nobody knows about. Our language dictates what we're able to think about. In Spanish, for instance, there are verb tenses that we don't have in English. Spanish speakers can think about timein ways that English speakers can't. So if we had extra letters, we'd have new words, new meanings, new ways to think of things. The "invisible helping hand" comes from Adam Smith, a 1700s philosopher that believed that a free market was the solution to the worlds problems, and the "invisible hand" of enlightened self-interest would make people act to the benefit of society even when they were acting completely selfishly. I loved the idea of mashing Morrison together with one of the fathers of modern Capitalism.

“The Cure... Depeche Mode... Hüsker Dü... have you heard their latest album? It fucking rocks! I’ll bring it over. At least you’ve got good taste in music! Alright, here we go.” He pulled an album off the shelf. It wasn’t one I’d expect. Judy Garland Live at Carnegie Hall. Another "treat" for people in-the-know. Castles is set in the early eighties. However, there is nothing about the story being in the eighties that is critical to the narrative, so I don't call a whole lot of attention to it since it isn't important now (it will be if I ever get around to writing the sequels!). However, if you were a fan of bands like The Cure when they first came out and you were buying them on vinyl, you'd know exactly when this story took place, and you'd be one of the "elite". I got this idea from Joss Whedon. In shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel, he's always putting in little references to things that maybe 1% of the audience will get. Like the scene in the final episode of Buffy where they're playing D&D and Andrew calls the dragon he's attacking the other players with, "Trogdor the Burninator". If you're a fan of Homestar Runner you know exactly who Trogdor is and find this hysterical. If you aren't you probably didn't even notice it. I love these little "treats" though. It makes me realize that there are people out there who are every bit as much of a geek as I am.

Oh, and everything Syd says about Judy Garland is true, by the way.

I’ll bring Zhang Yongwei over. He’s been teaching me. He’s like 2 dan which is really high for someone his age. Don’t call it Go though. Call it Wei Qi. He’s very touchy about the Japanese and says they stole everything good about their culture from the Chinese. It is standard for Chinese to use both first and last names when refering to somebody. Hating the Japanese for stealing their culture is also common, and not altogether unjustified.

There are two kinds of students who come to a school like this. Kids who can’t afford to go anywhere else, and kids who get sent here by their parents because they think it will get them away from the drugs, or whatever else they think they need to get their kids away from. This was my perception of the University of Maine, Orono, when I was a freshman there. I'm sure that this is true of a number of colleges. It isn't altogether innacurate. At the time, however, I was a lot more cynical than I am now. I didn't realize that there was a third group, those who were there because they love Maine and love their families and want to stay close to them. Back then I just felt trapped.