Yesterday I was talking about the concept of "If This, Then What Else?" If your show features one big idea, what else might that mean, or allow for? It's a way of getting us as a writer to really explore the space we've created, to see how much more might be there.
Episode 107, the Silent Episode, is an example of this idea married to a similar concept, "What's the coolest thing I can do with the car I'm driving?" If we're going to offer POV to various characters in the series, what's the boldest version of that? How about 30 minutes where no one speaks until the very last line? And then, what's the coolest version of that as well? If he signs his narration at us in the opening, what else will the episode involve?
But how do you pull that off in a way that's believable? It's one thing for half the episode to be embedded in Theo's POV, where the silence comes from his own lack of hearing. But the scenes with Mabel, Charles, Oliver and Jan have no such obvious necessity within them.
Part of how the episode overcomes that challenge is by putting them in situations where in fact silence makes sense. We have Charles and Mabel break into the Dimas' apartment, and then having to hide from Theo when he comes home. Later we do another break in, this time Oliver and Mabel at the funeral parlor. And once again, they have to keep quiet so as not to get caught.
For me, part of the fun of these scenes is the light they shine on the absurd way that TV generally does scenes like this. When you break into someone's home, you don't generally walk around talking, even quietly. And it turns out there's a ton more tension created when you have this built-in sense of having to keep things completely still. Even when no one else is yet around, a character's commitment to silence becomes an unexpectedly compelling high wire act. It just feels hard--which is always a great audience hook. There's a sense of impending doom too; it's a bit like Chekov's gun, actually. If you insist on being silent at the beginning, at some point you're definitely going to fail.
But still, there's a whole other sequence to deal with that has no need for silence--Charles' date with Jan. And here in a sense the writers cheat. They have Charles immediately put music on, which then plays as the characters dance and play Scrabble. It's definitely a workable solution. I think it would have worked a little better if they had previously set up this idea of Charles just sitting around listening to music or the two of them dancing together. But certainly we know they both love music, so there's that. (Another alt might have been to have her come in and the first thing they do is play their instruments together.)
Having said that, by the time we get to the Scrabble scene, we've pretty much accepted that this is the solution the writers have come up with. And then they use the characters' silence in such a wonderful way. That Scrabble game is both way hotter and way funnier because it involves this series of quiet reveals of different sexual-sounding words. In fact the silence itself becomes a way of building the tension; speech would have created a kind of release. By the end of the scene these two have pretty much got to go have sex. It's the catharsis.
One other thing I noted about the silence--just as it made some scenes more tense (or sexy), it also made other moments funnier. There's that scene at the funeral--another perfect justification for silence--in which Oliver suddenly falls off his chair. It's the kind of thing you expect from a Martin Short character, and yet somehow the silence makes it more surprising (and therefore more funny). I'm not totally sure I understand why that is; I'm guessing normally there'd be some sort of verbal tell that preceded a moment like that. And lacking that ends up strengthening the bit.
It really is a tremendous episode of television. (EVIL also has a pretty great version of a silent episode in its second season, which randomly is its seventh episode of that episode, too.) Definitely one to watch if you're thinking about doing a silent episode yourself, or just to get yourself thinking in terms of exploring the opportunities of a writing idea. It does that so well.
