Hello!
Here we are once more with the blog series where I (the writer) write commentary on each episode of Roy Kaplan. These are all written with the assumption that you’ve listened to the episode (and the ones preceding), so if you haven’t listened to (or read the transcript for) Foul Spirits, check it out here!
Off we go!
Foul Spirits is a fun episode. I think “real psychic investigates fake psychic” is an extremely low-hanging fruit in the ideas department but I’m nothing if not willing to go for the low-hanging fruit. Because, well, the idea of a fake psychic pompously telling Roy, a real psychic, about how to deal with ghosts is just funny.
The thing about Foul Spirits is that Roy has pretty much solved the case before the first conversation with Zahir has even concluded. And why not? He knows about psychics, he knows about scams, and he can put the pieces together easily enough. So instead of spending the episode’s runtime trying to figure out who stole what he gets to fool around and cause problems for other people on purpose.
A lot of credit goes to my friends whom I discussed this episode with while writing, trying to decide what someone in the post-apocalypse cyberpunk future would think about the very distant past–would they be likely to overestimate or underestimate the level of technology in that time period? We thought it would be the latter, and my friend Sadie had the absolutely galaxy brain idea of “alchemist” as a profession in 1940s Los Frangeles. I’ll never be that funny.
I knew when I wrote this episode that I wanted Charleston (so-named specifically because of the similarity to ‘charlatan’) to have the worst American accent of all time. Like, an American accent made by a European who has only vaguely heard of the concept of America from pop culture but fully confident that they’re getting it right bad. It was something we specifically looked for in our casting call, and Luna ended up casting our current actor because he, to paraphrase, had an impressively bad American accent while still being able to act well. I was not reviewing auditions at that time in production, but I heard there were some very good bad American accents!
I think this episode is the first time we learn much about Wes’s history–there are some allusions to Wes’s age in the previous episodes (Wes being from the 20th century, dying before computers were a thing, their use of 40s American slang), but not too many specifics. Of course, there aren’t too many details here, either, but I think this is the first time listeners find out more specifically when Wes died. Since I’m the writer and I know about Wes’s backstory, sometimes it’s easy to forget that not everyone coming into this knows that Wes is from actual 1940 (except that I mention it in most summaries of this series, I guess). There’s a little more to Wes than being Roy’s ghost roommate.
This is kind of the first episode where Wes has a larger role and we get to see them interacting with Roy at length. Since Wes and Roy are the two most prominent characters, it’s important to build a solid rapport between them, because it’s one of the few connecting threads across all the episodes.
It’s not too difficult to guess why I included Wes as part of the core cast–Roy Kaplan is, after all, an audio drama. It just helps to have a character to think things over with out loud so Roy’s thought process isn’t entirely voiceover and to be around when everything wraps up. It’s also nice to have some backup when things start going south, which given Roy’s personality, happens frequently. The reason why I made Wes a ghost is pretty easy to guess, too–Roy talks to ghosts, so it’s natural to have a ghost support character. Narratively, Wes occupies the space that would typically be taken up by the protagonist’s love interest–the character who’s generally not actively involved in the case, but who listens to what’s going on and offers advice, as well as personal interaction with the protagonist so we can learn a bit more about Roy’s life outside of his work.
So, sure. A ghost supporting character makes sense, but why make Wes a ghost from 1940s America in a story that takes place in a post-apocalyptic cyberpunk future not anywhere near America? The real answer is that I did it because I thought it would be fun–this series is, after all, heavily influenced and inspired by 40s-50s hardboiled fiction, as well as Richard Diamond, a radio show by NBC in the 50s. On some level, I wanted to write about a 40s hardboiled detective (which I am in my novel, but that’s different), so this is me splitting the difference. But there’s a lot of utility with having a ghost character from actual 1940, partially because Wes is from a time period much closer to ours than Roy’s is. This means that Wes acts as audience surrogate for some things–comparing life to how things were before, or grappling with strange future technology–but also that Wes is a relic of the pre-apocalypse past, which has its own utility we’ll see as we go on.
I like the dynamic between Wes and Roy. Wes is definitely almost always the sanest person in the room, and while Roy’s a smart guy, he’s also reckless and constantly doing things like provoking people and solving all his problems with burglary. The two of them make jabs at each other semi-frequently, but they also respect and care about each other. As the season goes on, we get to see more interactions between the two of them, and we’ll see more of how their personalities and views differ. I’m pretty excited for that.