Hello!
This is 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) Sleep Well, My Darling, check it out here!
Off we go!
If you’re a fan of the Philip Marlowe books, you probably already know what I’m going to say in this blog post: Sleep Well, My Darling is a pretty blatant pastiche of Raymond Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely. For the uninitiated, Farewell, My Lovely (1944) is one of the most well-known hardboiled novels of the time and apparently considered to be one of the best Philip Marlowe books, along with The Big Sleep and The Long Goodbye. I don’t know by what metrics it’s considered better than the others–I’m hardly a literary scholar–but I enjoy it well enough. Farewell, My Lovely is the only Philip Marlowe book that I’ve watched the movie adaptation (Murder, My Sweet) for. In a roundabout way, it’s what got me into the whole radio drama thing because Murder, My Sweet is what got me to look into Dick Powell’s (the actor for Philip Marlowe) other work and I found out about Richard Diamond, which is, as I’ve frequently mentioned, one of the primary inspirations for Roy Kaplan.
But that’s not really why I wrote this one. To be honest, I decided to make an episode that was a pastiche of Farewell, My Lovely because I was annoyed about the “Farewell, My Turnabout” case in Ace Attorney: Justice For All which is allegedly a reference to Farewell, My Lovely, because I can’t see how it’s a reference outside the name, unless it’s referring to the client being an asshole which is a bit flimsy.
I thought to myself for a while about how I would do an episode that references Farewell, My Lovely, because I didn’t want to have an episode that ripped off the plot wholesale and I didn’t want it to be an episode that just superficially referenced it, either. In the end, I decided to write a story that had the same setup as Farewell, My Lovely–a private investigator who’s on the tail end of a failed case runs into someone who’s been out of touch for a long time who’s looking for their old flame who’s gone mysteriously missing. From there, the plot plays out much differently from Farewell, My Lovely, but I chose to retain the two parts of the book that were most memorable to me–Philip Marlowe drugged out of his mind in a shady medical facility and having to break himself out, and the wet glass mark on the business card. Neither one is especially notable in the movie, but in the book, there’s a whole chapter devoted to Marlowe’s escape while being drugged to the gills which stands out for being a first-person account of Marlowe being out of his mind, and the business card is one of those subtle things that’s really easy to pass over on your initial read through that ends up connecting what initially looks like two completely separate plot lines. Being a pastiche of Farewell, My Lovely is one of the main reasons that Wes barely appears in it–just like Philip Marlowe is pretty much alone through the entirety of his stories, Roy has to get through this one himself.
Leaving Farewell, My Lovely aside, I wrote the plot for this one the way I did because one of my writing principles is that if you introduce a worldbuilding concept, you have an obligation as a writer to take that concept to its logical conclusion–in this case, the robot surrogate. We’ve seen what it looks like when they’re used as intended, but now we see other uses for it–there’s no reason why a robot surrogate has to be humanlike or simulate human senses and we see how that can take a toll when it’s taken to its logical extreme. This episode comes directly after Family Dysfunctions because that episode we learned that Roy is able to see ghosts in the form that they picture themselves. So when Roy sees ghosts of machine creatures, is he drugged out of his mind or is he seeing the ghosts of these navigators that have forgotten what it’s like to be human? Open to interpretation.
Sleep Well, My Darling almost didn’t get written. Originally, when our sources of funding were a little more murky, we had planned for a season of 10 episodes instead of 12, and Sleep Well, My Darling was one of the two episodes that we added to the lineup after we had a better idea of our finances. That being said, I wouldn’t say that this is ‘filler’ (whatever that means in the context of a series that’s episodic and disconnected to begin with). Here we get to see definitively that Roy is more than his psychic powers–when he loses access to his abilities, he doesn’t even panic, he just thinks through other ways to get out of his situation and makes it happen.
This episode we also learn a little more about the existence of other cities and the limited trade between them. Despite the advanced technology of Roy Kaplan, in some ways they’re less advanced than even now–not for lack of knowledge, but lack of infrastructure and resources. A lot of things that we take for granted like air travel and GPS and international communications just aren’t feasible in this cyberpunk post-apocalypse future because there aren’t the people or the space or the materials. The weird combination of advanced technology and resource limitations definitely isn’t a focus of the series, but I think it’s interesting to explore from a speculative fiction standpoint.
While I’m here, I want to briefly point out the sound design. Sleep Well, My Darling was actually one of the earlier episodes I ended up editing together, because it was one of the few episodes where none of the voice files were missing after my officially taking over the project. This was pretty daunting because Sleep Well, My Darling includes the most difficult sound design sequence of the entire season–that of Roy waking up in the hospital room and breaking himself out.
It’s a solid five minutes sequence with no music and just voiceover on sound effects. There was a point in time when I thought I would get a music track for this part, but none of my music tracks are long enough for this sequence, and I wasn’t really in a position to work directly with a musician to score the whole thing, timing and all. So I decided I should instead lean on ambiance, which is a bit difficult because through the rest of the series I only use ambiance very lightly. My overall policy with sound effects is minimum effective sounds, with the idea in mind that someone in a recording room should be able to do the sound effects live, as they would for an old time radio show. Because of that, pretty much the only time I actually use ambiance like crowd noise is when I need to establish that a scene is taking place outdoors in the city because other context clues aren’t enough to show that right away. The other part that made this section difficult was that I just didn’t have the right sound effects for a lot of it–things like pulling out IV lines or Roy walking barefoot or interacting with other medical supplies. I had to record a lot of my own sound effects for this one, much more than in other episodes.
Pretty much all the voice acting for this section is coughing and gasps and effort sounds, which is one of the places where I think it really helps that I’m both the editor and the voice actor for Roy, because I can’t imagine having to direct someone who can’t hear the rest of the scene into doing the proper sequence of labored breathing and coughing that can still portray what the hell Roy’s doing in the scene. I think I’ve mentioned it at some point in the past, but I actually rerecorded all of my lines for the entire season when I ended up editing all the episodes together–minus the voiceover for this sequence, which I left fully as-is. When there’s this much sound design going on, the timing of lines and sounds gets so tangled up that rerecording voiceover basically means redoing the entire sequence, which I very much did not want to do–my original take for the voiceover for this section was not going to be significantly improved by a retake.
I guess the main thing I want to point out is that when I do sound effects, I’m never going for “full realism” and trying to replicate all the sounds that you would actually hear if you were in that environment. Even in a scene like this that goes so heavy on the sound design, I don’t add the sounds of all the machines, I let certain ambiances fade out after I’ve established they’re there, I only use a few footsteps to indicate walking, I don’t really use fabric rustling noises unless it’s the only way to portray movements. Because at the end of the day, the sound effects aren’t meant for realism, they’re meant to make people understand what’s going on in the scene. Just like script dialogue isn’t really meant to be realistic but has the impression of realism, sound design isn’t meant to recreate a real setting but give presence to the setting and the actions within it. I think it helps that, because of my coming into this series with a radio drama mindset, I write scripts in a way that almost never calls for complex sound design.